I left the family to their reunion and walked up to my room thinking how astonishing it was that something as black as the “Night of Broken Glass” could have a silver lining.
I expected to see Erich at supper, but according to Walter, Erich had walked across town to deliver a fellow inmate’s message. Erich must know that Ruchay is gone, and if Andreas has told him that Ruchay was largely responsible for his mother’s arrest, then I trust Andreas has also impressed on his older grandson that looking after a brother requires him to stay out of prison.
If, as I expect, Erich rises to the occasion and does what his mother would want him to do, that will be good news for all concerned. Including, of course, myself. No longer indispensable here, I can get back to my real work. A state of affairs that finds me relieved, but feeling somewhat diminished.
Thursday, November 17
Andreas was not at his best today, and after supper Jakob and I had a long talk with Erich. The months in prison have either changed the boy or—Jakob’s view—brought out the one who was already there. He certainly looks different with an ordinary haircut and ordinary clothes—up until yesterday I’d only ever seen him in uniform, the one worn for work or the one he donned as a Traveling Dude. But that’s just on the surface. There’s also a stillness about him that’s new; all the old restless evasion is gone. The youth has turned into a man.
He thanked us for helping to look after his family and said he hoped he’d manage half as well. He’s assuming, probably rightly—the labor shortage gets worse each year—that they’ll give him his old job back and plans to apply at the office first thing tomorrow, with a view to starting on Monday. The doctor is going to visit Andreas tomorrow, and Erich intends to ask him how the old man really is.
I didn’t want to give the young man any more worries than he already had, but I felt I had to ask—what would happen if there was a war and he was called up?
He said he didn’t know but that he hoped Verena would look after Walter. When I pointed out her lack of legal status where Walter was concerned, he looked surprised. “Surely if war breaks out, they’ll have more important things to worry about. And maybe our mother will be back before then.”
I shrugged.
He sighed. “All I can do is play it by ear,” he admitted. “Sometimes that’s all you can do.”
Which was true enough. Andreas obviously hadn’t told Erich about asking me to take Walter out of the Reich—either Andreas is protecting my secrets, or he no longer sees it as relevant now that Erich is back. Which it isn’t.
After the talk, Jakob and I went out for a beer and agreed that we felt reassured. “Anna would be proud of him,” Jakob said, wiping away what looked like a tear.
She would. She will be.
I have decided to see Müller this weekend. I will say what I feel about Giesemann and see where the conversation goes from there. If that doesn’t take me to prison, next week I will start to put my resistance cell together. First Schulte, then Franke, then Opatz. Three pieces. Three gambles.
Friday, November 18
This afternoon I contrived a few private moments with Dariusz Müller and asked if he’d meet me tomorrow. He seemed unsurprised by the request and readily agreed to the time and place I suggested. I was left with the suspicion that if I hadn’t come to him, he would have come to me.
On a more exalted plane, our idiot foreign minister has been bitterly complaining that we Germans inhabit a hostile world. One, he might care to think how responsible he and his puppet master are for provoking all the hostility—did he really think the rest of the world would not be disgusted and enraged by last week’s pogrom and its aftermath? Two, he might put himself in the place of people who really are up against it, such as the Spanish Republicans whom his bombers are battering into submission. This week has seen more Fascist victories in Spain, and it feels as if the end is near. It’s the left that’s living in a hostile world, not evil buffoons like Ribbentrop.
Saturday, November 19
It was bitterly cold this morning but mercifully dry, given that I had decided Müller and I should meet in the open. He was sitting on the open lock gate when I got there, and we greeted each other like people well met by chance. There were other walkers strung out along the towpath, and several warmly wrapped fisherman exhaling clouds of breath in the frigid air. A kilometer or so to the south our workplace sprawled beneath its usual canopy of smoke.
I suggested we walk, and we did so in companionable silence for most of a minute.
“So why did you want to meet?” he finally asked.
I said that I wanted to explain why I’d been so cautious at Monday’s meeting. That I believed Paul Giesemann was a Gestapo informer.
“And what makes you think so?” Müller asked in an unruffled tone.
“I have no definite proof,” I admitted. “And I have tried to find some,” I added, bending over backward on Giesemann’s behalf.
“How?”
“I’ve followed him on several occasions, seen who he’s spent time with. I’ve brought him up in conversations, listened to what others have to say about him.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“But you’re still convinced.”
“Ninety-five percent.”
Müller gave me a sideways glance and waited until we had passed an angler and his tin of writhing maggots. “Just a layman’s hunch?” he asked. “Or one based on experience?”
I told him the latter.
He smiled at that and pointedly asked me why had I come home to Germany.
The moment of truth. Or something close to it. I told him that watching events from afar, I’d begun to feel like a soldier gone AWOL, a man who’d left others to do his fighting for him.
“You were in the party,” Müller said. It wasn’t a question.
“And so were you,” I countered, thinking it was time. “Anna told me they arrested you in ’33,” I added. She hadn’t, but I had to know it from someone, and I wasn’t yet willing to reveal my real employer.
“I was,” Müller admitted.
“Why did they let you go?” I asked.
Another smile, thinner than the last. “Why do you think? Because I agreed to work for them.”
“And have you? Do you?”
“Of course. But I have never knowingly put a comrade’s life at risk. I have reported on waverers, on those not displaying enough enthusiasm. I’ve gotten people fired, but the way things there are, they soon get another job. I’ve strung the bastards along, and I’ve used them as much as they’ve used me. Knowing who they are and what they know will be important one of these days. Soon, I hope.”
“A dangerous game,” I said, somewhat superfluously.
Müller agreed that it was. But it was one he chose to play. “At the beginning I could have said no, taken some beatings, served my five years, and come home to the family and just kept my head down. It didn’t appeal. I believe in the party. I always have.”
It didn’t seem the moment to mention that the party had rather less faith in him.
“And I’m serious about taking things to another level,” he went on.
“Then you’ll have to be certain of Giesemann.”
“We are,” he said, surprising me. “Wosz and I have been suspicious for a while. We searched his locker a few weeks ago and didn’t find anything incriminating, but this week we went through his room and found a report he’d compiled on the group that was clearly intended for other eyes.” Müller smiled. “He described you as ‘probably harmless.’”
I allowed myself a moment of professional pride and then asked Müller whether Giesemann knew that both of them reported to the Gestapo. Because if so, Giesemann could use the knowledge to counteraccuse.
Müller said Giesemann might know. “They haven’t told me about him, but they may trust h
im more than me. But it doesn’t matter. Wosz and several of the others already know about me—I told them from the start—and they trust me.”
“Do you know what you’re going to do?”
Müller’s brief scan of the heavens might have been a search for mercy. If so, he came up empty. “We have no choice, do we? We thought about forming another group, a secret one without Giesemann, and keeping the present one going to put him off the scent, but we’d spend more time and energy keeping up the deception than we would fighting the Nazis. And if we try and warn him off with threats, he’ll take fright and have us all arrested. No, we have to kill him.”
I could see the logic.
“Are you with us in this?” Müller asked.
“Yes,” I told him.
He nodded. “Good. I’ll let you know when and where.”
We walked back separately, Müller a minute ahead of me. As I followed him up the towpath, I trawled back through our conversation, reaffirming my conviction that he was telling the truth. Twelve hours have passed since then, and I’ve had no reason to change my mind. No car has screeched to a halt outside, disgorging men in leather coats.
I doubt he believed me completely, but if he’s who he says he is, and I’m who he thinks I am, then he’ll know I can’t be more open. The webs we weave.
That said, I think and hope we understand each other. Our new partnership may be a short one, but I hope it will give birth to something that lasts. If I don’t feel like breaking out in carefree whistling or dancing with joy, it’s because I’ve reached that familiar moment, the one where a singular secret existence gives way to reliance on another’s discretion. Someone else knows, and—rationally or not—I’m suddenly feeling vulnerable.
Sunday, November 20
Gerritzen brought his new car over to show us. It’s a small Mercedes convertible, which must have been expensive—how he afforded it, God only knows. He took Verena, Walter, and Marco out for a drive, which made me like him more—I can’t see his Nazi friends or prospective father-in-law offering someone of mixed race a ride.
Monday, November 21
Anna is dead.
I heard the news from Verena, whose face looked raw from crying. She told me the letter had come in the late-morning post—“Anna Gersdorff, died 14 November 1938, aged 37. Cause of death: pneumonia.”
I asked where the family was, and she said they were all in the kitchen.
I walked through with a heavy heart, the ache of loss held at bay by the thought of what I would find there. Over the years, I’ve seen hundreds of people struck down by sudden grief, and the faces came as no surprise. Andreas looked stunned and, for the first time since I’d met him, truly blind. Walter had his head on his grandfather’s shoulder, and the tearstained face he turned toward me was utterly bereft.
I said how sorry I was, the words sounding trite and inadequate, the way they always do.
Andreas gave no sign that he’d heard, and Walter, polite to the last, whispered, “Thank you.”
“Where’s Erich?” I asked, after suddenly realizing where he might be.
Walter shook his head as if wondering why I cared.
“Does he know about Ruchay?” I asked Andreas.
The old man looked blank for a moment; then realization dawned. “Go after him, Josef,” he said. “Please.”
I took the first few streets at a run, the rest as fast as my shortage of breath and a stitch in my side would allow. There was no sign of police outside Ruchay’s lodgings and no sounds of mayhem coming from within. When I knocked on the door and demanded to see him, the woman who answered gave me a look and told me to wait on the step.
Ruchay appeared, napkin in hand—I’d interrupted his dinner. He looked more than a little apprehensive, but not as if he’d just been beaten up.
“Anna Gersdorff is dead,” I said bluntly, and he took a step backward as if he’d been hit.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said automatically, but the look on his face told a different story.
“Others think you did,” I said, “so if I were you, I’d go away for a while. A couple of weeks looking after your mother, perhaps.”
His face twisted into a smile. “Why would you care what happens to me?”
“I don’t,” I said coldly. “But I will be really upset if someone else gets punished for giving you what you deserve. So make yourself scarce.”
I wanted to hit him myself, so I turned on my heel and recrossed the street, hearing the door close behind me. It seemed prudent to keep the house under observation—for all I knew, Erich was still coming—and I paced to and fro on the opposite sidewalk for a face-numbing hour before giving up. Hoping to find him at home, I ran into him on the way, sitting on a bench in the square, gazing across at the giant swastika which hangs on the Rathaus facade.
I sat down beside him, wondering what sort of reception I’d get.
He nodded in the flag’s direction. “This country is fucked,” he said. “Fucked beyond repair.” He turned toward me. “We knew that in the Dudes,” he said. “We all did. But then it felt like a joke. A really bad one, but still a joke.”
I told him how sorry I was about his mother.
He nodded.
“I was looking for you,” I said. “I was afraid you’d gone to see Ruchay.”
The smile was bitter. “The idea did occur to me. In fact I got as far as the place where he lives now. And I stood there, thinking that Walter only has me and Granddad, and Granddad . . .” He shrugged.
“Did the doctor tell you anything?”
“Not much. That Granddad might live for years. The ‘might not’ bit was left unsaid.” He offered a wry smile. “We can only hope.”
“Yes,” I said sadly. The thought crossed my mind that Erich would be a good recruit for my cell, but this family has already given far too much.
The two of us walked home together, and Erich insisted on shaking my hand when we parted. I came up to my room, sat down in my chair, and suddenly felt the wave of personal loss that the family’s greater grief had kept in check. Anna and I weren’t close—there was always that unspoken wall between us, which we each had good reason to keep in place. But I admired her enormously, as a mother, as a person. She was honest and brave; she made her choices in life and accepted their consequences with precious little complaint.
I have missed her since her arrest, and now the loss is forever. A shock but not a surprise. I am used to people not coming back.
Tuesday, November 22
First thing this morning Verena conveyed a message from Andreas that he wanted to see me, and after saying I should shut the door behind me, he asked if I’d visit the Gestapo office in town and inquire about bringing his daughter’s body back for burial. He was, he said, afraid to ask Erich. “I know he wants to act responsibly, but that might be too much to ask.”
I agreed, of course, and was there when the building opened. Kriminalsekretär Appel arrived a few minutes later and rather brusquely said he had no news. When I showed him the notification of death, his face turned red, and he actually said he was sorry.
My explaining why I was there had him sadly shaking his head. “The remains are never returned,” he said, in a tone that suggested the reason should be obvious. And I supposed that it was—the numbers would be prohibitive. Half of the Reichsbahn’s trains would have to include a mortuary carriage.
“They have to process fatalities quickly,” Appel was saying. “There’s typhoid in the camps; it’s in everyone’s interest.” If he was trying to soften the blow, he wasn’t succeeding.
“The letter said she died of pneumonia,” I pointed out coldly. Not that I believed that either.
Knowing there was no point in pressing the matter, I managed a cursory thank you and left. Andreas took the news better than I expected and agreed we could still have some sort of ceremo
ny, giving people a chance to say goodbye.
“Like in the war,” he said. “When collecting all the pieces would take too long.”
I nodded, sharing the memory.
“What life has become,” he murmured.
I set off to work, where an official warning awaited me for being two hours late. This afternoon at home, insult was added to injury—Anna’s effects came back in a parcel. Verena brought it in and had the sense to open it on her own. “There are just a few clothes,” she told me, “no ring, no watch. And the blouse she was wearing when she left is covered in bloodstains. I don’t think they should see that,” she added, meaning the family.
I agreed, and carried it up to my room for later disposal. Verena said she would give the rest to Erich, and by now I expect she has.
The family ate apart in Andreas’s room, Verena flitting between them and us lodgers. Our mood was somber, and we all ate quickly, keen to escape.
I’ve hardly seen Walter since the terrible news. Erich and Verena thought it better he go to school than stay home alone with his grief, and they may have been right, but I doubt he took anything in. When our paths crossed down in the hall, it felt like it took all he had to remember who I was.
What life has become, as Andreas said. And the only answer I have to that—the only one I’ve ever had—is what life could be.
I have to admit: I’m no longer holding my breath.
Thursday, November 24
We killed Paul Giesemann this evening. Earlier in the day Müller had told me where and when we should meet: in the rarely used storeroom adjoining the depot roundhouse at 7:30 p.m. Giesemann would be there half an hour later, expecting a hastily rearranged meeting to discuss the group’s subversive future.
There were four of us lying in ambush and two more I didn’t yet know about, waiting to play their part. It was quick and humane as killing can be, one man hitting him over the head with a heavy spanner as he came through the door, another slipping a blade through his rib cage as he lay there unconscious. We rolled him up in a sheet of tarpaulin, and three of us shouldered the bundle out into the night, the fourth man a few steps ahead, acting as our lookout.
Diary of a Dead Man on Leave Page 25