Two years to the very day, I was released. My time there had passed reasonably uneventfully, apart from the snide remarks of a fellow inmate, a petty thief with ambition, who hoped to slime his way into the favor of the prison staff.
Klara was waiting for me at the exit. I didn’t recognize David at all — how could I? He had become a serious little boy, had lost his mop of blond curls and his baby chubby cheeks. Klara had changed, too.
I had learned from a friend that immediately after my arrest she had been forced to walk the streets with a sign around her neck, denouncing herself as a Jewish whore. Klara was a very proud woman. I felt this humiliation must have broken her, for there was something in the way she looked at me I did not comprehend. Now I know she was despairing even then. With her innate practical sense she had long since realized the hopelessness of our situation, whereas I was still dreaming of a better life in another land.
Our financial situation had severely deteriorated. The money that my mother and Klara’s grandmother sent us was not sufficient. Through a friend of her mother’s, Klara had found a part-time job in an office. We were extremely surprised, for she was, being married to a Jew, race despoiled, after all. We made a definite decision to emigrate. I asked for emigration papers and worked at the Siegfried Scholem publishing house in Berlin-Schöneberg while we waited and waited.
We moved into a furnished one-room apartment on the first floor of an art deco house, whose over-the-top flourishes and stucco facade threatened to crush the stunted birch in front of it. Klara had clumsily hung striped blinds in front of the windows. Whether she wanted to protect David and me from the world looking in at us, or to spare us from looking out, I do not know. Whatever the reason, reality caught up with us nonetheless.
A few months later I was arrested again. This time they came toward seven, just as we had sat down for dinner. I have heard that this (along with nighttime, of course) was a favorite hour for the Gestapo to make their arrests, for they could be sure not to find an empty nest. There was always a logical reason for the way the Gestapo proceeded: I cannot vouch for the others. First of all, I was taken to an assembly camp, and then, because I had a previous record, to a concentration camp, KZ for short in German. To begin with, I worked in the kitchen there, where I was a dishwasher. I couldn’t complain, for at least I had something to eat, unlike the other prisoners.
Whenever I could — the guard was strict — I stole a raw potato or a slice of bread, which I swallowed on the way to our barracks. At some point, I had long stopped counting the days, I was transported east.
Nothing there resembled what I had experienced before. I worked in an ammunition factory, then in the orderly’s office, then in the hospital building. Several months later, I was called to the commander of the camp. I was afraid: he was known for his dangerous humor. I looked at the skull and crossbones on the badge on his collar. I don’t believe I looked him or any of the numerous guards in the eye throughout my detention. I only dared to many years later when I was giving evidence at a trial and was forced to identify Adolf Vogt, a member of the Einsatzgruppe, and I found that incredibly difficult to do.
The commander was eating. I stood in the corner of the room and waited. When he had emptied his glass, he fetched my file and read it out loud to me. He asked me why I had not mentioned that I was a dentist. I didn’t understand his question. I was incapable of establishing any link between the camp and my life.
12.
Fate can play some capricious tricks. When I was still wet behind the ears, my father told me again and again that I had to study to make something of myself. I did not always share his opinion, but studied nonetheless for his sake. And now the fact that I had studied something that I was not interested in was to save my skin; my cowardice with my father — for I had never dared to contradict him — was going to help me. I was given a new area of work and, because my value had gone up as a doctor, more bread.
Along with two dozen other dentists, all with their yellow stars like me or red and pink triangles, I dug for gold. After the men from the work unit had opened the doors and thrown out the corpses that stood upright, pressed against each other in the chambers, I opened the mouths with a hook.
Even in death, one could recognize the families. They held hands tightly as they died. Using pliers and chisels, we broke the gold teeth and crowns out of the jaws and put them into cans. We filled a can a day, sometimes two. We worked quickly, concentrated hard, for as we were extracting, the Ukrainians were refilling the chambers.
I can still see the corpses today. Not people, not women, children, and men, but jaws that had to be pried open. And the sickly sweet smell grows no less, the smell that came from the uninterrupted cremation of bodies. It penetrated the whole area and informed all those living in the surrounding communities that annihilation was at work.
That is my life, then. It does not stop there, but the rest of it is not worth the telling. I was liberated in 1945. When the Russian soldiers came to us in the camp and saw what had happened, they wept. We could not cry anymore.
I was taken to a sanitarium, I had tuberculosis. They thought I would die, that my body was too weak. I wanted to die, but I survived. Then my search began. I learned from the Red Cross that my mother, Käthe, and Otta had been killed in another camp. God rest their souls. I could not find out anything about Klara and little David. They had been taken away by the Gestapo one winter afternoon, but what happened then no one knows.
I hope that they did not suffer too much, that little David was not afraid when he saw the black coats, that it happened quickly. I hope that they were placed in a row in a forest full of firs and pines, and that the soldier was good at his job. I hope that they fell onto a soft carpet of moss and leaves, next to one another, and that the snow, the all-encompassing, soothing snow, was their shroud.
13.
I am coming to the end of my story. In ‘56 I opened another bookstore. People do not read as much as they used to, and nothing decent is written anymore, but books are and will remain my passion. I did not marry again, although once — that must be some twenty years ago now, too — I was almost talked into it by a blond widow with a poodle. In retrospect, I can only thank my lucky stars that I have an inexplicable (but who can explain everything anyway) aversion to overbred dogs.
I busy myself with my godchild, who is starting school next year. With her two front teeth missing, she looks like a little vampire, but a very sweet one. Once a week, I go swimming and otherwise I lead a peaceful and unremarkable life.
I did not go back to Berlin until last year, when the mayor organized a gathering for former Jewish citizens. We were taken from the airport to a festively decorated room where a dry turkey and all the trimmings awaited us. The city had vastly changed. Not for the better. I have never been back to my birthplace, that sleepy little town. What would I do there? Nothing remains of what I knew.
I recently read in a report that Special Operation Reinhard collected 11,730 kilos of dental gold during the war. I calculated my contribution and think that this figure best sums up my life. But what am I saying? I have seen so much, terrible things, but also beautiful things, and when I sit in my shop and a customer holds forth on his views on art and literature, with the contented air of a connoisseur, as though pulling a particularly white pearl of unique purity from a resisting oyster (everyone has an opinion these days), then the few exquisite moments of my life come to me again. And it is with one of these that I wish to take my leave of you: when I asked Klara to be my wife, at the same time going into why she should not accept my proposal, she looked at me with her sparkling green cat’s eyes and I saw myself reflected in her pupils, her big, round pupils, and I heard my breath catch in my throat, and she laughed in a deep voice, raw with tenderness.
* Cultural League of German Jews.
One Hundred Furs
HE CALLED HER TOWARD MORNING AND ASKED FOR HELP. The ringing telephone had jolted her out of a dream. She did not immediatel
y recognize his voice. She connected it to her dream: she was with Vicki, an old school friend, and they were trying to scale a wall. Only when he used his own affectionate name for her did she register what was going on. He told her she should hurry.
She hastily pulled on her clothes, which lay in a heap by the chair, and crossed the hallway. So as not to waken Bettina, who had forbidden her to leave the house, she carried her shoes.
She stopped in front of the door on which the name of her little niece was stuck in bright paper letters. While her sister and brother-in-law were quarreling in the living room, she had played hide-and-seek with the child. The little girl asked what was wrong, over and over again. She could feel the tension, but could not understand it. She had carried her into her room and laid down on the bed next to her. Then she had sat down in the kitchen and downed three glasses of cognac, one after the other. Wolfgang and Bettina had joined her. Together they emptied the bottle. After a while, her brother-in-law had gone through to the bedroom. Although he shut the door they could hear his sobs. His soft weeping frightened her. He had not cried since the murder of his sister, Ella. Everything else he had taken in silence: losing the right to vote, the J in their passports, his admission to the bar being revoked. She did not comprehend why the attempted assassination in Paris had unbalanced him so.
She listened to the steady breathing of the sleeping child, saw the untidy shock of brown hair sticking out from under the covers, and could not help thinking of Ella. She had seen her only fleetingly, once or twice. Ella had given the speech at Wolfgang and Bettina’s wedding. She was very witty and had made everybody laugh, and she, Eva, had been full of admiration. A few months later she had been stabbed to death. She kicked the stuffed toy dog that guarded her niece’s door — it looked like it was laughing at her maliciously, its felt tongue hanging out — went to the door of the apartment, and turned the key twice.
Everything was still asleep. Only the occasional single light was going on in the uniformly gray facades.
In the twilight, she thought, the houses and everything around them are curiously beautiful. She pulled her coat more closely around her and tightened the belt. She had actually wanted to wear her fur coat, her engagement present, but had decided not to, not wanting to draw attention to herself. Her quick little steps echoed on the cobblestones. She crossed the street, went along the right-hand side, and hurried past the empty site where a detached family house was to be built.
She had once read — where exactly she wasn’t sure, or perhaps they were Alfred’s words — that a city changes far more quickly than a person’s life does. That was true. She had the feeling that everything was rotating in this city. Yes, even lifeless objects were getting restless.
The streetcar was almost empty. Only a few workers were sitting on the wooden seats, their faces creased with fatigue. She sat down in the last row, next to the window, which steamed up immediately from her hot breath. Bettina would be awake now and would have read the note she had left in front of their bedroom door. She would crumple it up into a ball, furious, and flatten it out with her hand to read it again.
The streetcar stopped. Two men jumped down and wandered over to a group smoking in front of a gate. As the streetcar jolted into motion, she turned around and looked at the men. They were going through the factory gate, laughing. She got out at the next stop. She only knew this neighborhood when it was bustling with people; the peacefulness disoriented her.
As she passed the café where Alfred and she took lunch, the waiter, in the process of taking the chairs off the tables, gave her a long and penetrating look. Frightened, she clutched her chest and went on. She went as far as Kantstraße, turned right, and stood stock-still. Disbelieving, she stared at the pavement. It was covered with splinters of glass, shreds of paper, pieces of wood and metal. She had not wanted to believe her brother-in-law, who had spent the whole evening claiming things would go from bad to worse now, that the Reich citizenship laws were just a little taste of what was to come. Now she could see it for herself. She wanted to run but forced herself to walk slowly, and read the words that someone had painted in white on the walls and shop fronts:
JEWISH PIG
GO AWAY JEWS
THE JEW IS OUR MISFORTUNE DIE JUDAS
DO NOT BUY FROM JEWS
When she reached Alfred’s door, she realized her dress was drenched in sweat. She entered the shop. The table, the chairs, the glass case he had constructed just three weeks earlier, were smashed to smithereens. Softly she called his name, but there was no answer. She went to the display room and found him in the changing cubicle.
“Alfred, Alfred.”
He groaned. She sat down on the floor next to him and started to cry.
2.
There had been ten of them. He had seen them in the street and thought nothing of it. He had bolted the door and felt safe although he had not yet let the grating down. He had gone into the back room to cut the far that Schröder was to work on in the morning. Schröder had offered to stay. He had heard about the operation because his brother-in-law was in the SS. He had thanked Schröder, but would not hear of it. Schröder was not a well man and there was his wife to consider.
He had believed that they would not be able to get at him, and looked up in bewilderment when he saw a man standing in front of him. How had he gotten in? he asked. That the door must have been broken down did not even occur to him to begin with. The man answered by beating him with a truncheon. Then the others arrived.
They kicked him and dragged him out into the street. He could still remember that the streetlights seemed very bright to him. He could also remember the amused faces in detail, leaning over him, saying all sorts of things he could not follow.
They wanted to force him to set his shop on fire. He refused and was beaten up again. He shut his eyes and submitted to it quietly. They threatened him. An SS man cut his shirt open with a knife. He would do the same to his dirty Jewish skin, if he continued to disobey orders. He acquiesced. A woman passed him a flaming torch. He hurled it through the door. It went out right away. They left him an hour later and loaded the furs into a truck. Painfully, he crawled back to the building, and leaned against the wall. As he watched them piling the furs one on top of the other his thoughts turned to his father, from whom he had inherited the store. He also thought of his first trip to Russia, taken with his grandfather when he was four or five, and of the impish old woman who had given him a present of a foxtail.
“Let’s go,” said Eva. “We can live with Bettina for a while.”
She helped him to his feet.
“Come on, let’s go.”
3.
The street had come to life. About ten people were standing in front of the store, looking at them with curiosity. No one said a word. He was leaning heavily on her. They made their way laboriously along the street.
Two doors down, the windows of a tobacconist’s had been smashed in, and across the way those of a stationer’s: it was managed by a widow and he ordered his visiting cards from her. They stopped so he could catch his breath.
“Look at them.”
He pointed to a group of people, scouring the ground in front of the stationery store for anything of value.
When they were passing the café, the waiter helped them inside and told them to stay seated until he had ordered a car. The room smelled of fresh morning bread rolls. The regulars, mostly shop proprietors with a good hour before opening time, had not yet arrived. She went to the phone next to the cash register and called her sister. After she had explained briefly what had happened, she asked her to call the doctor.
“Tell him it’s urgent and he should come before his morning rounds,” she added, and hung up before Bettina could start with her reproaches.
When she went, she saw the second waiter. She had not recognized him right away for he was still in casual wear. He was sitting there spooning bright red jam out of a big container with a wooden spoon into glass dishes decorated wit
h fruit. There’s strawberry jam today again at long last, she thought, and immediately reproached herself for being able to think such thoughts at a moment like this. She sat down again and tried to compose herself by looking at her hands. She felt the tears coming. “I shouted, but…”
“Ssh,” she said. “We’ll be home soon and then I’ll tuck you into bed.”
“I asked them to leave me the sign. You know the one, the family sign. I said my great-grandfather … you can have all the furs … but the sign … they just laughed.”
“You shouldn’t talk now,” she said, and gently laid a finger on his mouth. “You mustn’t get worked up.”
With the help of the waiter she heaved him up and brought him to the door. The taxi was waiting outside. She carefully settled him into the backseat, pounded her coat into a ball, leaned him forward, and put it behind his head.
“They whipped me like an animal. Like a dog. Then they loaded my furs into a truck. And laughed … they were grinning as they did it… like a dog …”
“Shh,” she said, shutting the door, and told the driver the address.
They drove off slowly. As they passed the shop, she looked out of the window. The shards of glass had already been swept away. She looked at the sign that his great-grandfather had mounted on the wall outside, a century ago. Alfred Blumenfeld and sons. Four generations of furriers. She stroked his hair gently. Someone had nailed a plank across the door frame.
A warning, she thought, a warning nailed to the door. She took his hand.
In These Sacred Halls One Knows Not of Revenge
(Watches)
WHEN HE WAS AWAY, they had called his home and summoned him to the police station. He was to give testimony as a witness. He did not go, he knew it could only be a trap. His wife advised him to hide at a friend’s in Stuttgart for a few days.
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