by William Kerr
Above the low murmur of organ music, two priests, several friends, and a man who was almost the perfect image of a younger Eduard Richter delivered eulogies and prayers, much of which Matt was unable to follow, and finally Holy Communion. After the service, Matt sat waiting for Hannah to come up the aisle with the other mourners, but she remained seated on the front row. Looking neither sideways nor back, her eyes seemed locked on the high altar and its polished bronze, near life-size figure of Christ on the cross. Her family spoke briefly with her, then followed the rest of the people, passing close to Matt. Caught up in the herding of their children, they ignored his presence.
Matt waited several minutes, then sidestepped his way out of the pew and walked toward the front of the church, his footsteps echoing off the marble tile, through the sanctuary, and around the rotunda above the choir. Without disturbing the woman, he sat down beside her, his eyes following hers toward the chancel and figure of Christ. Within moments, he felt her hand on his and heard a sigh and the words, “Thank you for coming. How is your head?”
Matt subconsciously raised his free hand and felt his forehead, the bandage removed, swelling almost gone, skin still a purple hue with six tight little stitches in the center. He turned slightly to Hannah, noticing for the first time the increasing grayness of her hair and the sunken quality of her eyes.
“It’s getting better, but I’m so sorry for what happened, Hannah. If I hadn’t asked Eddy to help, if I hadn’t come over here, he’d still be alive.”
Hannah agreed. “Yes, for the moment, but the disease he had would have made life not worth living. It would not have been long. He would have asked me to help him end the misery, but could I? I don’t know. Did he live long after the shooting?”
Matt shook his head. “No. It was immediate.”
“So you see? It might be better this way. Better than the mind remaining sharp and knowing that nothing can help a body that is dying. But did you get what you came for?”
“Some of it. We were going back the next night to review the files of SS officers to see if we could identify the man who owned the hat I brought up from the U-boat.”
“Can you not find that anyway?”
“No. Eddy said files concerning concentration camp commandants and the more senior officers are still classified. From the death’s head insignia on the cap, that’s what he thought the officer had been. A concentration camp officer.”
Hannah took back her hand and sat quietly for a moment, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze directed at the crucifix as though she were in prayer. Finally, she asked, “When do you leave?”
“I’m driving back to Frankfurt later this afternoon and taking a flight to the States around noon tomorrow. The police called early this morning and said I could leave.”
“Then before you go, I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“For the other night when I saw the photograph of the hat. It brought back such memories.” Hannah shook her head. “For too long I’ve tried to hide the past.”
“I’m sorry. If I’d known…”
“The initials inside the hat. You said J. K.?”
“Yes,” Matt answered.
“I think I might be able to help.”
Matt’s eyes narrowed in a question mark. “How?”
Hannah sighed, pushed up from the seat, and said, “Come walk with me. There is a little wine shop on the river nearby, and I will tell you a story.”
CHAPTER 26
The shop was dark in comparison to the sun-dappled square on which it was located. Outside, great oaks and sycamore-like plane trees cast a canopy over the square. They allowed only splotches of sunlight to reach the sidewalk and open ground that separated Dagmar Wolff’s wine shop from the Peter-Altmeier-Ufer, a tree-lined embankment above the Mosel River. The shop’s windows were darkened to reduce nature’s glare. The effect on shelves of wines and a display of beautifully crafted, life-like Hummel figurines made the room resemble a tavern of ancient times. On separate tables stood, knelt, or lay miniature pewter soldiers waging mock battles: armies from the earliest days of Germany’s military prowess to the present.
“I was sorry to learn of Professor Richter’s death, my dear,” Frau Wolff said after placing the glasses of clear white wine in front of Hannah and Matt. “So sudden.” She patted Hannah on the arm.
“Thank you, Dagmar. It was sudden, but now he will feel no pain.”
Bending to kiss Hannah on the cheek, the portly, yet still attractive, Frau Wolff whispered, “I know, I know. A relative?” she asked, motioning to Matt.
“Nein. A friend of Eduard’s from America. He is leaving this afternoon, and I have stories to tell before he goes.”
Frau Wolff nodded her understanding before turning back to Hannah. “Don’t stay away so long. You are always welcome to share a glass of wine with me.”
Hannah smiled and touched Frau Wolff’s hand as the woman turned away to give them privacy.
Hannah sat for a moment, her upper teeth gnawing against her lower lip as if the pain of remembrance was too much to bear. Finally, a sip of wine and she said, “It was October nineteen forty-three. Our family name was Kolbe. My twin brother, Aleksander, and I were eleven years old when they came for us.”
Hannah fumbled in her purse, pulled out a wrinkled black-and-white photograph, and handed it across the table. “This is a picture of my mother, Marián, my brother Aleksander, and me. Taken the summer before.”
Matt studied the picture. A handsome, light-haired woman in her late thirties or early forties. And two children, the boy slightly taller than the girl, both blond and as beautiful as any children he’d ever seen. “Your mother was a lovely woman, and you and Aleksander, like two peas in a pod. Absolutely stunning, both of you.” He handed the photograph back.
“Thank you. We lived in Lublin in the east of Poland. My father, we were to find out, was a member of the Polish, what you say…underground?”
“That’s close enough,” Matt responded.
“It was night. The pounding on the door, the shouting, and the Gestapo, they took my father away. We were made to pack clothes and what valuables we had. Rings, watches, anything made of gold, money, family photographs—we packed.” Hannah glanced quickly at the picture in her hand before going on. “They gave us only minutes before they took us away. They said we would need all those things when we arrived.”
“Did they say where you were going?”
“A place near Krakow; that’s all they said. Before daylight, my mother, my brother, and I were taken to the train station.”
“What about your father?”
“I never saw him again.”
Matt emptied his glass and raised it for Frau Wolff to refill. “I’m sorry.” He paused a moment before saying, “I guess I keep saying I’m sorry over and over again, don’t I?”
Hannah gave him a sad smile before continuing. “Though we didn’t know to where, we knew most of the Jews had been taken away long before, but when the train pulled into the station, there was boxcar after boxcar filled with Jews and a handful of Gypsies, I later learned. Men, women, children, crying and moaning. My God, they were putting us with the Jews. There had to be a mistake.”
“But there wasn’t, was there? Your father had fought with the resistance, and they didn’t care whether you were Jewish, Catholic, or what.”
“Ja, no difference now. They had already taken most of the Polish intelligentsia and the politicians and professional people, and we thought we were safe. We didn’t know until that night that our father was secretly fighting against the Nazis.”
“So what happened?”
“They pushed us into a car that had only one window on each side. The smell of vomit and shit and all the bodies crowded together, it was terrible! So many people, we could only stand. As long as she was able, my mother holding our one suitcase above her head; Aleksander and me clinging to her coat.
“The first frost had already fallen, a
nd it was cold. The wind whipped through the two windows, one on each side, but they had to stay open, or we would all have suffocated. Sometime those that had been on the train the longest, mostly Russian Jews from Belarus, could stand no longer and would sink to the floor in all the filth.
“But that was nothing. Had we known what awaited us, we would have rejoiced in the filth and drunk in the odor like perfume. Two more days it took, stopping often for coal and water for the engine, but nothing for us. By the last day, I could have drunk my own urine. I wish I had. Perhaps its poison would have killed me before…”
Clouds hung low over the camp as the train huffed slowly through the eight-foot high gates of heavy wire with barbs strung across the top. Guard posts loomed high above the fence at regular intervals with wooden barrack like buildings in the distance. Pushed nearly flat against the side of the car, Hannah stood on her tiptoes to see through the open window, fingers wrapped over the gritty ledge for support.
Nearby, above the main gate to wherever they were about to enter, wrought iron words read, ARBEIT MACHT FREI—Work Brings Freedom. On a plaque at the side of the gate were the words AUSCHWITZ/BIRKENAU. She recognized the word Auschwitz, a small town outside Krakow she’d read about in her geography lessons, but the lesson had not mentioned a town encircled with wire fences and guard posts. A new odor drifted through the open window, a terrible stench worse than what hovered within the car itself. And fibers, like wisps of hair, floated on the air. She automatically held her hand to her mouth and nose.
As another train, its boxcars empty, rolled its way out through the gate, Hannah’s train rumbled to an agonizing stop. Almost immediately, the doors of the boxcars were thrown open, and soldiers with machine guns shouted, “Raus, raus!” “Out, out!” “Schnell! Schnell!” “Faster!. Faster!”
Her mother, brother, and she herself, being the last to board their car, were among the first off, roughly jerked by their arms to the concrete ramp that ran between two sets of rail tracks. Her mother’s suitcase was flung to the ramp and broken open. Hannah and her mother dropped immediately to their knees to scoop what little they were allowed back into the case, but the scramble of hundreds of feet and the immediate charge of barking, jaw-snapping German shepherds forced them to flinch away. The dogs’ handlers jerked back on the chain and leather leashes at the last moment. Even then, one of the dogs grabbed Marián’s coat sleeve and shook its head as though trying to rip away the arm. An officer’s boot swung suddenly from nowhere, kicking the dog in the head before sending the suitcase and the family’s valuables scattering across the ramp.
“On your feet,” he shouted, his voice rising above what had become a wail of human misery from the thousand or more piling out of the train cars, onto the ramp, each trying to avoid the blows of gun butts and wooden batons. The air was thick with the barking of dogs, the shouting of orders, and the cries of families being separated.
Officers pointed to one side of the ramp. “Men, over there. Women and children, other side. Quickly.”
“My husband, please, don’t separate us,” a woman nearby cried.
“Together soon,” was the reply from the officer who had kicked the suitcase.
Even before the last of the prisoners jumped from the boxcars, the engine jerked into reverse. It slowly backed away from the ramp and out through the yawning gate that was immediately swung shut by soldiers, locking in the new arrivals from the rest of humanity, or what was left of it.
It was then that Hannah saw the long, low-slung brick buildings. Five of them, she quickly counted. Each had smoke stacks belching rivers of black smoke into the morning sky, and suddenly she knew the source of the gut-wrenching stench and rain of fibers. But what were they? Automatically, she sneezed, the mucous filled with the mysterious fibers. Had she and her mother and brother been thrown into hell…and was this only the beginning?
As men and women with children were separated into two distinct lines, soldiers ranged in between the two groups, their voices and faces in the direction of the women. “Zwillinge, Zwillinge!” they shouted. “Twins, twins!” One of them stopped and looked at Aleksander and Hannah. Pushing their faces together, he asked Marián, “They are twins?”
“Is that good?”
“Ja, very good.”
Marian nodded quickly, “They are twins, yes, yes.”
“They come with me.”
“No, we go together. They will be afraid without me.”
The soldier looked at her for a moment, then said, “Come.”
More gunshots aimed toward the sky, and suddenly there was silence. Only the odor, the fibers, and intermittently one voice, a man’s voice, filled the air as soldiers moved into position between the two lines of people, weapons at the ready. “Links!” or “Rechts!” were the words Hannah heard, but to Hannah they made no sense.
They broke from the rest of the masses and walked forward between the lines of men and women, many weeping, others clutching children to their skirts. Hannah, with one hand tight in her mother’s hand, the other in Aleksander’s, saw an officer, standing alone on a small podium, directing the detainees to one side or the other with a hand and finger. Prisoners, one from each column, their arms stretched high in the air, were marched forward. In each case, the officer, his lips puckered, whistled a melody from Wagner, or was it Strauss, while scrutinizing their bodies, a look of total detachment, almost boredom, on his face. Interrupting the melody, he pointed to the left, followed immediately by the word, “Links!” or, more often, he pointed to the right and directed, “Rechts!” Hannah realized the words meant left or right. Dropping their arms, men and women turned in the direction they were ordered and were quickly ushered off the ramp. And then the whistling continued until Hannah, her mother, and brother were stopped just short of the podium. For a moment, the officer stared down at them, his gaze settling on Hannah.
At first she stared back, her mouth open in amazement at how impressive he looked. The man’s uniform, trousers and jacket, were neatly pressed; the boots were polished to a mirror shine; the hat was placed squarely on his head. A truly handsome man, she thought. He reminded Hannah of the American Clark Gable. Though she’d understood little, she’d seen the movie star in a German-dubbed version of Gone with the Wind with her mother and father before the Germans had gone to war with America. The officer’s mustache, the disarming smile that seemed to remain on his face, the dark hair showing from beneath his hat—she thought he was a gorgeous man.
But it was the skull and crossbones on his cap, just beneath the German eagle and swastika emblem, as well as on the right collar of his jacket, that frightened her. Her whole body began to tremble as she lowered her head beneath his gaze, her eyes closed in fear.
The man knelt to one knee, waved the soldier away, and motioned for Marián and her children to come closer. “Come, come” he urged, the smile on his face growing wider. “Twins, and so beautiful. Not Jewish?”
“Oh, no, Sir,” Marián assured him. “We are Polish. Catholic.”
The officer reached out and ran a finger along Hannah’s face, examining her, fingering the blondness of her hair. All the while, his eyes roved the length of her body. Turning to Aleksander and placing a hand beneath the boy’s chin, he gently lifted Aleksander’s head. “Open your mouth.” Aleksander did. The man nodded. “Very good. Your mother should be proud.”
With his fingers still beneath Aleksander’s chin, the officer turned to another man standing beside the podium, a man with the rank insignia of SS-Standartenführer on his jacket lapel. “What do you think, Colonel?”
As the Colonel nodded in agreement, a shrewd smile played across his face, causing the welt of a scar to form a puckered line of opaque-colored skin from the left side of his mouth to the top of his cheekbone. “Excellent, Herr Doktor. Excellent.”
Rising from his kneeling position, the officer, a doctor, Hannah now knew, looked at Marián for the first time. A frown swept away the near fatherly expression he’d kept on
his face. “Your arm. What happened?”
Marián looked down at her right arm. Blood dripped from beneath the sleeve, along her fingers and onto the concrete ramp.
Hannah spoke up, “One of the dogs—”
“Shussh, my pretty one. I ask your mother.”
“She’s right,” Marián explained. “It was one of the dogs, but I’m sure it was an accident. It is nothing.”
“Hummmm,” the officer said, a finger to his mouth, his eyes narrowed in thought. Finally, he ordered, “Rechts.” The index finger of his right hand pointed in the direction he’d already sent a number of the prisoners.
“Sir?”
“Don’t question me, woman. You are damaged.” He raised the riding crop as if to strike. “Do as I say. Move to the right.”
“My children?”
Rather than hit Marián, he cracked the riding crop against the side of his boot. “Move! I will personally see to their welfare. No harm will come to them.”
“When will I see them?”
“Soon. You have the word of the chief physician of the Auschwitz Camp, Department Five.” Slapping his boot heels together with a loud clop, his words emphasizing every syllable, he added, “I am Major Dr. Josef Mengele, and you have my word.”
“Mengele.” Matt closed his eyes at the sound of the name and the horror it must have meant to so many before they died. “And did you see your mother again?”
“No. The buildings with the smokestacks? They were the gas chambers and the crematoria. I quickly learned, Dr. Mengele’s ‘left’ meant spared to work or for medical experiments, the latter for which Aleksander and I were destined. To the right, the gas chambers. Links oder rechts! Left or right. My mother was sent to the right.