Russi twisted his pinkie ring around and around, morose. “It’s soul-destroying, our business. But I do like you. You have entertainment value. Talk to this fellow.” He wrote a Zürich phone number on one of his business cards. “He’s met the German industrialist, the one who knows about what’s at the end of all those trains that go east and never come back. Plus he knows Dulles. And he’s one of your countrymen.” Then Russi fell silent, his coquetry spent.
“He’s Latvian? You’re joking,” Misha said, stunned. “I—”
“No, your other nationality, the older one,” Russi replied. “Israel Kipfermann is the senior Jewish banker in Switzerland. Be nice to him, we’re friends. He’s an honest man.” Russi appeared to appreciate the quality.
Not until he was out in the street did Misha realize that the weight bumping against his hip was a Walther PPK pistol in his coat pocket. Had Russi slipped the gun there during dinner? Misha pressed the lapels of his greatcoat, searching. In the inside breast pocket were two spare clips of nine-millimeter ammunition.
He made a mental note to mention this gift to his stepfather someday. And to send Russi flowers. He’d like flowers.
XXXIX
MARCH 1943
Adela arrived by train, in a Swiss Red Cross hospital car; something had gone wrong. She should have arrived at eight in the evening, but he heard nothing until the hospital called him just after seven, the first hour of a gray morning. The corridor was wide and well lit and smelt of carbolic. A very Swiss notice—All visitors will observe silence of the sick—was pinned to the wall next to her room. This wing was terribly quiet and Misha gathered they had put her here so as not to disturb the others down the hall. “She has dreams,” the attending nurse had said confidingly as she led him down the hall. “Very harsh dreams, I would say. Do you know her well?”
There had been a miscue at the reception desk because his name was on the wrong list; the apologetic intern showed him the paperwork and to his surprise Misha saw one of Kauffmann’s work names, Julius Kahan, second from the bottom. After several minutes of failed negotiations Misha finally demanded a telephone and, after a short farrago in Yiddish with a deep voice with a Spanish accent, had the Jewish Agency call down its approval from Geneva.
This is where they bring the dying, said a voice in his head; he obsessed about that, that and the slip of blue telegraph paper he had in his hand. The single cryptic line at the end of the Agency’s message from Budapest, stripped of the extraneous coding, could not even in a few blunt syllables mask Shiloah’s voice: permission disclose granted.
“She won’t recognize you,” the nurse warned, stopping him at the doorway. “The doctor ordered me to tell you that she refuses to eat more than what she knows they are eating in Kraków. You understand: refuses to eat. We cannot force her. So,” she said, irritated with her own impotence.
They had closed the blinds, but the mountain sun eddied around the closed slats, falling in fingers of light on the blue-striped blanket. Her head lay deep on the pillow and there was a crucifix over her bed, an oversight Misha thought better of correcting. She wore a white cotton cap. She looks like a baker, he thought, ready to joke with her, until the state of her face registered in the cool, dim light.
Adela couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds: her cheeks had collapsed into hollows and her closed eyes seemed bulbous, large as hen’s eggs beneath almost-translucent eyelids. Her skin was the color of window putty; the only clue she was still alive was the steady blue pulse at her temple, a thready vein trembling there.
“I know it is a shock, mein Herr,” the attending nurse murmured. “Please remember it is a five-minute visit.”
He said nothing that first day and only sat there, feeling the bones sigh as he held her hand, tears pouring down his cheeks, humming a Yiddish song he used to sing to himself when he ferried the orphans out of the Reich. She gave no sign she heard.
He was back at eight sharp the next morning; this time Adela was awake, an untouched breakfast on her side table. Her eyes were fever bright and at first she did not recognize him, but when he spoke her name she shook her head in disbelief and the ghost of a long-past enthusiasm came over her.
“Oh my God, Misha, it’s you! I’m hallucinating, tell me I’m not hallucinating!” Adela muttered, too weak to cry but trying to sit up. The effort only knocked her cap off and then he saw she had lost most of her hair—the nurses had cropped what was left. Great patches of pale skin and a thin scar above her forehead. He touched the scar instinctively and she raised a hand to cover his fingers, holding them there for a moment.
“Look at me, Reuven’s ace agent, one foot in Palestine already, eh?” The false heartiness exhausted her; she shifted and frowned, settling back on the pillows. “I was in Kraków. The Gestapo beat me,” she said, hoarse, “when I tried to help an old Jewish woman up.”
“What the hell were you doing in Kraków?”
“For the Agency … on Enskilda papers … researching rolling stock and rail equipment … finance the deals with the Reichsbahn.” She had settled back now, her face half hidden in the pillow; there was a patina of sweat on her forehead simply from talking to him.
“And what were you really doing?”
“Talking to Polish railway workers … the transports to the east,” she replied. “Transports to the east … round the clock—”
He put a finger to her dry lips and stopped her. “Gently, dear, gently. Did you tell someone?”
“I told Kipfermann. The things I’ve seen, Mish …” The blanket moved with her as she cried, her eyes closed, breathing shallow.
Misha waited for a long minute until she lay calm again. Then, for the first time in a very long time, he went with his heart. “Adela,” he called, too harshly. “You must listen. I have to tell you something. Something about England.”
She nodded. “I’m not dead yet, Mish. I can hear you.” Then she winked and that just about broke his heart. “Your mad affair with Stalin … those awful commissars of his?”
“It was a job, for Reuven. Go underground, see what Moscow would make of me.”
“Did you change your mind, then?” she asked, ever so gently.
He looked down at her: the irises of her eyes had gone almost black. “No, Della, no. It was an acting job, to get inside what the Russians were doing, the Comintern, at the university, get myself recruited.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“It was Reuven’s operation, his idea, to learn what the Russians had in mind for us.”
He had her hand, cool and thin and damp, in his own palm, a dying fish trembling there in his grasp. The sounds of another ordinary day within the hospital’s shining white walls leaked into Adela’s tiny room, another planet.
“What?” she asked, the lines around her eyes tightening. “So worried. Don’t.”
From somewhere down the hall there came a great deal of bad language, squelched by a rising buzz and a door slam in the distance.
“The nutters,” Adela observed drily. “I’m off to England next. That should be a relief to you, darling. Get me out of your hair.”
Misha look amazed for a moment, then made a special effort to compose himself, stop the emotions chasing themselves across his face.
“You want to come to England too?” Adela asked, fading even as he watched. “I’d thought your work here …” She didn’t finish and he thought she’d passed out, but she opened her eyes again. “I always thought you’d be a civil servant, you see. Edging ever upwards in your clever way …”
She levered herself up on her elbow, her sleeve falling down, revealing a forearm no greater in diameter than a child’s. “How very brave of you, working alone for Reuven that way … even putting up with my tantrums … I didn’t know, you see.”
“You couldn’t know. Wouldn’t have been safe for you.”
“But I can look after myself. I always have. Reuven knows that. You know that. Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Misha?” Then
she repeated herself, this time quite loudly, and a nurse appeared protectively in the doorway.
Then the fever of discovery or simply the fever within her, whatever it was, broke loose and Adela slipped back into the cratered pillow; the energy her outburst cost her horrified him.
Misha held her until the day nurse, face frosty with annoyance, abruptly ordered him away. Adela called for him as he was led off, then again, and he knew he’d broken her heart twice over.
That night, for the first time in years, at the hotel bar he got himself deliberately and very thoroughly drunk. Just past three in the morning, he was sick. He showered, tore off the sweat-soaked sheets, and demanded housekeeping bring him a fresh set.
A very severe Swiss woman did so, leaving wordlessly and pocketing the two-franc tip. He was asleep, purged, within minutes. He had no dreams, but woke again in the darkness, still hearing Adela’s cry.
He wasn’t sure she’d understood.
The next day was Friday, and at half past ten, after cabling Miriam in London about Adela’s state, he brought soup in a jar. He’d made the stock himself on a hot plate in the hallway, a clear broth from boiled vegetables he strained with a sieve cadged from one of the waiters in the restaurant downstairs. The doctor, a needle-thin and very correct Schweizerdeutsch, made him divulge all the ingredients and forbade her salt. Misha stood the metal container out of her line of sight while he took off his coat. “She’s taken a little millet with yogurt,” he said. His expression was not hopeful. “I believe your visits are helping. Please,” he said, opening the door and ushering Misha in.
She was sleeping on her back, one hand cast over the blanket, palm up, a discarded toy. She seemed utterly helpless. He waited for her to wake, but she didn’t. He left the soup. When he got back to his hotel, he called the number Russi had given him.
Israel Kipfermann himself answered. Yes, he said, he would come.
Misha said nothing about Russi. Not, he thought to himself as he hung up, on an open telephone line.
Kipfermann was there the next day, in an impeccable suit, a carnation in his lapel and his shoes gleaming. He caught Misha looking at the shine and gave an eloquent shrug: Kipfermann was that rarest of bankers, one who didn’t take himself seriously. He had brought a spray of yellow jonquils, which stood like frozen fire in Adela’s dim room. “My wife said the scents from the flowers wouldn’t make her sick,” he announced solemnly. They watched her sleep and Misha noticed his soup container was empty, standing on the side table on a napkin.
“Did she drink the soup?” he whispered, but Kipfermann only inclined his head to the door and led him out.
Kipfermann sat on a sighing chesterfield, its fabric alive with green vines. “I’ve cabled Reuven. She is dying,” he said simply. “She was probably beyond help when I met her at the train station in Zürich. She was badly beaten up in Kraków, but somehow the Swedes ransomed her out—I don’t know that we could have raised the money in time. She’s been talking to the Polish rail people, did she tell you? She’s actually had human ashes in her hair, blown there by the wind, the day she drove from Kraków west to the biggest camp, right on the main rail line from Munich to the Russian frontier. It’s an industry, Mr. Resnikoff. The Nazis have made destroying us an industry. They all know, you know—the Americans, the British. They’ve known for months. They do precisely nothing.”
Little of this registered: Misha was trying to grasp the fact that Adela was really dying. “But didn’t she drink my soup?”
“My dear man, she eats nothing, drinks a little water. She’s killing herself—don’t you understand?” Kipfermann exhaled smoke from his nostrils and rubbed a spot on his shoe. “Her thinking is that she ought not to eat more than the people she saw on the street in Kraków, in the old quarter. Have you been to Kraków, Mr. Resnikoff?”
Misha nodded.
“They’ve paved walkways with broken headstones from the Jewish cemetery. No end of inventiveness, the Germans.” He seemed quite calm, but Misha could see the pale blotches on his face where the anger collected. “The project is proceeding in an orderly fashion, undisturbed by the rest of the world, Mr. Resnikoff.”
That night, fueled by a little broth and Mrs. Kipfermann’s herbal tea, Adela gave a statement, with Misha and Kipfermann and a dour Swiss judge listening, his skeptical face melting as the evening wore on into a mask of stunned disbelief. The young stenographer had been irritated at having to work that night, but at the end of Adela’s statement she was so shaken the judge had to escort her to the ladies’ room. They could hear the girl being sick from behind closed doors.
delivered March 28 1943 in presence of Herr Dr Israel KIPFERMANN, banker, canton of Zürich, and Herr Dr Marcus STARCK, judge-advocate, at the Klinik Feuermann, Bern. Oath administered by Herr Dr STARCK.
Affidavit made by Adela Mira BRAUDEL, underwriter with the Enskilda Bank, Stockholm, age 31, unmarried, of Jewish descent.
transcript prepared by Charlotte HARTKOPF, city of Bern stenographer witness: Misha RESNIKOFF, commercial traveler, Swedish national
AFFIDAVIT
My name is Adela Braudel. I give this sworn statement of my own free will. I am of sound mind. I am a naturalized citizen of Sweden, born January 21 1912, in Warsaw, then a possession of Imperial Russia. I have been a Swedish citizen since November 26 1934. I am here at the clinic because of complications from an assault in Kraków by a German officer March 12.
I am an employee of the Enskilda Bank, Stockholm, in the merchant banking section. My superior is Dr Bjorn SVENSSON. I began my employment in September 1933. I visited both Germany and Poland on bank business on many occasions from 1934 to the present time. I inspect both oil and metal refineries underwritten by the bank. My father was an engineer. I worked and traveled with him after my studies in economics at Warsaw University concluded in 1931.
I did not travel to Poland from August 1939 until the fall of 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, because commercial travel was unsafe. My first trip took me from Stockholm to the coal and steel regions of Poland, Silesia, and the Katowice region, but I saw nothing which confirmed rumors surfacing in Stockholm about mass German atrocities against the Jews of Poland.
In the fall of 1942, with assistance from various Swedish Jewish groups, my employers arranged a major inspection tour of the Katowice and Lublin regions, the latter to view a possible oil pipeline route from the Romanian oil fields through the Carpathians. While this German-Romanian deal never materialized, the research the bank needed to have in place enabled me to travel in the Lublin region in the fall of 1942.
I speak both Polish and German fluently. I do not look Jewish. I understand the German psychology and had a Swedish diplomatic passport as well. I departed Stockholm on November 29 1942 and arrived in occupied Copenhagen December 1, onbound for Berlin.
In Berlin, I had several meetings with the various ministries involved in structuring the pipeline deal, including several principals of Hermann Goering’s Kontinental Öl concern, which sought Swedish drilling technology and replacement parts for the project. I did not meet Goering personally but he stood to make millions of Reichsmarks if the deal went through.
I traveled to Lublin via Warsaw, which I saw only briefly from my Reichsbahn Pullman carriage. I was not allowed to leave the train in Warsaw. This caused me great anguish, as my parents were trapped in Warsaw when the Germans invaded. I have not heard from either of my parents since a letter from my mother in May 1940.
My three-day inspection trip to Katowice and its steel and coal facilities was uneventful, as I was escorted at all times by a Konti representative, MEYERSOHN, who was careful to monitor my movements.
On December 6, at about 10 am, I arrived at Lublin station. The station’s marshaling yard had some sixty wooden-sided freight cars with barbed wire over the windows. When I tried to get a closer look at these carriages, the German conductor closed the sleeping berth blind. When my train reached the station, I managed to get a second look
while my luggage was taken off and I realized these carriages were used for transporting human beings. I asked a Polish baggage handler quietly what the carriages were for and he said nothing but drew his finger across his throat and walked away.
The next day, two Konti representatives met with me at the Hotel Francuski. I asked for a car to inspect the region and was told certain areas were off-limits for military reasons. I said I understood this and then I reconfirmed the route I had permission to take. I was treated very correctly and no threatening action was even hinted. It was clear the Germans wanted this deal under way as soon as possible.
I was given a car and a driver. The driver was a German Pole named PEKARSKI who drove German civilian VIPs for the hotel. I bribed him with SF100, enough for him and his family to live on for six months in occupied Poland. We immediately set out for the southern part of Lublin, where I had heard there was a large camp called Majdanek, right on the edge of the city.
This was so. The rectangular camp complex, which is easily visible from the suburbs of Lublin, has about fifty barrack buildings and is completely surrounded by barbed wire. It is a major operation. There has long been rumored a killing facility within the complex and PEKARSKI told me that “thousands” of Jews have entered the camp via a rail spur line in the boxcars. They are never seen again. The smell of the camp was awful. PEKARSKI confirmed this was rumored to be a crematorium “for the dead Jews.”
I interviewed PEKARSKI’s cousin, one PAWLUK, who expected a bribe himself. We met in PEKARSKI’s car in an orchard some kilometers from Lublin. I gave him SF30 and he told me that the camp had “done away with” tens of thousands of Jews and Red Army prisoners by shooting and in “the ovens,” small furnaces where people are gassed to death. PAWLUK has not seen the ovens himself, but confirms dozens of people die each day in the forced-labor groups breaking the rocks he trucks away. He confirms there is a crematorium facility. He says all the Poles in Lublin “know what is happening to the Jews at Majdanek.”
The Witness Tree Page 30