Trieste

by Daša Drndic

  What is your name? Haya asks the woman sitting next to her.

  Aurelia.

  And just now, on Tuesday, a boy was attacked by a pack of dogs. The boy was on his way to kindergarten, the police reported, says Aurelia. Three dogs attacked the boy not far from the house where he lives, where he lived, and there wasn’t anyone on the street to help him, so the police say, says Aurelia, and the boy died. The police say it still isn’t clear why the dogs attacked the boy, says Aurelia, and now the spokesperson for the police is saying, We locked up the dogs, and we’ll speak to the owners, because, so the spokesperson says, in this region alone dogs bite at least thirteen thousand people every year. Do you have a dog? Aurelia asks Haya. One should have a dog, she says. Dogs protect us from rats and loneliness, says Aurelia. My dog died recently. I had a nice dog, a golden retriever, she says.

  The dog was called Barry.

  Barry was a nice dog. A black-and-white dog. A big one.

  Barry belonged to Kurt Franz.

  Kurt Franz was called Lalka. In Polish “Lalka” means “doll”. Kurt Franz was a handsome man, tall, big and strong. A blond man, blue-eyed.

  The dog Barry was a trained dog. The dog Barry was trained to attack camp inmates, especially their genitals.

  The dog Barry attacked inmates when ordered: Man, grab that dog!

  The dog Barry lived at Treblinka.

  What is your name?

  Ya’akov Wiernik

  When were you deported to Treblinka?

  23 August, 1942.

  How long did you stay at Treblinka?

  Until 2 August, 1943.

  How old are you?

  I’m dead.

  Do you recognize the person in this photograph?

  Even if I were on my deathbed Kurt Franz’s name would make me tremble.

  You said that Franz amused himself with the prisoners. How did Kurt Franz amuse himself?

  He had a big dog he called Barry. When Franz ordered, Mensch, schnapp den Hund! the dog would attack people and tear off pieces of their flesh.

  You are Kalman Teigman?

  Yes.

  You live in Israel?

  Yes.

  How old are you?

  Eighty-four.

  You were deported to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto. When?

  4 September, 1942.

  Do you remember the late Dr Chorazycki?

  Yes, very well.

  Who was Dr Chorazycki?

  A physician from Warsaw. At Treblinka he treated the Ukrainians and Germans. Once the deputy camp commander Kurt Franz searched him. I don’t know why. Maybe someone snitched on Dr Chorazycki. Maybe it was a routine search. I don’t know. And Kurt Franz discovered that Chorazycki was hiding money in his clothing. Chorazycki knew what would happen to him. People were hanged or shot for that.

  Why was Chorazycki hoarding money?

  He belonged to a group that was planning an armed revolt. Chorazycki didn’t hesitate. He rushed at Franz. He was already old, while Kurt Franz was young, tall and strong. Then he spun around and ran towards his barracks. He didn’t get far. After a few metres he dropped suddenly to the ground. Clearly he had taken poison of some kind. Then they called us to the scene, prisoners and personnel alike, to watch how they pumped Chorazycki’s stomach to revive and torture him. Franz’s faithful assistant Rogozo, a Ukrainian who had worked for the railways, grabbed a hook and with it drew out Chorazycki’s tongue. Franz poured water from a filthy bucket in to the man’s mouth, and then like a madman he began to jump all over him. Then the guards turned Chorazycki upside down, but nothing. By then completely and utterly dead, Chorazycki was stripped and beaten savagely with thick poles. Later they carried him off to the Lazarett on a stretcher.

  Who is in this photograph?

  Kurt Franz and his dog Barry.

  What do you know about Barry?

  Barry arrived at Treblinka in late 1942. He was as big as a calf. He was white with dark spots. He was a mongrel, a lot like a St Bernard. Whenever Franz went out to tour Treblinka 1 and Treblinka 2, Barry went along. Without any reason whatsoever, Franz would order Barry to attack prisoners. Go, man, bite that dog! he’d howl: Mensch, beiss den Hund! But Barry didn’t have to wait for the order. He’d pounce on the inmates as soon as Franz raised his voice. Barry was so big that his head came up to a persons thighs, so the first thing he went for were a man’s privates. He’d bite like crazy. He managed to bite the penis off several inmates; blood gushed everywhere. Barry knocked others over on to the ground and mutilated them. Until they were unrecognizable.

  You are?

  Henryk Poswolski. I watched S.S.-Hauptscharführer Küttner toss a live infant into the air as if it were a clay pigeon, and Kurt Franz “picked it off ” with two bullets. Then they went for a beer at the zoo.

  What is it, Zabecki?

  Once, when Kurt Franz was making the rounds at camp, Barry drew him off into some bushes. We were standing to the side. Franz parted the branches and saw a woman on the ground with a very small baby, only a few months old, lying on its mother’s breast. Apparently the woman was dead. Barry yanked free of the leash, went over to the baby and lay down next to it. Then the dog began to whimper and lick the baby’s hands and face. Franz went over to Barry and held his gun to the dog’s head. Barry looked up at his master and wagged his tail. Just then Franz, cursing loudly, whacked Barry on the back with a pole. Barry fled. Franz kicked the dead woman several times, then he started kicking the child and stomping on its head until it died. Then he continued his walk through the woods, calling the dog, but the dog played deaf, though he was nearby. We saw Barry lurking in the bushes and whining softly, as if searching for someone. After a while Franz went out on to the road and Barry came trotting over to him, but Franz started beating him with such violence that it was as if he’d lost his mind. Barry snarled and barked, and he even lunged at Franz’s chest, we thought he’d gone mad, but when Franz ordered him to sit, Barry sat. Then Franz shouted, Lie down! and Barry lay down. Then Franz shouted, Stand! and the dog stood and began licking his master’s boots, splattered with the baby’s blood. Franz fired several shots into the air and sent Barry after some Jews who were trying to escape from the railway station.

  I heard that after the war Barry ended up with a family, and that he became a docile, tame household dog. That he adored children.

  I don’t know how he was with children, but he was docile. After Treblinka closed, Barry was taken in by a Nazi physician and in 1944 the doctor sent Barry to his wife in northern Germany. Several years later they put Barry down, because he was old and feeble. Later, in 1965, veterinarians and psychologists from Düsseldorf asked the famous behavioural scientist Konrad Lorenz to shed some light on the dog’s behaviour. Lorenz told them that such behaviour in a dog is altogether plausible; that a dog’s behaviour expresses the subconscious of the dog’s master, as Lorenz put it. If he has an aggressive master, the dog will probably attack other people, Lorenz said, and if the behaviour of his master changes, the dog’s behaviour will change as well, Lorenz said, and Lorenz can be believed, because during the war he was a loyal Nazi who “changed masters” after the war and was given the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his research into animal and human behaviour.

  Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

  Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

  I would add something.

  Please do, Pound.

  See, they return; ah, see the tentative

  Movements, and the slow feet,

  The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

  Wavering!

  See, they return, one, and by one,

  With fear, as half-awakened;

  As if the snow should hesitate

  And murmur in the wind,

  and half turn back;

  These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe”,

  Inviolable.

  Gods of the wingèd shoe!

  With them the silver hounds,

 
; sniffing the trace of air!

  You have something against the Pope? Aurelia, who no longer has the golden retriever, asks Haya. People love the Pope, she says.

  There is a kind of sausage called Ratzinger, Haya says. Or is it Rottweiler? I’ve forgotten. Birds don’t chirp while they fly, that much is certain; while they fly, birds do not chirp. Ah, Aurelia, Haya says, and then again she says, Ah, Aurelia!

  Haya wants to talk, but she cannot. The year is 2006, it is the spring of 2006. In her purse Haya carries a newspaper article from the Corriere della Sera, wrinkled and tattered, stained, creased in several places, which was published on 28 December, 2005, and which for months she has been unfolding and refolding, reading and rereading then reading it again, and by now, of course, she knows it by heart. Haya would like to show this, this article, to Aurelia, who is so fond of the Pope and who is grieving the passing of her retriever. Alfonso Morelli of Bologna says that he found a document in the archives of the French Roman Catholic Church dated October 1946 in which Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII, is ordered to keep track of the fact that the Church must retain supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptized. In this document, Morelli declares, it says that children who have been baptized must under no circumstances be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, because these agencies cannot guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, who were saved by the Church during the war and were Catholicized with such benevolence and salvation, especially if these Jewish agencies are handing these, during the war, benevolently Catholicized children back to the Jews, the document says, writes Morelli, and the Jewish agencies can do even less to guarantee anything regarding children Catholicized during the war if the children are given back to their parents, who are searching for them frantically, who pound urgently on the heavy door of the Catholic Church. Further, the document states, Morelli quotes, such children, who have been baptized, should be kept at all costs within the embrace of the Catholic Church, even if their parents are found, even if their parents demand that their children be restored to them. In closing, the document states that this decision, or rather this order, is “confirmed by the Holy Father”, meaning Pope Pius XII, born Pacelli, as Alfonso Morelli from Bologna writes, and Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, future Pope John XXIII, known as “il papa buono”, Morelli writes, had been deeply concerned about the fate of the Jews, because he knew everything about what was going on, because he kept track of what was going on, because he listened to what people told him, among them some Catholic priests as well, and for that reason, Morelli writes, precisely for that reason, after the war Cardinal Roncalli does all he can to reunite the Jewish children, the Jewish children hidden during the Holocaust in Catholic monasteries and various Catholic institutions, to reunite those very children with their parents and their families. The document states that the children who have been baptized, Morelli writes, cannot be handed over to families who will not see to their Christian upbringing. Parents who entrusted their children to the Church, as it also says in the document upon which I stumbled in the archive of the French Catholic Church, quite by accident, since all Catholic Church archives are well guarded and absolutely inaccessible, especially the one in the Vatican called Archivum secretum apostolicum Vaticanum, writes Morelli, those parents who entrusted their children to the Church and are now asking for the return of their children, says the document, which is actually less a document than a directive, writes Morelli, it says “these children” as if they are gifts of God, but they are not, they are someone’s children, writes Morelli, it says these children could only be returned if they were never baptized; if they were baptized, then there is no chance of returning these children to these parents. The directive also stipulates that the Church will consider each case relating to the return of children on its own merits, and issue a final decision, whether to return the child or not, and further, the directive orders that the Church must never under any circumstances respond to official Jewish enquiries in writing. Secrecy and mystery are the underpinnings of the ideology of the Catholic Church, writes Morelli. Since the document which I stumbled upon is a legal Church document written in the spirit of the general principles of the Catholic Church and its policies, and since this document actually forbids the return of children to their legal parents, and as such is approved by the highest Church authority, Pope Pius XII himself, one can assume, writes Morelli, that the order was to be implemented throughout Europe. After this discovery, of course, Morelli continues, the canonization of Pius XII, about which so much has been written and said these past few months, is now in question. My colleagues, journalists and historians, writes Morelli, but also some institutions, he writes, are asking the Vatican to establish a fully autonomous international commission, which they will finance in full, to establish a commission staffed with historians, ecclesiastical officials and forensic experts in order to ascertain how many European children the Church kidnapped. Some estimates posit the number as high as eight thousand. The commission would have to have free access to all Church institutions, writes Morelli, and complete access to all documents. But, writes Morelli, the diaries of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, are soon to be published, and it may be possible to learn more regarding this question, the question of the children kidnapped all over Europe. I am appalled at the language in which this document-decree is couched, my friend Leo Levi, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, tells me, writes Morelli, because this document is addressing a serious question, a very painful question, in a manner that is utterly bureaucratic, as Leo Levi tells me, writes Alfonso Morelli. This document makes no mention of the extraordinary historical circumstances under which the Catholicization of Jewish children went on, circumstances in which all these children came under the protection of the Catholic Church, Leo says, Morelli writes. In this directive the Holocaust, which is what led to the baptizing of the Jewish children, in this decree, the Holocaust is never mentioned, Leo Levi says. And furthermore, when the document, or better yet—directive—was written in October 1946, memory of the liberating of Auschwitz was still fresh, Auschwitz had been liberated only a few months before this high-level Church decree was penned, but in it, in this decree, Auschwitz is never mentioned, nor is the Holocaust, Leo Levi says, writes Alfonso Morelli. However, writes Alfonso Morelli in Corriere della Sera on 28 December, 2005, we still don’t know how far Roncalli and other Church functionaries went in implementing the Vatican directive, since all documents pertaining to Church policy are sequestered either in the Vatican archives or in the archives of national churches. It is known, writes Morelli, that at the time of the war many children found shelter in Catholic monasteries, in boarding schools and in schools, but not at the behest of the Pope, writes Morelli. It is well known that after the war the Jews who survived had serious difficulties locating their children, retrieving their children from Catholic institutions, writes Morelli, but until now it was only possible to surmise that the Church was systematically stealing Jewish children in order to indulge Jesus. For sixty years the Church and its “servants” have been striving to prove to the world that they have no blemish on their conscience for their activities as far as World War Two is concerned, writes Morelli. For sixty years the Church has been trying to prove the innocence of Pope Pius XII and many of his bishops and priests. If there is anything that has been preserved with dedication and faith, anything that has been sacrosanct in the church books, then it is the dates of baptisms and deaths, writes Morelli, so it wouldn’t be difficult to ascertain what happened to the baptized Jewish children. If Switzerland, so-called neutral Switzerland, has mustered the strength to set up the Bergier Commission, the I.C.E.—an independent commission of experts—though only on 12 December, 1996, writes Alfonso Morelli, to prove the ties between the Nazi regime and the Swiss banks who had at their disposal vast quantities of stolen Jewish property; if Australia has spoken out
about the children kidnapped by their authorities, stolen from Aborigines during World War One, writes Morelli, then instead of obscuring history, the Catholic Church can get off its arse and throw open its archives. And not only that, writes Morelli. It is time for the Church to stop pretending, to stop lying about how its greatest crime during the war was inadequate involvement in saving Jews, writes Morelli, it is time for the Church to stop believing that it is enough for it to launch anaemic apologies for its “inadvertent” lapses, these ecclesiastical apologies, which are becoming more and more revolting over time, truly disgusting, insipid, writes Alfonso Morelli, because, he writes, it is reasonable to deduce that this letter written to Cardinal Roncalli is not the only incriminating document hidden in the vast secret archives of the Catholic Church. We are hopeful it has become clear by now, writes Morelli, that the Church should slow things down a bit as far as the panicked, nearly hysterical race to beatify, canonize, whatever, Pius XII, who, ah, now this is something that is widely known, writes Morelli, was at the head of a Church which was openly championing anti-Semitism at a time when the Nazis and Fascists were persecuting and murdering Jews on a grand scale. He, Pius XII, led a Church in which many German priests abused church birth registers in order to help the Nazis determine who should be first to wear a yellow star—and then be killed, and some German priests kept right on doing this officially for an entire decade after the Holocaust ended, in order to convince those Jews once and for all that they were guilty of murdering Christ. Just as a reminder, writes Morelli, the “Reichskonkordat ”, a concordat signed on 20 July, 1933, between the Holy See and the Reich, is in force in Germany to this day. During that time, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, is Secretary of the Vatican, and he is the one who signs this concordat, while Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, writes Morelli, in a sermon given in Munich in 1937, says, “Now, when the leaders of the greatest world nations observe the rise of the new Germany with a dose of reservation and much scepticism, the Catholic Church, this greatest moral force on earth, is showing its trust in the new German authorities through this concordat, which is an act of vast significance, because it contributes to the strengthening of the renown of the new authorities throughout the world,” says Faulhaber, writes Morelli. Abe Foxman tells me, continues Morelli, and Foxman is director of the Anti-Defamation League, writes Morelli, that they placed him, Foxman, with a Polish family and his nanny had him secretly baptized, and later there were terrible problems, all sorts of complications, before he was returned to his parents. I believe that today there are tens of thousands of Jewish children in the world who were saved and then baptized, Abraham Foxman tells me, writes Alfonso Morelli, children who do not know to this day of their origins, nor will they ever learn of them, says Foxman, writes Morelli.