Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  I sat back, exhausted from it, from trying to explain to children an adult’s world, the perspective of a piece of paper and a travelling fool.

  The captain studied me. My clothes, my waning.

  ‘We’re not as ignorant as you think, Mr Beck.’ He indicated Tenenbaum. ‘Ed here has a man attached to him. An ex-prisoner. We know what we need to. Ed, why don’t you tell him what you do.’ The captain sat, held up my plan like reading a newspaper and the lieutenant spoke in German.

  He was not part of the infantry, he said. His unit involved in psychological warfare. They were the ones who printed the red leaflets dropped all over the front lines that promised surrendering soldiers food and protection under the Geneva rules. The rules that we and the red-jackets did not accept. They even had their own printing press. Edward Tenenbaum’s position in Kassel was to drive with a loud-hailer around the streets and villages assuring resisting soldiers they would be fairly treated. His American German invaluable for such. Invaluable to me that Edward realised the magnitude of my schematic.

  ‘They’ll destroy everything they can,’ he said. ‘If they haven’t already. Unfortunately that probably also means … anybody in …’

  I did not need him to finish.

  ‘Not if you were quick,’ I said. ‘You can get to Buchenwald in a few days. A week if you are going north. I got here in two days coming west from Erfurt.’

  ‘Buchenwald?’

  ‘Outside Weimar. A camp. I have been there. I can take you, show you.’ I saw the captain folding my plan.

  My plan. My paper. My fingers on it before I knew what I was doing.

  ‘Please, sir,’ I said, dragging it back. ‘It is mine. I should keep it. Make sure it gets to proper place.’

  ‘Are you kidding me, Kraut?’ Veins in his neck purple. ‘I’m a god-damn US captain under General Bradley! You have a god-damn military secret there!’

  ‘It is mine. Sir. I will hand it over when we reach Buchenwald. I must get there.’

  ‘Where the hell is Buchenwald?’

  Edward defused.

  ‘Outside Weimar. Patton plans to get to Weimar by the thirteenth. That’s ten days. This guy says he can get us there in a week.’

  ‘And Erfurt,’ I added. ‘If you help me get to Buchenwald.’

  Edward rubbed his neck.

  ‘Man, you sure want to get to that camp. What the hell’s in it for you?’

  I put the plan inside my coat.

  ‘I … I have a friend there.’ Limped to my chair again. Repeated slowly in case my English was not as capable.

  ‘I have a friend.’

  Chapter 59

  I woke up in hospital, in the Gau. Tenenbaum in a chair watching me, speculating on me, his hands resting on his lap, legs crossed. The bedside lamp on. Night. I could see lumps of bodies in the other beds around me.

  ‘You’re sweating,’ he said. ‘You were having a nightmare. Do you remember passing out?’

  I had slumped off the chair in front of him and the captain apparently. I must have been out for hours, it was dark, I was starving.

  ‘I’ll bring you some soup. You’re going to need your strength to come on the road with me.’

  He gave little importance to it, explained casually that his unit were ‘peeps’, that this word was what the jeeps were originally ‘monikered’ because they could nip in and out, ‘peep’ at the enemy and get back to base at thirty miles per hour across a field of rocks or a river. Peeps. Jeeps. The strangest army.

  We would head out tomorrow, himself and another civilian with us. He had no contemplation, hesitation, of riding into his enemy’s country. The war already over. We would radio back every afternoon and the tanks and others would follow.

  ‘Do you need to fetch any personal stuff?’

  ‘Could I bring my motorcycle? It is only small.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I meant clothes, but, sure. Why not. If you can get it on the back it’s yours. Why do you want it?’

  I said it frankly. Could not tell in his German where his humour was.

  ‘In case I have to get away. In case they come.’

  ‘Sure. Sure.’ He stood up. ‘Whatever you want. I’ll get your soup.’

  ‘Lieutenant?’ I almost whispered, looked around the other beds. ‘Are there other … Germans here? Any … officers I mean?’ Sure he could see the anxiety on me. His levity lifted.

  ‘No. No officers. We wouldn’t put you in with soldiers. Why?’

  ‘I am a betrayer, no? A traitor.’

  ‘Ernst.’ He put his smile back on. ‘You’re only a traitor if the bad guys win. And we’re the United States Army. The bad guys never win. Someday you’ll be a hero.’ He left. I only noticed then that they did not screw their caps to their heads, did not wear them at all. Even his captain in his office did not need the formality. A strange army. It did not seem possible that they could be victors. Not with such an attitude. Maybe the British and the others were the formal ones. Maybe they were like our soldiers, our leaders. This army their cannon fodder. Or maybe I just did not understand. We the archaic force. Fighting in the old ways. And that is why we were now the retreated, the vanquished.

  Edward Tenenbaum returned with a potato soup, watched me eat. Nourishment brought my senses back, my concerns.

  ‘My plan? Where are my clothes? My plan?’

  ‘I hope you can trust your plan to me, Ernst. Temporarily. You’ll travel with me tomorrow. I’ll come for you at six. With your clothes. Could have left today if you hadn’t fainted on us.’ He got up, wagged his finger at me. ‘Don’t let me down now, Ernst. Get me to that camp.’ Winked at me, left without a care in the world. The strangest army.

  *

  I could not sleep. Would not sleep. I kept my feet out of the bed. You cannot sleep fully if your feet are exposed. You just drift, never fully rest. A caveman memory I guess. Animals go for feet first.

  I said her name over and over, and when I was too tired to speak it I said it in my head. Slept like that. With her beside. And no nightmare came.

  *

  Real scrambled eggs for breakfast, real coffee. Felt normal again. That’s all you need to feel human again. Pathetic. Food. Not books, not words or love. Just food.

  The stir of April light in the early morning outside. The concrete of the building shimmering eggshell blue. The red banners gone. A less intimidating building now. The same dishevelled queue forming outside already.

  Edward Tenenbaum waiting in the jeep, drinking coffee straight from a flask. Another fellow beside him in greatcoat and fedora, older than us, introduced to me as Egon Fleck. The pale look of all of us, but I only guessed him as German. He had been at Buchenwald. That was enough to not question further. We drove to my hotel, the building different from yesterday. Battered and exhausted.

  The little motorcycle fitted on the back of the jeep as if made for it. Webbing straps held it on. The jeep’s designer had imagined such jury-rigging, hooks and anchors all over. The only compromise was for me to sit with the petrol can, the ‘jerry-can’ Edward called it. A German invention they had utilised. The insult of the name lost. Jeep, Jerry, a dozen other phrases that did not belong in war. Everything a euphemism in their speech. A series of beeps and whistles for real words. ‘Bazooka’. I have written this word myself. A ridiculous word. Proper words for our weapons, our vehicles. Yet we were losing. Bazooka. Jeep. Peeps. Pineapples. Potato-mashers. These were not soldiers of old wars. They played games with words. Playground names for dreadful things. And I could only think that there might be something to fear in them for that. In the future.

  There were no road-blocks when we left Kassel. I watched the city vanish in the early-morning mist as if my entirety within her had been a dream. I was sorry. Felt sorry for a city. For a body I had left on a bed.

  But heroes move forward.

  Chapter 60

  24 April 1945

  Personal File

  Alfred Toombs

  Chief of
Intelligence

  BUCHENWALD

  A Preliminary Report

  by EGON W. FLECK, Civ.

  and

  1st Lt. EDWARD A. TENENBAUM.

  NOTE: Special distribution is being made of this report because preliminary evaluation indicates that it is one of the most significant accounts yet written on an aspect of life in Nazi Germany.

  It is NOT just another report on a concentration camp. It does not deal exclusively with the horror of life in Buchenwald, nor with the brutalities of the Nazi perverts.

  The report is obviously controversial. It has not been possible in so short a time to cross-check and weigh every detail. But independent investigation leads to the tentative conclusion that the basic story can be accepted. Later study and interrogation may lead to modification of this picture – one way or the other.

  A fortnight later I sat on the balcony of a villa in Vienna’s mountains under a warm April sun drinking coffee from a porcelain cup, smoking real American Camels. The previous occupant of the villa, the district governor, arrested and removed. We were the new residents. Edward, Egon and I, and eleven communist survivors from Buchenwald.

  The head of the PWD, the psychological war department which Edward was attached to, was an American-German Jew. Edward the son of Polish Jews. The outgoing governor who had deported sixty-five thousand Jews to the camps as a ‘contribution to European culture’ now had two sleeping in his beds.

  They were here to write a report. Document Buchenwald for Washington. I tagging along, using Vienna as a stepping stone for Switzerland, grateful for the Americans’ protection, their food and shelter. And the governor had a fine collection of suits.

  The war not over, just vast countries returned to themselves, dusting themselves down and starting again. But the fighting over enough for reports on the discovered camps to be written.

  On the road, after Kassel, Lieutenant Tenenbaum had shown no possibility that what we were doing had any danger attached. Maybe that was controlled. Maybe just to pacify Egon and I. To him it was simple. The army would maintain a north–south invasion, roll a line across Germany to meet up with the Russians. Forget getting to Berlin, the red-jackets would get there first. His role was to ‘peep’ ahead, stop, let the armoured division catch up if all was well and then carry on. He wore his helmet only if he had a feeling to wear it. Nothing for Egon and I.

  Egon was mostly quiet. He only spoke openly when he prayed before he ate. Never talked about family or his past. He was there for one reason. He had been in Buchenwald. I could show them where it was, how to get there, but he could show ‘it’. And I imagined that was part of his silence. We were taking him back to that place. What would a man talk about if that his object of being?

  Edward spoke a lot. He was a Yale graduate, the highest grade. Summa cum laude. An economist. He had already been chosen as someone who would help rebuild the mark for Europe when this was all done. He said it as a matter of fact. With all of this around us, with Franz Werra dead in a hotel room, Hans Klein in a camp or dead, my wife in another country, my parents’ fate unknown, the displacement and reduction of races, someone somewhere had contemplated on the future of the mark and sent Edward Tenenbaum to do so. I never imagined that other nations would concern themselves, were concerning themselves, with our currency. There are sides to war that does not make sense except on bank ledgers. Our enemies would need only Germany. Not its people.

  It was 11 April when we saw them. Seven days out of Kassel. I said it would take a week.

  Our jeep gone ahead as always, to wait for the tanks and armoured cars to follow. We were north of Weimar. That had been our action. Go round, go north, and then back on ourselves. The US Army moving up from the south, the German army concentrated in Berlin. The countryside not of interest.

  We came across hamlets untouched by the war. Their farming, their season carrying on as if of another world. We met labourers more interested in the jeep than the American escorting us. Gave us potatoes and apple wine. Planes were all they knew of it. They pointed to the sky and mimed the planes for Edward, marvelled at the star painted on the jeep’s bonnet, laughed at Edward’s German accent, wondered what Egon and I were doing with this alien and his odd vehicle. And then, on a gravel road lined with beech forest, we saw them.

  They marched. Thousands of men in striped uniforms marching along the side of the road. They carried German guns, waved at us as we drove past, and Edward stopped the jeep. He ordered us to stay in the car, to stand and tell them to go back. Back because the tanks were behind us, that it was not safe.

  They saluted us like walking to a football match, were friendly, because we had a star on our car and an American, but they all said the same thing.

  They were going to kill Germans. Said this to me and Egon. They were going to Weimar. They were going to kill Germans. There were SS hiding in the forest. They had taken prison clothes to disguise themselves. They were hunting them.

  Edward convinced, ordered, most of them to go back and we followed their trail. By then the armoured division caught up and the tanks made them turn back. We were ahead. Just after five we reached the turn in the road over the railway where I had been with Hans Klein a year before. I tapped Edward’s shoulder, told him to go on, that there was another gate east.

  ‘What the hell are those bears doing there?’ He had seen the zoo. I explained as best I could, odd even as I said it. Egon said nothing. We were at the gate, his eyes fixed to it.

  There were armed guards. Not SS guards.

  Edward swung out of the jeep, introduced himself, gave cigarettes through the wire of the gate. They told him that the last of the SS had run off after hearing tank and small-arms fire from the hills, although they had captured over eighty which were held within. Since the first of the month the SS had been marching out large groups of prisoners, the fittest prisoners, thousands of them every day. Today the communist factions in the camp had taken it over. All undesirables and criminals were herded into the ‘Little Camp’.

  I called Edward back, told him I knew the Little Camp. That it was a barbed-wire square of wooden and sheet-metal rotting huts in the centre of the prison. Told him we have to go there. I had to go there.

  ‘Ernst. This could be dangerous.’ The first time he had used this word. ‘This is a prison taken over by inmates. I can’t think of anything worse right now.’

  I got out of the car.

  ‘I can,’ I said, and Egon followed. I ordered the gates to be opened. Faced them. Stood like I owned the place. As Klein would have done.

  ‘We are translators for the Americans. They are behind us. But they do not know where you are. We can show them. Protect you. I have been here before,’ indicated Egon, ‘we have been here before, know what you have suffered. Trucks will come with food and medicines. But we need to see. And I may have a friend here. I need to find him. Who is in command?’

  ‘Comrade Eiden runs the camp now.’ A military response from a communist German in rags.

  ‘Inform him the United States Army is here to assist. Let me in to find my friend.’

  ‘What about him?’ Their eyes to Egon.

  ‘I have no friends left,’ he said, gave them the look of the camp. The unfocussed glaze of one looking past barbed wire to the woods beyond. They opened the gate.

  Edward walked by my shoulder, whispered, a new experience for him. His voice always loud.

  ‘This is crazy, Ernst.’

  ‘Then wait outside for your tanks. You’re lucky. You’re not looking for a man who saved your life, your wife’s life. Look around. Your army will find Germans here. We did this to ourselves.’

  I walked ahead, left Edward and Egon, went straight for the Little Camp. The place where they put the undesirables, the unclean, the near-dead.

  It was guarded also. Expected that. I smoothed my short hair, not much longer than theirs, straightened my coat. Became the best Hans Klein that I could as they puffed up their chests and closed together in
front of the gate.

  ‘I’m with the US Army,’ I lied. The strong lie. Shoulders back. ‘Twelfth Army under General Bradley.’ I took out the silver case, the silver lighter. Lit up slow. Their eyes never leaving the silver. Offered them a cigarette each.

  ‘I’m looking for a civilian. Would have been here two months. Hans Klein. Do you …’

  I stopped talking. Saw beyond them. And Egon stepped back.

  Shapes moved from the twilight over the guard’s shoulders. Not men. Shapes. Angles for bodies, spheres for heads. Not people.

  They shuffled from the tents and stables. White and blue ghouls. Hair gone, cheeks shrunken with missing teeth, sucking on their gums, their heads enlarged by their sunk temples. You could see the cracks of bone that made up their skulls. They crawled or hobbled on spindle legs like spiders or on branches for crutches. They moved to the sound of my voice. A healthy voice. That meant food. Even if I had only eaten it myself. The memory of food about me. Maybe something in my pockets. An apple I might have been gifting for a horse, a toffee from my car, for my children, forgotten in my pocket.

  ‘You want to go in there?’ The guard’s thick voice, a Russian voice. A communist sneer. Some, as always in such places, better fed than others. ‘My guest.’ He pulled back the bolt on the gate. I stood at his face.

  ‘Half an hour behind us are generals. You have heard of Patton? Bradley? They are coming right here. How you act in the next half-hour will be the remainder of your war. Lieutenant Tenenbaum is speaking with your leader. This is an American camp from today. Thank you for your assistance. You will be commended, comrades.’ That’s how Klein would have done it. ‘When I come back to this gate make sure you let me out.’

  ‘Typhus,’ one of them said.

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t lick anybody.’ I looked back at Egon. Rooted. He shook his head. And I was alone.

  ‘Anyone I come back with you let us both out. Understand? I have to report to General Patton in an hour.’ I marked my words with a stab of my cigarette, put it to the ground. Went inside the gate.