by Jirí Weil
And now fear struck Schönbaum once again. In his mind’s eye he recaptured the people in the barracks courtyard, their bruised cheeks, their eyes wide with terror. Their fear was far greater than his, because they were being sent into the unknown, perhaps to their deaths. The darkness enveloped them, illuminated only by an occasional torch. They had been condemned, expelled from the town; they had become mere numbers. Such a fate awaited him, too, if the director kicked him out, because then he’d be assigned a less important job, perhaps as a sweeper. After that nothing would protect him and they could send him to the East with the next transport.
The office of the director of the technical division was in the Magdeburg barracks, where all the ghetto functionaries were based. It wasn’t far, but to Schönbaum it seemed miles away. Finally he arrived at the barracks entrance, showed his summons, and was allowed in to find the office. Even as he stood before the door he thought about whether he should go in or not. But if he ignored the summons he’d be in worse trouble.
The director of the technical division greeted him with unaccustomed kindness, but of course kindness can be contrived, kindness can be a mask covering a harsh decision. A moment later his face took on a more severe and serious look. Here it comes, thought Schönbaum, and wondered whether he ought to beg and plead for mercy, or whether he ought to hold his head up and be proud before the fateful blow.
All at once he heard an agitated whisper just at his ear: ‘Swear that you will preserve secrecy; otherwise you face the penalty of death.’
It sounded like a phrase out of one of those cheap novels you buy at the news-stand and Schönbaum was even more confused. But he was obviously not being kicked out. So he answered: ‘I swear.’
‘Tomorrow there will be an execution in the moat of the Ustecky barracks. Your job is to design a double gallows for the technical division. I hope you realise what a great responsibility this is. The gallows must be strong and simple, so that our carpenters can make it easily, because everything must be ready by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Now run back to your office. I’ll be sending for your design in an hour.’
A gallows – he had never designed such a thing. He didn’t even know what one looked like. But in the ghetto library they had many books. Perhaps he’d find a picture of a gallows. He stopped there on his way and borrowed a volume of a technical encyclopedia.
Among the ghetto guards patrolling the transport that had gathered in the barracks courtyard that morning was Richard Reisinger. He had been assigned to the ghetto guards against his will and he hated the job. But the only way to get out of it was to volunteer for the transport himself. The baroness had been right – he hadn’t lasted long in the warehouse. They sent him to the fortress town anyhow. In Terezin he was assigned to the ghetto guards because he had worked at the Gestapo warehouse and was used to dealing with SS men, and also because he had served in the army
It was a brutal job. With his fellow ghetto guards he had to get rid of people coming to the Magdeburg barracks with various requests. He checked passes, he quarrelled endlessly with people who wanted one thing or another. And today was the worst of all. They had dragged people out of their dormitory bunks during the night, ordered them to get dressed, pack their things and hang their numbers around their necks. Then, at three in the morning, in the dark, with only torches and flares for illumination, they hounded them into the barracks courtyard, into the freezing cold. The confused children were screaming, the old men and women were groaning and moaning, sounds of weeping could be heard on all sides. And he, Richard Reisinger, together with the others, had to get them going, threaten them, herd them into groups. The troopers were waiting in the barracks courtyard, where they took over the guard duty.
He wore a funny peaked cap bordered in yellow, and his only weapon was a wooden truncheon. But even this clownish uniform created fear and made people avoid him or doff their hats respectfully to him: a uniform meant power. The power was conditional, virtually meaningless, because any SS man, however lowly in rank, could beat him up, smack him around or demote him to a job cleaning sewers. Even the troopers, though they had guns with bayonets, were puppets in the hands of the SS, who could do anything they wanted with them – they had already ordered a few troopers executed in the Small Fortress. But power, however conditional, however tenuous, still inspires fear. It gives rise to emptiness, it makes contacts with people impossible, it creates loneliness. And thus did Richard Reisinger live in the fortress town, a marked and godforsaken man, his only friends those with whom he carried out his work.
At six o’clock in the morning, in the dark and freezing cold, the transport set off on its journey. People burdened down with baggage trudged heavily through the snow, helping the children make their way as well. Every few minutes an old man or woman would fall by the wayside, pulled down by the weight of a heavy knapsack. The ghetto guards helped them to their feet and urged them to hurry. The procession trailed along slowly, spurred on by constant shouts, curses and threats. It took two hours for it to plod its way from the fortress town to the station, though the marker indicated only three kilometres. In their fatigue people forgot about weeping and lamenting. Only as they stood in the icy frost on the platform of the small station and saw the cattle trucks they were going to ride in did they begin to cry and lament again. Children, terrified by the despair of the adults, were shrieking, even though they didn’t understand anything. It was necessary to stuff the people into the cattle trucks. Their feeble resistance was easily overcome because they had the mark of death on their brows already and didn’t know how to defend themselves effectively. The gendarmes and ghetto guards crammed them into trucks in groups of fifty and then the trucks were sealed. And yet the suffering did not end there. The people in the cattle trucks as well as the people on the platform had to wait several hours before the train began to move in the direction of Dresden, destination unknown. Only then, finally, could the gendarmes march off to their dormitories and the ghetto guards return to the fortress town.
Richard Reisinger was frozen to the bone and looked forward to the warmth of the guardhouse. It was always warm there, even when it was freezing everywhere else, because the ghetto guards were able to get firewood for themselves. After sitting down on a stool and slowly beginning to thaw out, he began to think about his own fate. Things had gone so far that he had become an enemy of his own people, a driver of human cattle being sent by the murderers and robbers to the slaughterhouse. This was the last stop of his journey that had begun at the stone quarry. Now as he chewed a piece of dry, hard bread he had been saving and swallowed it down with the warm, unsweetened water they called tea, he had time for reflection. He understood that there was no other way out for him than the transport and death. He began to read a detective book and soon dozed off after the exertions of the night and day. He barely had time for a quick thought: nothing more could happen today because the transport had departed.
He woke up just as they brought the main meal into the guardhouse. The ghetto guard received increased rations and also enjoyed the great advantage of not having to queue up at the little window. That meant one potato in its skin or one dab of margarine more. They could eat in the warmth, comfortably, at a table. Some of them actually ate with forks and knives in memory of the old days. After eating Reisinger dozed off again; the members of the command that escorted the transport were given time off.
Around four in the afternoon the commander of the ghetto guards burst into the guardhouse, cast an eye on the sleeping men and gave Reisinger a shove. Reisinger stared at him uncomprehendingly. The commander paid no attention to him and awakened two other members of the guard in the same manner.
‘Come with me,’ he ordered sharply.
They staggered out, still warm and half asleep, but they came to their senses at once in the fresh air. They tried and failed to figure out what the commander might want with them, and why he had picked them out from all the others. He led them to the Magdeburg barracks. There
in a large hall where roll call was sometimes held, they saw that twenty other ghetto guard members were already gathered. They didn’t know anything either. They had been summoned from work. There were twenty-three members of the ghetto guard waiting there to hear what the commander was going to say.
The commander had been a high officer in the German Army during the First World War, not in the Austro-Hungarian Army, which the SS members scorned, and he had received several decorations for bravery. He observed military decorum, to which he easily added the habit of screaming he had picked up from his Nazi mentors. He addressed the ghetto guard bluntly: ‘I need eleven people. All former soldiers step forward!’
There were only nine former soldiers, and so the commander picked two additional non-soldiers. Reisinger had been a corporal in the First Republic. The two people on either side of him breathed a sigh of relief: they hadn’t been chosen.
The commander asked the eleven to come closer. The others stood behind them. He barked out: ‘Are there any veterans of the First World War here?’
Only one of the eleven responded, but he had been drafted during the last weeks of war and never got to the front.
The commander looked at them scornfully. They all waited in suspense to hear what he would say next.
‘Ten chosen men will assist at the execution tomorrow. They are to report to Untersturmführer Bergel tomorrow at nine o’clock at the moat of the Ustecky barracks. The others will be assigned special tasks.’
A wave passed through the rows of ghetto guards. What execution? Executions didn’t take place in the ghetto. People were hanged or killed in the Small Fortress. They couldn’t understand it. What did he mean?
The commander realised that he owed them an explanation. He spoke brusquely, as if snapping out orders during a military drill: ‘Today at two o’clock in the afternoon the Jewish Council of Elders was called into the Command Office. The ghetto commandant swore them to secrecy on penalty of death and informed them that several residents of the ghetto would be executed by hanging tomorrow. He ordered a double gallows to be constructed in the moat of the Ustecky barracks and twenty-five coffins to be prepared. Nobody is to know of this event. Everything must be prepared by nine o’clock tomorrow. At three in the afternoon I was called into the Magdeburg barracks, where the Jewish Council of Elders was meeting. I received this information there and was instructed to procure ropes for binding the hands and feet, and two strong ropes for the hanging. And further, to pick ten men to supervise the execution along with myself. I am carrying out this order now and binding you to secrecy as well. I picked eleven men. The others will be assigned other jobs. So one of you may be released from the obligation of participating in the execution.’
The brusque words, delivered in military fashion, fell on the ears of the men. It took them a few moments to take in the horror that was about to happen. In the silent room you could hear the sighs of relief of those standing behind the eleven chosen ones. Those eleven stood as if riveted to the floor. They didn’t want to believe the terrible assignment that was awaiting them. But they knew it was true. The news was so sudden that for a few moments they stood there numbly, unable to utter a single word, and yet they had to take a vote – one of them would be let off. Every one of them hoped to be that man; every one of them hoped to avoid this job, to forget he had ever heard about it. The one to be relieved of the duty to assist at the execution should be a weak person, one whose nerves couldn’t stand such a terrible sight. So when they began to consider who it should be, they all turned their eyes to young Bauml, who was already shaking, obviously about to break down.
‘Who will it be?’ the commander asked sharply. ‘You must decide quickly.’
Reisinger replied in the name of the others: ‘We are recommending Bauml here, he’s the youngest of us; he was never actually a soldier, but was simply drafted in May 1938.’
Perhaps he didn’t have the right to speak for all ten, perhaps any number of them were sorry not to be in Bauml’s place. But nobody spoke up. And so Bauml stepped out of the line.
The commander gave further orders – to find ropes, to prepare twenty-five coffins, to erect the gallows. Those tasks were given to the others who didn’t have to assist at the execution. But since it was necessary to preserve secrecy, how were they to avoid answering the inevitable questions of those who would be assigned these various jobs? Those assigned the job of weaving the rope out of hemp might be put off somehow, but what were they to tell the carpenters who were to construct the gallows and to set it up at the Ustecky barracks? They would have to let them in on the secret, at least partially, and force them to take a vow of secrecy also. They would have to draw them into the monstrous circle. The commander explained that the director of the technical division had been notified directly by the Council of Elders to arrange for the gallows to be designed and constructed and for the graves to be dug. The role of the participating guards would be to make sure that everything was ready by nine o’clock in the morning. That meant that the groups who received the orders from the director of the technical division would have to work the whole night.
Thus ended the pronouncement, and the ten who were to assist at the execution the next day were given time off. They were given permission to get some sleep – but how could they sleep? Nobody, not the commander of the ghetto guards or the Council of Elders, knew who was to be executed. Twenty-five coffins had been ordered, and so there would be twenty-five people executed. How long could such an execution last?
A great frost gripped the fortress town, and fog descended on it. The ghetto guards had gone out into the darkness to escort the transport on its final journey – and they were returning to their dormitories in the darkness to wait for the bitter morning.
SEVENTEEN
FRANTISEK SCHÖNBAUM set to work on the assignment given him by the director of the technical division. He knew that the messenger would not be a single minute late. To design a gallows that could be quickly constructed by carpenters was not such a difficult task. It was easier than the ‘secret armchair’, than the crazy kidney-shaped tables, than the chair on which one could recline but in no way sit. Of course, a gallows is not furniture, nor is it a cart for human carthorses: a gallows is destined for an execution. The director of the technical division didn’t know who was going to be hanged, or perhaps he was pretending not to know. In any case, he ordered Schönbaum to design the gallows and told him that an execution would be held the next day at the Ustecky barracks. No more and no less.
Why did he have to be told that there would be an execution? It would have been enough to tell him to design a gallows, period. At least he could have found comfort in the thought that the gallows was only intended to scare people and would then be taken to the Small Fortress, where executions took place daily. But this way he had become a direct and conscious accomplice of the murderers. He was drawing so that people could be hanged. His own people. It might be a friend who had slept in a bunk directly above his own, someone he had shared packages with. The multi-layer bunks had also been constructed according to his design. Bunks, of course, are for sleeping, but when each person in the fortress town is allotted one-and-a-half square metres, then multi-layer bunks are the only answer.
But a gallows? This drawing would haunt him to his dying day, though he had nothing to do with the execution personally, though he knew nothing more than what the director of the technical division had told him about it.
The messenger did indeed arrive exactly one hour later, and Schönbaum handed him the drawing in a sealed envelope. Now he had nothing to do, because the director of the technical division hadn’t assigned him any other job. But he didn’t feel like leaving the warm little room to go out in the freezing cold or to the reeking dormitory, where there was hardly enough air to breathe. His mind wandered back to the plays he had once designed sets for, and the two actor-comedians who were always greeted with thunderous applause in those final days of the theatre, when they used to sin
g their song about the millions who go against the wind, a song that had become virtually a hymn at the time of Munich.
What he had designed might actually be considered a sculpture; indeed, the only sculpture permitted in the fortress town. It had a curious T shape. Of course, in the avant-garde French magazine called Minotaur he used to subscribe to, many abstract sculptures had that shape. Back then, when he used to go through its pages, it never occurred to him that he would become the first and only Terezin sculptor. His sculpture would be made of wood, like the old statues of saints. His statue would be a Pietà, and at the same time a symbol of the martyr’s crown. But it would be erected for the benefit of those others, to be helpful to them in carrying out their murderous trade.
There was no escape for him now. All those who know the secret and who take part in preparations for an execution of their own people are condemned in advance. Even if his role was insignificant, still he would pay for his crime. For those who work behind the barriers at Command Headquarters and who run the ghetto will want to hide their crimes and erase any record of them. This was the first time he regretted that the only thing he had accomplished in the world was to design meaningless furniture that future architects would ridicule when they came upon it in junk stores. But the gallows-sculpture he designed would undoubtedly live on in the memories of survivors. They wouldn’t know who designed it, however, and that was good. Slowly his fear began to subside. At least he’d gain a little time, and who knew what might happen in the meantime. The Germans were losing on all fronts, they were dying of cold in the Soviet offensive. Maybe they’d be defeated soon and the fortress town would be liberated. Tomorrow he must find the latest reports from the front.
Richard Reisinger slept fitfully. He woke early in the morning – it was still dark. Everyone else was already up. He turned on the electric light, one twenty-five-watt bulb, though it was forbidden at that hour. At first everyone kept silent. Nobody wanted to talk about what was awaiting them. Finally someone couldn’t hold back – fear forced him to speak. He longed to hear the words of others. But what words could console them? There was no consolation for them. They must be witnesses at an execution. Yet why did the murderers require them to watch as their victims perished? They wanted to draw them into their crime, they wanted to turn them and the Czech troopers into accomplices. Everyone fell silent again and seemed half asleep. All words were now useless. They were waiting for the commander’s order to leave for the Ustecky barracks.