The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  Nuance is a luxury no one has time for in the midst of war, and that goes for the aftermath as well, when people are trying to put the war’s abominations behind them. I have to confess that I too found it a great consolation to let myself loathe all that was German.

  42 …

  When, several weeks later, I was finally able to get to Amsterdam, I found it in a deplorable state. It was with growing dismay that I toured the great city, once so proud, now a drab, impoverished, bare, dilapidated urban desert with no electrical power and very few trees. No buses or trams were running, and many of the houses were in ruins, stripped of anything for which the desperate citizens might have had any use. Some shop windows displayed the official portrait of the queen, as if her likeness could make up for the lack of merchandise. As I walked through the former Jewish quarter, now practically razed to the ground, the ominous silence chilled me to the bone. That teeming anthill of shouting and yelling, laughing and singing humanity that had once tried to eke out a living here in abject poverty had vanished. Those proud, distinctive folks with their singular brand of humor, Amsterdam’s heart and soul, had been eradicated like a plague of rats.

  I had gone to the capital to try to find out what had happened to my brother and Rivka’s parents, and also to see Rafaël Levine. I had to have the talk with him that would clear the way for the new enterprise.

  With a suitcase full of provisions from our rural town, which for once was far better off than poor, plundered Amsterdam, I trudged through the gray streets to the house of my former in-laws. I was scared of what I might find, worried I would find them gone, but just as afraid of the unlikely chance that I’d encounter them at home and have to tell them Rivka and I had split up.

  I halted in front of the house that for twenty years had been a warm substitute for my own childhood home. The building looked run-down, but it was not in ruins. At the second-floor windows I could see the curtains that had hung there since Rivka’s childhood. I thought I saw some movement inside. Could it be my parents-in-law? Had they survived? Lugging my heavy suitcase, I climbed the front steps and rang the doorbell. The shrill noise reverberated inside the house. A few moments later I heard a voice calling from the window, “Who’s there?”

  I stepped back out onto the sidewalk and looked up. A blonde with a bouffant hairdo waving on top of her head like a proud cockscomb was leaning nonchalantly out the window. She wore a flowered apron and had a dust rag in her hand.

  “I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Salomons, are they home?” I asked.

  “No idea,” the woman answered in a surly voice, “why don’t you ask them? They don’t live here, anyways.”

  “But they used to live here,” I called up to her. “Will you let me come up?”

  “Why should I?” the woman yelled back. “We live here now, we’ve been here two years and we ain’t got nothin’ to do with no Salomons. They left, and now it’s ours. Good day, mister.” She slammed the window shut.

  I sighed, considered ringing the bell again and making a pest of myself until the broad let me in, or even kicking in the front door, but decided instead to go see Levine first; perhaps he’d have some more information.

  Crossing the Amstel River, smooth and indifferent as ever, as if the most harrowing scenes had never taken place on her banks, I made my way to the Levines’ house, which looked untouched except for the peeling paint on the window frames. The electric bell didn’t work, but after quite a bit of knocking I heard footsteps, and the Dauphine threw open the door. There wasn’t much left of her once portly girth. Her old-fashioned, matronly dress hung loosely around her emaciated frame, her face was wan, and her double chin, which had once billowed majestically over her tight collar, was now a deflated jumble of empty skin drooping over the lace jabot like a quivering turkey wattle.

  “Motke,” she exclaimed in surprise, looking me up and down, “do come in!”

  She gave me a hug, and I followed her up the stairs. The familiar living room looked emptier and more austere than before. She served me a cup of ersatz coffee and told me that Rafaël had gone to his lab for the very first time that day. But before letting me go after him, she said, she wanted me to tell her what had happened to us.

  I told her that Rivka would be staying in England with the children for the time being, and that we had decided to separate. I also said Rivka was anxious for some news of her parents, and that I’d promised to try to find out what had happened to them. I hoped the Dauphine might be able to enlighten me.

  Enlighten me she did, and gladly. She rattled off her story at top speed, about their terrible suffering during the Hunger Winter of that year, and their anxiety about the two daughters who, with their husbands and children, had been deported to the east and whose fate was still unknown. About all that Rafaël had done in trying to save as many of the hunted and persecuted as he could. And about Aaron, who, I was surprised to hear, had once paid a visit to them in their canal house.

  It seemed that one day in 1943 Levine and my brother had bumped into each other in the crowded corridors of the Jewish Council, where Rafaël spent most of his time in a never-ending quest to obtain the coveted bis auf weiteres reprieve for every desperate soul turning to him for help. If you were lucky enough to have that stamp in your identity papers, it meant the feared “transport to the east” was temporarily deferred in your case. There, in the nerve center of the deportation industry, the building where despicable officials—conniving with assiduous civil, police, and railway authorities—had facilitated a smooth and flawless transport operation, Levine and Aaron suddenly found themselves standing face-to-face. They had not seen each other since the 1938 debacle and, in light of the extraordinary times, were able to put aside their onetime antipathy. When Levine invited Aaron to go home with him, my brother accepted. Sitting in the very chair I was now occupying, he had given the Dauphine and the professor an account of how he was surviving.

  He was living in a poky little room in the Jewish quarter, which was crowded with Jews from all over the country who’d all been ordered by the occupiers to move into that sector of Amsterdam. When members of the “inferior race” were instructed to hand over their valuables, he had managed to hide some money from those crooks. What was left of his capital was going into helping people postpone deportation. Like Levine, he had been arranging reprieves and helping with medical deferments; he also seemed to have underground connections, although he was very vague about those. It was clear, however, that he was involved with acquiring forged identity papers and arranging hiding addresses.

  “You wouldn’t have recognized him, Motke,” the Dauphine said with a smile. “There was nothing left of his old apathy. There was a dogged intensity I had never seen in him before, an acute restlessness that seemed to be driving him on. He would not stay for dinner, although he probably hadn’t had a good meal in quite a while—he looked pale and exhausted—but he said he had to go. He was in a fever to do what he could to save what could be saved.”

  Some months later, in September 1943, Levine saw him one last time. This had been at the railway station. The last Jews still remaining in the city had been rounded up and were being packed into trains bound for the Westerbork transit camp, including Levine’s daughters and their families. The professor had run to the station in a last, desperate attempt to rescue them; a fruitless mission, for the German officer in charge would not relent. Levine was running along the platform looking for his daughters to say goodbye, and spotted Aaron in the doorway of one of the crowded railcars.

  “Levine!” Aaron had shouted. “Have you come to wave us off? We’re traveling in style, just like our pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse.” He gestured at the packed cattle car at his back. Just then Levine was ordered off the platform, and the freight car doors were slammed shut. He had failed to find his daughters. The sounds of the doors screeching shut and the clang of bolts sliding home went on ringing in his ears for a very long time.

  “Rafaël returned from tha
t mission a broken man,” the Dauphine continued. “His health has been going downhill ever since. He started having heart trouble. But he never gave up trying to stop our children or his friends and colleagues in the transit camp from being sent on to Poland. He just kept going day and night with the same single-mindedness that he’d applied to running his institute, doing as much as he could for them, largely in vain. When the children were finally sent on, we tried to console ourselves with the thought that the special stamps in their ID cards would land them in a camp in Germany, and not in Poland; that they’d be sent to what was called a ‘preferential treatment camp.’ But now we hear that in those last few months, the German camp was actually the worst of all, an inconceivable hell, with prisoners dying by the thousands from hunger, exhaustion, and typhoid. We still refuse to give up all hope, but we haven’t yet heard a word.” She sighed, staring bleakly into space.

  I was silent. I was dying to ask her how far, exactly, Rafaël had taken the role of savior; what he had done with his shares, whether his hands were dirty or clean, and how they were still living scot-free in their own unscathed house, when elsewhere there were no Jews left, except for the lucky few who had come out of hiding. But asking about it now seemed inappropriate. Besides, the Dauphine was not yet finished. She jabbered on, as if putting the horrors of the past five years into words would lessen their sting.

  “As for Aaron,” she continued, “we heard he was very quickly sent on to Poland.”

  The gaping hole in my chest began to ache. “And the Salomons?”

  “For the Salomons too, Rafaël left no stone unturned. But then they asked him to stop. They weren’t afraid of dying. ‘We’ve had our time,’ they said. They explained they’d rather Rafaël spend his money and efforts on saving the young people. They were sent on almost immediately. Old people didn’t stand a chance.”

  We sat there for a while in silence, the only fitting response to the Dauphine’s harrowing tale. No, that’s wrong—the only suitable answer to her story would have been a visceral scream, an animal cry like the howl of a jackal, growing louder and louder as it passed from person to person, from nation to nation, from continent to continent, until the whole world was one great sound wave of anguish, a cacophony of cries, a pandemonium of pain, a symphony of despair, culminating in a frenzied finale of agonized screams. And then, silence.

  43 …

  I left the suitcase of food with the Dauphine, who thanked me profusely; she was going to use the ingredients for a rare feast. I turned down her invitation to join them for the meal, since my primary errand in Amsterdam was to have a rather painful conversation with Levine, and once he’d heard me out, I didn’t expect that he’d be very keen to have me at his table.

  Getting up from a rickety desk in his ransacked laboratory to greet me, Levine appeared fragile. The august dinosaur of yore had lost much of his former imposing looks. He too had grown thin, and he seemed shrunken. The little mustache, however, with its now infamous association, had managed to survive these five years, although it was no longer jet-black, but gray. He greeted me warmly; I was more reserved.

  I told him in broad strokes how we had fared, and that the Dauphine had already updated me on their bitter news. He seemed relieved to hear it.

  “Good,” he said, “then we can get on with discussing how to get the business back on its feet. We have no time to waste. It seems there have been incredible new breakthroughs in the development of steroids and synthetic preparations, which I am only just now finding out about. We have quite a bit of catching up to do! Who knows if we’ll ever be able to make up for lost time. Especially since so many of our esteemed colleagues are not likely to have survived, although I haven’t given up hope that many of them will still show up someday. If they wound up somewhere on the Russian side it could take some time for them to reach the Western sector. And as for you, Motke, I understand that you have been working diligently on expanding the firm. I applaud you for that.”

  This was Levine all over. His laboratory had been verboten to him for all this time, and now he was eager to get back to work as soon as possible, all systems go and full speed ahead, to catch up and recover his preeminent position as a trailblazer in the pharmaceutical field. He looked frail, but far from defeated. For an instant I was tempted to take up again with my old partner where we had left off. The Dauphine’s sad tale had softened my stance on Levine’s wartime choices; the day’s emotional turmoil had aroused some compassion in me. I sorely wanted to give in to that sense of sympathy, but I could not ignore what my cousin and I had decided: I was here to settle an important issue. In our blueprint for the multinational we had been working on while Levine was putting all his efforts into keeping himself from deportation, there simply was no place for the former colossus. He was too old, too stubborn and set in his ways, too passé, and, worst of all, too German.

  So I said, “Rafaël, before we go any further, I’d like to clear up a few things. I’m not going to beat around the bush. People say that you were the only Jew to have kept your privileged position throughout the occupation. How did you manage that? What did you have to do? Who did you have to pay, and what price?”

  Levine shut his eyes. Then he smiled. “Aha,” he said, and the derision in his voice did not escape me, “do I hear a judgmental undertone in these questions by my dear colleague, the chairman of Farmacom, who turned and ran as soon as he had the chance? Is he sorry that I managed to keep myself, my family, and a few of my friends out of the gas chambers?” he asked, tapping his pen angrily on the mangled desktop.

  “I am very happy that you have survived,” I replied, “and to find you in such good health. And as far as my flight goes, I left because I had received information from my contacts in government that the brownshirts were keen to get their hands on the company, and that I was a prime target of theirs. I got out of here for the sake of our firm.”

  Levine laughed scathingly. “They were keen on getting their hands on Farmacom, you are correct about that. They couldn’t get over how you managed to escape. They were furious that you outfoxed them with that diplomatic train ploy, and they were crushed to think they might be missing out on the income from our foreign patents and licenses. They were also afraid you’d cut the foreign branches off from the Dutch concern. It was that fear that caused them to treat me with kid gloves at first. Which, in turn, gave me the opportunity to help many people obtain those exorbitantly expensive, ultimately worthless deferment stamps—they fleeced us blind! I did manage to help finance a hiding place for some—including for one of your workers, in fact: the Salomons’ protégée and her child. That one cost us a pretty penny. Even over there in your luxury exile you must have heard that going into hiding often meant having to pay through the nose. If they were going to stick their necks out for a stranger, most of the Dutch weren’t all that keen on being made worse off by it; they much preferred being made richer. A mercenary lot down to their very bones they are, these compatriots of ours who are now celebrating like mad, piously pretending they were all resisters. As if there weren’t a single enthusiastic Nazi flunky or Jew hunter among them. I can’t say they’ve left me with a very favorable impression, all those good folks who are now the first to sing the national anthem, and the loudest. Hypocrites wrapping themselves in the red, white, and blue—I’ve seen too many of them with their arms stretched out in the Nazi salute.”

  “You helped Rosie find a hiding place?” This was the first time I’d had any news of her.

  “I did,” Levine answered. “At the Salomons’ urgent request. But I heard later that she was picked up anyway. Betrayed, I believe, by the very people who’d been hiding her, because she hadn’t been able come up with any more money than the amount I had already shelled out. Which only goes to show that evil isn’t limited to just one nation.”