“There were Germans who fought against Hitler,” Williams reminded him.
“How many? You could count them all on the fingers of one hand,” Boris said angrily.
I listened to them all in silence, unable to say anything, although I wanted Boris to tell me more about my father’s murder. I made an effort and asked him:
“What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing more than what I’ve already said. I asked if they kept anything of what your father was wearing, but I already knew that they took all their clothes and stole anything that might be of any value. All that’s recorded is that the day he arrived they removed his two gold teeth and then the same day . . . I’m sorry, I swear that I am.”
I tried to imagine what my father’s last hours might have been like. The moment the doors of the train car were opened where they had all been kept for days in the dark, piled up in a heap, all kinds of people whom the Nazis treated like they were worth less than cattle.
I saw him blinking in the face of the sudden light, disoriented by the unknown. I imagine that as a gesture of respect to the others and to himself he would shake the dust from his wrinkled and foul-smelling clothes. Then some of the Nazi soldiers would tell them to get out of the car and line up to be counted. Then they would have put them, a little later, on a truck to take them into the heart of the camp.
Maybe some innocent would have tried to get people’s hopes up: “They’ll make us work, but we’ll survive.” My father would not have been so optimistic. Except for the case of Katia, my father had never allowed himself to be carried away by imagination or desire. So my father would have asked himself at what point the Nazis would decide to get rid of him. Why should they want a man of his age, a man past seventy, a man whose arms were weak and whose eyes were clouded? I imagined him dealing with the pain when his two gold teeth were pulled out with no anesthetic. Trying to maintain his dignity in the face of death.
They would have taken him from that room, the room where they pulled out his teeth, to a larger room where they would have made him take his clothes off, along with other men who were of no use to these devils’ interests. It wasn’t difficult for me to put myself in his skin and imagine the shame he felt in front of the other men, and how he would then be pushed into an even bigger room where they were told that they were going to have a shower to get the dirt of their journey off them.
The door would close and the men would look up to the roof where they would see some false showers from which suddenly there would come pouring not clear water but a poison gas that would kill them, making their bodies convulse as it did so.
My father’s body would fall alongside other bodies, and would lie there until the devils came to clean them up as if they were no more than rubbish and carry them out and throw them into the crematorium, where they would disappear forever in a thick smoke whose penetrating smell filled the whole camp.
This had been how my father, Samuel Zucker, had died, the same end as that of six million other Jews. I wanted to ask Boris and Colonel Williams how there could be people who thought that the Jews who had survived could just get over the Holocaust—what could they say to make us come to grips with the magnitude of what had happened?—and above all, who thought that we could somehow be able to pardon our executioners.
But I said nothing and they said nothing, leaving me a few minutes of silence with my eyes shut as I saw what had happened to my father pass before my eyes, as well as the fates of all the men who had gone down the same route.
“Can you tell us anything about Dalida Zucker and Katia Goldanski?” Colonel Williams’s voice drew me back to reality.
Boris cleared his throat and took a good swig of whisky. He looked down at the paper in his hand and seemed to be thinking about whether to tell us. He must have thought that I needed a rest before hearing about my sister Dalida. So he turned his blue eyes to Gustav.
“They took Katia Goldanski to Germany, to Ravensbrück. She arrived in January 1944. This was a women’s camp to begin with, but they built other camps nearby. She died there.”
“In the gas chamber?” Gustav dared ask.
Boris’s fist against the desk startled us all. It was such a heavy blow that he knocked over his glass of whisky. Boris got up and went to find something to clean up the spill. We looked at him without daring to say anything, while we tried to take in what he had just said, that Katia was dead, that she had lost her life in a camp in Germany itself.
“These murderers weren’t content with the gas chambers. There were some psychopaths who called themselves doctors who gave themselves carte blanche to experiment with the prisoners.” Boris took a large gulp from his glass of whisky, draining it. He seemed to be wondering whether to continue, so Williams poured him a good slug of scotch.
“Please, carry on,” Gustav said.
“These psychopaths were working on bone transplants. They took a section of bone from someone and implanted it into someone else whose bone they had previously cut open. They did it without using anesthetic.” Boris hit the table again.
“Why should they bother? We Jews are subhuman, anyway,” I said.
“Zucker, please!” This was more than a request on Williams’s part; it was an order for me to control my bitterness.
“In Ravensbrück they also used prisoners in experiments with pathogenic germs. They injected people with,” and here Boris took a piece of paper and read it with a certain amount of difficulty, “tetanus, and then put earth, wood, ground glass into the wounds . . . They wanted to see the effects of the infection, and if the medicines that they were using were effective. Many people died of gangrene.”
“And my Aunt Katia, how did she die?” Gustav spoke in such a low voice that it was hard for us to hear his question.
“Your aunt . . . Katia Goldanski had several bones sectioned and transplanted into another prisoner. But when they were sectioned . . . Well, I don’t need to go into too much detail, but the nerves and the muscles were cut as well . . . Some of the victims died in terrible pain. She couldn’t deal with the experiment . . . She died of blood loss, and none of these animals even gave her anything to calm the pain.”
Gustav covered his face with both hands. He was making an immense effort to control his tears, trying to hold himself together before he could look us in the face again.
Katia had been like a marble goddess to me. I had heard Dina say that she was so beautiful she didn’t appear real. Dina had been right. It was impossible not to surrender to Katia’s beauty, although she didn’t feel any sympathy toward her. I hadn’t been able to forgive her for taking my father away from me, but even so I had not been able to hate her.
The beasts of the Paris Gestapo had been merciless to her body. They had shattered her beauty into fragments, and when she was only a mass of blood and meat, they had sent her on to Ravensbrück, where a sadist dressed as a doctor had completed the sacrifice.
Countess Katia Goldanski, sleeping in a barracks along with other prisoners who had had almost all their humanity stripped away from them. Lice and fleas clambered over their flesh and hid in its crannies. And her hair? What had they done with her hair, so blonde it was almost white, the hair she wore drawn up in a chignon on her neck? They had cut it all off to emphasize her nakedness.
It was hard for me to imagine her in those striped sacks that the Nazis used to dress their prisoners. She would have had to share that stinking food, and work without pause while the guards beat them with sticks. I imagine that Katia would have clenched her teeth, and even though she was dressed in striped sackcloth, would have tried to walk upright and smile at her companions, to console the ones who were fading, and not to forget for a moment who she was, to do whatever it took to avoid committing any shameful act.
The day that they took her to the room where those sadists who called themselves doctors experimented on the prisoners, she would h
ave followed the instructions that the witch disguised as a nurse would have given her. “Take your clothes off.” “Lie down on the bed.” “Stay still.” She would have set her lips when they tied her to the bed so as not to move, and would have tried to hide the first grimace of pain and not to cry when the butcher’s knife started to cut through her flesh until it reached her femur, cutting through veins, arteries, muscles, tendons. She would have shouted, and fainted, and died, in the face of the indifference of those devils to whom Katia meant nothing, because she was Jewish, or half Jewish, or a third Jewish. She had enough Jewish blood in her veins not to be considered a human being. She had also been in the Resistance, so for these monsters Katia, beautiful Katia, had to die.
“Her body . . .” Gustav could hardly speak.
“They burned it in one of the Ravensbrück ovens. It’s in the register,” Boris replied.
It was my turn again. Boris was looking at me to see if I was capable of hearing how my sister had been murdered. No, I wasn’t, but I had no option other than to hear it. I saw Gustav clenching his fists and trying not to cry. He felt as defeated as I did. We had fought in the same war but had not been able to save our loved ones. We had not been able to stop our people from being massacred. Never had I, before that day, understood what it meant to be a Jew.
“Dalida Zucker was taken from Paris to Auschwitz. She didn’t go through Drancy, but was taken directly to Poland, so she couldn’t have seen her father.”
I don’t know why Boris made this observation. Would anything have changed if they had seen one another in one of those abominable camps? I had been trembling for a while now, and I tried to control my body as I listened to Boris’s thick voice.
“Your sister lived for longer than your father and the countess. She was killed a few days before we liberated the camp. I’m sorry.”
I felt anger taking hold of me so strongly that I nearly leapt up to attack Boris, the colonel, or anyone else nearby. Gustav put his hand on my arm again, as if he could calm me down with that gesture. But I could not have moved even had I wanted to. My head and my body were now almost completely dissociated. I looked at Boris and invited him to continue.
“According to the records, your sister reached Auschwitz at the end of January 1944 in a train filled with French Jews that over the course of its transit was joined by other prisoners from all over the battle zone. When the prisoners reached Auschwitz they were divided into groups by the camp commandant. Many of them were made to work from sunrise to sunset on a number of tasks, including the maintenance of the camp itself, which was a branch of hell on earth. Your sister was young and strong, and so, instead of being sent to the gas chambers she was selected to work. Auschwitz was the largest camp, although it was in fact three camps, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II, more commonly known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz. Your sister was in Auschwitz-Birkenau and they sent her to work in the munitions factory near the camp. From the very first day of her time there she suffered unbearable torment, because although the prisoners were an invaluable source of free labor for the Third Reich, the SS guards enjoyed mistreating and torturing, these poor wretches. Also . . . Well, your sister was a beautiful young woman and was made to be a . . . distraction for some of the SS officers.”
Boris lowered his head as though the words he had just uttered embarrassed him. He poured himself the last inch or so of whisky from the bottle and drank it in a single gulp, without breathing. I asked myself why I was letting my mind wander by watching Boris instead of thinking hard about what he had said. I now know that it was because I could not bear the pain that hearing about what had happened to Dalida caused in me.
I felt Gustav and Williams looking at me, but I avoided their gazes. I couldn’t bear for anyone to feel sorry for us.
“Apparently your sister was not easy to control, so she was sent to Auschwitz I, under the control of Dr. Josef Mengele, although the commandant of Auschwitz at that time was SS Colonel Arthur Liebehenschel.”
“Dr. Mengele?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes, Mengele, the sadist who ruled over Block 10; it was there that he carried out his experiments along with other doctors and nurses as bloody and psychotic as he was. His preferred victims were twins, dwarves, children . . . He sterilized his own sister. Mengele and two other doctors of death, Dr. Carl Clauberg and Dr. Horst Schumann, were struggling to develop a method whereby they could sterilize all the ‘subhumans’—Jews, the mentally ill, the sick . . . They injected them with homemade medicines that included silver nitrate, iodine, and other substances that caused unbearable pain in their victims, as well as provoking hemorrhages that often led to a swift death. Many of them died, but this was not a problem for Mengele, he had thousands of human guinea pigs at his disposal, and didn’t care what happened to them. Apparently he came to the conclusion that radiation was the easiest and cheapest way of sterilization, and used it on thousands of prisoners. Lots of them died because of the radiation treatment. Dalida Zucker endured these experiments, but when she was little more than a ghost she was of no use for their macabre games, and they sent her to the gas chamber. Her murder coincided with the arrival of our troops. A few days earlier the commandant had sent a few prisoners out of Auschwitz to other camps, but those who were too weak to travel, or were simply of no use to them, were all gassed.”
There was not a single drop left in either of the two bottles, and Boris had nothing to help him recover from having informed us of these deaths. Williams sat still in his chair without even daring to offer me his condolences.
Everything had now been said. My father and my sister had each died in a gas chamber. Katia Goldanski had had her bones sawed open, and had bled out on an operating table. I didn’t want to hear anything else, much less did I want anyone to pat me on the back and show their sympathy.
I got up and Gustav did the same. Like me, he wanted to get out of there and breathe fresh air. We were both feeling stifled.
“I brought my car, I’ll take you back to your sector,” Williams offered, but we both refused.
“Could I visit Auschwitz? Speak to a survivor?” I asked Boris and Williams.
They looked at each other uncertainly. In those days the Red Cross was in charge of most of the camps, and in some of them there were survivors whom no one knew what to do with.
“It’s not a good idea,” Colonel Williams said.
I shrugged. I didn’t care about his opinion. With or without the help of these people I would go to Auschwitz, even if they arrested me.
“We can arrange it,” Boris said.
“Do it, as soon as possible,” I asked him.
Gustav and I walked in silence for a couple of hours. We didn’t need to say anything, all we wanted to do was think about our dead relatives. I thought about my father and my sister; he thought about his aunt. It would have been meaningless to try to console one another.
“I will go with you to Auschwitz,” was all that Gustav said to me when we got back to the hotel.
“And I will go with you to Ravensbrück.”
It was easier to get to Ravensbrück. It was fifty-five miles from Berlin, and Colonel Williams decided to travel with us, “to help us with the paperwork.”
A Red Cross doctor came with us on the visit, giving us terrifying details about the survivors. Gustav wanted to see the barracks where Katia had spent the last months of her life.
We could smell misery and sickness and despair when we entered.
A few wooden bedsteads were piled against the wall, and Katia had slept on one of them. We imagined her there, defenseless even though she tried to make it appear as if the Nazis could not break her spirit.
The doctor told us of a woman who had been in the same barracks and who was still alive, although very sick.
“She’s lost her mind, and only speaks nonsense.”
We insisted on se
eing her, wanting to rediscover Katia via the shadows of madness that shrouded this poor woman.
The camp’s hospital was now a refuge for a few poor wretches who were being looked after by the doctors and nurses of the Red Cross. They were too sick or too mad to be taken anywhere else. Also, the Allied powers had not yet come to any agreement about what should be done with the Jews. They had not fought to save us, but to save themselves; we Jews were simply there, and once again we seemed to be in everyone’s way.
A nurse put a couple of chairs next to the bed and warned us that “she didn’t know what she was saying. When she arrived in Ravensbrück she was four months pregnant, and they cut the child out of her. They did it without anesthetic, they wanted to see how much pain she could bear. Then they cut open her breasts. She went mad.”
“Did you know Katia Goldanski?” Gustav asked her.
The woman looked at us and I thought I saw a spark of recognition in her eyes.
“She was tall, with white-blonde hair, very blue eyes, very distinguished,” Gustav continued.
“Katia . . . Katia . . . Katia . . .” The woman did nothing more than repeat the name, but suddenly she rummaged in her sheets and pulled out a lace handkerchief.
Gustav held out his hand to take it, but she hid it among the sheets once again.
“That was Katia’s handkerchief,” Gustav murmured.
Yes, it could have been no one else’s, a cambric and lace handkerchief. The woman held onto the piece of cloth as if it were somehow important.
“She cleaned me . . . She cleaned me . . . like this, like this.” The woman passed the handkerchief over her face and neck.
We watched her without daring to interrupt her, hoping for a spark of sanity to grow in the mind of that woman who had taken refuge in madness.
“Did she say anything, talk about anyone?” Gustav insisted.
She looked at him as if she recognized him, then she passed her hand through his hair. Gustav didn’t move, he seemed to have turned to marble. Then she put her hand down and began to sing, an old Yiddish song. She curled up and closed her eyes and we saw thin tears trickle down her cheeks.
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 72