by Gerald Green
Max Lowy, the printer, my father’s old patient, came running in with the news. My father and a woman named Sarah Olenick, a nurse, were trying to find food and medicine for the sick children. They died every day, huddled around a cold stove, moaning, unable to resist the diseases that ravaged the ghetto.
Lowy insisted he had seen my mother. At once my father left the hospital and practically ran all the way to the registration office at the station.
And so they were reunited, more than a year after my father’s deportation.
Letters that my mother wrote to Karl (apparently never mailed, or returned, and saved by Inga) reveal the true depths of her emotions for my father. In front of the children, she was always restrained, very much the daughter of an old infantry officer.
But the letters were a different story. In one, she wrote:
It is perhaps my fault, dear Karl, that you are as shy and what shall I say—suppressed—as you are. I never made an outward show of deep love or emotion towards your dear father, indeed to my children. This does not mean I did not love you or him. How could I not? Your father is simply that kind of good man whose goodness is taken for granted. He treats the meanest of his patients, the worst beggars, scoundrels and complainers, with the dignity he would afford a prince. And as for unpaid bills! And his talent for not getting after them!
He confounds me at times, and I know he is a better person than I am. My love for him is mingled with a kind of wonder, an awe at his everlasting goodness. You have this in you also, Karl….
My mother had always lacked the ability to show deep emotion, warmth, outwardly. An only child, raised in a hothouse atmosphere by strict parents, she was wary of kissing, hugging, let alone sexual suggestions in public.
But now she and my father kissed shamelessly, like young lovers. He joked about her insistence on standing on line to register, saying she was still the law-abiding Berliner. He assured her that even in the pitiful Warsaw ghetto, the bureaucracy was inept and she could wait a while to register, while they sat in what passed for a cafe, pretending they were at the Adlon Hotel.
“Where there are Jews, there must be places for people to sit, and hold hands, and talk,” my father said. “Even if it is a coffee house with no coffee.”
They looked at each other for a few moments. They had aged. The suffering had hurt them, etched lines in their faces.
“You are hiding something from me,” my father said. He knew her moods, her reactions.
“Josef … Anna is dead.”
She told him about the strange letter, about Anna’s death from pneumonia in the sanitarium. Inga had tried to learn more, find the grave, and had been rebuffed.
My father cried freely, unable to control his sorrow. My mother lied to him about the events that led to her death. He was told nothing of how she was raped and abused by drunken hoodlums, how this had caused her mental decline.
“It was painless,” my mother said. “The hospital people said the drugs dulled the pain, and that she died peacefully.”
“I can’t believe it,” he sobbed. “My child, my Anna. What in God’s name do they want of us? What tribute are they demanding? Our children’s lives?”
For a long time, he said nothing, bending his head, pressing his hands to his eyes, while my mother lied about Anna. He was too good a physician to accept the story that she had simply gone into a decline. Such mental collapses, he argued, trying to temper his bottomless sorrow with medical analysis, were usually set off by a trauma of some kind. Had something happened to Anna? No, my mother said—just a gradual depression.
“The life in her, the life in her,” he wept. “They killed it.”
He understood now that no indignity, no humiliation, no torture was to be spared us—the family Weiss, and the Jews of Europe. For the rest of his life, he would not be able to dispel the vision of his lost daughter.
My mother tried to divert him. She asked about conditions in the Warsaw ghetto. Was there work for him? Where would they live? With her infinite capacity for optimism, for seeing the bright side, she said she would volunteer to teach school. She had heard that the schools in the ghetto, for all the deprivation, were active, full of eager students. She would be happy to teach a music class, perhaps literature also.
My father agreed, but he could not let the subject of Anna alone. “I can’t believe she’s gone. You haven’t told me all. Where was this hospital? Who was the physician?”
She took his hand. “Josef, cry if you think it will help. But it will not bring our daughter back. Perhaps … perhaps … it is better.”
“Better? Life is always better than death.”
“I am not so sure. Don’t ask me anything else.”
“The boys?”
“Karl is still in prison. Yes, he’s alive, getting by. Inga says she is still trying to see him, to pull strings and get him freed.”
“Rudi?”
“Gone. Our wild one. Our street fighter. He vanished in the night, left me a note, and said we must not worry about him, but that he would not stay and let them arrest him.”
My father shook his head. “How I miss them. I never talked to them enough, spent enough time with them. How I wish they were with us, so I could make things up. I once disappointed Rudi so terribly. The first time he started at center in a big game. Sixteen years old, the youngest player on the team. And I ran off to some medical meeting. He said he didn’t care, but I knew he did.”
“We’ll make it up to them when this ends.”
“Yes, yes, of course we will. And we must not dwell on our misfortunes. There are hundreds of thousands worse off. We at least will have work, and enough to eat, and a place to live.”
They got up from the cafe, held hands like young lovers.
“Josef,” my mother said. “I have never loved you more.”
“Nor I you. Dear God, I look at you and I see Anna.”
“But you must not cry again.” She took his arm firmly. “Now you may take me to that elegant apartment.”
“I’m afraid it’s one room—over the old drugstore.” “And no piano? No Bechstein? I may leave you if there isn’t.”
“No piano,” my father said. “But memories of one.”
Some time before Christmas, Inga received a letter from Sergeant Heinz Muller, telling her to come to Buchenwald. He was vague, but he hinted that he might be able to arrange for her to see Karl. He could promise nothing, but he would at least try. And he ordered her to burn the letter.
My sister-in-law was a courageous and tenacious woman. She pretended to be a hiker, with boots, rucksack and staff, and approached the outer fences of the prison camp fearlessly. There is much to be said for a working-class background, for women who are independent and resourceful. Inga was ahead of her time.
Of course she was stopped by armed sentries. She could see double strands of barbed wire, a high fence, watchtowers, and a moat surrounding the place.
Distantly on the frozen earth of the internment camp, she could see men in striped suits moving slowly, flailing at the ground with picks and shovels.
An SS private came running forward to chase her off, but she insisted on seeing sergeant Heinz Muller, an old friend. The soldier, intimidated by her manner, rang up Muller on a field telephone, warning Inga to wait outside the outer barriers of the camp.
Muller came out of the guardhouse, buckling on his uniform belt, slicking his hair back. He was smiling, his manner cordial, almost oily.
Muller dismissed the curious sentry and extended his arms in welcome. She drew away.
“So. You got my letter.”
“Yes,” Inga said.
“How have you been, dear girl? The esteemed and honorable Mrs. Weiss.”
“I’m well enough. I’m here to see Karl. You said in the letter you would arrange it.”
Muller looked into the distance, at the men laboring out of doors under the lash of a wintry wind. There was, Inga remembers, a sniff of wet snow in the air.
“Regulations have gotten stricter,” he said. “I don’t have direct jurisdiction over inmates.”
“Then why did you deceive me?”
His eyes had trouble meeting hers. “I felt as a favor to your family. Old friends, and so forth.”
“I want to see Karl.”
Muller grabbed her arm. “Are you afraid of me?”
“No. I know too much about you. And others like you. One must not show fear to you people. My brother-in-law Rudi understood that.”
“Hah! That dumb soccer player. They’ll catch him and take care of him also.”
“Take me to Karl.”
“Come. We’ll discuss it in the guardhouse. We have a visitor’s room there.”
He led her to the barracks-like building, through a side door. At once she saw it was not a “visitor’s room” at all, but his private quarters—bed, desk, chairs, photographs on the wall.
“This is your room,” she said.
“Please, please. Guests are always welcome here. Sit down.”
Inga did.
“Cigarette?” Muller asked. “Perhaps some cognac? Nothing is too good for our brave soldiers guarding the enemies of the Reich. We do as well here as they do on the front.”
“I came here for one reason. To see my husband.”
“Perhaps some coffee. Not ersatz, mind you. The real thing.”
She shook her head.
“Ah, that Helms singlemindedness.” He put a hand on her shoulder, then began stroking the back of her neck.
She endured it for a moment, before removing his hand. “How is he?”
“Not too well, I’m afraid. He got into some trouble in the barracks. Fighting, stealing food. I’m not sure. They took him off that cushy job with the tailoring shop and he’s out in the quarry now. In fact, he and a friend of his, some kike named Weinberg, were strung up for a while.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my poor Karl.”
“Yes, it’s no party out there with pick and shovel. The guards don’t allow any goldbricking. They work until they drop sometimes. And with winter coming on …”
Inga got up, raging, but controlled herself. “You lied to me. What a friend of my father’s! You summoned me here falsely. I can’t see him. And I learn he is being worked to death. I have heard stories of what goes on here.”
“Nonsense. You work, you get by. You don’t work, you get in trouble.”
Inga loved my brother deeply, and the thought of him suffering, that frail man out in the snowy fields hacking at rocks, beaten, under the threat of death, broke her iron will. She held her head in her hands and wept softly.
Muller sat opposite her on his bed and put a gentle hand on her knee. “Don’t cry. I’ll help you.”
She looked up, ashamed of her tears. “How? Can you appeal to let him be freed?”
“I am only a sergeant. But … I’ll take him a letter from you.”
“You will?”
“And bring his letter out, and post it to Berlin.” “I will be grateful to you.”
“For you, Inga Helms, it will be an honor.” He lifted her chin with one hand. Inga remembers to this day that for a big man, a former factory worker, he had an oddly soft hand—as if the easy life of the last few years had changed him. He also smelled of some scent, a male lotion.
Then he knelt in front of her. She recoiled.
“Don’t, please,” he said. “I am no monster. I’m doing a job, that’s all.”
“It’s more than a job, what you people do.”
“You people. Will you condemn a whole nation fighting for its rights, its very life? Someone’s got to take care of internal enemies.”
“Good God, Muller, spare me those party-line speeches.”
“All right. We’ll put it on a personal basis. You’ve known me a long time. I’m an old friend of your father’s, your brother’s. I was at your wedding. I watched while you married that Jew from a fancy family. And me, what about me? A mechanic all my life, no education. Was I to be sneered at, snubbed because of that? Inga, I loved you more than that … that …”
“Don’t say it, Muller.”
“It is the truth. I was dying in my guts when you exchanged rings with him. You should have been my wife.”
“Please, don’t talk about it. I brought a letter with me. Take it to him for me.” She opened the rucksack, took out the letter and gave it to the SS man.
Muller eyed it as if it were poisoned, or might detonate in his hand. “Done. Risky business, Inga. But for you … your family … Heinz Muller will take the chance.”
At this point he unbuttoned his tunic and draped it on a chair. Inga got up to leave. He stood in the doorway, barring her from going. Then he forced her to the edge of the bed.
“Your man Karl,” he said. “I saw him yesterday. He looks awful. Another few days in the quarry may kill him.”
“You said he was managing.”
“Didn’t want to upset you. But I’m telling you the truth now. They die every day out there.”
“Help him, I beg you.”
Muller began to unbutton his shirt. “I have a bit more influence than I let on. If we come to some kind of agreement, I’ll get him out of the quarry and into an even softer job than the tailor’s shop. They have an artist’s studio here. He’d be perfect for it.”
“What sort of agreement?”
“I think you understand.” He took off his belt.
“You pig.”
“Another week of hacking at rocks out there in the cold and he’ll be one more dead Jew.”
He came to her, freshly shaved, reeking of cheap men’s cologne, and began to smear her face with wet, sucking lips. She fell under the weight of his body, let him raise her dress. He tried to be gentle, but his hot, trembling hands betrayed his crude passion.
In disgust, revulsion, she found a way of combatting her hatred of him and what he was forcing her to do. She stared at the barracks ceiling, listening to his grunts, his moans, accepting the clumsy thrusts, detesting him. It was a mechanical experience, she told herself—like minor surgery, or being fitted for an orthopedic device.
Oddly, he spent himself in seconds. He gasped, whimpered, fell away. Yes, she told herself, pure mechanics, something devoid of human qualities, detached from even the lower forms of physiology.
“I love you, dammit,” Muller whispered. He was stumbling to the small bathroom. “I love you. You will come back. And you will love me.”
She did not answer him, but thought: Perhaps I will kill you first.
I have lost any sense of how long Helena and I tried to cross into some country not occupied by the Nazis. We wandered again. Her skill with languages was an invaluable aid—Czech, German and later her excellent Russian. I posed as a stupid farmhand, talking as little as possible.
One day, sometime in January 1941, after spending a night in a deserted barn, I questioned an old farmer, and he told me that there was a thinly guarded stretch of border just to the south. He said the road forked, and the right fork led to a thick woods, where one might see eastern Hungary at one end, and even a bend in the Tisza River. It was a flat wooded area, he said, and one could find the barbed-wire barrier without too much trouble.
When night came, I led Helena to the place he had described. I had developed cat’s eyes. I could see at night, almost smell my way to water, to farms, to human habitation. The human stink was a pronounced one in the wilderness.
We crawled on all fours through thickets of scrubby bushes to a four-stranded barrier. The wire cutters went to work. Within minutes Helena and I, on our backs, shoving with our feet, pressing our spines against the earth, scratched by iron barbs and thorns, passed into Hungary. We had no idea what village we were near, what our story would be.
I led. She followed. My nose sensed the odor—too late. A man had stepped from behind a tree and was jamming the barrel of a short rifle into my belly. He was a short, fat man in a gray-green uniform, boots, peaked cap.
“Against the tree
,” he said.
Helena gasped. The man spoke German, but I was certain he was not a German. A Hungarian border guard. German was in common use in frontier areas.
“Papers,” the guard said.
“We lost them,” I said.
“Put your hands over your heads,” he said. He cradled the rifle in one hand, leveled a flashlight at us with the other. “What are you doing here?”
“Please,” Helena said. “We’re trying to get to Yugoslavia. To the coast. Give us a chance.”
“We can pay,” I lied. We had not a penny between us.
“Fucking Jews,” the Hungarian said. “You fucking Jews are all alike. You think you can buy the world.”
I measured him. About thirty-five. Paunch. Small feet. He looked soft. A few good kicks, if I could take him unawares.
“Give us a break,” I said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. In a few days we can be in Yugoslavia.”
The guard gestured with his rifle. “Move. You first, the woman behind. If you try anything smart, I’ll shoot her. To the path.”
“Where are you taking us?” asked Helena.
“Border jail. The Gestapo sends a truck around every few days to pick up Jews, Communists, other strays from Czechoslovakia.”
“Gestapo?” she asked.
“Sure. We got no argument with them. We’re happy to send back a few Jews.”
He marched us off. We must have walked about a hundred feet down a footpath. The barren tree limbs were thick on either side of us, the ground damp. There were evergreens—pine, spruce—and we must have been higher than I had calculated. In the distance I saw the outlines of a striped sentry box. Another light flashed. Someone called.
“Lajos? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” our guardian answered. “Got two more.”
I shoved Helena out of my way—so hard that her hip and leg remained bruised for a month—and leaped at the man behind her. I hit him with all my strength—arms, head, chest—and he went down with a soft blowing-out of air. I grabbed the gun and the flashlight, but not before kicking him in the chest twice, once more in the head.