Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Gerstein, I had doubts about you at first, but now I can see you’re as firm as iron! I’ll bring you to Theresienstadt tomorrow morning. Captain Seidl is Austrian, like our Führer himself. A real iron man! I think you’ll be impressed by the way he hoodwinks the Bohemian Jews. Even the Red Cross swallows the bait! It’s time to teach you his system, because we have to get ready for Hungary.

  By your order, Herr Captain! Thank you for your confidence in me . . .

  Nor should we allot exaggerated importance to the recollection of Pastor Otto Wehr that at his final rendezvous with Gerstein, in the fall of 1944, the latter told him: Every half hour, those trainloads of doomed Jews come chasing me . . .—He gasped out to Bishop Dibelius, who’d officiated at his wedding: Help us, help us! These things must become the talk of the world— . . .—Why dwell on sad and secret matters? After all, the General Plan for the East was being fulfilled!

  To be sure, the Plan’s very success had impelled us out of sight of those easy days when the very heart of the Reich had still been full of Jews who, ripe for the harvesting, offered their hunters not only the currency and valuables which any city dweller, even the poorest, is practically bound to have, but also the shared language so convenient for torment (spit in the face of the quarry’s Aryan wife and call her Jew’s whore; no fear that the husband won’t understand!). But now the hunters were compelled not only by the scarcity of game in the homeland but more so by the continuously increasing magnitude of the hunt to forage in the alien preserves of the General Government, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (where Gerstein could have helped himself to a golden tankard with an eagle on the lid), the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the widening strip of unincorporated Soviet territory behind the eastward-rushing front, not to mention Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, where in many cases the Jewish peasants, already accustomed to centuries of beatings, confiscations and pogroms, clumped silently together when the hunters flushed them out of their already blazing huts; and when the hunters cursed them the Jews gazed back wide-eyed as though they comprehended nothing even when the Einsaztgruppen men, in between reading advertisements for Rosodont, which is to say Bergmann’s Solidified Toothpaste, shot the old ones and the sick ones right there; even when they took the strong young males away to dig the pit, the hunters’ domination seemed to make no mark upon those faces pale as writing paper; worse yet, what was there to pilfer except a few gold teeth? Of course the Jews of Holland, Belgium, Italy and France were richer, but they tended to get stripped by the police of their own countries. So the German hunters felt that everything was diminishing now. Sometimes there weren’t even gold teeth. Ebbing Jewry might dry up completely, as it continued to seem, yet profitlessly, rustling and dying, draining into each new earth-pit, its blood absorbed, its memory walled off like the festering heart of Shostakovich’s still unwritten Eighth String Quartet (Opus 110), the charred smears of Jewish villages quickly overgrown with grasses golder than guilt. The hunters still believed in the hunt (after all, in our Ukraine there remain compliant U-maidens, in Russia R-girls, and so on). But they’d begun to feel as if they were shooting fieldmice instead of deer.

  Until the Ostfront stabilizes . . . Captain Günther kept saying now. He had begun registering Jewish property in the last marches of Bohemia. The former owners marched past Prague’s powder-tower, whose bas-reliefs of matronly virgins and froglike knights were all black and old. Then off they went to Theresienstadt, to wait until Auschwitz’s ovens had room for them. As for Gerstein, he grew haggard trying to learn the contents of more secret documents. This was his honor, you might say. His comrades were disappointed, because he couldn’t find time to accompany them to the cinema to see Lisca Malbran. Mostly he shuttled between Prague and Berlin, but I seem to see him at Dachau, where Russian prisoners got frozen for experimental purposes, their falling body temperatures being measured with rectal thermometers; and he was likewise at Birkenau, where hiscomrades collected the most interesting skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, coding them, then affixing labels as colorful as Mussolini’s decorations. (There was Berthe again. Her eyes resembled those of the Italian princess who died in the brothel of Buchenwald.) I find him pacing the sidewalk below the Deutsches Haus in Prague, with wreaths and swastika buntings fading moment by moment above his head; now here came the transport: fifteen Green Minnas whose barred high windows showed him only darkness; he knew from experience that as many as fifty prisoners could be packed in, if their packers didn’t care about a few suffocations, so that meant that a possible seven hundred and fifty more victims of Hitler had just now (at 1145 hours) passed this street corner and vanished while he’d pretended not to count them; they must be bound for the Petschek Palace, where the Gestapo operated; his quest called him there to observe the incoming traffic, but moderation forbade him. Traversing and transecting Europe Central with his top-secret manifests for the delivery of Zyklon B, he sometimes had time to inhale the gloomy yet somehow satisfying smell of old church-stone soaked with five hundred years’ worth of incense, breath, and the steam from fresh-baked sacred bread. Instead of relief, his prayers brought him only desperation. How could he deny that with knowledge came sin and death, that his quest to learn the truth had infected him with horror, that he was now an accomplice until he saved the Jews?—But he had clean hands.

  In 8.42, his horrid visions like heel-claps echoing in an old church, he sought out the Papal Nuncio in Berlin to bear witness. Monsignor Orsenigo would not see him, perhaps on account of theSiegrunen flashing on a shield on the side of his dark helmet. Leave bad manners to their own quarrel, his father always used to say, but Kurt Gerstein, who still had much to learn, persisted until they begged him to go away in God’s name. When he emerged from the legation, pale and twitching, a policeman began to follow him, and then another policeman on a bicycle came after the first. He changed direction, ducking around a wall whose poster, a little torn and grimy, for it was last month’s “Word of the Week,” displayed the compulsory Jewish star, with the explanation Who wears this symbol is an enemy of our people. The two policemen continued to follow him. His first thought was to knock on Bishop Dibelius’s door, but he disdained implicating anybody in his own doom. (What I can do is almost nothing, Dibelius had said.) Desperately he leaped aboard a tram and rode three stops toward Wannsee; that was how he shook them. (Captain Wirth dined with him at Auschwitz and said: You need stronger nerves, my friend.)

  He paid a call on the Swiss press attaché, who sniffed at him and said: Of course I’ll relay your story to the bureau, Herr Gerstein. But in the first place, it’s unbelievable; and in the second place, if you take a look at the map of central Europe, you’ll see that Switzerland is not a very large country, but the Reich is growing all the time, so please don’t expect to read your anecdote in the newspapers tomorrow.—Gerstein turned on his heel.

  Once more he attempted to meet with Monsignor Orsenigo, but that gentleman, they told him, was away at the Vatican. So at extreme peril to himself he conveyed a note to Dr. Winter, legal adviser of the Archishop of Berlin. There came no answer.

  Day after day, dangerously neglecting his own duties, he paced before the gates of the Swedish embassy until he saw Baron von Otter emerge. Frau Hedwig’s twins expected him to come and speak to their Hitler Youth chapter on the topic of German chivalry, but he was going to be late. At the corner, two Gestapo men sat in a Mercedes-Benz watching. Gerstein rushed at his acquaintance, wrung his hand, asked in a quivering voice whether anything had come of the story he’d told.—Of course I made a report, his acquaintance replied, glancing at the Mercedes uneasily. It has already had a great influence on the relations between Sweden and Germany.

  Thanks be to God!

  And now please excuse me, Obersturmführer Gerstein. I must attend to my official duties . . .

  Baron, I beg to inform you that they’re now opening all the mass graves in the East, to destroy the evidence. Write this down, please:-Standartenführer Paul Blobel is their inc
ineration expert—

  Herr Obersturmführer, are you insane? Those men over there—

  That winter they were in a broken-windowed, sandbag-walled nightclub in Minsk, a city now belonging to our Reich, which was why with the exception of certain specialists who were needed for the war effort the Jews there had already been apprehended and rendered harmless, and Gerstein, who to the astonishment of his comrades had just declined the present of a huge glass jar of malt syrup, which his wife would have gratefully received, was thinking: What is my life? A lovely blonde R-girl who’s so slender I could wrap my arm around her waist twice, she lounges against the wall or carefully squats down to pass tiny cold transparent glasses of “Kazakhstan” vodka to the Wehrmacht officers who are playing billiards in the sunken room; she is glowing with her youth, burning her youth instant by instant, wasting it here. What should she be doing with it? What should I have done with mine? Mine is gone, burned out. And she is as slender and blonde as this candle she’s lit for me, the candle with its slender blonde flame which ever so gently sways as her head does, its expression as unreadable as hers. She’s Aryan; she’s one of us; she’s beautiful; she should be with one of us. That’s what they say. But the flame eats the candle whether it touches another wick or not. (Don’t you want to watch the show, Gerstein? We’re just about to cram the gas chamber full of naked women!—But they seem so innocent!—Ha, ha! How sly they are!—And his heart screamed out; far away, in Kuibyshev, Shostakovich heard the scream in his nightmares and saved it for Opus 110.) She squats down, and places another vodka glass on the ledge by the billiard-players. The liquid trembles. It’s clearer than ice, more silver than water. Her face is blank. Is she bored or afraid? She wants to go home. If she had enough to eat I suppose she wouldn’t be here. Then what would she do with her beauty? Does she even know? It’s night, and the snow is dark and dirty outside—snow in the shell-cratered streets, dark houses plastered with tattered eagle-and-swastika announcements of regulations and reprisals, then more snow, frozen garbage, swastika buntings flapping and creaking unseen in the night wind, and somewhere, probably in a narrow alley heaped roof-high with rubble, Berthe’s ghost glides, forever invisible to those shivering, blue-faced German soldiers who await another grey dawn. She’s not Berthe; I know that. She lays her hand upon her cheek. She gazes down at the billiards. I expect her to yawn. Her hips barely bell out. Her legs seem to come all the way up to her chest. Her breasts are modest but firm. She’s streamlined like a German airplane. This blonde woman-metal shoots through the air, consuming itself with a magnesium flame. The flame is steady. She faintly smiles. A player whirls his billiard stick like a propeller; he would fly, too, if he could, but he’s too fat and old. Youth will win. Youth is her firm, almost flat buttocks which swell out from her only with the most subtle and aerodynamic roundedness. And her face—a fully perfect blank blonde stone! Those Greek caryatids, they’re female without being human. That’s what she is. Maybe I don’t want to be human. I want to be her. I want to eat her like caviar. But if I could eat her goodness, it would only melt away on my tongue.

  Across from Gerstein sat another-man, watching him searchingly. At last this comrade said kindly: Never mind, Gerstein. I myself vomited after my first execution.

  14

  His wife implored him to resign from thefor her sake and the sake of the children. She took him by the hand and drew him to a mirror, murmuring: Look at yourself, Kurt! Look at what this is doing to you!

  Proudly he said: I myself have chosen this road.

  Then she said: How can you, a man of honor and a sincere Christian, stand by and watch these things?

  His face hardened into helmet-flesh and he replied: I am glad to have seen these atrocities with my own eyes, so that one day, God permitting, I may be able to testify about them.

  She laughed at him.

  Then he swung round as though he were about to strike her; and he said: Perhaps I ought to sue for divorce. What do you think? That would save you, should anything happen to me . . .

  No, Kurt, no—

  Very well then. We mustn’t just think of ourselves.

  But wasn’t that precisely what he was doing? The next time he went to Theresienstadt, on another secret mission for “Clever Hans” Günther, there weren’t as many boxcars as usual so he completed the registration early. Detraining at Prague, he thought to buy something for his family. He was anman; he could go anywhere he chose! Czechs and Germans alike, everyone gazed at him with fear, which made him long to scream. Smiling coldly, he flicked an imaginary granule of dust from his death’s head cap. He called himself a spy for God. In those curving streets walled high with watchful windows, swastika banners hung down on either side with perfect regularity just as in Berlin, so quite often he could see three ahead on his left, three more on his right, until the street arrived at a squat black archway like a grave. Following a stone bridge across the Vltava, the Moldau we call it now, he came to a street where an old woman was selling honey. She was sitting on the cobblestoned curb, drowsily humming to herself. Something about her face reminded him of the Catholic nurse who’d cared for him in his childhood; she was the only one who’d been kind to him. When his shadow fell on her, she looked up and screamed.

  15

  The Anglo-Jewish Bolshevists label us “totalitarians,” and it’s true that all over our Reich, even at Wolf’s Lair itself, we express ourselves by means of the same signals; for example, the preliminary end of an air raid alert is represented by three high-pitched sounds within a one-minute interval; then, once the cessation of the enemy threat has been verified, a tone of the same pitch shrills out steadily for one minute; we have found this consistency to be quite convenient. I’d be surprised if the enemy didn’t have their own equally “totalitarian” system! For much the same reasons, we’ve elected to school every German boy, every decent one, that is, in the Hitler Youth; so that his response in these times of racial threat can be relied on.

  Frau Hedwig’s twins, Erich and Edmund, were among the decent ones. They had just been studying the Teutonic Knights. When he entered the room, Edmund was reading aloud: Long and wide went the forest through which he must make his way were he not to shun the combat to which, through no fault of his own, he had been called.

  Laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Gerstein asked him how he understood what he had just read. Edmund replied: Hard times, hard hearts! That’s our Word of the Week. When a war gets foisted on us by international Jewry, we don’t have a choice. We have to fight. That’s what it means for us today.

  Correct! laughed good blond Kurt Gerstein. By the way, have you dreamed about that dark forest?

  Never, said Edmund.

  Erich?

  No, Herr Gerstein. Perhaps we don’t understand your question. It’s about good versus evil, isn’t it?

  Clearly. Now read it again.

  Long and wide went the forest through which he must make his way . . .

  Would you boys like to be knights?

  Oh, yes! Like you, Herr Gerstein!

  Continue.

  Were he not to shun the combat . . .

  Against whom?

  The Jews, Herr Gerstein.

  And who else?

  There is no one else! cried the handsome boy, proud to have solved the trick question. The Jews are our misfortune. The Slavs and Anglo-Americans merely follow them. Isn’t that right, Herr Gerstein?

  That’s right, he said gently, remembering that time back in ’35 when the Hitler Youth insulted our Lord in their performance of Wittekind by Edmund Kiss. When the blond young actor on stage jeered: We’ll have no Savior who weeps and laments! Kurt Gerstein had stood up to shout: We shall not allow our faith to be publicly mocked without protest!—They kicked him to the floor, and kept kicking. That was when he’d lost three of his teeth.

  Hadn’t he done everything he could? Wasn’t he still doing it? He told the boys the tale of Simple Hans, whose princely brothers despised him for a fool but who won t
he princess in the end because he saved the ants, ducks and bees from harm, a favor they requited by coming to his aid when he was set humanly impossible magic tasks in the castle of stone effigies: The ants gathered up and counted all the scattered pearls, the ducks dove down to find the lost key, and the bee queen tasted the lips of each sleeping princess to find out which girl was the most charming.

  16

  Once more he succeeded in meeting the Swiss consul, Hochstrasser, and furtively spewed out his disgusting secret, while Hochstrasser gazed upon him with resentment.—I’ll pass on your story to Berne if you insist, Herr Obersturmführer. But you continue to require that it remain unattributed!

  For the love of Christ, sir! Don’t you comprehend the situation of my wife and children?

  As you prefer, then. But unattributed rumors of this kind, well—

  What do you want me to do? Must I bring you a trainload of corpses?

  Herr Obersturmführer, good day.

  17

  Again the prussic acid has decomposed! reported Obersturmführer Gerstein. There is nothing to do with it now except bury it.

  It seems to decompose awfully frequently these days, said “Clever Hans” Günther.

  There’s wartime quality for you! his-man replied with a ringing laugh. I’ve complained to the factory in person several times.

  Someone should be shot.

  Naturally they use Jews and Slavs on the production line! But for the sake of our transportation personnel—