Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  Many Jewish leaders during the Shoah helped the Nazis herd their own people, providing also detailed records of all those people owned, which facilitated expropriating it. Some of those Jews even helped shot other Jews. Horrors like those made possible for the Holocaust to happen with such hideous efficiency. If you ever read, say Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Chapter VII, “The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate”, you would see some examples of this. Probably, not all who acted this way did it for the same reason. Who can say what people do in a world gone insane? You just need to look at many present-day countries to see what corrupt madmen can do to entire nations.

  Moreover, not all knew—even though many suspected—what would happen to the people sent on those trains. Arendt speculates: had there not been this efficient network of Jewish leaders who made this possible, the Nazi state might have imploded in bureaucratic chaos; but nobody can say what an alternative past would have really been like. That might be one of the most horrible parts of this horrible page of our history. But…it might explain your hideous amulet ‘herding souls’,” finished Haim choking in tears.

  “The Theresienstadt Syndrome, that’s how Ehud called that,” said David, a knot in his throat. “That was horrible, but is now in the past. So, what do we do to fix this problem we have now, this little praying man with a Jewish hat herding tormented souls, betrayed souls, angry souls, innocent souls, to Auschwitz—G-d knows for what unholy abomination?”

  “If Odessatron, the spawn of Odessa, is as necromantic and as Wotanist as Himmler—and if the keychain of our ‘surfer’ visitor near Haim’s synagogue is any indication, seemingly they are—we will need a powerful ally,” commented Severian, in a rather pensive, slow tone, each word marked, as heartbeats inside an echo chamber.

  When the last word was still echoing in the room, everyone else had already turned to face him. There was a brief but leaden silence. Siegfried cleared his throat. Tony did the same, and then spoke: “Any help we could get would be great; but for this, it would have to be someone really powerful, and probably well versed in dark, intricate witchcraft, I guess,” he admitted, a bit unsure if he should be happy or worried about whomever Severian was thinking about. When Tony stopped speaking, a whole list of the strangest Nazi hunters, exorcists, wizards, witches, demon hunters, and what not—people he had either met before or hunted down unsuccessfully—was already parading in his mind, like increasingly terrifying visions of a witches’ Sabbath.

  “Yes, Tony,” said Severian, startling him by resting his hand on Tony’s shoulder. “But none of those you’re thinking about would do now.

  I am thinking about calling on Lilith herself.”

  15—Stones, Spells and Searches

  “It isn’t something to do on a whim. If we fail, there would be a very steep price to pay,” began Severian. Since he let his words hover over the sudden sepulchral silence that followed, confused by his apparent retreating, the others started glancing around, first intently looking at him, then glancing sideways, waiting, expectantly.

  “Before we go into this rather disturbing tangent,” coughed the Countess, breaking the impasse, “calling someone whom I, in principle, admire as a feminist—and dread as a religious person—could we, instead, do something else? What do we know? Siegfried, Sól, haven’t you two deciphered anything else we could possibly use?”

  “Well,” started tentatively Sól, “seems to cast that spell which shall lead to a ‘new and just equilibrium’ one would have to procure three stones—one for the past, one for the present, one for the future—from each of the places where souls have left those bodies—such places being each of those sites of extermination—three stones who have to be the vertices of a triangle ‘trapping the evil wind’ (I guess three stones where the outside of the swirling wind is inscribed), kept in the same orientation as an arrow pointing towards the ‘main gateway’ (I suppose that being Auschwitz), ‘fasten them to the cloth’ so that when all twelve clusters of three stones are sown, fastened to the cloth, they reproduce the ‘herder of souls’ (I presume the praying stickman).”

  “That would require clearly seeing the wind’s limits…” said David, “a bit like the eyewall of tornado.”

  “You do see it, don’t you? It’s vicious. It seems to have different…refractive index…than normal air…” jumped Severian.

  “You do…?” mumbled David.

  “Alright. Then you have to ‘obtain’ three stones, a ‘procurement’ which hopefully won’t send you to jail for ‘trying to desecrate’ a site where respect is expected; and also, an action sure to raise a lot of eyebrows, aside from site policy infringements sure to, at the very least, rise a lot of questions… Now, even if you could, and did, all of this be fine until you go to Auschwitz. How could your stones, taken from Auschwitz, point to Auschwitz…?” asked Tony.

  “Auschwitz,” sighed Haim, taking a deep, guttural breath, as if his throat had itself suddenly filled up with stones, “were indeed three large camps—up to forty camps, if you count smaller force labor sub-camps.” He made another pause, looked at David, who nodded, more with his eyes than with his head. “The biggest one, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), had four crematoria, and two older ones, occasionally used, all closer to the southwest part, near “Kanada” and the Koeningsgraben ditch. Of the more than one and a quarter million people who were killed there, about a million were Jews. In Auschwitz I,” Haim swallowed hard, his eyes full of tears, “…in Auschwitz I, there were crematoria, where tens of thousands died, people were shot in droves, and…and…and…”

  “…And,” continued David, “in Block 10, on the southwest part of the camp, Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’, performed every conceivable inhumane atrocity in children and adults…calling such savagery…‘medical research’. Auschwitz I was separate from II, southeast of it, close to the Sola River, an affluent of the Vistula. There was more, but between those two ‘places’, I’d say, is where you should find a truer center of this savagery, the horror of horrors…so to speak. The place was rather big…Auschwitz II was about 150 hectares, Auschwitz I far smaller; but if you want to cover the two, ignoring III who was a slave labor camp to produce synthetic rubber for the Nazis, the entire area, including just the two, would be about 500 hectares. Gesture of bravery, the exact opposite of a quiet surrender, happened at Auschwitz II: for example, before being caught, savagely tortured for weeks, and hanged, Ala Gertner and Roza Robota, smuggled gun powder, blew up a crematorium and destroyed another. On that account, they died in horror—but they died free; not ‘like sheep going to slaughter’ at all, but like true lionesses instead.

  In any case, you have a space of about 500 hectares—or, as we say in America, 1000 acres—where the most hideous horrors happened: on the Southwest of camp II and the Southeast of camp I.

  How are you going to choose, I have no idea. Is there anything in your gold sheet, written in cuneiform, holding supposedly splinters of the original Tables, that says where in Auschwitz might be the center of this hell?” sobbed more than said David, slowly sliding down his chair, sitting on the floor, bent forward, cupping his face with both hands, making a sound reminiscent of a wounded animal in agony.

  “Perhaps...” hinted the Countess, rather daintily, “we should go take some fresh air. It is a lovely night. Some beauty, to mitigate so much horror and help us think more clearly. This castle has a certain harmony, a certain balance…my father used to say said ‘because it was all built around the fountain’ and the fountain is quite old, and quite splendid…”

  “What did you say, Mutti?” asked Siegfried.

  “What did I say? In…what sense? Did I say something wrong? I was trying…”

  “No, no, Chloé! You are a genius, an absolute genius!” said Sól, visibly shocking the Countess. “The castle is built around the fountain. I doubt Auschwitz was built around anything but the Polish barracks turned jail at the beginning of 1940. But, if this castle, which is about 140 hectares
can be seen in such exquisite detail from satellite imagery that we’re irritated by our lack of privacy, one could also use satellites to precisely determine where your stickman with the bonnet points at in each and everyone of those places where it was found. We should be able to tell if Auschwitz I or II from the closest extermination camps, like Majdanek, Bełżec, Janowska and Sobibor.”

  “Fine, then,” said Tony. “We have now an idea of how to find out exactly where in Auschwitz, so we can get our stones…but now, Sól, I forgot what were the stones for….”

  “As I was saying, according to what the cuneiforms engraved in the gold sheet say, the stones, kept in the same orientation as an arrow pointing towards the ‘main gateway’ (I suppose that being Auschwitz), have to be ‘fastened to the cloth’ so that, when all twelve clusters of three stones are sown, they reproduce the ‘herder of souls’ (I presume the praying stickman), and then...the cloth with the sown stones has to be placed ‘over a sacred symbol that could offer those souls salvation’…” Sól clarified, looking at her notes.

  “Well, there is a symbol of salvation we can put that cloth on…in Paris,” almost whispered Tony, his face quite sheepish.

  “In Paris…? A symbol of salvation…?” mumbled the Countess, “I guess what you mean, but our friends, no matter how ecumenical and open-minded they might be, doubt would approve…”

  “What are you talking about?” asked David.

  “I guess I know,” said Haim, almost biting his thumb. “Remember the fire in Notre Dame? Christ’s Crown is now kept at the Louvre. If that is your suggestion, I might as well go home. My faith is mine, imperfect though they might be. I could quote Leon Uris in ‘Exodus’ and say: “Almost everything that Jesus taught, all His ideas, had been set down before in the Old Testament. Then came the largest riddle of all. If Jesus were to return to the earth she was certain He would go to a synagogue rather than a church. Why could people worship Jesus and hate His people?” but I won’t. You’re well aware of the giant can of worms Karol Wojtyła opened in 1979 with his cross in Auschwitz: co-opting a place where a million and a half Jews were murdered to install a Catholic symbol. Praying to Father Kolbe—the reason for this cross; a priest the Church made saint because he took the place of a Jew, and was executed instead of him; a priest, who, by the way, was also publisher of a journal that printed anti-Semitic articles. That not being enough, the Pope also prayed for and to Edith Stein, a convert Jew that became Carmelite—and was sanctified in 1998—but was killed by the Nazis for being a Jew, all the same. That not being enough, he also called Auschwitz “the Golgotha of the modern world”—thus implying that, given that Catholics believe Jesus transcended at the place of his crucifixion, maybe Jews butchered at Auschwitz transcended as well; thus, in a sense, denying Shoah victims their own right to be mechanically mass murdered and nothing more; in short, making those horrors slightly less vile. So, two people—one, a priest with ostensible anti-Semitic past; and two, a nun that to Jews is an apostate—shaped the prayer of a Catholic Pope in Auschwitz, leading to the permanent installation of a massive cross there. Wojtyła’s adding the implication that such horrors could be mitigated—because Catholics impose their atonement on the murdered Jews—to many of us is not ecumenism: it is negation of Judaism in a place where a million and half Jews suffered the Holocaust, the Shoah—even if a quarter of a million non-Jews died there as well. And forty years later, no matter who might protest it, or how loud, the cross remains there.

  “Even so,” retorted Tony, “in 1965, after eighteen centuries, the Second Vatican Council officially quashed calling Jews ‘Christ killers’ as an excuse for anti-Semitism.”

  “Sill, some Catholic Poles who went there to defend keeping the cross in Auschwitz raised it. True, not only some Catholic masses, but also Protestant masses (Luther followers notably), sometimes use it to incite anti-Semitic violence. Still, this wasn’t why Himmler, and those like him, started the process that lead to the Shoah. They were pagans—Wotanists, adepts to hocus pocus and obscurantism—which used the old Christian Jew-hating sentiment and seduced the masses to endorse mechanized mass murder and plunder in an unprecedented scale. In short, well intentioned though it might have been, the Second Vatican Council hardly ended Jew-hating rhetoric by agitators, and utterly ignored the role of Wotanist neo-Nazis. Also, let’s not forget that, after 1945, the ‘Ratlines’ sure have something to do with neo-Nazism flourishing today.”

  “In a sense, this reminds me of the reign of Justinian, a time when Byzantium & Sassanid Persia had been at each other’s throats for centuries. They kept using Arab allies as proxies to fight attrition wars—near bankrupting one another in the process. While they kept fighting, those Arab tribes kept consolidating, and growing stronger, and the two enemy empires, becoming poorer and weaker. So, by the sixth century, the Romans relied essentially on the Ghassanids and the Persians, on the Lakhmids to fight their wars for them. When the two tribes united, around 620A.D., Byzantium and the Sassanid Empire experienced a very rude awakening. The same might happen if neo-Nazis succeed at pitting Christians against Jews and vice versa once again—historical horrors notwithstanding,” warned Haim, shaking his head, face buried in his hands.

  “That is precisely why I’m here asking for your help—and also for your discretion. If we’re to help each other, so we can find and defeat whoever if behind this abomination, we’d have to try doing it from the shadows,” intimated Tony.

  “We agreed we’re not going to proselytize, right?” retorted Haim. “However, it is a river of Jewish souls these psychopaths, necromancers, Nazis, demons, whatever it is they are, are trying to ‘enslave’. The ‘sacred symbol that could offer those souls salvation’ would have to be a symbol we Jews recognize. Even better if ‘your Biblical people’ recognize it too, in case there might be other souls being ‘herded’, i.e. caught in this abhorrent monstrosity…”

  “I agree, in principle. But my superiors have sent scouts to many other camps, places where people died horrible deaths, by disease, starvation, or brutal mistreatment—and they have found no sign of this ‘stickman’ as you say,” replied Tony. “However, we have found it in non-Jewish cemeteries—in the Carré Israélite of the Montmartre cemetery, though. Also, we have sent scouts to the area in Père Lachaise, where daggers and swords were used fighting in between the tombs, on Saturday, May 27, 1871, and the Communards were thrown in a communal ditch—and there, we did find the ‘stickman’ symbol—in Section 96, near the Mur des Fédérés…”

  “But that’s the area which used to be the Carré Juif, where lies the tomb of David Sintzheim, France’s First Grand Rabbi. He was rabbi of Strasbourg, after the Terror…” interjected Sól.

  “Yes. So that’s a maybe,” continued Tony. “However, talking about symbols, there is another one—aside from those small splinters, which purport to be pieces of the original Tables of the Law—, which is common to all three major Abrahamic religions.

  Finding it, however, has, so far, proven impossible.”

  16—Was Lilith summoned, by mistake?

  Raising his eyebrows and shaking his head, pinching his lips with his right hand, Haim looked around, pensive, in silence, for a while. Then, suddenly raising his right hand, fingers fully spread, he exclaimed: “You cannot be serious! That is not at any museum, or vault, or anything. Are you going to go to Ethiopia, knock at the door, and ask to leave there a piece of cloth with stones on it as a souvenir? If it even is the real one…”

  “I suppose you gentlemen are discussing…Hmmm…” mumbled Sól, shaking her head, then looking at Siegfried a bit frustrated. “In any case, while we were discussing stones and war atrocities, to cope with the horror, I tried concentrating on work…and…”

  “And…?” asked Tony.

  “And…studying these hieroglyphs and some Aramaic notes on one of the corners of the gold sheet, by comparing it with the Hebrew inscriptions on the silver cylinder, I think I’ve discovered, first, that there are three splinte
rs, even though I first saw only the larger one and the other two were together, a confusion perpetuated because one of the writers, the dyslexic one, wrote something by mistake. What Severian was suggesting we should do, Izsák’s son, Endre, might have done by accident, and that, by accident as well, could have saved his life.”

  “Care to explain, Schatzi?” asked Siegfried.

  “If I’m not mistaken, you said that in his house in Palos Verdes, there were signs of someone having been butchered, or rather of a large butchery. And yet, Izsák’s son and his family, you found perfectly safe, in Long Beach, right?” hinted Sól, seemingly rather pleased with her own sleuth work.

  “Yes,” admitted Haim. “And when they came back to attack them in Long Beach, Severian created yet another carnage, one that Tony had to clean up…”

  “Except I wasn’t the author of the carnage at Palos Verdes…” Severian insisted, visibly uncomfortable with the turn things were taking.

  “Another…er…expert in martial arts…like yourself?” said David.

  “No. This had to be more than an expert on martial arts swinging a katana,” Severian emphasized. “There were many attackers. There was blood of at least seventeen people in that place. That was literally a bloodbath, not a few arterial sprays from fang puncture wounds and claw slashes. Those people were…mauled, hacked off…and…devoured…raw, in situ…to appease…the wrath…of Lilith—who happened to defend the home of those who invoked her when a horde of Odessatron operatives descended on the house, to take the cylinder…”

  “So Lilith served Endre and his family as a bodyguard?” asked Tony.

  “She serves no one but her own sense of ‘equilibrium’. If the onslaught’s objective had been to create a ‘distortion’, she probably would neither appreciate it nor allow it to succeed. We believe she resides in a higher ‘plane’, too far removed from ours to bother with individual acts of ‘destabilization’, or ‘injustice’ if you prefer. She would only deal with ‘actions’ whose consequences could be colossal, sensing them, foreseeing them, as they are about to happen. Then she will act, forestalling them, to maintain ‘equilibrium’.