Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “The winter of 1945–46 was almost as hard as the winter of 1941–

  42.

  The new government was forming, but the more pressing reality was one of food shortages, lack of fuel, black marketeering, refugees returning by the thousands to pick up the torn strands of their lives, and the Soviet occupation. Especially the occupation. For centuries we had fought the Russians, dominated them, resisted their invasions in return, lived under their threat, and then welcomed them as liberators. Now we awoke from the nightmare of German occupation to the chill morning of Russian liberation. Like Poland, I was exhausted, numbed and somewhat surprised at my own survival, and dedicated only to making it through another winter.

  “It was in the spring of 1946 that the letter came from my cousin Rebecca. She and her American husband were living in Tel Aviv. She had spent months corresponding, contacting officials, sending cables to agencies and institutions, all in an effort to find any remaining vestige of her family. She had traced me through friends in the International Red Cross.

  “I sent her a letter in response and soon there was a cable arriving which urged me to join her in Palestine. She and David offered to cable the money for the voyage.

  “I had never been a Zionist— indeed, our family had never acknowledged the existence of Palestine as a possible Jewish state— but when I stepped off that overcrowded Turkish freighter in June of 1946 and set foot on what would someday be Israel, a heavy yoke seemed to be lifted from my shoulders and for the first time since eight September, 1939, I was able to breathe freely. I confess that I fell to my knees and shed tears that day.

  “Perhaps my sense of freedom was premature. A few days after I arrived in Palestine there was an explosion at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the British command was housed. As it turned out, both Rebecca and her husband David were active in the Haganah.

  “A year and a half later I joined them in the War of Independence, but in spite of my partisan training and experience, I went to war only as a medic. It was not the Arabs that I hated.

  “Rebecca insisted that I continue my schooling. David was then the Israeli manager of a very respectable American company and money was not a problem. This was how an indifferent schoolboy from Lodz— a boy whose basic education had been interrupted for five years— returned to the classroom as a man, scarred and cynical, ancient at the age of twenty-three.

  “Incredibly, I did well. I entered the university in 1950 and went on to medical school three years later. I studied for two years in Tel Aviv, fifteen months in London, a year in Rome, and one very rainy spring in Zu rich. Whenever I could I would return to Israel, work in the kibbutz near the farm where David and Rebecca spent their summers, and renew old friendships. My indebtedness to my cousin and her husband grew beyond repayment, but Rebecca insisted that the only surviving member of the Laski wing of the Eshkol family must amount to something.

  “I chose psychiatry. My medical studies never seemed more to me than a necessary prerequisite of studying the body in order to learn about the mind. I soon became obsessed with theories of violence and dominance in human affairs. I was amazed to learn that there was very little actual research in this area. There was ample data to explain the precise mechanisms of dominance hierarchy in a lion pride, there was voluminous research relating to the pecking order in most avian species, more and more information was coming in from primatologists on the role of dominance and aggression in the social groups of our nearest cousins, but almost nothing was known about the mechanism of human violence as it relates to dominance and social order. I soon began developing my own theories and speculations.

  “During those years of study I made numerous inquiries after the Oberst. I had a description of him, I knew that he was an officer in Einsatzgruppe 3, I had seen him with Himmler, and I remember that Der Alte’s last words had been ‘Willi, my friend.’ I contacted the Allies War Crimes Commissions in their various zones of occupation, the Red Cross, the Soviet People’s Standing Tribunal on Fascist War Crimes, the Jewish Committee, and countless ministries and bureaucracies. There was nothing. After five years I went to the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. They, at least, were most interested in my story, but in those days the Mossad was not the efficient organization it is reputed to be today. Also, they had more famous names such as Eichmann, Murer, and Mengele which were higher on their list of investigations than an unknown Oberst reported by only one survivor of the Holocaust. It was in 1955 that I went to Austria to confer with the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal.

  “Wiesenthal’s ‘Documentation Center’ was one floor of a shabby building in a poor part of Vienna. The building looked as if it had been thrown up as temporary housing during the war. He had three rooms there, two of them crammed with overflowing filing cabinets, and his office had only bare concrete for a floor. Wiesenthal himself was a nervous, intense person with disturbing eyes. There was something familiar about those eyes. At first I thought that he had the eyes of a fanatic, but then I realized where I had seen them before. Simon Wiesenthal’s eyes reminded me of the ones I stared into each morning as I shaved.

  “I told Wiesenthal an abbreviated version of my story, suggesting only that the Oberst had committed atrocities on Chelmno inmates for the amusement of his soldiers. Wiesenthal became very attentive when I said that I had again seen the Oberst at Sobibor in the company of Heinrich Himmler. ‘You are sure?’ he asked. ‘Positive,’ I replied.

  “Busy as he was, Wiesenthal spent two days helping me attempt to trace the Oberst. In his cluttered tomb of an office complex, Wiesenthal had hundreds of files, dozens of indexes and cross-indexes, and the names of more than twenty-two thousand SS men. We studied photographs of Einsatzgruppen personnel, military academy graduation pictures, newspaper clippings, and photos from the official SS magazine, The Black Corps. At the end of the first day, I could no longer focus my eyes. That night I dreamed of photographs of Wehrmacht officers receiving medals from smirking Nazi leaders. There was no sign of the Oberst.

  “It was late in the second afternoon when I found it. The news photograph was dated twenty-three November, 1942. The picture was of a Baron von Büler, a Prussian aristocrat and World War One hero, who had returned to active duty as a general. According to the caption under the photograph General von Büler had died in action while leading an heroic counterattack against a Russian armored division on the Eastern Front. I stared a long moment at the lined and craggy face in the fading clipping. It was the Old Man. Der Alte. I set it back in the file and went on.

  “ ‘If only we had a last name,’ said Wiesenthal that evening as we ate in a small restaurant near St. Stephen’s Cathedral. ‘I feel certain we could track him down if we had his last name. The SS and Gestapo kept complete directories of their officers. If only we had his name.’

  “I shrugged and said that I would return to Tel Aviv in the morning. We had all but exhausted Wiesenthal’s clippings relating to Einsatzguppe and the Eastern Front and my studies would soon be demanding all of my time.

  “ ‘But surely no!’ Wiesenthal exclaimed. ‘You are a survivor of Lodz Ghetto, Chelmno, and Sobibor. You must have much information about the officers, other war criminals. You must spend at least the next week here. I will interview you and have the interviews transcribed for my files. There is not telling what valuable facts you may possess.’

  “ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not interested in the others. I am interested only in finding the Oberst.’

  “Wiesenthal stared at his coffee and then looked at me again. There was a strange light in his eyes. ‘So, you are interested only in revenge.’

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just as you are.’ “Wiesenthal shook his head sadly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we are both obsessed, my friend. But what I seek is justice, not revenge.’

  “ ‘Surely in this case they are the same thing,’ I said. “Wiesenthal again shook his head. ‘Justice is required,’ he said so softly that I could hardly hear him. ‘It is demanded by t
he millions of voices from unmarked graves, from rusting ovens, from empty houses in a thousand cities. But not revenge. Revenge is not worthy.’

  “ ‘Worthy of what?’ I snapped back, more sharply than I intended. “ ‘Of us,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘Of them. Of their death. Of our continued existence.’

  “I shook my head in dismissal then, but I have often thought of that conversation.

  “Wiesenthal was disappointed, but he agreed to continue his search for any scrap of information which fit my description of the Oberst. Fifteen months later, only a few days after I had received my degree, a letter arrived from Simon Wiesenthal. In it were photostated copies of Section IV Sonderkommando Sub-section IV-B pay vouchers for Einsatzgruppen ‘Special Advisors.’ Wiesenthal had circled the name of an Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert, an officer on special assignment to Einsatzgruppen Drei from the office of Reinhard Heydrich. Clipped to these photostats was a newspaper clipping Wiesenthal had retrieved from his files. Seven smiling young officers posed for their picture at a special Berlin Philharmonic performance to benefit the Wehrmacht. The clipping was dated twenty-three, six, forty-one. The concert was Wagner. The names of the smiling officers were listed. The fifth from the left, barely visible behind the shoulders of his comrades, his hat pulled low, was the pale countenance of the Oberst. The name in the caption read Oberleutnant Wilhelm von Borchert.

  “Two days later I was in Vienna. Wiesenthal had ordered his correspondents to research the background of von Borchert, but the results were disappointing. The von Borcherts were an established family with aristocratic roots in both Prussia and East Bavaria. The family fortune had derived from land, mining interests, and exports of art objects. Wiesenthal’s agents could find no record of the birth or christening of a Wilhelm von Borchert in records going back to 1880. They did, however, find a death notice. According to an announcement in the Regen Zeitung dated nineteen, seven, forty-five, Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert, only heir to Count Klaus von Borchert, had died in combat while heroically defending Berlin from Soviet invaders. Word had reached the elderly count and his wife while they were staying at their summer residence, Waldheim, in the Bayrische Wald near Bayerisch-Eisenstein. The family was seeking Allied permission to close down the estate and to return to their home near Bremen for memorial ser vices. Wilhelm von Borchert, the article went on to say, had received the coveted Iron Cross for valor and had been recommended for promotion to SS Oberstgrup penführer at the time of his death.

  “Wiesenthal had ordered his people to follow any other leads. There were none. Von Borchert’s family in 1956 consisted only of an elderly aunt in Bremen and two nephews who had lost most of the family’s money in poor postwar investments. The huge estate in East Bavaria had been closed for years and much of the hunting preserve there had been sold to pay taxes. As well as Wiesenthal’s limited Eastern Bloc contacts could tell, the Soviets and East Germans had no information on the life or death of Wilhelm von Borchert.

  “I flew to Bremen to speak with the Oberst’s aunt, but the woman was far gone into senility and could recall no one in her family named Willi. She thought I had been sent by her brother to take her to the Summerfest at Waldheim. One of the nephews refused to see me. The other, a foppish young man I caught up with in Brussels as he was on his way to a spa in France, said that he had met his Uncle Wilhelm only once, in 1937. The nephew had been nine at the time. He remembered only the wonderful silk suit his uncle wore and the straw boater he wore at a jaunty angle. He understood that his uncle had been a war hero and had died fighting Communism. I returned to Tel Aviv.

  “For several years I practiced my profession in Israel, learning, as all psychiatrists do, that a degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to begin learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality. In 1960 my cousin Rebecca died of cancer. David urged me to go to America to continue my research into the mechanics of human dominance. When I protested that I had access to adequate materials in Tel Aviv, David joked that nowhere would the spectrum of violence be more complete than in the United States. I arrived in New York in January of 1964. The nation was recovering from the loss of a president and preparing to drown its sorrow in adolescent hysteria at the arrival of a British rock group called the Beatles. Columbia University had offered me a one-year visiting professorship. As it worked out, I would stay on there to finish my book on the pathology of violence and eventually to become an American citizen.

  “It was in November of 1964 that I decided to stay in the States. I was visiting friends in Princeton, New Jersey, and after dinner they apologetically asked if I would mind watching an hour of television with them. I owned no television of my own and assured them that I would enjoy the diversion. As it turned out, the program was a documentary commemorating the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was interested in the program. Even in Israel, obsessed as we had been with our own priorities, the death of the American president had come as a great shock to us all. I had seen photographs of the president’s motorcade in Dallas, been touched by the oft-reproduced picture of Kennedy’s young son saluting his father’s coffin, and had read accounts of Jack Ruby’s murder of the probable assassin, but I had never seen the videotape of the actual shooting of Oswald. Now the documentary showed it— the smirking little man in a dark sweater, the Dallas plainclothes officers with their Stetsons and quintessential American faces, the heavyset man lunging out of the crowd, a pistol shoved almost into Oswald’s belly, the sharp, flat sound which reminded me of white, naked bodies falling forward into the Pit, Oswald grimacing and clutching his stomach. I watched as police officers grappled with Ruby. In the confusion, the television camera was jostled and swept across the crowd.

  “ ‘My God, my God!’ I cried out in Polish and leaped to my feet. The Oberst had been in that crowd.

  “Unable to explain my agitation to my host and hostess, I left that night and took the train to New York. Early the next morning I was at the Manhattan offices of the network which had aired the documentary. I used my contacts at the university and in publishing to gain access to the network’s films, videotapes, and what they called outtakes. Only in the few seconds of tape I had seen in the program did the face in the crowd appear. A graduate student I worked with kindly took still photographs from the network editing monitor and blew them up as large as possible for me.

  “Viewed that way, the face was even less recognizable than during the second and a half it was on the screen: a white blur glimpsed between the brims of Texas cowboy hats, a vague impression of a thin smile, eye sockets as dark as openings in a skull. The image would not have served as evidence in any court in the world, but I knew it had been the Oberst.

  “I flew to Dallas. The authorities there were still sensitive from the criticism of the press and world opinion. Few would speak to me and even fewer would discuss the events in the underground garage. No one recognized the photographs I showed them— either the one taken from the videotape or the old Berlin news photo. I spoke to reporters. I spoke to witnesses. I tried to speak to Jack Ruby, the assassin’s assassin, but could not receive permission to do so. The Oberst’s trail was a year old and it was as cold as the corpse of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “I returned to New York. I contacted acquaintances in the Israeli Embassy. They denied that Israeli intelligence agencies would ever operate on American soil, but they agreed to make certain inquiries. I hired a private detective in Dallas. His bill ran to seven thousand dollars and his report could have been distilled into a single word: nothing. The embassy charged me nothing for their negative report, but I am sure that my contacts there must have thought me mad to be searching for a war criminal at the site of a presidential assassination. They knew from experience that most ex-Nazis sought only anonymity in their exile.

  “I began to doubt my own sanity. The face that had haunted my dreams for so many years had clearly become the central obsession in my life. As a psychiatrist, I could understand the ambiguity of this obsessio
n: burned into my consciousness in a Sobibor death chamber, tempered by the coldest winter of my spirit, my fixation on finding the Oberst had been my reason to live; erase one and the other disappears. Acknowledging the Oberst’s death would have been tantamount to acknowledging my own.

  “As a psychiatrist I understood my obsession. I understood, but I did not believe my own rationale. Even if I had believed it, I would not have worked to ‘cure’ myself. The Oberst was real. The chess game had been real. The Oberst was not a man to die in some makeshift fortification outside Berlin. He was a monster. Monsters do not die. They must be killed.

  “In the summer of 1965, I finally arranged an interview with Jack Ruby. It was not productive. Ruby was a sad-faced husk of a man. He had lost weight in prison and loose skin hung on his face and arms like folds of dirty cheesecloth. His eyes were vague and absent, his voice hoarse. I tried to draw him out of his mental state that day in November, but he would only shrug and repeat what he had said in interrogations so many times before. No, he did not know that he was going to shoot Oswald until just before the act was performed. It was an accident that he was allowed to enter the garage. Something had come over him when he saw Oswald, an impulse he could not control. This was the man who had killed his beloved president.

  “I showed him the photographs of the Oberst. He shook his head tiredly. He had known several of the Dallas detectives and many of the reporters on the scene, but he had never seen this man. Had he felt anything strange just before he shot Oswald? When I asked this question, Ruby lifted his tired, basset-hound face for a second and I saw a flicker of confusion in his eyes, but then that faded and he responded in the same monotone as before. No, nothing strange, just fury at the thought that Oswald should still be alive while President Kennedy was dead and poor Mrs. Kennedy and the children were all alone.