PAWLUK says the camp near Wlodawa is “completely for killing” and has only a small prisoner population, “all Jews.” There is considerable black market commerce between the nearby Polish townsfolk and the camp guards at the Wlodawa camp, and it is clear from personal items bought and sold that wholesale killing is going on at this camp, “entire families, as soon as they arrive.” Dozens of trains a month enter the camp but no one ever leaves. PAWLUK has never been near the Wlodawa camp, but he said “it would be worth my life getting caught there with no reason.”
On my last day in Lublin, I spoke to a German Catholic priest at the hotel, there to visit a sick brother in the army who had suffered a heart attack. He recognized immediately what I was doing after my first serious questions. He became very nervous and would not give his name, for fear of reprisals against his brother’s family, but he did agree to meet me outside the hotel. We met several hours before my train was to leave, in a park near the Old Town, pretending to encounter one another by accident.
The priest told me that “there is a ghetto in Lublin itself, not five hundred meters from where we sit. It is something from Gustave Doré,” he said, “hell on earth.” He had not seen the ghetto but had spoken with two Wehrmacht soldiers from his brother’s unit who had been inside the ghetto two days before and were shocked by what they had seen. They described the treatment of the Polish Jews, including the very old and children, as “beneath the dignity of the German people.” When I asked to speak to the Wehrmacht soldiers if possible, the minister refused. “I cannot risk the lives of innocent men, even to help you,” he said. When I asked him about the innocent people being killed in the ghetto, he said, “I know what is going on there. But I cannot risk another life to stop it, do you see? Not even yours.”
On the train back to Berlin, I spoke with a fellow passenger in the dining car. This was Rigoberto RODRIGUEZ, a Spanish wine agent who had business in Romania. I asked him if he had seen anything unusual from the train. We spoke in our common language, French. RODRIGUEZ said that when his train to Kraków passed a certain area to the west of Kraków, not far from Katowice, the entire train had its blinds pulled down. The conductors would only say the area was “a military secret,” but RODRIGUEZ said he’d been on that route before and had heard German tourists joking in whispers about what “was happening to the Jews there.”
As my health is failing, I want my recollections recorded. Should my parents survive me, I have asked that this statement be shown to them. I want them to know I tried to do something to stop the sufferings of my people.
I swear this statement is truthful in all material respects and given to the best of my ability.
[signed]
Adela Mira Braudel
on this 28 March 1943
witnesses
[signed] Misha RESNIKOFF
[signed] Israel KIPFERMANN
He came back Saturday for an hour while she slept. Sunday they wouldn’t let him in. “She is too weak,” the intern said.
Monday morning Misha couldn’t sleep, so in the predawn murk he walked the two and a half miles to the sanatorium. He knocked at the shuttered front door and this time they let him in, hurrying him to the third floor.
Adela Braudel died ten minutes after they let him into her room. She simply stopped breathing. Misha sat with her, alone, until the sun came up and the doctor came back to ask him to sign a form. They gave him a sedative and let him sleep in the room next to the conservatory. He slept until noon, and when he walked back to her room, heart pounding, hoping against hope he’d dreamt the whole thing, the bed was stripped and the blinds wide open.
Light streamed into the room; in the distance, the sunlight lit up the perfect Swiss mountain snowfields as if by electric current, a terrible, clear, beautiful morning.
They buried her in the tiny Jewish cemetery in Zürich; the plain pine coffin had no nails, in the Orthodox tradition, and Misha paid for the simple headstone. The rabbi seemed younger even than Adela and sang Kaddish in an eerily high register that echoed around the hillsides. When Adela was interred, her coffin felt nearly weightless. We are, Misha thought as he held the rope, burying but the breath of her.
XL
MAY 1943
“Bring the papers,” the handwritten note from Kronthal demanded, asking Misha to meet him at the bus stop in front of a florist’s shop, steps away from the walled entrance to Bern’s Jewish cemetery. The first of the May rains left puddles shining like new florins where he walked, mulling why Kronthal hadn’t asked him over to the legation offices. But it was a Sunday, and Bernese Sundays were designed, Misha had long ago decided, for as little in the way of event as the Swiss could possibly engineer. Misha took the precaution of visiting his lockbox and retrieving the buff envelope of four-by-five photographs from its resting place.
Kronthal’s note asked for a ten o’clock rendezvous, which meant most of the Konditorei and cafés along Misha’s route were shuttered. The occasional cab trawled by—which might have been the Swiss police putting in a little overtime—but only the churchgoers showed any sign of life. Prim and staid and properly Calvinist, the Bernese went about their Sunday morning, it seemed to Misha, with a calculated eye on eternity. Kronthal arrived in a taxi, which stopped in the small square well inside the cemetery gate. There, a gaggle of pigeons foraged the cobbles, so tame the passing cab didn’t fluster them. The leavings were sparse: this was Bern, spotless to a fault.
Kronthal had a seed packet with him.
“Not burying someone, are we?” Misha asked as they watched the pigeons at work.
“I sure as hell hope not. You brought the papers?”
Misha nodded and followed Kronthal the forty-odd paces to the cemetery gates. “A moment,” Kronthal said, fighting the key over the tumblers, producing a small screech, fingernails on slate.
Once in, the American glanced quickly up the hill, scanning the trees. “It’s too quiet,” he muttered, but didn’t slow his pace. “Far too quiet.” They headed along the top of the low ridge, between the old black headstones, cracked teeth set in the fuzz of the new spring grass.
He led Misha toward a squat black and white granite mausoleum set inside a low cast-iron railing, ornate with grape leaves and relief heads of lions, rams, antelopes. The lettering on the black marble read WEISZ; a strip of stained glass ran all the way around the mausoleum’s circumference, just below the roofline; a Torah scroll unwound on either side of the family name.
Kronthal slowed, checking his watch, then hopped the cast-iron railing. At the entrance to the mausoleum, he disappeared inside and returned very quickly, his face a mask of worry. “Matthias!” he called once, then again. “They’ve gone,” he said to Misha. “They can’t have.”
But they had. Misha entered the cool darkness of the Weisz memorial. A jumble of Red Cross blankets, boxes of canned food, a Primus stove, and a pyramid of methylated spirits tins lay on the floor, with a bucket and a heap of Swiss newspapers.
“They’ve been here for nearly two months,” Kronthal said.
A clanking sound drifted from the stand of spruce behind them, and an ancient bicycle worked its way toward them, piloted by a disheveled fellow in a cap, smoking as he pedaled.
“Let’s see if Matthias is sober this morning,” Kronthal remarked.
Matthias hove the bicycle to, dragging a boot to brake. He was sober—barely—grizzled with a thin beard, his bulging eyes the worse for wear. Misha saw Kronthal hand the groundskeeper a five-franc note.
“They’ve gone, haven’t they?” Kronthal asked in his slow German, his voice hard. The groundskeeper didn’t meet the American’s eye. “What? Where? Spain? Say something, Matthias.”
The old groundskeeper fingered the banknote. “No. France. They were arrested last night.”
“Arrested? Who told the police?”
“Our council. The Jewish council. They told the police, told them the brother and sister were here.”
“Dear God. Why?” Kronthal dem
anded.
“They weren’t registered. The council voted to tell the police, so they wouldn’t … so it wouldn’t look bad on the Jews of Bern.”
“The council told the police,” Kronthal said, his voice low, amazed.
“Yes. They thought it was better that way.”
Misha joined them, standing a little apart. “Did you see the arrest?”
“No. No. The cemetery was closed,” said the groundskeeper, looking out over the rows of headstones. “I saw the place”—he waved a hand at the mausoleum—“was empty this morning, when I brought them the water for the washing.”
“They were gone,” Misha said.
“Gone. Yes. Gone.” The groundskeeper tapped a drumroll on the bicycle handlebars with his gnarled fingers. “To France,” he repeated.
“What will happen to them in France?” Kronthal asked, far too gently for Misha’s taste.
“A transport. To the east. Somewhere there.” The groundskeeper pointed first, then drew the same bent finger across his lips, as if the incident were still a secret to be kept. He shook his head, blinking. “They were children. What kind of threat were they to anybody?”
A pall of shame covered all three of them. No one looked at anyone else, until finally Misha eyed Kronthal—the OSS man was staring at his shoes, his hands thrust past his splayed-back coat into his trouser pockets. Kronthal cleared his throat, eyes welling, but no words came.
Matthias the groundskeeper mounted his bicycle, clanking away down the hard-packed path between the headstones. Two crows settled into the open door of the Weisz mausoleum, but Kronthal never saw them. He walked into the tiny copse of pine just down the path and stood there, alone, for a long minute.
“You knew them, then?” Misha asked. They sat, facing one another, on the knee-high ornamental wall bordering the flagstones to the mausoleum entrance.
“Nicknamed them, even. Adam and Eve. Sweet, sweet kids, brother and sister. Belgian Jews.” Kronthal thought for a moment, looked away, looked back. “I’ve been a fool.”
“Never underestimate the power of fear. You did okay. You did what you could.”
“I wanted you to get them to Palestine. You know people. I know you do.”
Misha nodded. He wondered how far Kronthal’s knowledge went.
He made a pained face. “I waited a day too long. I thought they’d be safe on the Sabbath.” He had his hands open in his lap; he waggled his fingers, then made a pair of fists. “God. They’re halfway to Paris now. Or worse.”
“I’ve a name for you,” Misha said as he reached over and prized the flask gently from Kronthal’s pocket. “Nothing to do with this.”
Kronthal made no reply.
“Renni Schippers. Union Bank. Amsterdam. Branch in Haifa. Has his finger in Rockefeller oil money when he’s not fronting Thyssen’s millions offshore.”
Kronthal sat motionless, his eyes glazed with smashed hope. He focused on Misha. “How are you going to use Schippers?” Kronthal asked. Not, Misha noted, How would I know about Schippers? but Schippers as a given. “Look, Misha. I trust you, but there’s plenty of people who’d use what I know against … you know the drill. To compromise.”
Misha said he understood, then waited.
“The legation, well, it’s split right down the middle,” Kronthal continued. “There’s Dulles on the one side, ready to do anything, use anybody. And then there’s Harrison, who can smell a diplomatic incident a mile off. It’s a blood feud most days.”
What followed wasn’t strictly true, but Misha knew the power of a well-timed leap into the dark. “I want the connection between Thyssen’s Dutch bank and Schippers’s bank in Amsterdam and New York. The Dulleses are up to their necks in the legal work. It’s a swamp, Jim. There are interlocking boards of directors and share swaps left, right, and center, with Standard Oil and IG Farben popping up every time you look under a rock. It’s a pipeline for oil deals, cash, shares, and God knows what else. And word is you know all about it.” He offered Kronthal the envelope from his chest pocket.
Kronthal stared for a long moment at the first image. “You have the negatives?” he asked quietly, handing the envelope back.
Misha nodded. Kronthal raised his hand in dismissal, then took off his hat. He turned the hat in his fingers, buying time. “Where,” he asked, his face slumped, “do you want me to begin?”
Misha could feel how fragile this was, so delicate it could all shatter. He waited.
“Thyssen is everything,” Kronthal opened, his voice suddenly determined. “Thyssen made Hitler. People think Schacht or Schröder did. No: it was Thyssen. He made the devil’s compact with Hitler.” He shrugged, drifting away again. “My family in Philadelphia … we don’t get along. They sent me to Frankfurt, to the Sperrlerbank, to get me to go to law school. Sperrlerbank is run by my German cousins, the Aryan side. It’s a small bank, but it has some very influential clients: the Hallstadts, the Langemanns, the Ehrlenmayers.”
“Had, you mean: those are all Jews.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true,” Kronthal said, still looking away.
Misha let the American come back, let him turn his face into the warm sun, gave him air. Finally their eyes met. “Perhaps,” Misha suggested, as if offering a slice of cake, “you were at one time privy to the legal work regarding the Sperrlerbank’s corresponding banks outside the Reich.”
Kronthal’s eyes never left Misha’s. At last he said: “You don’t pussyfoot around, do you, Resnikoff?”
“Why should I? I’m feeling a little nauseous about all these funny banks with Foster Dulles’s handwriting on their charters and his placemen on their boards.” Misha examined Kronthal’s smooth features for a sign the American had seen some way out of the bear trap.
There was none—nothing at all.
“I figure you and I”—here Misha gestured complicitly back and forth between the two of them—“have our very small fingers in a very big dike: if it breaks, it’s going to rain runaway Reichsmarks and oil money and gold from Bern to Lisbon to God knows where else. Is it going to rain, Jim?”
Kronthal seemed ready for something. Then, abruptly, he stood and pulled his coat together, clasping his hands behind his back.
“This is the pointless, pointless world we’ve made,” Kronthal said finally. “Children are deported because they offend the Swiss sense of order? Jews offering up their own? God. And look at us. Look at us.”
“It’s loot, Jim,” Misha pressed on, “what’s behind that dike: you saw that yourself at the Sperrler in ’36. Those first dribs and drabs you saw were just the skimmings, for sure—and it’s an ocean now. I don’t want you, or your family, pilloried. I can find the rest, the corporate paper, the really awful personal stuff the big boys have done, but only if I can see into the banks. Starting with Foster Dulles’s legal work.”
Kronthal shook his head no. “I can’t, Misha. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I care about Foster Dulles. Him I don’t care about. But there are people I do care about who’ll be torn to pieces if this gets out.”
“Allen, then. You know what he’s really doing here, what all those meetings with his old clients are about. I know you know. Those banks are moving his clients’ flight capital, have been since Stalingrad fell. It’s blood money, Jim. And you know that for sure.”
“I can’t. Not because of them, either of them. You’ve seen them up close. They’re … the technicians, no holds barred, come at you any way they can with those battalions of lawyers. At least Foster is. Allen’s the hand-holder …” Kronthal was drifting: Misha could sense him slipping away, the chance lost. Kronthal shook his head, then shared a feeble smile with Misha. “God, they do love power, don’t they? But I can’t talk. I can’t.”
“How far does it go, Jim? Point me there and the negatives are yours, like nothing ever happened. I promise you.”
Kronthal kept his silence. He turned and walked down the brick-dust path, through the grave markers broken by age and frost, breaking himse
lf—but not giving way. Misha put his back to the family Weisz’s fine smooth marble, letting the mid-morning sun warm his face, as Kronthal headed for the cemetery gate.
Misha pictured a railcar heading into the marshaling yards of Paris, two terrified children, utterly alone. Somewhere, Misha wanted to believe, poor Adela watched over Kronthal’s wards, a nameless brother and sister, keeping them close, with arms of loving grace.
From Misha Resnikoff’s microfilm archive: diary 1942–44
July 26, 1943
re: Kronthal
Yet more liaison intrigue with the Americans; Schorr has winkled out of Dalton that the OSS section at the Bern embassy is backtracking through its own cables, an investigation in the form of repeated queries to the Office of Censorship. The OOC vets all transatlantic cables, I’m told: they are the repository of all suspect cable files.
Question is: why? Schorr thinks there’s dirty work at the crossroads—why else would anyone go to the trouble, except to cover one’s traces? Did this mean the OSS Bern is being wiretapped by their own people? If so, why?
XLI
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JULY 1943
There were no fireworks that year on the Potomac: the Eastern Seaboard’s strict blackout meant a daylight Independence Day. By the time Eleanor and Clover arrived, concertgoers had already crowded the Watergate hillside, picnickers, servicemen, schoolkids, and bureaucrats alike. No matter: playing hooky from their own children for the afternoon, the sisters-in-law had rented the rowboat now floating upstream of the symphony’s barge stage. A swell of applause carried out over the water; the four Red Army singers at the microphone had finished their number.
“What’s a bandura?” Clover asked as she clapped. “Does it say in the program?”
The Witness Tree Page 31