by Richard Wake
It was quiet. The doors of the first two cells were open, and they were empty. I was placed in the third cell. It was empty, too.
"Your clothes, sir," said the bigger of the trench coats. And so it was -- topcoat and hat, suit and shoes and socks. They left me in my undershirt and shorts. My arms were folded, and I was shivering when they clanged the iron door behind them.
I kept telling myself not to panic. I also kept telling myself the fact that I had not seen or heard Peiper in another cell was a good thing. All I had done was go to church -- and I didn't think things had gotten to the point where they would question a priest about what somebody had said in confession. As long as Peiper had been careful, I hadn't done anything. Then again, how many people had admitted to doing things they hadn't done just to try to bargain their way out of whatever torture could be coming.
I don't know how long I had been in there -- maybe an hour, maybe a little more -- when nature called. There was a bucket in the corner of the cell for that purpose. As I peed into it, the iron door opened. The Gestapo officer from the car and one of his henchmen stood and watched as I finished.
I suddenly forgot about my just-act-scared rehearsal. "Enjoying the view?" I asked as I pulled myself together.
The officer locked his eyes with mine.
"Take the underwear," he said, and walked out, leaving his aide to collect my shorts and shirt. I was naked now, alone and naked when the door slammed again.
I sat down on the wooden bunk. I had been sitting there before, but this time I rubbed my hand across it, to make sure I didn't catch a splinter in my ass -- as if that was the biggest of my worries. For some reason, I wasn't all that scared about having a finger or toe lopped off with a pair of bolt cutters. But when I played this out in my nightmares, all I could think about was that same recurring dream, with wires leading from a battery's electrodes being attached to my balls -- of, if they were feeling like kind torturers, maybe it would be my nipples. Those were the things that terrified me.
But I kept playing it out in my head, wondering if there was anything I could admit if I had to. It kept coming back to this: if I knew for a fact that they had Peiper in a nearby cell, and that he had admitted something specific to them, I could confirm it with a clear conscience. I mean, at that point, Peiper would be a corpse in waiting. There would be nothing I could do for him, and there was no reason not to try to save myself -- and admitting a little something would probably play better than denying something they knew for a fact to be true.
But if not? Then I just had to deny everything. I mean, there was no physical evidence -- not on this trip, anyway. And the more I thought about it, the more I could convince myself that they weren't going to kill me, even if they had something. It was tricky for them -- they did need the magnesite, after all. I did have some level of protection because of that, and the Gestapo knew it. At least Vogl knew it. So maybe they would just threaten me and tell me that I would be under 24-hour surveillance anytime I came back to Germany. Or perhaps they would tell me I couldn't come back to Germany at all. Or maybe I would be going to Dachau. But to kill me would risk international news coverage and repercussions, especially if Leon managed to make a stink about it at home -- "The Two Kovacs Murders in Cologne" was my working headline. It was a small risk, granted, but it would be there. No, they didn't want that. That's what I kept telling myself.
Then I heard a scream -- just one, but it was piercing. And as I sat there on that bunk, bare-assed and shivering, all I could do was try to convince myself that the scream didn't sound like the way Major Peiper would scream if someone showed him a wire attached to an electrode from a car battery.
41
I don't know how long it had been -- another hour, maybe more -- when the iron door of the cell was opened again, the turning of the key accompanied by a loud, angry-sounding conversation, muffled by the iron barrier and then clearly heard as the door cracked open. The last bit of the rant:
"-- EVER LEARN TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS? HOW DID YOU EVER GET PROMOTED?"
Vogl was doing the screaming. The junior officer who had collected me off of the street with his men was being screamed at. I was the only naked person in the room, reflexively covering my manhood as I stood, but it was the young officer who appeared to be holding his balls in his hands.
Vogl looked at me for a second, then exploded again.
"NAKED?" And then he paused a beat, leaned into his underling, nose to nose, and in a lower voice, lower but even more frightening, said very slowly, "Get...his...fucking...clothes."
The eunuch scurried off, and Vogl and I were alone. I don't know how long the silence lasted. After a time, he walked out into the hallway, as if to offer me an apologetic gesture, to give me some privacy.
For the next minute or two, I spent the time running the phrase "learn to follow instructions" over and over through my head. What could that have meant? Learn to follow instructions. For one thing, it meant that there were, in fact, instructions attached to my name. But what kind of instructions? Keep an eye on me discretely? Or don't be discrete about it and make sure I knew I was being followed? Or do something a little more overt, like question me briefly, just to make it entirely clear that the Gestapo had suspicions?
Whatever -- naked in a cold cell appeared to have crossed the line. Unless, that is, this was all some elaborate bit of play-acting, a good-cop/bad-cop routine like from the movies. Anything was possible. But the one thing was, Vogl really did seem enraged. If this was an act, it was a damn good one.
Soon, Vogl walked in with my clothes, folded and in a neat pile, shoes and hat on top. He walked next to me and placed them gently on the bunk, and returned to the doorway. "Please," he said, motioning to the pile.
I did my best not to display any emotion in reply. I turned my back on him, began getting dressed, and attempted to think of the proper response. I buttoned up slowly, tucked in fastidiously, tied my necktie with care. I went as slowly as I could and tried to think of what to say. There was a point where he coughed behind me. I thought he might be clearing his throat to say something, but no. There was just the silence, both of us clearly calculating.
I could be meek and essentially thank him for clearing up the misunderstanding. I could be curt and just nod and leave. I could be furious at this violation of my rights and promise to lodge a complaint with the Czech consulate. Or I could be silent and wait for him to say something. That's what I ultimately chose, silence.
In my stocking feet but otherwise dressed, I turned to face Vogl. As it turned out, he began speaking almost immediately.
"You must accept my apology. My man was overzealous. You have heard me reprimand him verbally, but he will be reprimanded formally as well. He will apologize, also, when we are leaving the building. I hope you can accept it with the sincerity it is offered."
I just looked at him, no nod, no acknowledgment of what he had just said. He continued.
"I am not excusing him, but you need to understand his motivations, all of our motivations. We are working here in the service of something great, something greater than all of us. It is an awesome responsibility."
He stopped again, seemingly seeking some sort of acknowledgment from me, some flicker of recognition. I did my best to remain expressionless. He continued.
"You have seen the Romerturm?" he asked. And I did nod here. The Romerturm was the remains of a stone wall and tower, built in the first century AD, when Cologne was part of the Roman Empire. It was only a couple of blocks away from where we were standing although, when I saw it a few years earlier, I had no idea about what EL-DE Haus was, or what it would become.
"I walk by it almost every day," Vogl said. "I can close my eyes and see it, every brick. This was the northernmost outpost on continental Europe of the Roman Empire -- right over there," he said, extending his right arm and pointing. "We can almost touch it from here, the very edge. But why did it stop? And why did it end?
"You have read the history, I'm sure. You
know why. It was rot from within that ended the Roman Empire. It was laziness, it was decadence, it was complacency -- and it all came from within. You've heard about the barbarians, but that is rubbish. That wall was strong enough. The real problems were inside the wall, not outside."
He was speaking in a cadence now, a rhythm. He seemed like one of those preachers from the American south who I had seen recently on a newsreel. Either that or like Hitler himself.
"This is our job, the Gestapo's job, my job -- to protect against that rot as the Fuhrer's vision is being realized so that the realization can endure. Our job, my job, is to identify the small problems before they become significant problems, to root out the decadent and the subversive and make sure they can never become widespread enough or strong enough to challenge the vision. Because the vision must endure.
"I took an oath. It is a promise, and I take it seriously. So does that little shithead who pulled you in off the street. You must understand that I had no idea you were being detained and brought in here and that it should not have happened. Again, I do apologize. But you also must understand that it was overzealousness in the name of a greater good -- the most important good, in fact. Think about that old wall and you will recognize it. I know you will."
I did my best, again, to remain expressionless, to not give him the satisfaction. We locked eyes for a few seconds, just staring, and he blinked first, half-turning away, saying, "Finish getting dressed and I will drive you back to your hotel."
"I'll walk."
He seemed hurt. It seemed real. Then again, he might have been the Emil Jannings of the Gestapo. I just didn't know.
"As you wish -- I'm sure you can find your way out." With that, he was gone. I turned to put on my shoes, resting my right foot on the edge of the bunk, tying it, then my left foot. Leaning over, my eye caught a few more of the carvings in the wall that I had not seen before. One was just a calendar marking off the days -- eight days, it seemed, followed by God know's what for the poor sap in question. Near that was a single word, "Papa."
Then I saw the third etching, and I stopped tying my shoe. I might have stopped breathing.
There, off by itself, was an O with three lines drawn neatly below it.
42
1) Could I kill him?
2) Did I have the guts?
3) Could I possibly get away with it?
4) Could I find out why he had Otto killed?
Those were the four questions I asked myself, over and over and over, as the train devoured the miles. It always came back to No. 2, of course. The rest were details.
We had all pulled the trigger on our rifles in the army -- Leon, Henry, me, all of us. Presumably, we had hit somebody at some point. But that's not with this was. That was survival. This was an act of calculation.
Henry said he could never do it. His father had killed as a young man, establishing his credibility in a brutal line of work. He told Henry a couple of the stories, but only when he was drunk and only when he was an old man. He never used those stories to shame Henry in his formative time, to prod his son into doing something he otherwise couldn't do. Henry was not a killer, and nothing short of self-defense or war could turn him into one. He could barely rough up a gambler who was behind in his payments.
But what about me?
1) Could I kill him?
2) Did I have the guts?
3) Could I possibly get away with it?
4) Could I find out why he had Otto killed?
That I was even considering the possibility was an indication of where my head was. Seeing Otto's signature on the wall of the cell answered every question. It was not suicide. It was not a jealous husband. Otto had been in EL-DE Haus, the bruises on his torso were torture at the hands of Vogl's goons, and a day or so later, they were the ones who threw him off of the bridge and into the Rhine. One letter with three little lines drawn neatly beneath it told the whole story.
Except for one thing: the why. Was Otto a spy? Was that really possible? The fury I felt was tempered by that unanswered question. This was not to kid anyone, of course. People who knew me knew that Alex Kovacs didn't do fury, not even when confronted with the killer of the person he loved above all others. But my friends would be wrong in this case. The rage was not outward, true enough, but it was there, and it was real. And it manifested itself in an almost manic determination to consider actually killing a captain in the Gestapo and to do it on German soil, an act that was incredible on its face, falling somewhere on the spectrum between idiotic and suicidal. Yet I couldn't let it go.
Round and round it went, then, past Frankfurt and Wurzburg and wherever. No sleep on this trip, just Hennessy followed by breakfast.
And the questions.
1) Could I kill him?
2) Did I have the guts?
3) Could I possibly get away with it?
4) Could I find out why he had Otto killed?
The truth was, as the train pulled into the Westbahnhof and I grabbed a cab from the rank on Felberstrasse, I didn't know the answer to any of the four questions. But I had 10 days to figure them out, especially No. 2.
MARCH 1938
43
Johanna was furious. I liked it when she treated me like crap for fun, but this was serious, even if it was about a Fasching ball. Specifically, the most glittering and exclusive and expensive of all of Vienna's annual balls, which the von Westermanns treated like church on Easter but which I was declining to attend because of a previous commitment at the secretary's and office worker's ball.
She was screeching. "I mean, it isn't even a choice. How can you turn down a ball in the Hofburg, right in the royal apartments, to go to one in the...wherever the hell it is."
"It's in the Morganthaler Hall."
"Oh, fine. And what was the last event they hosted? A swap meet?"
In truth, it was a sale of surplus housewares from a small chain of three stores that had gone out of business. But there was no stopping this rant.
"The royal apartments! Catering by Cafe Central! Deserts by Sacher! And what are the secretaries serving?"
"I'm sure we'll eat scraps of wurst off the floor, and drink homemade schnapps out of chipped porcelain jugs. Come on, Johanna. You know why I have to do this."
The truth was, I really wanted to do it -- but I also had to do it. Otto, Hannah and I had gone to the ball together every year. It was one of the dozens of balls in Vienna every winter, before Lent, organized around professions mostly. Everybody got dressed in formal wear and toasted the shitty weather. You would expect doctors and lawyers to have their own balls, and they did. But so did store clerks, government workers, even washerwomen. Leon said the newspaper ball was always a hilarious drunken mess. They were all the same -- debutantes marched in at the beginning, a mass quadrille danced at midnight, a lot of waltzing happened in between -- but they were all different, too, because the people were different. They're scheduled months ahead of time, and there aren't enough days to avoid at least some conflicts. How was I to know that the secretaries' ball would be on the same night as the rich assholes' ball? Or that I would be invited to the rich assholes' ball?
The argument degenerated, but only a little. I was able to leave before Johanna said something really hurtful. She had already been mad that I had to make the extra trip to Cologne, and this just tipped her over. Or maybe it was the lingering embarrassment she felt about the museum opening. She would sometimes swing, from the modern woman with an education and a career and opinions to the daughter of the Baron and Baroness von Westermann. I couldn't quite figure her out, even after a year. And I still didn't think I could tell her about my other life.
I couldn't tell Hannah, either. As far as she was concerned, Otto had jumped off of that bridge after receiving a bad diagnosis and that was that. She had come to live with it, to accept it. There was still a hint of sadness in her personality, but I'm pretty sure most people couldn't see it. She had even considered accepting an invitation to the ball from the man who
was the office manager at a law firm on the first floor of our building. Well, she said she considered it, but I don't think she did.
As it turned out, Morganthaler Hall looked great. The band was pretty good. The drink was plentiful. We danced and laughed and shared memories of Otto. It is what we both wanted.
"Here, let's sit," I said. It was about 11:30. We weren't at our table, but in two chairs near the edge of the dance floor. I grabbed two drinks from the bar, and we sat quietly, watching the waltzers waltz by.
Finally, I just blurted out what I had been practicing all day.
"You know it's time to go, right?"
"Go home? It's still early. We haven't even had the quadrille."
"Not go from here. Go from Vienna. Go from Austria."
The city had grown so emotional since Schuschnigg's trip to Berchtesgaden -- the Christians sadly expectant, the Jews quietly frantic. They couldn't cancel the balls, but people just weren't going out at night anymore, weren't doing anything spontaneous or frivolous. The Nazis in the streets were getting more noticeable -- they still couldn't wear the swastika, but you saw more and more of the white knee socks and the breeches, which had been their subversive trademark. They were just strutting. It was happening, and everybody felt it. Leon said they weren't putting it in the paper, but that their police checks the week before had turned up five Jewish suicides. One guy cut his throat with a razor while standing at a bar.
It was time for Jews like Hannah to get out if they could. It was past time.
Her response when I brought it up was the same as always. It had become a reflex at this point. "I can't. My whole life is here."