Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  He tried to telephone Baron von Otter, who was in Romania again, they said. What about Bishop Dibelius? He was a moderate man; he advocated only the exclusion of the Jews from our economic life. Trembling, Gerstein ran downstairs.

  He must have looked a sight, but the swastika-lapeled porter opened the door for him with an imperturbable Heil Hitler! Where could he go? He needed to walk and walk, to cool his head . . . On the Kurfürstendamm, a reddish-blonde woman on a bicycle was pedaling with long pink legs; everything about her was pink; that reddish-blonde hair of hers resembled the “good red gold” which ancient Norsemen prized. Why wasn’t she working in a munitions factory? She must be the wife of someone important. Nothing was wrong. In the Tiergarten, a policeman on a brown horse passed slowly by, half visible between trees . . .

  The telephone rang. It summoned him to Bohemia. Clever Hans had some surplus Jews.

  One eyewitness claims (this I can hardly believe) to have seen him enter the Castle of Prague, residence of our Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where under the guise of inter-district cooperation, he is supposed to have questioned-Oberstgruppenführer Daleuege’s personal staff about certain secret actions carried out against the Czechs in revenge for Heydrich’s assassination. A parade of Nazi nurses was passing outside. Through the open window he heard them screaming: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! Daleuege’s assistant was saying: Something about you smells, Herr Gerstein. I’m going to report you.—Gerstein stood up tall, slapped his face, smiled (deliberately showing off the missing three teeth), and said: Go ahead and report me, you pasty-faced little kike! Now, Berlin wants to know whether this office has been hard enough, whether measures have been taken. For instance, it’s alleged that the female inhabitants of Lidice are still alive. I’m going to tell Berlin that you’re not men here, that you’re just a bunch of soft-shelled Jewish creeps.—In the end, because he acted so crazy that he must really be from Berlin, they allowed him to read the file on Lidice: one hundred and seventy-three men shot in the village, nineteen more liquidated in detention, seven women rendered harmless, two hundred and three others sent to concentration camps, a hundred and five children either deported or Germanized, the village razed, all with the approval of our Führer himself. To Gerstein that was the next horror, the next iron-ringed vault now opened within him: He had always known that the sleepwalker knew, but that knowledge had been kept secret from himself, like a skeleton in a forest, like something silver on black.

  He went back to Berlin and from memory wrote down the statistics on Lidice. American bombs were falling on the Reich Chancellery again. Someone he’d never met was shouting; he was supposed to go to the air raid shelter. Coldly, he replied that he was busy. At that moment, the Kaiserhof Hotel got smashed by the planes. He heard our antiaircraft guns firing, and then the all-clear. Then he tried once more to telephone Baron von Otter. The line was out. When service was restored, he telephoned three half-strangers, all of whom hung up quickly and quietly. Then the typist from the motor pool came in with ersatz coffee. Very gently she said to him: Excuse me, Herr Obersturmführer, but what you are under the uniform is nobody’s business.

  21

  He dreamed that he was digging in the earth, and turned up a golden skull with rubies for eyes—a death’s head both beautiful and terrifying, like the uniform he wore; as he awoke he had a dissolving vision of holding the skull up to the sunlight.

  22

  Prague called him once again on the telephone; he took the express. “Clever Hans” Günther was waiting at the office.

  More secret business for you, Gerstein. Most secret.

  By your order, Herr Captain.

  Take this suitcase to Herr Lang at the Reichsbank and tell him that this is from me. You’re not to ask for a receipt. Do you understand?

  It’s all clear, thank you, Herr Captain.

  Gerstein, I’m very pleased with your work. You’re an outstanding young man. That’s all. Heil Hitler!

  Heil Hitler!

  What a heavy suitcase! He knew all too well what was in it; Clever Hans’s trust in him was now proven. He sat gazing out the window of the Berlin Express, watching the summer scenery. Hour upon hour the other passengers in his compartment sat in silence, too terrified to look at him. An old woman coughed. Flicking a fingernail across the death’s head on his cap, Gerstein turned slowly toward her, fixing a stony expression on his face. The woman lowered her head. Then the conductor came. Gerstein thrust out his ticket, staring the man down. He lit a cigarette. Now came the long tall facade of the Reichsbank, with its swastika banners and its five rows of rectangular window-pits which resembled the slits from which the defenders of medieval castles used to discharge their arrows. Herr Lang was expecting him. Together they weighed the gold: twenty-two kilos. To Gerstein there was something terribly unclean about that brownish-yellow mass: was it the fact that it came from dead peoples’ mouths, or did its Jewishness defile it? This is one of the most secret matters. He closed his eyes, turned out the gas chamber’s light.

  Are you unwell, Herr Obersturmführer?

  No, I was just trying to calculate how many Reichsmarks it comes to.

  Quite so. Well, in round numbers . . .

  A month later he was summoned back to Prague, to receive another suitcase. He had two hours before his train. (There went his colleagues, marching in a light as straight and grand as the Doric columns of Schinkel’s Neue Wache.) This time his footsteps guided him to an antique store’s ticking clock, bare-breasted porcelains, fake pearl necklaces and dead women’s black gowns. Something for his wife . . . He allowed himself to imagine how Christian’s face would have lit up had he dropped around his neck that eighteenth-century Cross of the Order of the White Eagle which Captain Wirth had forced on him; boys always love militaria, and this was an eight-pointed star of gold, garnished with silver and diamonds! Actually, what he should have done was to sell it and feed his family. Instead, he buried it in the Polish earth, praying softly for its former owner, the grey-green trees going ethereal beyond his tears as they would have done in any rain. Rain of blood, rain of steel, rain on the rich green grass of Auschwitz! Tears and prayers are both supposed to refresh one’s soul.

  23

  Like Himmler, he now secreted a cyanide capsule on his person; I believe he kept it beneath the signet stone of his ring. Just as in the beech forests of Lower Saxony, the shadows of converging autumn-bare trunks project like guns into the darkness they’re made of, so his own thoughts led him deeper and deeper into despairing confusion: Here comes Kurt Gerstein, who since his adolescence has always rejected the impurity of this earthly existence, inspecting another extermination camp! One is tempted to dismiss Gerstein as a romancer, writes the historian-ethicist Michael Balfour. He must have realized that his actions were having no result.

  He compelled himself to witness everything now; maniacally he counted strands in the barbed wire of a transit ghetto: another footnote in his not yet written affidavit. He stood over the dark huddle of Polish Jews who sat in the marketplace of their town; they were waiting for theand police who ringed them round to escort them to death. While his colleagues guarded them, Gerstein counted them: seven hundred and twenty-four more crimes for his affidavit. And then—because his pass, stamped by Eichmann’s office, allowed him to come and go almost at will—he went with the trucks, to see where the mass graves were. He was present, trying to laugh with his comrades, when they stripped the Jews naked, beat them and shot them. An old man, needing to relieve himself, squatted down in the bushes and got overlooked by his murderers. Gerstein whispered in his ear, urging him to hide in the forest.— No, thank you, Herr Obersturmführer, the Jew said coldly, in perfect German. I prefer the company of my wife and children.—And then he pulled up his pants and joined the next batch of lean, yellow-faced Russian Jews with upraised hands, bearded, kneeling, while the Order Police stood smiling easily, posing for pictures beside their bagged quarry. They were so at ease that they could have been Sunday eques
trians in the Tiergarten. In the town, the churchbell under its cross-roofed platform stayed silent, dangling between massive wooden legs.

  24

  Evening, and he strolled around the grounds of the old palace. By seven it began to grow cool, and the fountains were delightful. A mosquito bit his neck. Beneath the honeysuckled arch, the ticket girl chain-smoked cigarettes, launching quips at all the German officers. Then came Berthe, simultaneous with the pure, rather thin bell-tones of seven. He remembered a passage out of Tristan which he had helped explicate for Handsome Heini: Whoever gazes into Isolde’s eyes feels both heart and soul refined like gold in the white-hot flame— the flame of the crematorium, of course.

  She took each of his fingers in turn into her hand, reminding him of his arrest back in ’36, when they’d made him “play the piano,” which means to be fingerprinted. The Storm Troopers had been gentle with him then, because he was no Jew and because he could sing.

  He said: Do you remember how you told me to go down the dark way?

  Of course. And I know what wrings your heart now. It’s long, isn’t it, this dark way? And you’re losing heart, aren’t you?

  Never, he whispered.

  Look at your hands, crooned the dead woman. They’re so soft and white. There’s no blood on them.

  Thank you, Berthe. Thank you for saying that . . .

  He kissed her Jewish-looking eyes. Then she led him into the church. The sacristan came trembling forward.

  Open the crypt at once! ordered-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein. Now leave me. Wait outside.

  Shiny black marble steles, old white granite tombs, wooden crosses, a rusty iron box with a cross on it, that was the place where Berthe had led him. Do you want to know how to get through life? At the base of a wooden cross, burn a candle.

  25

  And now, a note for those of you who consider this a vulgarly supernatural tale: It may well be that ambitious people of any stripe find themselves compelled to schematize the subjects of their solicitude into, say, Jews to be liquidated, or Jews to be saved. There might not be time to learn the name of every Esther or Isaac who falls within Operation Reinhard’s purview. And the further those subjects (I mean objects) get altered in accordance with the purpose, the more problematic it becomes to perceive their irrelevantly human qualities. I quote the testimony of Michal Chilczuk, Polish People’s Army (he’d participated in the liberation of Sachsenhausen): But what I saw were people I call humans, but it was difficult to grasp that they were humans. What did Chilczuk mean by this? To put it aphoristically, a human skeleton is not human. It frightens us because it proves the truth of that gravestone epitaph so common in the age of Holbein: What I once was, so you are. What I am now, so you will be. The gaze of those dark, sharp-edged eye-sockets seems implacable, and the many teeth, which haunted Edgar Allan Poe, snarl much too nakedly, bereft of those festive pink ribbons of flesh we call “lips,” whose convolutions and involutions can express mirth, friendliness, even tenderness. A human skull’s smile is as menacing as a crocodile’s. Since death itself is nothing, the best our minds can do to represent it is through that expressionless face of bone which one day will be ours, and to which we cannot help imparting an expression. Under such circumstances, how can that expression be reassuring? This is why-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein cannot help clothe the skull in beloved Berthe’s image.

  On Ash Wednesday of that year, he’d been present when those few pastors of the Prussian Confessional Church who dared read a sermon about the commandment Thou shalt not kill. Even then hiscolleagues failed to suspect him, such was their own confidence in themselves.

  Following the collapse of the Ostfront on a secret map, he shouted: Christ will overcome those devils! The neighbors must have heard, but no one ever reported him. Every evening he read from the Bible, then prayed aloud, lying weakly in bed.

  Next came the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which struck everybody as no less viciously, ruthlessly useless than the way that encircled Russians will fight to the death.

  Why wouldn’t the Allies do anything? They must dread the responsibility for sheltering so many millions—or were they themselves anti-Semites?— He stood between the columns of the church nave, trying to ask. Glaring arches of candle flame replied. What was the use? He might as well have kept on bowing and clicking his heels to Berthe’s ghost.

  Helmut Franz whispered into his ear that the British, who alone could have done it, had deliberately refrained from bombing the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Switzerland refused to grant asylum to Jews. Only Kurt Gerstein was willing to act!

  26

  We now see him alone and impeccably uniformed, silver on black, his face as resolute as the death’s head on his forehead as he sped down the road from Warsaw to Krakow in a military truck, with a spade and six fifty-kilogram cannisters of sky-blue Zyklon B crystals under a tarpaulin in the back, and around him the wet and gentle crests of Polish fields in summer rain, tall flowers behind house-fences, wet roads, lush trees bearing white stars for blossoms, and on the far horizon ahead of him stood other trees as grey as the North Sea. At each checkpoint they clicked their heels, saluted and gestured him through. If they could have seen within his soul, they would have shot him, shot him, shot him!

  Tall, blond-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein rushed on toward Auschwitz. Soon now he’d arrive at the black-and-white signal barrier, the sign ARBEIT MACHT FREI, and it would be too late. (He’d just told Helmut Franz about the female victims of medical experiments in Nr. 1 Block.) How many cannisters could decompose in transit? Quick, into the slender-trunked, green green forest shining with new rain! Were there any partisans here? Let them kill him. Screened by trees, sweating and trembling, he began to dig a grave for the prussic acid: two cannisters’ worth today, a hundred kilograms. In theory, he was saving a hundred thousand lives. Out it came into the pit, glittering, celestially beautiful; he retched at the fumes. They’d shoot him, shoot him, shoot him! Why didn’t he just stuff a handful into his mouth and be done with it? Give ’em something to chew on! That was what Sergeant Möll always said, when they swished it down the distribution cones into the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And Gerstein laughed; he actually laughed so that they’d leave him free to fulfill his pledge . . . Afterwards he’d spend the night in Krakow. He usually managed a visit to Saint Mary’s Basilica, the terrorized crowds rushing aside to let him through to lurk within that dark wooden labyrinth smoothed by many hands, gazing emptily at dark candelabra, darker portraits, windows as deep as a skull’s eye-sockets. Their pale Christ had risen, but, alas, risen nailed to His cross. There He was, hovering helplessly in the high blue firmament of the groined ceiling with its golden stars.

  27

  By 31.1.44 the front line had broken into segments of flotsam on an ebbing wave.—They’ll never breach our Atlantic Wall! cried his father loyally.

  How could they? agreed-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein. He was the perfect picture of our Aryan race; quite obviously he possessed a firm resolve to harshly but fairly enforce German authority.

  Kurt, old as I am, I feel I should be doing something.

  Look at you, father! You can scarcely walk!

  That’s all right. Give me a shovel, and even if it takes me all day I can still dig my meter of antitank trench!

  That’s commendable, father.

  Recently I had a nightmare. I dreamed that the Slavs were in Berlin! You don’t suppose they’ll ever come here?

  God will do what’s best.

  What exactly does that mean? In the name of the All-Highest, do you support our Führer or not?

  You see the uniform I wear, said Kurt Gerstein through clenched teeth.

  I see what you think of that uniform. Even your children see that. And Elfriede! What that poor girl suffers on your account you’ll never understand. If you want to live a worthy life, Kurt, you must never treat a woman badly. A woman, you know, bears no weapons in her hands. Your duty—

  Excuse me, father, but how do you d
efine your Christian duty?

  Did you mean to criticize me just now, Kurt? Was that your intention?

  No.

  Well, then what were you trying to say?

  Father, I . . . To me, the worship of Our Lord means nothing unless it’s expressed in practical acts of charity.

  But that in and of itself is impractical, because if each of us decided to express his Christian love in the way he thought best, no one would do his duty. The truth is, we’re all selfish, and we all look for excuses! You know, Kurt, in the course of my career I often had to condemn some poor wretch to the gallows. From an individual, human point of view, he might not have done anything wrong, and nobody will ever know how much I sympathized. For example, one fellow’s mother was dying an agonizing death of cancer. They could do nothing for her; on account of those damned Versailles sanctions, the pharmacies didn’t even carry any opiates to reduce her pain. And so he suffocated her with a pillow—purely out of love, do you understand me, Kurt? But one has to do one’s duty.

  Suppose you’d refused to convict . . .

  First of all, I might have faced disbarment, and I don’t know what would have become of your mother and all you children in those years. We were already poor enough, not to mention the disgrace. One must not lose sight of such things. But setting aside my obvious family duty, the larger principle is this: If the man who suffocates his mother for love gets acquitted, then you may be sure that the man who suffocates his mother for hate will seize on that fact!