Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  But not all minds and spirits are gone. There are toughwilled fellows among them who mean to survive. They too obey the SS, but with eyes and ears alert for self-protection.

  For Jastrow and Mutterperl, working down in the graves has advantages, once one is steeled to handling gap-mouthed limp skeletal bodies all day. The SS allows you to wear a cloth over nose and mouth, and the guards, having no great zest for the sight and smell of the bodies, stand well clear of the holes.

  Slave workers can be shot to death without warning for talking on the job, but Jastrow and Mutterperl carry on long free conversations behind their masks. Today they are rehashing an old argument. Berel Jastrow is against trying a getaway here. True, he knows the forests, he knows partisan pathways and hiding places, and he even recalls old passwords.

  That is Sammy Mutterperl's argument; this is Jastrow's territory, and it's a good place to make the try.

  But Berel is thinking ahead. It is not a question of taking to the woods to save their skins. Their mission is to bring the photographs and documents of Auschwitz to Prague, where the organized Resistance can get the material to the outside world, above all to the Americans. But Kommando 1005 has been moving farther and farther from Prague. Escaping here, they will have to traverse all of Poland through the woods, behind German lines. Some of the Poles are, all right, but many of their partisan bands in the forests are unfriendly enough to Jews to kill them, and the Polish villagers cannot be trusted not to Turn Jews in. Berel has heard talk among the SS Offimrs about an impending transfer of Kommando 1005 to the Ukraine. That is many hundreds of miles closer to Prague.

  Mutterperl doesn't want to rely on SS gossip. The transfer may not happen. He wants to act. He does most of the talking as they work their way down the row, lifting each maggoty body with what reverence they can, and passing it up to waiting hands above" signalling, when the corpse is a loose disintegrating one, for a canvas sling to hold it together.

  While he does this work, Berel Jastrow recites psalms for the dead. He knows the psaltery by heart. Several times each day he goes through all hundred and fifty of them. The dead hold no terrors for Berel. In the old days, as an officer of the burial society, the hevra kadisha, he washed and prepared for interment many bodies, Here the terrible odor, the disgusting condition of these long-buried corpres, cannot mar his deep affection for them,They cannot help the way they died, these pitiful Jews, many still streaked with black blood from visible bullet holes.

  For Berel Jastrow these rotten remains possess all the sad sacred sweetness of the dead: poor cold silent mechanisms, once warm happy creatures sparkling with life, now dumb and motionless without the spark of God in them, but destined one day in His good time to rise again. So the Jewish faith teaches. He goes about this gruesome task with love, murmuring psalms. He cannot give these dead the orthodox hen purification by water, but fire purifies too, and the psalms will comfort their souls The Hebrew verses are so graven in his memory that he can listen to Mutterperl, or even break off to argue, without missing a word of a psalm.

  Mutterperl is beginning to alarm Berel Jastrow. Sammy's health is good; the man is burly, and Kommando 1005 feeds its exhumers well, before (as they all realize) their turn comes to be shot and burned on the frame. Until recently Sammy has seemed to be retaining his hard sanity, but he is talking really wildly now. The idea of crossing Poland through the forests is not enough for him today. He wants to organize the strongest Jews in the kommando and make a break in a body; steal some guards' guns, and kill as many SS men as they can before plunging into the forest.

  Sammy is talking so vehemently that his breath makes risky telltale smoke through the cloth mask. This situation is nothing like Auschwitz, he argues- There are no electrified wire fences. The SS men are a stupid, lazy, drunken, altogether careless gang. The cordon of soldiers is far off, and alerted only to keep the peasants away from the grave. They could kill a dozen Germans before getting away-maybe twice as many- if they could seize two or three machine guns.

  Berel replies that if organizing an uprising and killing a dozen Germans will help a getaway, fine, but how can it? The chances of being informed on and caught will increase with every Jew they approach. A silent escape always has the best chance of succeeding.

  Killing Germans will raise a hue and cry and start the whole military police force in Byelorussia after the fugitives. Why do it?

  Sammy Mutterperl is handing up out of the grave a little girl in a lilac dress. Her face is a peering grinning skull patched with shreds of greenish skin, but her dark streaming hair is feminine and pretty..

  "For her " he says, as a Jew above takes the girl. The wide-eyed jittery look he gives Berel Jastrow above his mask is more gorrible than the dead girl's face.

  Berel does not answer. He heaves up body after bodythey are light, these long-dead Jews, one seizes a body by the waist and twitches it readily into the air, into the waiting hands above -and goes on murmuring psalms. This is how Berel Jastrow holds on to his sanity. He is doing hevra kadisha work; his religious structure can contain and support even this heavy horror. Why such strange death has befallen so many Jews he cannot fathom. God will have much to answer for! Yet God did not do this, the Germans did it. -Why did God not pass a miracle and stop the Germans? It may be that the generation did not deserve a miracle. So things went naturally, and the Germans broke loose all over Europe, murdering Jews. In this narrow squirrelcage of question and answer Jastrow's mind runs when he allows himself such vain thoughts. He does his best to suppress them.

  Mutterperl says after a long silence, "I intend to talk to GOodkind and Finkelstein tonight, to start with."

  He is serious, then!

  What can one say to him? Mutterperl knows as well as Jastrow that beyond this grave where living Jews in a long file are handing up dead Jews, beyond the pyre which is now burning down to glowing ash, the ring of SS men stands always with tommy guns at the ready, with leashed dogs that if released will kill any moving prisoner. These are different ways that this work changes men. There are the crazy ones: Berel understands them. There are the ones who have been robbing the bodies, and-usually the same ones-sucking up to the SS, informing on other Jews, doing anything to get more food, more comfort, more assurance of surviving. He even understood them. God did not make human nature strong enough to stand what the Germans are doing.

  The bullying Jewish kapos in Auschwitz, the Judenrat officials in Warsaw and the other cities who picked people to go on the trains, and protected their relatives and friends, are all a product of the German cruelty. He can understand them The mysterious crazy ferocity of the Germans is too much to endure; it turns normal people into treacherous animals. The hundreds of thousands of Jews that now lie in these graves meekly marched out to the pits and stood on the bank to let themselves be shot, with their wives, children, old parents, and all.

  Why? Because the Germans were acting beyond human nature. The surprise was too numbing. It could not be happening. People didn't do such things for no reason.

  On the brink of the hole, with the Germans or their Latvian or Ukrainian shooters pointing the guns at them, these Jews, clothed or naked, probably thought that it was all a mistake, or a hoax, or a dream.

  Now Mutterperl wants to fight. Good, maybe that is the way, but with sense, not crazily! When Berel was with the partisans they killed some Germans. But what Mutterperl is talking about is a suicide rush; the work has gotten to him, and he really wants to die, whether he knows it or not; and this is wrong. They do not have the right to the surcease of death. They have to get to Prague.

  "There he is," Mutterperl says with hoarse hate. "Ut iz er.

  An SS man with gun tucked under an arm has come to the edge of the hole. He looks down, yawning, then takes out a pale penis and urinates over the bodies. This same fellow does this every day, usually several times. It is either his idea of humor, or a special way he has to show contempt for Jews.

  He is not a bad-looking young German, with
a long narrow face, thick blond hair, and bright blue eyes. They know nothing else about him; they call him the Pisser. Marching to and from the work sites he is like the other SS men, tough and harsh, but not one of the sadists who look for excuses to beat a Jew. It is just his fancy to piss on the dead.

  Mutterperl says, "Him, I want to kill."

  Later, when both men are on the bone-disposal detail, raking warm fragments or whole collarbones, thighs, and skulls out of the smoking ash heap and feeding them into the bone-crushing mill, Mutterperl pokes Jastrow with an elbow.

  "ut iz erAt the pit, the SS man is urinatin again, picking a spot where the bodies still lie.

  Mutterperl repeats, "Him, I want to kill."

  The sun has gone down. It is almost dark, and bitter cold.

  The last fire of the day is flickering low all along the frame, lighting up the faces and arms of the Jews who are raking the fallen ashes for bones. The trucks have arrived. This grave is too far out from town to march the kornmando there and back; not that one has to coddle Jews, but time is important.

  Blobel has even taken criticism for "torching" Jews with precious gasoline, as one critical SS inspector put it; but he has a tough hide and he runs his show as he pleases. Only he knows the true magnitude and urgency of the job. He knows more about it than the great Himmler, who assigned it to him, because he is the man on the spot, and he has all the maps and reports of the execution squads.

  So the Jews will ride back to the cow barns at an abandoned dairy in Minsk. There are of course no cattle or horses in occupied Russia.

  The Germans have long since taken them off. Blobel's far-roaming Kommando 1005 has no trouble quartering its Jews in one animal stall or another, and its SS contingent merely turns out of their homes as many Russians as may be necessary. Food for the field kitchens is a chronic problem, because the Wehrmacht is so stingy about it, but Blobel's officers are now old hands at smelling out and requisitioning victuals from the local people. Even in this scrubby and devastated part of the Soviet Union there is food. People must eat. One has to know how to lay hands on their stores, that is all.

  By the last light of the fire, UntersturmFuhrer Greaser is himself locking up the valuables Collected from the corpses, in heavy canvas bags used for transporting.secret SS correspondence.

  Mbre of this disagreeable work tomorrow; a pretty deep grave, after all, two layers of bodies left. Half a day's work to c lean them up, shovel in the ashes, level off the pit with dirt and scatter grass seed. BY next spring it will be hard to find the place. In two years brush will cover it; in five years the woods will obliterate it with new growth, and that will be that' Standartenfflhrer Blobel's car drives up. In the dim firelight, the chauffeur gets out and salutes.

  Untersturmfuhrer Greiser is to report to the Standartenfuhrer at once, and the car has come for him. Greaser is surprised and concerned.

  The Standartenfuhrer seems to like him, but any summons from a superior can be bad news. Probably the boss wants a report on the economic processing. Greaser puts his master sergeant in charge of the sacks, keeping the keys himself. The car drives off with him toward Minsk.

  How Greiser would love a bath before he makes his report!

  It's no use keeping clear of the pit, the bodies, the smoke; the smell infects the air all around a work area. It haunts the nerves of your nose You're still smelling it even after a bath, when you sit down to try to enjoy your dinner. Rough duty!

  Untersturmfuhrer Greiser rerted to Kommando 1005 with a high rating for loyalty and intelligence. His father is an old National Socialist, a top official in the post office. Greiser was brought up in the Hitler movement. The special treatment of Jews was a hard concept to swallow when he first heard of it in a secret SS training program. But now he understands it. Still, he has had trouble With the Kommando 1005 mission. Why conceal and obliterate the graves? On the contrary, once the New Order triumphs these places should all have monumental markers to show where the enemies of mankind perished, at the hands of the German people, Western civilization's rescuers. He once ventured to say this to the Standartenfuhrer.

  Blobel explained that once the new day dawns for mankind, all these evildoers and the world wars they caused must simply be forgotten, so that innocent children can grow up in a happy Jew-free world, without even a memory of the bad past.

  But, Greiser objected, what will the world think happened to Europe's eleven million Jews, that they just vanished into thin air?

  Blobel, with an indulgent smile, advised the young man to read Mein Kampf again, on the stupidity and short memory of the masses.

  Standartenfuhrer Blobel, well along in his evening boozing, is poring over his SS maps of the Ukraine while he waits for Greiser to arrive. He finds the loyal naievety of the young officer very engaging. Blobel could not tell him the truth about the 1005 operation, which he himself has surmised but has never breathed to a soul; and which is, that Heinrich Himmler now thinks Germany may lose the war, and is taking steps to preserve Germany's reputation. Blobel thinks the Reichsfuhrer is very wise. One can hope the Fuhrer will still pull it off, in spite of all the odds, and in spite of the hard Stalingrad blow. But now is the time to prepare for an unfavorable result of the war.

  Whatever happens, doing away with the Jews will remain Germany's historic achievement. For two thousand years the European nations tried converting them, or isolating them, or driving them out. Yet when the Fuhrer took power there they were still. Only the leader of Kommando 1005 can appreciate the true grandeur of Adolf Hitler to the fullest. As Himmler said, "We will never talk about this to the world." Even the mute evidence of the corpses must not exist. For otherwise the decadent democracies will pretend holy horror at Germany's special measures against the Jews, should they find out, though they have no use for the Jews themselves; and the Bolsheviks of course will make crude distorted propaganda of anything that can be turned to the Reich's discredit.

  In short, Kommando 1005 has become the custodian of the great and sacred Reich secret; indeed, of Germany's national honor. He, Paul -Blobel, is in the last analysis as great a guardian of that honor as the most famous general in the war; but the difficult work he must do will never get the praise it merits. He is a German hero who must go unsung. Drunk or sober, this is what Paul Blobel truly thinks. He is, in his own mind, no common concentration camp plug-ugly; nothing like it. He is a cultivated professional man, in peacetime an independent architect, a loyal German who understands German world-philosophy and is serving heart and soul in a very demanding war job. One honestly needs nerves of iron.

  Greiser learns, on arriving at the house in Minsk which the Standartenfuhrer is occupying, that Blobel is not interested in a report on the economic process. There is big news.

  Kommando 1005 is going to the Ukraine! The Standartenfuhrer has been nagging Berlin for a month to issue these orders. He is in a jovial mood, and presses a large glass of schnapps on the young officer, who is glad enough to get it.

  Down in the Ukraine things will hum, because that is his own territory, Blobel says. was a leading officer of Einsatzgruppe C, and he insisted from the start on keeping decent maps and accurate body-count reports. As a result the Ukraine sweep can be done with system. All this groping around for grave sites wastes precious time, and the ground in the north is still frozen, and the whole thing is stupid. While they are cleaning out the Ukraine, he will send an officer detail back to Berlin to make a thorough review of all the records, maps, and reports of Einsatzgruppen A and B. That detail will then return and search out and mark every northern grave site in advance.

  Hope stirs in Greiser that he is being detailed back to Berlin, but that is not it. Blobel has another mission for him.

  The graves in the Ukraine are enormous, much bigger than any Greiser has seen. One frame will not do down there, they will have to work with three for best results. Greiser is to proceed at once to Kiev with a detachment of a hundred Jews from the section, a suitable number of SS guards, and rep
ort to the office of the Reich commissar for the Ukraine. Blobel will issue to him the necessary top-priority authorizations for steel rails and the use of a foundry. The Jew work leader "Sammy" is a construction man, and Greiser will have no trouble manufacturing the frames in a week or so. Blobel wants them finished and ready for use when Section 1005, arrives in Kiev. Meanwhile, it will clean out one. more small, grave to the west of Minsk, which was found today.

  Greiser diffidently asks about the economic processing of the new grave. Very little to do, says Blobel; the bodies in that grave are naked.

  But Standartenfuhrer Blobel's plan for the move to the Ukraine is delayed at the outset by a grave accident at the Minsk railroad station.

  At about nine o'clock in the morning, when the train has already failed to show up for two hours, and the Jews in striped suits are drooping sleepily on their feet in two long lines that stretch the length of the platform, and the SS guards are grouped in desultory tatk to kill time, a burly figure bursts from the Jews, grabs a machine gun from one of the guards, and begins shooting! It is never known whose gun he snatched, because several guards fall and their guns go clattering over the platform. But no other Jews have time to snatch up the fallen guns and make real trouble. From both ends of the platform SS men come running, pumping bullets into Sammy Mutterperl. He topples, still holding the machine gun, blood flowing over his striped suit. The surviving guards surround him in rage and riddle his body with bullets; possibly a hundred slugs enter his already lifeless body.