*
Axel drove his Skoda to 38 Hempelstrasse, parked it, and soon pressed the elevator button for the ninth floor. The city street was no longer well tended. Sidewalk cracks had proliferated, grass obtruding at both sides. The hallway of the apartment building was without the trademark flower pot. Faltering his apartment, after the six-week absence in Poland, he was reminded of the genteel deterioration of bachelor life. Pretty much everything was as Annabelle had left it. He didn’t need to open the closet door to confirm that there were boys clothes there as well as the odd piece of clothing of Annabelle’s, ostentatiously left behind to give the impression that she would be coming back. The bookcases were full, mostly with books he or Annabelle had read what seemed decades ago. The furniture was undisturbed, only superficially dusted by the landlord’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter. The framed family pictures were prominent on the circular table between the two armchairs. As he looked, almost dutifully, at the picture of his parents, the doctor and his nurse/wife, he could not feel sorry that they had died young, his father pre-Hitler, his mother after Hitler came to power but before the militarization.
Axel removed a paper sack from his briefcase and withdrew from it a ham sandwich and bottle of beer, setting them down on the coffee table. He lowered himself into the armchair, turning on the reading light by the bookcase and tilting it over his shoulder. Wearily, he pulled the newspaper from his pocket, laid it on his lap, and bit off a corner of the sandwich. He put it down and reached in the drawer for the bottle opener. The beer opened, he set it on the table, then paused, staring out the window into the winter blackness.
He removed the sandwich from his lap, placing it back on the table, and slowly reached over for the framed photograph of Annabelle and Sebastian, taken that afternoon in the summer of 1939 at the Hamburg Fair. After a moment he altered the light to shine without creating a reflecting glare. Axel studied the face of his wife, renewing his silent pledge that one heavenly day ahead he would be reunited with her and, more prosaically, that one day ahead he might devise a safe way to get word to her.
Word of what ? — he interrupted his desultory thought. Not much more than word that he was alive. What more could be said, could be risked?
He stared down again at the full face and full head of hair, the hint of a smile of surprise at the camera that was pointed at her, the bright brown eyes with their searching look.
Was there anything at all in that face that was discernible as — Jewish?
After she and Sebastian sailed, Axel had looked through an old scrapbook with the pictures of the Leddihn family, proud Austrian grandfather and grandmother; the blond young man, her twenty-year-old brother, standing stiffly at their side, Henrietta’s hand over his shoulder. There was nothing in that scrapbook about Henrietta’s life after she married and left Munich.
Well, if Annabelle couldn’t be said to look Jewish, what about their son? Did Sebastian look Jewish? Look, more exactly, one - quarter Jewish?
He remembered the words of the Gestapo’s Captain Gradler as clearly as when they were spoken at the Rialto Hotel, informing Axel that he could not be permitted to sail with wife and son:
“ Alois William Steiner was a Jew ,” Captain Gradler had said. “ He was the father of your Annabelle , who is therefore also a Jew . And of course , Sebastian is her — your — Jewish son. ”
Why , oh why did Henrietta have to write and tell Axel about her first marriage — to the Jew by whom she became pregnant. The Jewish father of his wife. The true father of Annabelle Linda Chapin Reinhard.
Henrietta had had to tell him because, he shuddered in disgust, there were actually people all over the ‘Third Reich who walked about with magnifying glasses attempting to trace, or to establish, evidence of Jewishness. Henrietta had written that letter to him in 1938. It had been addressed to his office, to escape detection from her own daughter. She had written to warn Axel about the clanger of staying on in Germany. To warn Axel meant to divulge Henrietta’s family secret. Henrietta had left home to marry a Jew, conceive by him a daughter who, in 1938, was living in Hamburg, ignorant that her biological father had been Jewish. Living in Germany with her son, within easy reach of the dreaded Einsatzgruppen .
If he could manage to get a letter to Annabelle now, from Germany, athwart the ban against any communication with anybody in any country with which Germany was at war, would he reveal to her, tell Annabelle, what her own mother hadn’t told her?
Why? The Leddihns were dead. Who else now knew about Sebastian’s forebears?
Other, of course, than the Gestapo.
Chapter Fourteen
Lodz , February 1942
Lodz, only eighty miles southwest of Warsaw, lay in resolutely unglamorous potato farm country. Axel Reinhard spent his days and nights at the Staski Hotel. He had no trouble requisitioning additional rooms to serve as offices. There he kept the blueprints and construction memoranda and met with the foremen and, often, with the adjutant of Governor Frank.
He had devised means of dealing with Frank, his fellow German, telling him what he had to know, and talking around what he didn’t want Frank to know, let alone dwell upon. It was less easy to manipulate Frank’s adjutant, the Polish Captain Stefan Plekhov, whose knowledge of German was fluent. The adjutant’s eyes were wide open, recording fastidiously everything going on at the construction site twenty miles south.
The orders had been to proceed to construct the security personnel placements and Axel had undertaken to do so, but he reminded Captain Plekhov that he could not construct efficient searchlight towers without first building a generating plant. This was now accomplished, using Polish forced labor. The workers included carpenters, engineers, and electricians. They were all periodically egged on to work fourteen-hour days. Exhortations and injunctions and threats were relayed to the workers by the construction chief. They came across to the workers in a Germanized Polish through the hoarse loudspeakers that surrounded the forty-acre compound. What the workers heard boiled down to: Do more , or expect to hear your name called out to meet with the military court . That court convened every Wednesday to review the performance of individual miscreants. They did not need to be told of the consequences of poor or insufficient work. Twice the adjutant Plekhov had taken the microphone to speak in his native Polish tongue, inveighing against delinquents, resisters, or shirkers. Captain Plekhov at one point asked Axel himself to deliver, as chief engineer, an intimidating message to the workers. Axel avoided the commission by pleading an insufficient knowledge of Polish.
As soon as he had completed his generating plant, Axel, negotiating through a German-speaking Polish foreman, directed carpenters and plumbers to take odd bits of time from the construction of the watchtowers in order to get on with the command post. Once the initial part was built, he could live at Joni, eliminating the tedious, and sometimes arduous, daily drive to the hotel in his Kubelwagen, so often done in freezing weather.
By February, he had his own quarters at Camp Joni, close to what would be the main entrance to the camp. He had a bedroom, a rudimentary kitchen, and a large separate room that served as the central office of the Joni operation. There he had his drafting tables and clipboards with construction schedules and, for necessary visitors, wooden chairs and coat hooks.
The eastern end of the suite was a plain, temporary wooden wall. When time came to complete the building, it would extend to additional offices for camp personnel and as headquarters for the Totenkopfverbaende , the professional camp guards. Opposite, on the western end, Axel’s architect had provided that the office of the construction superintendent should have two windows. From these Axel could see out to where the barracks would rise, and see also the large clearing that would serve for whatever congregations the camp commander, operating from his own headquarters outside the gate, ordained. The Kommandant would need only to go through the gate to his microphone to address the prisoners directly.
It was through one of those windows that Axel would get
his first view of the tenants of Camp Joni when they arrived. Ignoring the palpably preposterous orders from Warsaw — that no provisions were to be made for the inmates until all else had been attended to — Axel contrived to get a detachment of laborers and carpenters to work on the first of the planned stretch of four-story barracks. He had persuaded Captain Plekhov, in personal exchanges, of the need for something in which to house the scheduled prisoners.
It seemed odd to need to inform him on a matter so rudimentary. Perhaps the problem was Plekhov’s inexperience in construction scheduling. Before the Nazi invasion, Plekhov had been a librarian at the University of Cracow, highly literate to be sure, but librarians, Axel reminded himself, lead thoroughly indoor lives. Axel simply explained to him that it would not be possible to contain 100 Russian soldiers, let alone three thousand Russian soldiers , without providing them with basic elements of survival: food, sanitary facilities, and shelter. The adjutant was now standing in his overcoat, immediately outside the door of Axel’s new headquarters. “They cannot sleep in the open, Captain Plekhov. Until late spring, they would simply perish from the cold.”
“They will perish from something, Herr Reinhard.”
“Goddamit, Plekhov. We have been commissioned to build a camp for prisoners of war. I came here to supervise the construction of exactly that, a camp for captured soldiers. I was not entirely surprised that you were depending — that we were depending — ” Axel forced himself to remember that, although he was living and working in Poland, he was doing work for Germany, work for his native country — “that because of the exigencies of war we would need to depend on — forced labor. And of course the prisoners will not be coming to Joni of their own free will. They are men defeated at war and don’t expect tender treatment. But it is hardly the intention of Governor Frank to bring them to Joni exclusively for the purpose of letting them freeze to death at night or die of malnutrition.”
It was late in the afternoon and it had got dark in that hard winter country, the open fields cold and friendless. Stefan Plekhov turned to Axel. “Herr Reinhard, let us go in and sit down for a minute. Is there any point in discussing these problems outdoors in my overcoat, while standing?”
“Of course not.” Axel opened the door and nodded toward a wooden chair, taking for himself the revolving stool by the workboard.
“And something else, Herr Reinhard. I am an older man. In fact, I do not mind telling you that today — February 22nd, 1942 — is my seventieth birthday! Would you mind very much giving me a glass of vodka?” Captain Plekhov chuckled. “There is more vodka produced in the area of Lodz than in any equivalent area anywhere in the civilized world, except of course that no part of the world is truly civilized that doesn’t produce vodka!”
Axel experienced a wave of relief in the informality of the language. He found himself, after hearing only a few words, in the company of someone in the huge, omnivorous, demanding Nazi Lodz machine with whom human conversation seemed conceivable, even plausible. What he had just now heard from the governor’s adjutant was something other than the utilitarian conversations he had become used to since arriving in Lodz. Mostly these conversations were had over the telephone, burdened by the conceptual difficulties of conflicting priorities, generals talking to engineers, political deputies to architects. Now he was face-to-face with someone who talked as a human being about human subjects.
“Yes, Captain Plekhov. I have some vodka. And yes, I congratulate you on your feast day.”
“ Feast day? We don’t celebrate feast days anymore.”
“Birthday.” Reinhard raised his glass.
Chapter Fifteen
Lodz , May 1942
It was May now and the twelve blockhouses were if not quite complete, habitable; prisoner-habitable. The camp’s hospital unit was done and the camp administration office, the Kommandant’s office, the SS guardhouse, and the kitchen. Camp Joni would be open for the POWs late in the month. An exact date had not been set. Captain Plekhov called from Warsaw.
“I will need to meet with you.”
Plekhov was always welcome at Joni even when he brought, as he almost always did, a new demand from Governor Frank or from the Berlin military command. Two weeks ago it had been an order to increase the capacity of Camp Joni to contain not three but no less than five thousand prisoners. This did not completely surprise Axel. He listened to the news from the BBC night after night on the shortwave. Its use was proscribed by the military command in Warsaw but Axel had quietly reasoned that that order could not reasonably apply to him inasmuch as he was a civilian engineer from Hamburg, Germany, residing in Joni, Poland, only in order to do business for the army, which he was hardly a member of. The news from London was that both Russian and German casualties were heavy.
So, then, he knew something of military tidings. He had been appalled, the week before, to hear that the British had been able to send one thousand bombers over German skies, devastating Cologne. Would one of those bombs have fallen on the great Cologne cathedral? Once again he was face-to-face with his most carefully guarded secret, that his sentiments were not unequivocally on the side of his native country. He had had the same problem for two years and kept banishing it to the back of his mind; but an event such as the bombing of Cologne yanked it to the front of his mind, crying out for a commitment. It seemed starker, somehow, than the military casualties, which were the staples of wars.
He couldn’t help but feel pride in the Nazi military accomplishments in western Europe and to marvel at the generalship of Adolf Hitler. But he needed psychological satisfaction from his own work. He was a truly accomplished engineer and had superintended the creation of a prisoner of war camp under seriously handicapped circumstances and done so on schedule. He would need eventually to give consideration to the end for which his work was being put, transient quarters for bloodied Russian soldiers. He didn’t care who won the war, he decided, provided he could then be reunited with Annabelle and Sebastian.
On the matter of the incoming flood of prisoners of war, what more was there to be said other than that, in wars, there are prisoners? And when the news came in on the BBC about the Soviet spring counterattack on the Kharkov front, he knew that the volume of prisoners on both sides had to increase — Russian prisoners held by Germans, German prisoners held by Russians. When informed by Plekhov that quarters were needed for yet more prisoners, he pondered the alternatives. They were to build six more blockhouses, which could not be done in less than sixty days, or increase the density of prisoners in those already constructed. He had designed each of the buildings to house four hundred prisoners in three stories.
Plekhov made the decision for him: Headquarters could not wait for two new blockhouses? Double up.
The friendship having taken hold, Plekhov used a playful cipher in arranging his visits to Joni. On the telephone he would schedule a “day” visit, or an “evening” visit. The day visits bore directly on problems at hand, usually having to do with personnel: Who, for example, was especially needed to complete one or another of the camp’s requirements? Evening visits meant there was business to be transacted but that the adjutant, arriving some time after six, would expect companionship.
He’d sit and bring out from his traveling case his own contribution to their little feast — some cheese, sausage, or ham. Axel was especially grateful for the occasional jar of honey. Axel would contribute the vodka, which he had a weekly supply of, by special bargaining with one of the Polish foremen, whose uncle worked in a distillery.
“You don’t have to tell me where you get it from, Axel,” Plekhov said, bowing his head in a courtly manner before emptying his glass. If so, Axel rejoindered, that was the only aspect of the Camp Joni enterprise he had ever found Stefan Plekhov incurious about. Vodka glass in hand, Axel drew the shade on one of the two windows (it was light outside now, in early Mav). They chatted.
Plekhov asked for more vodka. He accepted the glass, then set it down.
“Herr Reinhard,
” he addressed Axel with unconventional formality, “the orders have come down from Glucks SS. The requisitions for Camp Joni have been altered.”
Axel felt a searing ache in his stomach. Could it be ...
“ — Camp Joni will now serve as a concentration camp.”
Axel drew breath. “A concentration camp to serve what purpose?”
“To serve the great purpose of a final solution to the Jewish question.”
The words Axel went on to hear might have been taken, verbatim, from a General Directive from Berlin. And Plekhov spoke then without any of the ironic nuance Axel had come to expect from the university librarian-turned-adjutant to the Nazi governor of Poland.
“The added facilities will need to be built. These are — extensive productions. They require decontamination quarters, gas chambers, and then crematoria.”
Plekhov paused. He looked over at his glass of vodka, untouched. “It transpires that the means of eliminating the corpses were until quite recently primitive and undesirable. The bodies of the...enemy simply...accumulated outside and were consumed by kerosine fire. Our scientists have developed crematoria that take care of this problem...nicely. You will need first to inspect elsewhere such facilities as are needed to be constructed here. At Camp Birkenau there are such, which dispose of over three thousand undesirables per day. That is far larger than the quota SS Obergruppenfuehrer Glucks has assigned to Camp Joni. But the point of it is we must — you must — familiarize yourself with working facilities. Which is why I have here an itinerary, with the required authorizations, for your travel to Camp Birkenau. I would expect that you could arrange to make that trip within — shall we say, one week? Is that reasonable?”
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