by Daniel Stern
“When Jud, or I, or anyone like us arrived, it was not so orderly, though. Doors of trucks opened and a wild crush of bodies fell or were pushed to the ground. Some stayed there. The rest of us were lined up for our first ‘selection.’ En route there was more disorder. Prisoners who happened to be wearing ties were grabbed and choked with them. Old men were grasped by their beards and dragged along the ground. Then, some random clubbing—a few shots—and ‘selection.’ Those chosen to go to the left—the old, the too young, the sick—went to die. A little more disorder because people sometimes caught on. Mothers screamed to stay with their children. The German doctors were kind and often let them stay together if they insisted. Those chosen to go to the right could enter the zoo alive, for the time being.
“Oh—and the music …” Walkowitz was pacing about the stage, his excited movements in contradiction to his dry, ironic tone. “Jud, she has to know about the music. The band wearing a kind of pajama-like uniform. And they played such sweet, sentimental tunes. I’ve wondered often about the connection between sentimentality and cruelty. But, anyway, the music was out of tune. The players were prisoners—you understand.
“But, the records. After the giving up of property, all carefully recorded, after the tattooing of numbers, after the issuing of camp clothing—sometimes with the yellow Star of David already sewn on—the heads were shaved. The hair by the way, was baled and shipped back to the Fatherland to be used. The medical examinations—they were a new kind—combined the humor of humiliation with the noting down of significant physical facts. And the dentists—the new kind, too, the gold-mining kind. If the teeth were not pulled immediately, again records, charts, and then, weeks or months later—if you were lucky—a Kapo called your number (a real Kapo, not like our gentle friend Avrum), and you were off to the hospital to contribute teeth to the gold reserves of the Reichsbank. Or, to some quick thinking S.S. man who was planning for his personal future—”
Jud slammed his words into Walkowitz’s speech.
“Say what you have to say!”
“This short course on the camps is obviously not for your benefit.”
“Then why didn’t you just tell her right away, the first night you met us, if that’s what you wanted. Or the first night you slept with her?”
“That would have been too easy on you.” A wing of strange sadness brushed his face. “There’s no easy way for her to know,” Walkowitz said.
“Shit,” Jud said abruptly. “I don’t have to go through all this.” He looked at Marianne coldly. “Yes, I gave a Blockführer named Stauffel the gold watch I hid for weeks in case I had to buy my father’s life or my own. It was a Bar Mitzvah gift from my grandfather. Real gold—in those days a Bar Mitzvah was a serious matter …”
Walkowitz prodded him. “And what did dear Blockführer Stauffel give you in return?”
“A job—clerk in the orderly room.”
Marianne had been watching the two men closely. “What’s so terrible about that?” she asked. Her voice was shaky.
Walkowitz laughed. “Well,” he said, “it all depends on where you stand. If you’re—”
Again Jud was abrupt. “What he means is that something happened after I got the job in the orderly room that makes it not so simple as that.”
He gestured toward Walkowitz on the elevated platform of the S.S. office and imitated his bitter tone: “It does depend on where you stand, doesn’t it?”
“Or where you lie,” Walkowitz said soberly.
Jud thought, I can’t let him say it. This much at least I can claim for myself.
“Marianne,” he said, “I changed names on a list. I’m not sure what connection Carl has with that—I have an idea—but even if he’s only guessing I don’t care if he knows. A list came down every day. It had the numbers of everyone scheduled for extermination. The day he’s talking about, my sister, my mother, and I were on the list.”
Marianne could not restrain an involuntary “Oh”—a breath of pain.
“I saw the list. And …” He paused, looking for the right words—words that would neither excuse nor incriminate, that would tell precisely how it had been.
The chance to tell it was taken away from him. Walkowitz jumped down from the platform, a distance of about three feet. When he landed, his great frame wobbled; the bad leg gave more than the other one, and it seemed as if he might fall. Then his body gained balance, straightened, and he limped toward Jud.
“Don’t make such a big thing of it, Jud,” he said. “It was simple. You changed names. After all, it was your mother and sister.”
“I crossed them off.”
“And replaced them.”
“The list had to be complete.”
“I know. One hundred and thirty-eight scheduled to die and one hundred and thirty-eight had to die. Germans, you know. The figures had to correspond. So you substituted three people not scheduled to die.”
“The ones next in order.”
“Ah, that makes it so automatic. That absolves everyone.”
A strange, slow parade had begun across the set of the camp street, unnoticed by any of the marchers. Walkowitz inched toward Jud in uneven half-steps, Jud moving backwards and Marianne following, faltering a little because of her high heels.
Jud said: “My name begins with K—the numbers correspond to the alphabet. Who were the three others? I mean, who were they to you?”
Walkowitz laughed. This time it was not just a mirth-mocking sound. His shoulders trembled, his back shivered. He was not underscoring a point, he was reacting painfully. When the spasm ended he said, “Now it’s the alphabet that rules. If my name isn’t Krieger or Kronfeld, what harm can you have done to me?”
“I didn’t say that. I asked something else.”
“Who were they to me? Simply my dear, socially conscious, naïve mother and father whose name begins with W, and who could never endanger their lives by following someone named Kramer in alphabetical order. They had some money saved, and they were Socialists, they were ‘aware’; they knew what was coming. They made provisions. In nineteen forty you could buy new names, passports, identities—guess you always can. Anyway, they made arrangements to buy passports.”
“From who?” Jud forced the question.
“People named Kroger. It’s an old and honorable German name. But unfortunately these particular Krogers had forgotten the grand Aryan tradition of blood and honor. That became clear when the S.S. came for us. It turned out that the Krogers thought so much of their name that they sold it twice, using forged passports, then left. Their other customers were quicker than my parents.”
Jud stopped the slow-motion parade. His back was against a side flat showing the camp street in long perspective, trailing off into a vague clump of trees. He was thinking, Yes, of course, yes, it had to be so. The blankness returned, stripped of its covering, leaving only the substance, the knowledge of how close the connection had to be between Walkowitz and what had happened, had kept on happening, it seemed, because here he was, so many years later, being backed into a corner to account for it.
“I knew,” he said simply. “I knew about twenty minutes ago. Maybe before that, too.”
“Is that all?” Walkowitz stopped the pressuring forward steps. “But there are other things you can’t know—that no one could know. Not the sentimental things about how I loved them. I did, but we were a complicated family. You know, the sophisticated Socialist Jews of the twenties—atheists who took me to shul on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur for a sense of one-ness—their word—with my people. Not Zionists. Being Jewish was only a cultural etcetera. You know all the arguments. Your family had it easy; they believed in God, in Israel. All Josef and Anna Walkowitz believed in was the goodness of man—a dry-as-dust idea, as hard to demonstrate as the existence of God.”
“You sound like you hated them,” Jud said stiffly.
“No, don’t try to make it easier on yourself. My father was an extraordinary man. He taught school all day an
d went to school to study Political Science at night. And Anna—dear, well-dressed Anna. She always insisted I call her Anna instead of Mother; Socialists were very modern in those days. I always felt she was acting, a little, for my father’s benefit. Somewhere behind those latest Warsaw fashions and Marxist ideas was a nice Jewish housewife who was disappointed that her son did not want to study for a profession and was married too soon, to the wrong girl—a poor, uneducated village girl from an Orthodox family. Not a girl from a nice rich Warsaw family, one of those who recalled that they were Jewish only because of the culture and the foods, and because they didn’t want to seem hypocrites. No, I never gave them much happiness. You didn’t know I saw them die, did you? I told Marianne about it.”
“No,” Marianne said. “No, please.”
“But let’s stay with the important question—Did you kill or did you save?”
“I saved,” Jud said.
“Who?”
“… them—my mother and sister.”
“And?”
“And myself. All right. I saved myself, too.”
“No! That’s too easy. You saved yourself, period.”
“They might have made it—at least I gave them that chance.”
“But they didn’t. You got the chance, too, and through luck or one way or another, you made better use of it. Anyway, you lived.”
Balancing the words carefully, Jud said, “Yes. But the bargain, the chance was for all three.”
In a caricature of a sympathetic tone, Walkowitz said, “And the other two were your mother and sister. How fine and noble. Who could possibly blame you? Every human instinct cries out for a man to do anything, even die, to save a sister, child of the same blood, and a mother, flesh of my flesh. What safer ground could there be? Except that somehow it turned out differently. It wasn’t your life you gave up, and somehow, they’re all dead and you’re alive.”
“Then the crime is not changing those names. It’s being alive now.”
“If you sacrifice three strangers so you and your mother and sister may live—and everyone dies except you—then you’re a murderer exactly as long as you’re alive.”
“You’re a lunatic. You’ve got some kind of crazy idea of an eye for an eye—”
“Can you be the one?” Walkowitz said. “I’ve often wondered if there was any one of us who never felt sick at the idea of living on, who never wanted to die just to let the faces rest, just not to hear the accusations any more.”
“Accusations?”
“The questioning. ‘Are you worth being alive, when we’re dead instead of you?’”
“I know a little about that,” Jud said flatly.
“If you did—”
“I said I know about it. That’s enough.”
“It’s hard to know what’s enough in this.”
Jud cried out suddenly: “What the hell do you want from me, what do you want? Because of me, they’re dead. I’m alive. All right.” His breathing was difficult. “I would probably do it again.” Between the words, he clenched his teeth so hard his jaws ached. “What do you want from me?” he repeated hypnotically. “You want me to die, too? I won’t. Not yet, anyway.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“Then what, you rotten bastard, what do you want?”
Walkowitz stared at him, cocking his head sideways so that his good eye seemed to widen, to encompass the figures of Jud now and of Jud before. He stared, unblinking, and said: “I want you to see your victims in the flesh—in the torn flesh. Less hideous than you might think, but still with a face, a voice, arms, legs …”
“Don’t you think I know?”
“I don’t think you do know. You’re talking about imagining. I’m talking about seeing, about being face to face with them. Right here, now.”
“What are you doing?”
“Here.” He was a few steps away from Jud now. His arms spread, the hands pointing inward, presenting himself. “Here they are. Good, gentle Anna, and Josef, and the other nameless one. All of them, here. Dead all these years, but still walking around with no hope—because no one knew, no one would acknowledge … and no one would take responsibility.”
“That’s a damn proud claim to make. Are you sure you’re entitled to it?”
“Are you so sure I’m not? While you were thriving—eating, traveling, getting laid, marrying, working, making plenty of money, getting your name known—somebody had to remember what happened to the others just so you could have all that.”
Jud closed his eyes, unnerved. He’d seen Walkowitz wear his wounds like vague accusations. Now they were clear. He felt dizzy. Always, in the shadow days so long ago, when he’d still allowed himself to think directly about it, it had been cloaked in a group—his mother, Miriam, and himself, triad of his effort to save. But chance and time had favored only him.
The dizzy sensation resolved itself into an almost imperceptible vertiginous sway. He remembered his mother’s face with absolute clarity as she had looked standing at the window, with her absent half-smile, watching for someone’s return. The picture was heavy with shadow. But he knew she was waiting for Miriam, who came, little hands at her forehead or mouth, never still, fluttering birdlike into view. Ah, if only one of them had lived it could be different. Either one of them, enjoying pleasures that could be seen, touched, tasted; those tangible joys would ransom him. It wasn’t only their concrete happiness that could be measured against the exchange he’d made. It was their (his mind stumbled on words till he found the difficult, simple one) their goodness that would be so valuable. Who could measure his own life, and find himself “good” enough for such a bargain? That was what Walkowitz was asking him. He was so struck by the formulation that he spoke it, aloud, without realizing it.
“What?” Walkowitz said.
“Isn’t that it? Isn’t that the question you’re rubbing in my face?”
“Can you answer it?”
“Nobody could.”
“We’re talking about you, Kramer.”
“You’re not them, Carl. Maybe you can speak for them. But that’s all.”
“And you?”
“I can’t testify for myself. But before you showed up I could count—my child alive and happy, my wife the same, my work having some value. But none of that matters. What matters is that I couldn’t be good enough, alone, to deserve that sacrifice. And it wasn’t intended that way, even if that’s how it turned out. I don’t want them as my victims, I don’t want you as my victim, either.”
Now Walkowitz smiled. “But we are. We joined together at one moment, when I saw them die.” He said, sounding as if he were reciting from memory: “I was on a special detail, to handle the burning of those the gas had not quite killed—those who were still moving, though not necessarily still conscious …”
Marianne came to life again. “Please, please, Carl, don’t.”
He turned toward her. “But Jud won’t accept my credentials. I must present them to him—the ditch, the kerosene, the burning …” He turned back to Jud, his smile trembling on the edge of hysteria.
Before he could speak, Jud said in amazement: “That was what you saw? You saw them …?”
“What I saw,” Walkowitz said softly. Then he repeated, “What I saw,” a little louder. Finally, he cried out, “What I saw!” In a sudden passionate gesture he threw his arms out to their full length. He spoke to himself. “Like moving graves … the goodness of man …” He shut his eyes tightly, forehead wrinkled in a constriction of pain.
Jud was numb. He was seeing pain so powerful that he could not bear to share in it for another moment. Not even his own complicity could force that. To his eyes the form of the man seemed to shrink, to lose its massive, crippled strength. Walkowitz’s shoulders, his chest, his muscled arms—all were crushed down by the weight of the vision behind that screwed-up grimace of forehead and eyes.
“What I saw,” he repeated, his mouth hardly moving. He began to rock back and forth on his heels, nod
ding his head, hypnotically. Gray hair flopped down over his eyes. A distant moaning came from behind his compressed lips.
He looked like a man in the grip of an unwilling prayer—a caricature of the old men of Jud’s childhood synagogues, humming, in sad little bursts, prayers to a tormenting God, rocking back and forth in the ancient movement of rhythmic comforting. Jud could not take his eyes away. The chilled part of his feelings knew now what he had done to Walkowitz, saw the results of his long-gone action. He wished he could die—or else join in Walkowitz’s anguish so deeply that it would be as if it all had happened to himself as well.
Walkowitz’s arms were no longer outstretched. They were clasped around his shoulders as if to warm himself, or perhaps to hold his body together. His face was still masked in the contortion of horror and memory.
Jud took a few steps forward, the first since he had been backed into a corner. “It was something I had to do,” he said softly. “If you had killed me the moment you saw me …”
Walkowitz was still enwrapped in the privacy of his pain.
“Carl,” Jud called out.
Walkowitz unfolded his arms. His eyes opened. “What?” He seemed startled to see Jud so close to him, sensing a shift in the balance of attack and defense between them.
“What about you? You died without being killed. But you lived for fifteen years, looking for me?”
“It’s not that simple. You look, you wander, you plan, and you wander some more. Then I saw your name in the paper that day. I knew I had to do something.”
“What?”
“Take away from you everything that mattered.”
“And what you couldn’t take away you could poison.”