None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II

by Anthony A. Goodman

  Chapter Thirty-two

  15 April 1946, 1900 Hours

  Deutsches Theater Restaurant, Munich, Germany

  The old restaurant was slowly filling up. The people milled about uncertainly as they entered the large room, finding their way to wooden tables set with military precision in long, parallel rows. The room had been cleaned meticulously, something of a rarity in Munich at the time because, now, even a year after the liberation of the camps, rubble and destruction were everywhere. The tables were set with clean dishes and silverware, mostly unmatched. There were water glasses and wine glasses supplied by the US Army.

  Quiet dominated the room in spite of the fact that more than two hundred people were gathering for dinner.

  “Hey, Hamm,” Schneider whispered. “Where should we sit?” Hamm shrugged his shoulders and looked over at McClintock. McClintock, moved into the room and began searching for an empty place. He roamed the room to find a table. Berg and Molly were sticking very close to Schneider. The group did not want to impose themselves upon the civilians there. They would be happy if any of the German citizens joined them, but this little medical team felt as if they were intruding into someone else’s home. All except Berg, himself, who knew he was home. Finally.

  They were dressed in their cleanest uniforms, pressed as well as they could be. Their shoes had been shined, and some of the battle-weary clothing long since replaced. There was a stark contrast between their own clothing, now replenished by the quartermaster corps, and the range of attire that surrounded them. Some of the civilian men and women were dressed neatly in suits and dresses. Most of the garments were clean, if a bit tired looking, with attempts made to repair the tears and the ragged cuffs. Some had not been able to do so. Many of the men were wearing tallit, Jewish prayer shawls, and all had their heads covered with black yarmulke, the small ever-present skullcaps. Schneider, McClintock, Berg, and Hamm had picked up their yarmulkes from a basket at the door. Schneider looked a bit uncomfortable when he put his on, but McClintock seemed to be enjoying it, as if he were incognito. Hamm took a tallit and folded it into his pocket. Berg was dressed in a dark gray suit and black tie. His shirt was new and stood out in contrast to the tired clothing of the other civilians. It was oversize, but clean.

  They found an empty table not too far from the front of the room. There were sets of candles on every table, with matchsticks lying neatly next to each. The military precision and orderliness shone through the religious civility of the room. They sat down on the chairs and benches and noticed, as they waited, that no one else seemed comfortable enough to join them at the couple of empty places at their table.

  “Who’s at the head table?” McClintock asked, pointing toward the dais with his chin.

  “I think that’s the army chaplain, the Rabbi,” Hamm said. “He put this whole thing together. Massive undertaking, from what I heard. They had to organize—appropriate, uh, steal really—everything, sometimes not exactly through Army channels.”

  “Like what?” Molly asked.

  “Like everything!” Schneider cut in. “They scrounged the silverware, the glasses, and the tablecloths. Food. Kosher wine. They even had to find Hebrew type to print the prayer books. Almost all that stuff was destroyed by the Nazis years ago.”

  “So, Steve, you going to be my guide tonight?” McClintock asked. “I mean, this is my first Passover dinner. Probably Molly’s, too,” he said nodding in her direction.

  “Seder, Ted. Not dinner. You may as well start out calling it by the right name. It’s a Passover festival, but don’t forget that Jesus’s Last Supper was a Seder too. And he was a Rabbi.”

  “I know, I know. We just never emphasized that part of it in our family. Presbyterians don’t really spend a lot of time on Jesus’s Jewishness.”

  “I can only imagine,” Hamm said.

  “Well, tonight’s Seder is very special,” Schneider said. “It’s the first one openly celebrated in Germany since Hitler and his goons took power. This is going to be one hell of a special event.” He was barely able to speak by then, as he realized just exactly what a moment this was for the German Jews there that night.

  An older man and woman entered the room, looking around for seats, which were rapidly becoming scarce as the time approached for the Seder to begin. Hamm saw the couple tentatively approaching the table. He raised a welcoming hand and waved them over. The couple nodded and, as if ordered, took seats next to Hamm and McClintock. The old man helped his wife off with her coat, and then settled himself into his own seat.

  Hamm realized he couldn’t tell how old these people were. Maybe in their sixties. She had the look of a scared sparrow. There was constant fear in her eyes, as well as an unbearable sadness. Hamm was, by then, too familiar with that look, those eyes. He thought she might jump up and fly away at the first word spoken to her.

  The husband—he supposed the man was her husband—seemed to be holding it together for the two of them, though he was in no great shape himself. He, too, had that look. Hamm didn’t know quite how to describe it, but when he looked into the man’s eyes, he felt as if he had to look away. It was as if he might see in those eyes what the man had seen. Those scenes burned into the poor man’s retinas might project back to Hamm like an image on a movie screen. He just didn’t want to see them. He had already seen enough, and what his eyes had seen was nothing to what the old man’s had.

  As if to confirm his suspicions, the woman stretched out her left arm to steady herself on the table as she sat down. In doing so, she exposed her forearm, and everyone could see the serial number tattooed there in black ink. They all looked away quickly, and the woman seemed not to notice.

  “Guten Abend,” Schneider said to the couple. Good evening.

  “Guten Abend,” the man and woman said together. She was still looking down at the table. The man, at least, was able to meet Schneider’s eyes as he spoke.

  Though Berg remained quiet, Schneider knew that he could count on him to bring the couple into the conversation if necessary. Schneider’s German was very good by now, but of course, Berg’s was perfect.

  “Sprechen sie Englisch?” Schneider asked them, and to everyone’s relief, they did.

  Their speech was somewhat halting, and heavily accented, but the evening was made immeasurably easier for everyone once they had a common language.

  Berg reached across the table to shake hands with the husband. “My name is Meyer Berg,” he said in English, “and I’m so glad to see you here.” The man shook Berg’s hand tentatively, and the woman nodded, her eyes still lowered.

  “My name is John Hammer,” Hamm said, “and this is Steve Schneider, and Ted McClintock. This is Molly Ferrarro.” He purposely avoided using terms of military rank.

  “I am Chaim Guttmann,” the old man said, nodding to everyone at the table in turn. “And this is my wife, Bessie.”

  “We’re so happy you could join us,” Molly said, speaking for the first time since she entered the room. Molly had shifted her seat to be nearer Bessie.

  Hamm, for his part, still feared that at any moment the tiny woman would flap her little wings and fly out the door, but Molly’s presence seemed to reassure her. Then the group settled back in silence and looked at each other. It was a very awkward moment for everyone, that feeling that they had so little to say at such a momentous time in history. And yet there were so many horrible shared stories that they did not want to share, or even to remember.

  Soon the tables were filled to capacity. GIs were bringing in extra chairs to fill up every possible place. They all had the same thoughts gnawing at their brains. They looked into the faces of the young GIs and WACs and saw there the faces of all the others who were gone now. Gone forever.

  By the time the rabbi was ready to begin the service, every seat in the hall was filled. There were easily more than two hundred people there.

  Hamm leaned toward the elderly couple. He still could not be sure of their ages because there was a timelessness in the
ir faces obscured by something that spoke of stories almost too terrible to tell. He asked, “So, Herr Guttmann, are you and your wife from Munich?”

  Great conversationalist I am, he thought.

  Guttmann looked at his wife for a moment. She turned her face, but Hamm could see the tears forming on her cheek. She did not wipe them away.

  “No, sir,” Guttmann replied. “We are from a very small town in the east. On the Polish border.” Guttmann did not mention the name of the town. Hamm suspected it would mean nothing to him anyway, and perhaps there was no longer such a place.

  “Do you have family here in Munich?” Hamm asked, instantly regretting it, and wanting to pummel himself for his stupidity. Everyone had lost family in this war, and of all people to ask, Jewish refugees.

  Idiot! he thought to himself. Leave it alone. I should stick to talking about the weather!

  But Guttmann never missed a beat. He began to tell his story as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Bessie didn’t look up, but kept her eyes fixed on the rabbi and the preliminaries of the service.

  “When the Germans marched into Poland,” he explained, “all the Jews were rounded up and moved to the resettlement camps. We were given a few hours to collect one small bag of belongings, and were told that we would be moved to a place where there were other Jews; that there would be some sort of work for us to do. Food and shelter would be provided.” He paused and smiled the tiniest of smiles, shaking his head at his stupidity, his naiveté. “So, what could we do?” he went on, shrugging his shoulders and turning his hands upward as if to God. “What else could we believe? We packed a few things, and we went.” His voice rose a little at the end of each sentence.

  “We went to the railway station, and then it became clear that all was not as they told us…that something was wrong. There were hundreds of guards with guns, and uh hunds, uh…dogs, biting at us. We saw that the trains were cars for…for….”

  “Cattle?” Berg offered, after exchanging a few words in German.

  “Yes. Yes. For cattle. Not for people. They put so many of us in there that we could not sit down. We were shoulder by shoulder. Even the old ones had to stand up. There were no toilets…no heat…no water or food….”

  He stopped and began to shake. Berg reached out and touched Guttmann’s arm.

  “This is hard, I know. But, it has been very good for me to tell these things. To say it out loud. But take a moment. It’s okay.”

  Guttmann nodded. He looked to Bessie for support, but she said nothing. Then he gathered his strength, seeming to steel himself to tell the story that had to be told. Each time he told it, Hamm and Schneider realized, he was writing history. He, like Berg, like so many others, was insuring that there would be someone else—one more person, a witness—who would know what happened; who would hear the truth; who would tell the truth to others.

  “It was the old ones who made me so sad,” Guttman went on, “and the children. It was so awful for them, for they didn’t have the strength. I was only thirty-eight years old at the time, and I could barely take it. But the children….”

  Everyone at the table was horrified when they realized that this man sitting next to them was likely less than forty-five years old. The man looked as old as their grandfathers.

  But Guttmann went on as if he had not noticed.

  “We were on that train for nearly four days, in weather that was often below freezing. Several people in my car died, and their bodies were passed out the door whenever the train stopped.”

  The man stopped again and rubbed his eyes. Then he told some of the details of his imprisonment. Only at the very end of the story did he mention that he and Bessie had brought their three small children with them. When they arrived at the camp, the children were taken away and sent to a different enclosure. They would go to a children’s school, the guards had said, reassuring the panicked parents.

  “We never saw them again. We still look, but….”

  “How did you survive in a place like that?” Molly asked. “And how do you ever get over it? How…?”

  Bessie interrupted her. The table became quiet, and all the eyes were on the woman, for it was the first time she had spoken.

  “You survive!” she said with a fire that was completely unexpected. “That’s all you can do,” she added, looking directly into Molly’s eyes. She spoke each word separately, distinctly, as if to emphasize that every word counted; every word she said, they all must remember. “You do whatever it takes to survive,” she went on. “Every person is capable of doing the most awful things imaginable, if it means surviving for just one more minute.”

  There seemed nothing more to say. But, quietly, Chaim finished their story.

  During the past year they had been going from town to town, soliciting everyone from the International Red Cross to the Armies of Occupation to the relief organizations, searching through the various lists of both the dead and the survivors. There was still no word of their children. Their whole life’s quest was merely to answer that one question. It would be better to find out the children were, in fact, dead, than to go on not knowing where they were, how they were, who was taking care of them…or not.

  The rabbi moved to the center of the dais, his neat black robe open at the top button, exposing a glimpse of his army shirt and tie underneath its folds. On his head, he too wore the traditional black yarmulke and around his shoulders the tallit. He grasped the fringe hanging from the corner of the blue and white silk shawl and kissed it.

  Hamm reached into his pocket and pulled out the tallit he had picked up when he entered the room. He kissed the prayer shawl and placed it around his shoulders.

  While the rabbi prepared to begin the service, Berg leaned toward the Guttmanns. He said in German, “We must continue sometime, the three of us. Just us. It will be good for all of us.”

  Guttmann nodded.

  The rabbi looked up at the congregation gathered before him. He started to speak, but stopped. Tears filled his eyes, and he paused to wipe them away. He cleared his throat and, in a voice hoarse with emotion, began the service with the most important of all Jewish prayers, the affirmation of the unity of God.

  “Shema, Yisroel. Adonai eloheynu. Adonai, echod.”

  Hear, oh Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is One.

  All around the room, the voices of the Jews followed the Passover prayers in several languages. Schneider, too, was uttering the first Hebrew words that every Jewish child learned. Hamm realized that this was the first time he had ever heard Schneider speak Hebrew. Schneider looked at Hamm as he spoke, the trace of a smile on his lips painted over with a dab of shame.

  Molly nestled close to Schneider’s shoulder. Hamm could see a terribly sad look in her eyes. He felt as if he needed to pray for the two of them as much as for anyone else. Life was not going to be easy for them no matter what course of action they decided.

  As the evening wore on, German remained the dominant common language. However, there was a polyglot mixture as well of Hebrew, French, English, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Czech, and even Italian. And these were only the languages Schneider and Hamm could pick out from the voices around them. Others, they had never heard before.

  On the table between every two seats was a black book, marked on its cover with two concentric circles surrounding the familiar capital letter A, the insignia of the United States Third Army—by then known as The Army of Occupation of Southern Germany. Beneath the famous A were printed in red the English words:

  PASSOVER SERVICE

  MUNICH ENCLAVE

  Munich, Germany, April 15–16, 1946

  McClintock shoved the book nearer to Schneider and gave him a questioning look. Schneider opened the first few pages and saw a woodcut design in Hebrew letters: Haggadah. He couldn’t read the rest, but he assumed it had something to do with the artist and the author of the extraordinary text.

  “It’s the Haggadah,” he whispered to McClintock. “The book we use for the
Seder. It tells the order of the service, but basically it’s the story of how God freed the Jews from slavery under Pharaoh in ancient Egypt.”

  McClintock nodded. He knew the story. He had, after all, read the Old Testament. Probably even more carefully than Schneider.

  The next page was the title page for the book, which noted the place of the service: the Deutsches Theatre Restaurant. The rabbi’s name was at the bottom. Neither Hamm nor Schneider had met him before, though they had heard of the work he was doing to restore the destroyed Jewish community, the She’erith Hapletah, “the few who escaped,” or “the surviving remnant,” as they were now called in Hebrew.

  Hamm moved closer to follow the Haggadah with Schneider, McClintock and Molly. He pushed his own Haggadah over to the Guttmanns, thinking they needed to celebrate this on their own.

  Schneider turned the page, falling further behind the chanting of the rabbi and the congregation.

  The next woodcut shocked everyone. Instead of the traditional drawings of the pyramids and the other symbols of ancient Egypt, their eyes were drawn to the border of the page where there was a caricature of Hitler with a swastika armband. There were figures of emaciated men in the striped prison uniforms of the concentration camps, bent under the burden of heavy loads, presumably toiling for the Nazis rather than Pharaoh. The images of the victims of the Nazis evolved around the border of the page into pictures of fruit, and crops of grain, and a trowel to build a new nation: the foretelling of the coming of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.