“Yes,” the colonel said, and studied the paper, his thumbnail going back and forth rhythmically across the short hairs on his lip. “Your papers were destroyed in the bombing of a prisoner train in Celle last fall, I understand.” The colonel’s cold eyes stared across the desk; he managed to make it sound as if the prisoners were somehow at fault.
“Yes, sir.”
“We are familiar with the incident.” And bored with it, his tone seemed to imply. The colonel abandoned his mustache long enough to shuffle some papers; he located the one he wanted and went back to his mustache, no longer considering Grossman but studying this new document instead. “Do you have a family?” He spoke a stilted but correct German.
“No.” Enough of “sirs.” To hell with the bastard, Grossman thought. And let us hope we won’t have to start inventing relatives who died in other camps or in ghettos, because this colonel looks just prick enough to follow up and disprove anything we said. Still, if there wasn’t a Grossman in every camp in Europe, he’d be very surprised.
But Colonel Manley-Jones was not at all interested in either Benjamin Grossman or his family; it was a question on his list that had to be asked, but there was nothing in his instructions that specifically said he had to pay any attention to the answers. At first he had listened to all the tragic stories these people managed to invent, but in the end it became quite boring. Before he had come to the camp, the colonel had supposed a bit of sympathy for them might have been in order, but that sympathy had long since dissipated into an almost active dislike for them. Oh, he supposed some of them had suffered a bit in the camps; but when you came right down to it, they were also a pretty scruffy, unattractive bunch. Guarding them could hardly have been a pleasure, and almost certainly was bound to have led to occasional excesses. Any memory of the camp as the colonel had first seen it, with its skeletal inmates gripping the fence wire for support and silently staring at him with anguished eyes, or the piles of corpses covered with flies outside each barrack or lying about haphazardly where they had fallen and died, had faded once the camp itself had disappeared in smoke and flame. The bulldozers that had filled in the huge burial pits and covered them over had buried the colonel’s memory with the dead. Now the prisoners—for the colonel still thought of them as prisoners—were properly fed, probably better than they had ever been fed even before the war, and undoubtedly better clothed, as well. All the colonel wanted from this unprepossessing bunch was information he had been detailed to obtain for the coming war-crimes trials. And those trials were another thing—also undoubtedly an exaggeration, the colonel thought. It was true, he supposed, that there may have been a few sour apples among the accused captured Germans—after all, you can’t pick and choose your personnel in wartime—but many of them had also been officers in the regular army, the Wehrmacht, dammit! You couldn’t convince Colonel Manley-Jones that very many career officers in any army in the world—excepting the Russians, of course—would behave like that. He stared at Grossman, not pleased by what he saw, and got on with the distasteful job.
“Other than Bergen-Belsen, what camps were you in?”
“I was transferred here from Buchenwald—” Grossman waited to hear the colonel say there never had been a prisoner at Buchenwald named Benjamin Grossman, and then decided he was simply overtired. It was evident the colonel was asking his questions by rote.
“Was that the only other camp you were in?”
“No. I was in Maidanek.”
“Maidanek?” The colonel moved papers, bringing a new one to the top. “When you were at Maidanek, who was in charge?”
This was what Grossman had been waiting for.
“A Commandant Mittendorf,” he said evenly. “A vicious, miserable, perverted son of a bitch. When you catch the bastard—”
“The Russians have a full dossier on Mittendorf, I’m sure,” the colonel said, interrupting. “He’s their problem if they catch him. I’m only interested in war criminals now in the Allied areas. For example—” He consulted his papers. “There was a Colonel von Schraeder of the SS at Maidanek, who was transferred to Buchenwald. That makes him our problem. A Colonel Helmut von Schraeder. What can you tell me about him?”
Grossman picked his words carefully. “Von Schraeder was the assistant commandant at Maidanek, yes, and he was transferred to Buchenwald after I was. But he’s dead. He died at the camp there. At Buchenwald.”
“We’ve heard that as a rumor, but we want any further data we can get. We have a feeling,” the colonel said with what passed as humor for him, “that more SS died than there were bodies.”
“Von Schraeder died,” Grossman said with all the conviction he could marshal. “I know that for a positive fact. I should; I was the one who had to sew him into the burial sack and help cart him to the crematorium. He died of typhus in Ward Forty-six, and I watched him burn. With pleasure.” The conviction in his voice was not all acting; he had lived with the thought so long it had almost become truth to him.
“I see.” The colonel made a note, muttering under his breath. “Von Schraeder’s death confirmed by prisoner Benjamin Grossman.” He looked up. “How long were you at Maidanek? You’re sure you knew von Schraeder on sight?”
“I knew him! I was at Maidanek three years—”
For once the colonel was surprised. Maidanek might have been the problem of the Russians, and the question, like many of the others, may have been asked without conscious thought, but the answer still surprised him. He looked at Grossman almost with respect.
“How did you manage to survive so long? The stories we’ve been hearing about that camp—”
It was a question Grossman had given considerable thought to, and the answer came easily.
“I was strong when I first went into the camp,” he said quietly. “I know I don’t look it now, but I was strong. I could do work. They made me a Sonderkommando …” He managed to look ashamed at the admission, knowing it would be expected.
The colonel’s look of near respect changed instantly to one of deep disgust. They would soon be hanging officers, army officers, while these filth who cleaned out the gas chambers and fed the ovens would be pampered heroes! It was a strange world. The colonel changed the subject.
“And in Buchenwald?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What did you do in Buchenwald?”
“I thought I mentioned it. I was an orderly in Ward Forty-six, in the typhus section.”
“And what atrocities did you witness in Buchenwald?”
“There were atrocities in all the camps,” Grossman said slowly, “but I was in Buchenwald such a short time, and most of the time I was in the typhus section. But in Maidanek, this Commandant Mittendorf—”
The colonel had had enough of this particular inmate, who in any event would be of no use to him. He interrupted brusquely.
“I think that will be all, Grossman. You can leave.”
Grossman cleared his throat nervously. “Colonel—?”
The cold eyes came up, contemptuous. “I said, that’s all.”
“But, Colonel—don’t you issue passes from the camp? I mean, your office?”
“Why? You don’t need any pass. If you want to leave, just leave.” And good riddance, his tone seemed to add.
“I mean, passes to a different zone …”
“Why? Where do you want to go?”
“I thought the American Zone. Or the French Zone …”
Colonel Manley-Jones frowned. “Where are you from?”
“Originally, Hamburg.”
“That’s in this zone, the British Zone. You don’t require a pass.”
“I know, but Hamburg—” Grossman’s shrug indicated there wasn’t much left either of Hamburg or in Hamburg to entice a person.
The colonel’s voice became accusatory.
“You said you had no family. Why would you want to go to the American Zone? Or the French Zone? You have no one there.”
“I have no one anywhere,” Gr
ossman said in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, “but none of us can stay here forever. It’s been two months since the camp was liberated, and a month since the war ended. There’s nothing for me in Hamburg. I thought from the American Zone or the French Zone I might eventually be able to get permission to enter Switzerland …”
“Switzerland?” The colonel made it sound as if the suggestion was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. “You say you have no family anywhere, so obviously you have no one in Switzerland. So how do you expect to get permission to immigrate there? Switzerland isn’t exactly waiting with open arms to be filled with”—with a diplomacy rare with him, the colonel bit back the word “trash” and substituted it with—“refugees.” He considered Grossman coldly. “Why, then, do you want to go there?”
Ben Grossman had always known this was a question that would have to be answered carefully. He realized he had not ingratiated himself with Manley-Jones, but he suspected no prisoner really could. He tried to sound as sincere as possible.
“Before the war I often visited Switzerland. I came to like it very much. There was a girl I met when I was in Lucerne, a very beautiful girl …” He tried to smile but the result was a rather ghastly grimace.
No muscle moved on the colonel’s narrow equine face, but inwardly he was outraged. Those Sonderkommando hands that still carried the stench and blood of the dead bodies that they handled, to be thought of touching the body of a beautiful girl, undoubtedly a gentile girl, which all the Jews seemed to prefer? Grossman misunderstood the colonel’s continuing silence for some form of understanding. He hurried on.
“Also, I’m an engineer, Colonel, a mechanical engineer by profession. I—I studied in Switzerland. I can easily get work there. I would never be a burden on the state.”
The colonel regarded him expressionlessly, and then shrugged.
“I can’t imagine where you got the idea such passes are in my department. All passes from the British Zone to any other zone are issued through the office of the military governor. The liaison between that office and this camp is provided by Major Wilson.”
He immediately bent over his papers, his thumbnail stroking his mustache almost fiercely. It was an obvious termination of the interview. Grossman stared at the bent head a moment, then slowly came to his feet and shuffled from the room. The colonel looked up to be sure the man had left, then reached for the telephone and asked the operator to connect him with Major Wilson’s office.
Switzerland, indeed! Not if Colonel Manley-Jones had anything to do with it! The Russian Zone, perhaps, but no pass to either the American or the French Zone, if he could help it. From there it would be only a step across the border, and the Yanks and the Frogs would probably close their eyes. They were too soft-hearted, that was their trouble. That Sonderkommando! It was a bloody wonder the Jew hadn’t demanded a chauffeur-driven limousine to carry him in luxury across the bloody border!
Max Brodsky and Morris Wolf were discussing God.
Time passed slowly in the camp and a discussion on any subject was a welcome relief from the boredom, becoming the principal mental exercise the inmates could indulge in. Besides, being Jews, Wolf and Brodsky were prepared to argue either side of any proposition with a passion that was almost the equivalent of honest conviction.
“How can anyone but a fool deny the existence of God?” Brodsky demanded. “Look around you. Where do trees come from? Or flowers? They say that man descended from the monkeys, but what about trees? Another question—where do you come from? Why do you have five fingers—”
“Ten.”
“—on each hand,” Brodsky said, determined not to be put off by Wolf’s so-called humor. “It isn’t something that happens occasionally; it happens every time a baby is born. Millions of times a year. Every time the same five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. Why do you think the sun rises in the east every morning? According to you, it’s all an accident, is that it? On a Tuesday you get up expecting light and that day the sun is just going down—”
“You overslept.”
“I’m serious! Everything that happens is following some great master plan. Nothing happens by accident. Look around you.”
Brodsky was sitting on his cot, picking the threads from the SS shoulder patch on a woolen shirt he had just “organized” from the captured stores. At his elbow a radio softly gave the news. Max’s thick fingers, once again approaching their former strength, held the tiny needle with infinite delicacy.
“All right, look around you!” Wolf countered, no longer humorous. “Take a good look! Go take a look at the burial mounds, go look at the electrified fence, take a look at the watchtowers and the momsers there with their machine guns! This is all part of your God’s master plan? All those dead people? The chosen people! That’s a laugh! Chosen to be killed. This is your God? The one who fried the people like that dumb Yashinko? On the fence?”
“He was shot. And he wasn’t a Jew.”
“So that makes him healthy again!” Wolf shook his head disbelievingly. “On a Tuesday the sun is going down instead of up, you don’t know whether to eat dinner or breakfast—that’s your argument for God? I’m impressed. The gas chambers, the ovens, the pits! Those are my arguments. And they outvote you six million to one!”
Brodsky shook his head stubbornly, his thick fingers continuing to pick delicately at the stitching of the patch.
“You don’t understand,” he said sadly. “You don’t want to understand. If there’s no God, what makes everything work? How do you explain the fact that every winter it gets cold and it snows, every summer it gets hot. Every year with no exceptions. Answer me that! Accidental? Never!”
“I have no idea,” Wolf admitted. “I admit I don’t understand, I only know this—leaves or trees or no leaves or trees, sun or no sun, snow or no snow, why does your all-powerful God permit a Hitler to kill millions and millions of people? Does your God think we’re overpopulated? What kind of a God lets things like that happen? You answer me that!”
Brodsky paused in his work, frowning.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, “but God has his reasons. We have to believe that …”
“You have to believe it,” Wolf said bitterly. “I don’t. Look at me. I’m a gargoyle. I could get a job swinging from that Notre Dame church in Paris. They could hire me to frighten children. Children? Adults! God needed another ugly man? And if he needed one so badly, he couldn’t make one from an SS? He needed me?”
“You don’t understand,” Brodsky said patiently, and then paused as Grossman came into the room. He smiled and gestured toward Wolf’s list on the wall. “They picked up Raeder today. The great Admiral of the Navy was simply sitting at home in the Russian sector of Berlin, can you imagine? Officially registered and completely undisturbed. It’s—” He noticed the expression on Grossman’s face for the first time. He reached over and switched off the radio. “What’s the matter?”
Grossman slumped onto his cot. “I didn’t handle it very well.” And thought, a few years ago I would have had that miserable colonel shoveling shit in the gas pens, carting the dead to the ovens, and happy to be alive to do it. Now I sat and apologized to the bastard! The time here at Belsen has done more to me than I would have supposed!
“Who did you have?”
“Some colonel. Manley-something.”
“Manley-Jones,” Wolf said and bobbed his small head. “I had him. He’s a prick. There has to be one in every outfit, I guess, including the British. Or maybe especially the British.”
Max had stopped his needlework. “So what happened?”
Grossman shrugged. “I should have stopped after I answered his questions and he told me to go. But I thought he was the one who handed out passes to a different zone.” He stared down at his new shoes. “Now the son of a bitch is undoubtedly getting in touch with some office and making damned sure I don’t go anywhere. Especially Switzerland.”
Brodsky snorted and went back to his blouse
. “Switzerland, Switzerland! It’s all you talk about. You’d think you had a fortune in a numbered account there!”
“If I thought so,” Wolf said, “I’d get you into Switzerland if I had to carry you across the border. And don’t break our hearts about that girl you say you met there before the war,” he added. “You think she’s still waiting for Grossman to appear after six years?” He put a hand up to his scarred face, moved his fingers to touch the eyepatch over his empty socket. “For somebody handsome like me, maybe they’d wait—but for you?”
“Forget Switzerland,” Brodsky said definitely. “Come to Palestine with us, instead. We’ve got prettier girls.” My Deborah, for instance, he added to himself, and wondered if his Deborah would still be waiting after all the years. He had written to her immediately after liberation, and still had heard no word.
Grossman shook his head. It was an old argument. “If you two want to go to Palestine, go. Nobody’s stopping you.”
Wolf smiled. “Only the British.”
“That’s your problem. I’m going to Switzerland, and the British aren’t going to stop me. Certainly no British named Manley-Jones!”
Brodsky went back to his needlework, speaking over his shoulder.
“So at least come with us until you’re somewhere near the Swiss border. You can say good-bye there just as easy as here. We’ll be leaving here in a month or so—”
“A month or so?”
“That’s right.”
“When was all this decided?”
“Today, while you were at your interview. The Mossad man was here, you knew he was coming today. Davi Ben-Levi. You didn’t want to see him, remember?”
“I didn’t have anything to see him about.”
“Well,” Brodsky said, disregarding Grossman’s comment, “the Mossad are setting up places we can stay until we reach a port in Italy. They have to buy a ship, or ships.” He shrugged. “It all takes time.”
“And you’re going to stay here until they’re ready?”
“Why not?” Wolf said. “What’s wrong with here? All the comforts of home—” He gestured toward the radio. “Entertainment, good food, good company—”
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