A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  Erik Kramer, one of the ‘& Sons’, brought them to a room in the basement of the funeral home, and Perlman’s body was briefly removed from the refrigerated unit in which it was being kept. This was the favor that Epstein had asked of Parker, and Cory Bloom had seen no reason to object. As Epstein had explained to Parker, it was not just the bereaved who were troubled by death, but the dead themselves. According to the Talmud and Kabbalah, the soul did not completely leave the world until after burial. Until then it was in a state of transition, of disconnection, which was why the deceased should not be left alone between death and burial. Out of this had come the Jewish tradition of shemira, or watching over the body.

  But, as Erik Kramer explained to Epstein, Kramer & Sons was a very old-style funeral business, and his father and mother continued to live on the top two floors of the home, for they were not troubled by the presence of the dead. In this way, although they were not Jewish, he suggested that they were performing a kind of shemira. Epstein thanked him for this kindness, but said that he knew of a Chevra Kadisha, a Jewish burial society, who would be able to find volunteers to act as shomrim until the time came for Perlman’s burial. The rabbi then said a prayer over the body before it was returned to the cold and the dark. After that, Epstein remained silent until they arrived at the Brickhouse, where he ordered salad and spoke to them of numbers.

  Tattooed numbers, as Bloom had already established, were used to identify prisoners at just one concentration camp – the Auschwitz complex in Upper Silesia – and then just from 1941 onward. Only prisoners selected for work received a serial number, Epstein explained. Those who were sent directly to the gas chambers – including the elderly, the weak, and children – were not tattooed, although in the early days of the camp those who were in the infirmary or marked for execution were also tattooed on the chest using a metal stamp made up of interchangeable centimeter-long needles which allowed the tattoo to be created using a single blow, after which ink was rubbed into the wound.

  The digits were generally tattooed on the outer side of the left forearm, although some prisoners from transports in 1943 received tattoos on the inner forearm. The numbering sequences used varied over time, according to intake and the nature of the prisoners involved. An ‘AU’ series denoted a Soviet prisoner, a ‘Z’ series a gypsy. ‘A’ and ‘B’ sequences up to 20,000 were used to identify male and female prisoners arriving at the camp after 1944, although an administrative error resulted in the ‘B’ series exceeding 20,000. The Nazis’ original intention was to get as far as ‘Z’ if required.

  ‘So,’ said Epstein, ‘your initial surmise was right: these are Auschwitz identity numbers. Perlman lost four family members – the Nemiroffs – in the camps: a great-uncle, a great-aunt, and their son and daughter. But the curious thing is that they didn’t die at Auschwitz. They were killed at another camp entirely. They perished at Lubsko.’

  Epstein had never met Bruno Perlman while he lived – his first sight of him had come that day at Kramer & Sons – but he knew of him. Perlman had been a troubled youth. He was involved in minor criminality, and was a heroin addict for a number of years. Eventually he rediscovered his faith with a vengeance, which led him to begin researching his family. In the actions of those who had killed the Nemiroffs, he found an outlet for his rage at himself, and grew obsessed with the Holocaust. He also became involved with a number of organizations targeting neo-Nazi groups, although Perlman was by nature and inclination more of a loner, and was regarded by most as a dabbler who could not be relied upon. He was also essentially self-absorbed, seeing everything through the prism of Lubsko.

  Parker had heard the name used recently. It came to him.

  ‘Engel,’ he said. ‘The war criminal they’re trying to deport from New York. He was a guard at Lubsko.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Epstein. ‘He’s the first of the Lubsko staff that the US government has been able to lay hands on. Lubsko was a nasty, sordid little footnote to the Holocaust, as if such a thing could even be required.

  ‘To understand Lubkso, you have to recognize something: Nazism was, at heart, a criminal enterprise, a product of which was the Holocaust. The Nazis were gangsters and hoodlums. As much as they were ideologically driven, they were also greedy. Pure ideologues don’t pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead.

  ‘And lest you should be mistaken, we are speaking here of sums of money almost beyond comprehension, of quantities of looted assets that defy the imagination. Take one man, just one: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who in 1943 became the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA, the Reich Main Office for Security, which was responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution. Kaltenbrunner had a house at Altaussee called the Villa Kerry, and when he was forced to flee from the American advance, he decided to bury his wealth in his garden. He had at his disposal fifty kilograms of gold, fifty cases of gold coin, plate, and jewelry, two million US dollars, two million Swiss francs, five boxes of gemstones, and a stamp collection valued at five million marks. It was too much to bury, so he hid what he could and had to be talked out of putting the rest in a cave and dynamiting it. This is one man – just one. Do you understand?’

  Epstein banged a thin finger on the table before him. Parker had never seen the old rabbi so animated, so enraged.

  ‘This was not simply about gassing and shooting and burning millions of innocent men, women, and children, about turning Europe into one vast funeral pyre: it was about robbing these people along the way, of taking everything they had from them down to their spectacles, their hair, even the clothes that they wore, so they were forced to go to their deaths naked.’

  Epstein regained his usual composure. His point had been made.

  ‘But the Nazis were worried about wealth slipping through their fingers, for they wanted nothing to get past them. So a unit was formed within the RSHA to identify Jews and other prisoners who might have managed to hide significant transportable assets – gold, jewelry, art – before being sent to the camps, and put pressure on them to reveal their location. It drew on staff from Amter II, the Administration, Law, and Finance Section, along with Adolf Eichmann’s Referat IV B4, but it was secretive about its work, to the extent that those who were involved in Lubsko did not even have it listed on their service record. It took years for the Allies just to figure out that “Special Administration (Amter II-L)” was a reference to Lubsko.

  ‘Now there were some who advocated torture and the threat of immediate execution as a stimulus, but given that most of the prisoners in the camps were already brutalized and facing death, further threats struck those involved in Amter II-L as redundant. Instead a more refined approach was decided upon, and Lubsko was created.

  ‘The idea for the deception came from the death camp at Treblinka, of all places. I don’t know if any of you have ever visited a slaughterhouse, but the trick is to hide from the cattle the imminence of their deaths. It makes them easier to handle. So you don’t want them to smell blood and panic until the end, and you don’t want them to hear the sounds the animals inside make when they sense what is about to happen. Most of those who ended up in Treblinka survived only minutes before being herded to the gas chambers, but in order for the operation to be conducted with the minimum of fuss and panic, the prisoner transports arrived at what looked like a village train station, with timetables and flowers, and the path to the chambers led through a grove of trees. You see, the best slaughterhouse is one that doesn’t look like a slaughterhouse at all.

  ‘So Lubsko was a death camp disguised to resemble a work farm, with small chalet-type huts and a minimal guard presence. It had a proper infirmary for prisoners, with no more than four to six prisoners to a hut, although the preference at Lubsko was to give each family its own dwelling. Prisoners would be expected to work, but compared to Auschwitz the labor was minimal, even pleasant. They would be required to farm, plant vegetables, feed chickens, and do some light maintenance – painting, cleaning – to keep the camp looking fresh.
An Obersturmbannführer named Lothar Probst was given command of the camp, along with his wife, Magda. She was twenty years younger than him, and very pretty, by all accounts. She was almost the perfect wife for an SS officer; her only flaw was that she could not give him the children he wanted, but whose fault that was, I do not know. She was a local leader in the League of German Girls before she joined the Party, and trained as a nurse at Grafeneck Castle near Stuttgart.

  ‘You have heard of Grafeneck? No? It was the headquarters of the Nazi euthanasia program. Before they began slaughtering us, they practiced on their own: the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the weak, the deformed, the ones who did not match the Aryan ideal. In 1940 alone, they killed almost ten thousand people at Grafeneck: first, an injection of morphine to calm them, then the gas, although by the time they got to the Jews, they had dispensed with the morphine. After Grafeneck, Magda moved around hospitals as part of Operation Brandt, the expansion of the euthanasia program to geriatrics and the war-wounded, before being posted to the Ukraine in the Ostrausch, the “Eastern Rush”, the great colonization, and there she met Lothar Probst. As a regional commander, Probst was responsible for Aktions on the Ukrainian-Polish border: he worked alongside a man named Wilhelm Westerheide, and together they reduced the Jewish population from twenty thousand to five hundred in the space of fourteen months. One of their tricks was to force Jews in the local ghetto to hand over money and valuables in return for guarantees of protection – which, of course, never came. That was why Probst was chosen for Lubsko: he had experience of deception.

  ‘The first intake arrived in the spring of 1944: seventeen individuals, most of them Jews, including three children. They came from Belsen and Auschwitz, and perhaps could not quite believe what was happening to them. They were given the opportunity to shower, offered clean clothes and decent food. They found one couple, the Dreschers from near Koblenz, already in residence. They were not Jews, they said, but had been incarcerated for sheltering them. They claimed to have been at Lubsko for a month, and had helped to get the camp fit and ready for the first intake. They had been treated well, but before they could say any more, Lothar Probst and his wife arrived to explain the arrangements to the new arrivals. It was very simple: they could choose to return to their original camps, where they would immediately be executed, or they could find a way to pay for the relative privileges and comforts that Lubsko offered. They would be given one week to decide.

  ‘By this time, of course, there were whisperings, both among the Germans and the prisoners, that the war could not last forever, and it was only a matter of time before the Allies invaded. It was a question of surviving to see the end, and Probst and his wife made it clear to the prisoners that they, too, desired an easy life, and Lubsko could only continue to exist if it produced wealth. Also, who would choose to go back to the gas chambers and the death pits if there was another option? The RSHA researchers had done their job well: all those who had been picked gave up assets of some type. This information was sent back to Amter II-L, and trusted officers were sent to secure the items in question.

  ‘But this was a kind of blackmail, so a few days later Probst would come back to the prisoners again, seeking further assets. Those who could not pay were publicly threatened with being returned to their camps, but those who could pay often stepped up and offered to save not just themselves, but the others too, for the Nazis understood that goodness can be exploited just as much as evil. And even if the prisoners at Lubsko quickly began to realize that they were the victims of a terrible duplicity, they had no choice but to go along with it. To borrow a gambling analogy, if they folded now, they lost everything.

  ‘About three weeks after the first intake arrived, they were all murdered. The adults were shot in the woods and buried in a mass grave. The children were separated from them, taken to the infirmary by Frau Probst, and killed by lethal injection. Only the Dreschers were spared, because they were part of the deception, and were in reality a pair of loyal party members, the Kuesters. They were the Judas goats, leading the cattle to the slaughter.

  ‘One week later, the next intake arrived, and the Dreschers were now from Zwickau instead, for a pair of Jews from Koblenz were among the new prisoners. And so it went on – Bruno Perlman’s family being among the final prisoner groups, incidentally – until it became clear that the Allies would soon be at the gates, at which point Probst and his wife died in what appears to have been a murder-suicide pact, after which some of the guards must have turned on one another, possibly over the division of spoils. It’s clear from surviving documentation that concerns were being raised in Berlin about possible inconsistencies in the level of assets being reported to the RSHA from Lubsko. Some skimming was probably to be expected, but it seems likely that the Probsts were engaged in holding back information about the location of significant quantities of hidden wealth. A warrant had already been issued for their arrest in the days before the camp was ordered to be liquidated, and it may be that the killing of guards by their comrades was not unconnected with this fact. Had the Reich not collapsed, there’s a good chance that the Probsts could have found themselves facing the same fate as their prisoners. Instead, with the Russians advancing from the east, and the British and Americans from the west, the Probsts chose death.

  ‘The Americans found all of the bodies when they arrived – the Dreschers and the Probsts among them – along with one survivor, a Jewish woman named Isha Górski, who escaped from the camp and hid in the last death pit when the shooting began. It was from her that we learned of Lubsko’s existence. The rest is based on research, and admittedly some speculation, especially concerning those final days. I have to confess, though, that I am no expert, and I had to make some calls to find out what I’ve told you. Such information I don’t keep at my fingertips.’

  ‘And what happened to Isha Górski?’ Bloom asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. If she is still alive, then she is a very old woman by now.’

  ‘The question remains,’ said Parker. ‘What was Bruno Perlman doing up here in the first place?’

  ‘You can say, with some assurance, that it will be linked either to Lubsko or to neo-Nazism,’ said Epstein. ‘From what I hear, he had little interest in anything else.’

  ‘Was he—?’ Bloom started to ask, then tried to find another way to phrase the question before deciding to follow her original path. ‘Was he suicidal?’

  ‘The Jewish view on suicide is very severe,’ said Epstein. ‘It’s a serious sin. That’s not to say that Jews do not commit suicide, but Perlman, with his newfound religious fervor, would not have been unaware of the consequences of it for his soul. But who is to say what goes through a man’s mind at such moments? Not the torments of the next life, I think, but an end to the pain of this one, and Bruno Perlman was, I believe, a man in a great deal of pain.’

  It was time for Epstein and Liat to leave if they were to make their flight to New York. Epstein fell back as they walked to his car, and Parker joined him.

  ‘You are recovering,’ said Epstein. It came out as a statement not a question.

  ‘I hope so,’ Parker replied.

  ‘No, I can see it in you.’

  ‘I think that’s partly thanks to you.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘The Brook House Clinic. I noticed that two members of its board share your surname.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Epstein, as though it were nothing, when Parker’s time and treatment there had made months of difference to his progress. ‘Distant relatives. It’s a commandment: every Jew has to have a doctor in the family. It was on the third tablet that Moses couldn’t carry down from the mountain, then left up there when he realized his people would have enough trouble keeping up with the ten commandments he already had.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m grateful.’

  ‘You know, you never cease to surprise me. I think you may outlive us all. Liat, she worries for you. I think that, if you were a
Jew, she might even consider marrying you, if only to keep an eye on you. Have you ever considered converting?’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘A little, yes. But she does care about you, as do I. Get well. Return to doing what you do best. Perhaps investigating Bruno Perlman may be a step on the way.’

  They reached the car. Epstein hugged Parker again, and whispered, ‘Don’t leave Perlman in that place for much longer. Make some calls. Let him be buried so that his soul can rest at last.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Liat opened the door for Epstein, and when he was safely inside she returned to Parker. She mouthed the words clearly so that he could understand her.

  Earlier you signed ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  For what?

  ‘For everything.’

  For sleeping with you?

  ‘I didn’t want you to think I was ungrateful.’

  She smiled.

  ‘And for watching over me in the hospital.’

  The smile faded, to be replaced something unknowable.

  You died.

  ‘I know.’

  So I was your shomeret, for a time. I don’t want to do it again.

  ‘I’ll try my best to make sure you don’t have to.’

  This time, it was Liat who signed ‘Thank you.’ She kissed him once more before leaving, this time brushing the corner of his lips with her own.

  Bloom and Parker watched them go. She considered asking Parker about Liat, then thought better of it. Some things, she knew, should remain unexplored and unremarked.

  21

  The next day, Parker arrived in Bangor more than an hour before he was due to meet Rachel and Sam, and just in time to pick up a message from Rachel to say that they had been late in leaving Vermont, and wouldn’t get to town until early afternoon, which left him with even more time to kill. He was a little relieved. The headache from two nights before – when he’d woken to find himself on the rug by his bed, a pillow beneath his head – lingered as a dull throb, and he’d been nauseous again on the drive to Bangor. He had no idea how he had come to be lying on his floor, and retained only a vague memory of a dream in which his dead child whispered words of comfort to him. He still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to spend all that time with Epstein and Liat the day before without vomiting, which might have been taken amiss. Viewing Bruno Perlman’s body and listening to the story of the camp at Lubsko hadn’t helped.