“That the two events are connected? That we’re targets as much as my father was? The thought occurred to us,” Erika said. “But why would we be targets?”
“I don’t know any more than I know why your father disappeared. But wouldn’t it be wiser if you and your family stayed out of sight while we investigate? If you are a target, you won’t be able to move as freely as we can.”
“You think I’d be satisfied doing nothing, waiting, while my father’s in danger?”
Misha exhaled. “In conscience, I had to suggest the prudent course of action. But before you commit yourself, there’s one thing I still haven’t told you.”
Saul waited uneasily.
“What we found in the basement,” Misha said.
3
For an instant, no one moved. At once Saul reached for the doorknob, about to go out to the stairs in the hallway, when Misha’s voice stopped him.
“No, through there.” Misha pointed toward the bedroom door.
“You said the basement.”
“The part I’m talking about can’t be reached from downstairs. In the bedroom, in the far right corner, there’s a door.”
“I remember,” Erika said. “The first time I came here to visit, I thought the door led into a closet. I tried to open it and found it locked. I asked my father why. He claimed he’d lost the key. But you know my father never lost anything. So I asked him what was in there. He said, ‘Nothing important enough to call a locksmith.’”
“Then why did he lock the door?” Saul asked.
“Exactly my question,” she said. “His answer was he didn’t remember.”
Misha opened the door to the bedroom—the shadows beckoned.
“When our investigators searched the apartment, looking for anything that might explain your father’s disappearance, they came to that door, and obviously they had to know what was behind it, so they picked the lock and … well, with a little research, they learned that this house has a history. They checked old city directories. They located the architectural firm that built the house. They managed to find a few former neighbors, quite old by now. In the thirties, a doctor owned this building. His name was Bund. Well-to-do. Large family. Seven children. They lived on the second and third stories of the building. Bund had his offices on the first floor. He kept his records and supplies in the basement.”
Misha’s shoulders sagged as he continued.
“The war started. And in 1942—the Holocaust. From files our investigators found, carefully hidden beneath the basement floor, they learned that many of the doctor’s patients were Jewish. Beyond that—and this reaffirms my belief in humanity, a belief sorely tested from time to time—the records made clear that even after the war began, after the Holocaust began, he continued to treat his Jewish patients. It’s astonishing. He truly believed in his Hippocratic oath. Our good doctor continued to care for his Jewish patients till the day the SS came to take him and his family away to the concentration camp at Mauthausen.”
Saul felt a chill.
“But Dr. Bund did more than administer medicine to his Jewish patients,” Misha said. “He actually hid the sickest ones, those whose weakened condition would have meant automatic execution instead of forced labor. Bund”—Misha glanced toward the ceiling—“the unnameable loves you.”
“Hid them?” Erika whispered.
“In the basement. The way the house was set up, Bund had a stairway down from his bedroom to his clinic on the first floor. He never had to pass his patients in the waiting room as he entered his office. He merely admitted them to his sanctum. But as long as he had a stairway through a door in back, from his office to his apartment, why not continue the stairs all the way to the basement? He wouldn’t have to go through the waiting room to reach his records and his medications below him. Efficient, direct, simple.”
“And”—Erika shook her head—“in the end, it killed him.”
“At the height of the pogrom, conscience-torn between his need to survive and his oath to heal, he built a partition across his basement. The front half, reached from an alternate and obvious door at the bottom of the outside stairs, was cluttered with boxes of records and supplies. Bund knew that the SS, prigs at heart, wouldn’t dirty their uniforms to wade through the boxes, finally reach the partition, and test it. How could the so-called Elite Guard have strutted in front of the populace with dust stains on their shirts? For a time, that logic saved the doctor’s life. Meanwhile, after dinner every evening, the doctor went down to the back half of his basement where, hidden by the partition, he took care of his Jewish patients. I don’t know what medical horrors faced him, or how the SS learned his secret, but I do know he saved at least a dozen Jewish lives, men and women who somehow found ways to leave Europe, before he and his family were arrested. That’s the point. Not only Bund. But also his family. His wife and children. They all accepted the risk. They chose to reject the obscenity of their nation’s politics. They sacrificed themselves for us.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because our investigators were able to find two Jews in Israel, now elderly, who in those days were hidden downstairs. To use Christian terminology, the doctor was a saint.”
“Then maybe there’s hope,” Saul said.
“Or maybe not. After all, he was killed,” Misha said.
“My point exactly. He died for us,” Saul said. “So there is hope.”
His eyes sad, Misha nodded. “We don’t know if Joseph chose to live here because of the house’s association with the Jewish cause or if he selected this apartment at random. If it was at random, there’s no way to tell how he learned about that stairway behind his bedroom—because the SS sealed both that entrance and the one from the office down on the first floor. They removed the doors and put in new sections of wall. We asked the landlord about this upper door. He claimed the door wasn’t here six years ago when he bought the building. We asked several former tenants about it. The door wasn’t here when they rented the apartment.”
“So my father must have been the one who unsealed the opening and put the door in,” Erika said.
“But then he locked it,” Saul said. “I don’t understand. What was he protecting?”
“You’ll have to find out for yourselves. Experience this the same way I did—with no expectation, no prejudgment. Maybe you’ll understand what I still haven’t.”
“And whatever we find, you think it’s connected with my father’s disappearance?” Erika asked.
“I haven’t made up my mind. If the people who took your father were looking for something, they surely would have been suspicious about the locked door. They’d have investigated. The door shows no sign of having been forced open. So if they did go through it, they must have picked the lock as we did, or possibly they made your father tell them where the key was. When they finished searching, they locked the door again, leaving the apartment exactly as they found it. But I assume if they’d discovered what your father was hiding and it was what they wanted, they’d have taken it or else destroyed it. By the way, you might as well leave your son up here with me. He looks like he needs a nap.”
“You mean, it’s better if he doesn’t see what’s down there.”
“No one should.”
4
Saul glanced toward Erika. Apprehensive, they entered the bedroom. It, too, smelled of pipe smoke. The covers on the bed were tucked in neatly. A handkerchief and a comb were on the otherwise bare dresser.
Saul allowed himself only a moment to register these details. The door alone occupied his attention. Already Erika was testing the knob. She pulled, and the door swung open, its hinges silent. Darkness faced them. She groped along the inside wall but didn’t find a light switch. Her shoe touched an object on the floor. She picked it up. A flashlight.
When she turned it on, its beam revealed steps descending to the left. The walls were unpainted, stained by mildew. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling; dust covered each side of the stairs, the middle
section brushed clean by footsteps.
The bitter smell of dust made the inside of Saul’s nostrils itchy. He stifled the impulse to sneeze. Peering down, he saw a landing. As Misha had described, the former entrance to the first floor had been sealed by a section of wall. Even the dust and mildew couldn’t disguise the contrast between the dark original and the later light wood. In the apartment on the other side, wallpaper or paint would have hidden the renovation. But on this side, no attempt had been made to conceal where a door had been.
Saul went down. The wood of the landing’s middle wall was the same type the SS had used to seal the door on the left. Despite its layer of dust, the pallor of pine was evident. Saul shoved at the middle wall—it felt solid. He drew his index finger along it and discovered two barely detectable seams, a shoulder-width apart. Opening a pocketknife, he inserted its blade within one seam, used the knife as a lever, and nudged the handle sideways. A section of the wall creaked loose. He pulled it toward him, setting it to his right. Erika aimed the flashlight through the opening to reveal the continuation of the stairs.
They stepped through, descending. Below, the gleam of the flashlight showed the concrete floor of the basement. A stronger musty smell, accentuated by dampness, attacked Saul’s nostrils. Reaching the bottom, he turned left as Erika swung the beam of the flashlight.
He gasped.
The narrow range of the flashlight emphasized the horror. Each object, isolated by the beam, surrounded by darkness, seemed to have greater force alone than it would have had as part of a group. While Erika shifted the light across the room, one terrible image gave way to another, and another, the series becoming more and more unbearable. The blackness toward which the flashlight headed seemed to intensify with the threat of what it hid. Saul’s shoulder blades tightened. “Dear God.”
Erika stopped pivoting the flashlight. Though she hadn’t yet scanned the full length of the basement, she seemed unable to tolerate seeing yet another obscene affront. She lowered the beam and revealed a battered table upon which stood a lamp.
A box of matches lay beside the lamp. Saul approached the table, struck one of the matches, and lit the wick. A flame grew, casting shadows. He set the glass chimney on top of the lamp. The flame became brighter.
He forced himself to look again, only to discover that his initial impression had been wrong. The darkness hadn’t made each image worse alone than it would have been if seen in a group.
He was staring at photographs: large and small, black-and-white and color, glossy and grainy, from newspapers and magazines, books and archives. Thumbtacks attached them to the wall, which, unlike the other three walls, wasn’t made from concrete but was wooden, the partition Dr. Bund had built across the basement so he could hide his sick Jewish patients in the rear compartment down here. The partition was thirty feet wide and ten feet tall; every inch of it was crammed with photographs.
Of concentration camps. Gaunt-cheeked prisoners. Gas chambers. Corpses. Ovens. Pits filled with ashes. Trucks crammed with clothing, shoes, jewelry, human hair, and teeth. In a snapshot, SS officers, their lightning-bolt and death’s-head insignia prominent on pristine black uniforms, stood in a line, their arms around each other, grinning at the camera while in the background bodies formed a disheveled pyramid so large it stunned the mind.
Saul slumped on a rickety chair beside a table. He reached for Erika’s hand, squeezing it.
“What was my father doing down here?” Erika asked. “He never mentioned … I never knew he was obsessed by … This wasn’t sudden. All along he had this room down here.”
“Madness confronting madness.” Saul scanned the rest of the room. It was cluttered with stacks of cardboard boxes. Drawn as if toward a vortex, he approached a stack, pried open the flaps on a box, and found documents.
Some were originals. Others were carbons, photostats, Xeroxes. Brittle yellow pages alternated with smooth white ones. The language varied—English, French, German, Hebrew. Saul’s French and German were good, and Erika’s Hebrew was perfect. Between them, they managed to translate enough of the documents to understand the common theme.
Concentration camp records kept by German commandants. Lists of SS officers, of Jewish prisoners. Military dossiers. Progress reports on how many inmates were executed at which camp on which day, week, month, and year. Lists of the comparatively few Jews who’d survived the death camps, of the correspondingly few Nazis who’d been punished after the war for their participation in the Holocaust.
Saul’s eyes ached from translating faded typescript and cramped handwriting. He turned to Erika. “I met your father only once, when we were married. I never had a chance to get to know him. Was he in one of the camps?”
“My father and mother almost never talked about what had happened to them during the war. When I was young, though, I once overheard them mention it to each other. I didn’t understand, so I pestered them with questions. It was the only time they discussed the war in my presence. Other times, they were willing to talk about the pogroms, the persecutions. They wanted me to know about the Holocaust, in detail, as history. But their own experience … They were both in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw when the Nazis laid siege to it.”
Saul grimaced, understanding. In 1943, Nazi soldiers had surrounded the Warsaw ghetto. Jews were forced into it, but no one was allowed to leave—except in groups being transported to concentration camps. The 380,000 Jews there were reduced to 70,000. Those that remained revolted against the Nazis. In a massive retaliation that lasted four weeks, the Nazis crushed the rebellion and razed the ghetto. Of the Jewish survivors, 7,000 were executed on the spot. Twenty-seven thousand were sent to labor camps.
“My father and mother were part of the group the Nazis sent to Treblinka.”
Saul shuddered. Treblinka hadn’t been a labor camp but rather a death camp, the worst of the worst. Arriving prisoners lived less than one hour.
“But how did your mother and father survive?”
“They were young and strong. They agreed to do the work—removing corpses from the gas chambers and burning them—that even the SS couldn’t stomach. That’s why my parents didn’t talk about the war. They survived at the expense of other Jews.”
“What other choice did they have? As long as they didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, as long as they didn’t participate in the killing, they had to do what they could to stay alive.”
“The first and last time my father talked to me about it, he said he could justify what he did in his mind—but not in his soul. I always thought that’s why he joined the Mossad and dedicated his life to Israel. To try to make amends.”
“But even helping to dispose of the bodies would have given your parents just a temporary reprieve. The Nazis fed slave laborers almost nothing. Eventually your parents would have been too weak to work. The SS would have killed them and forced other Jews to dispose of the bodies.”
“Treblinka,” she said. “Remember where this happened.”
He suddenly realized what she meant. The prisoners at Treblinka had revolted against their guards. Using shovels and clubs as weapons, more than fifty had subdued their captors and managed to escape.
“Your parents took part in the revolt?”
“First in Warsaw, then at Treblinka.” She smiled wanly. “You’ve got to give them credit for persistence.”
Saul felt her pride and shared it, squeezing her hand again. He scanned the wall. “An obsession. A lifetime’s worth. And you never suspected.”
“No one else did either. He couldn’t have kept his position in the Mossad if they’d known what was festering in his mind. They don’t trust fanatics.” She seemed startled by a thought.
“What’s wrong?”
“My mother died five years ago. That’s when he asked to retire from the Mossad, moved from Israel to here, and in secret began setting up this room.”
“You’re saying, your mother was the controlling influence?”
“Subduing his obsession.
And when she died …”
“His obsession took over.” Saul imagined ghosts around him. “God help him.”
“If he’s still alive.”
“This room … Have we found the reason he disappeared?”
“And if we have, was he taken?” Erika asked. “Or did he run?”
“From what?”
“His past.”
As Erika’s expression became more grim, he spoke before he realized. “You don’t mean … suicide?”
“An hour ago, if anyone had suggested it, I’d have said my father was too strong to give up, too brave to destroy himself. But now I’m not sure. This room … His guilt must have been intolerable.”
“Or his hatred for those who’d made him feel guilty.”
On the counter, an open book—spread with its pages flat, straining the spine—attracted Saul’s attention. He picked it up and read the title. The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. The author was Heinz Höhne, the text in German, its publication date 1966. Where the pages had been spread open, a passage was underlined in black. Saul mentally translated.
The sensational fact, the really horrifying feature, of the annihilation of the Jews was that thousands of respectable fathers of families made murder their official business and yet, when off duty, still regarded themselves as ordinary law-abiding citizens who were incapable even of thinking of straying from the strict path of virtue. Sadism was only one facet of mass extermination and one disapproved of by SS Headquarters. Himmler’s maxim was that mass extermination must be carried out coolly and cleanly; even while obeying the official order to commit murder, the SS man must remain “decent.”
“Decent?” Saul murmured with disgust.
In the margin beside the passage, a cramped hand holding a black-inked pen had scribbled several words in Hebrew—two groups of them.
The League of Night and Fog Page 9