Heinrich Mueller arrived by train to Lublin on November 2,1943. He had been on leave for two weeks after vacating his post in Bergen-Belsen, and had traveled first to Berlin to visit his family, and then to Vienna, which he had never seen. He spent four days there, during which he ate great quantities of pastries, and had numerous sexual intercourses with prostitutes. He visited the Hofburg, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and Schloss Schoenbrunn, but mostly spent his time in the cafés and night clubs. He was not deprived of company, as there were always groups of cavorting SS men who invited him to join in. He even went dancing with a group of town girls who attached themselves to some young officers like himself, but out of a sense of honor he had not had sex with any of them, though without a doubt, he told himself later, he could have. There was one in particular who seemed to like him, and he thought about her all throughout the train ride to Lublin. He had gotten himself a first-class berth, but he could not sleep. He had written her name on his ticket, but he hadn’t had the courage to ask her address. He reproached himself all night long. Upon disembarking the train, he flagged down a car, threw his duffel in the back, and arrived at his post by midday. It was depressing, after the gaiety of Vienna and the beauty of the girls, the excellent food, the fine Austrian wine, the endless rounds of beer, to be shuffled into the commandant’s office by a dour-faced adjutant, to be shuffled out again after a quick salute and a few meaningless inquiries, and to be shown a desk with no window and a bunk in the officers’ quarters that was but a straw mattress on a steel frame, a few inches of private space that contained a miniature writing table, and, off to one side, a minuscule closet. It was a terrible, foul-smelling place; the air was dark even now at midday, whereas the sun had been shining only a moment ago in town. On top of that, his heart sank when he met his immediate superior, Wippern—a man with no imagination and plenty of ambition. One could never advance under such a person.
The very next day, Mueller was taken across the highway, to be shown the lay of the land, as Wippern put it.
“You’re in luck!” Wippern said. “Today is a big day! Big action today. Lots to see!”
As soon as he crossed the road, he could hear the loudspeakers blaring music, but beneath that, something else.
“What’s that?”
“That’s what I’m saying!” snapped Wippern impatiently. “Big action today! Harvest Festival! That’s what we call it.”
As they walked toward the main field, the field that joined the two camps, he saw hordes of men and women stripped naked, their clothes thrown into piles, which others loaded onto carts. It was a pleasant day, not too cold at all, and the sun was shining brightly in spite of the gray cloud that hung over the camp. The music was incredibly loud, but as they walked farther, the mask of music grew thin, and he began to hear bursts of shooting and screaming. It was coming from an area behind several large buildings, one of which was clearly the ovens.
“I thought I heard convoys coming in last night,” Mueller remarked.
“Yes, some crackerjack units. Special orders from Berlin,” replied Wippern, rubbing his hands together against the damp morning air.
Mueller watched as groups of a hundred or so of these naked people were herded like cattle through a narrow causeway of barbed wire. They ran along, trying to cover themselves. The women put one arm in front of their breasts, the other between their legs. Why bother? thought Mueller.
“Rosamunda!” the loudspeaker sang. “Give me a kiss!”
“It’s a good thing you’re here,” said Wippern. “There will be a lot of paperwork tonight. A lot of head counting, a lot of shoes to deal with.”
He winked.
He pointed out the various fields and blocks, told him where the Soviets were held, where the Poles, where the Jews, where the women.
“We just got in a huge crop from the ghetto in Warsaw,” he said as a way of explaining what was going on. “Leftover from the riots, you know. Can’t have that type around, can we? Next thing you know there’ll be trouble here too!”
“How many?” asked Mueller, thinking ahead to how much work he had to do on his very first day.
“I don’t know. Ten thousand, maybe, from Warsaw. Plus all our useless Jews in Camp A.”
“It will be a long day,” Mueller sighed.
“Attitude is everything!” advised Wippern.
“I only meant—”
“Never mind,” Wippern said kindly. “I know what it’s like to come back from holiday.”
They walked until they reached the gas chambers and crematorium. The music had gone dimmer here, for which Mueller was grateful, but now the sound of automatic weapons, barked commands, and human screams filled the air.
“Let’s take a peek,” suggested Wippern.
Mueller went along beside him. Not far beyond the crematorium they had dug several huge trenches, four, perhaps five, meters deep. They lined up the naked Jews and commanded them to climb down into the trench. There they were ordered to lie down atop a row of dead bodies—those who had come only moments before. They did what they were told. Amazing, he thought to himself. They did not seem to him at that moment the arch villains who had almost destroyed Germany in their plots to rule the world—the puppet masters of Roosevelt and Churchill, who had started this war. Only we could have broken them! he thought. The operation was wonderfully orderly, yet their nakedness disturbed him, he did not know why. It was particularly hard to watch the women lie down on the row of corpses. It offended, somehow, his German sense of chivalry, to see their asses lined up that way, and, after the Sturmbannführer nodded and the guns went off, to witness their defecation, or worse, the way their bodies writhed under the pressure of the bullets in a mockery of coitus. He knew he must not close his eyes, but he felt himself grow faint, so he pulled out his handkerchief and made a show of blowing his nose. When he uncovered his face again, he saw a lieutenant briskly walking the perimeter of the trench, finishing off any left alive with a deft pistol shot to the head, although with some he did not seem to bother, since, Mueller assumed, the half-dead criminals would be buried or crushed in a matter of minutes anyway. Indeed, a second later another group of naked Jews was led to the trench, and they too lay down upon the row of bodies, and they too were put away in a red flood of gunfire.
Mueller looked around and noticed Weiss, the commandant, on a little rise a few meters away, seated in his camp chair next to which was set up a table upon which breakfast was being served. The table was covered with linen, and the attendant poured coffee from a silver urn. When they saw him, Wippern and Mueller rose to attention and saluted, but Weiss did not notice them, and after a while Wippern suggested they stop fooling around and get back to work.
And they did have a lot a of work, too! The special units left Lublin that evening, and Wippern and Mueller had to do the accounting. It was a tedious and laborious task, but when it was finally done, they could report to Berlin that the population of Majdanek had been reduced by 18,400 Jews. They had decided to round off for convenience.
That night, the Poles in Block 3 were heard celebrating. But Mueller was exhausted and oddly aroused. He knew it was the moral thing, the right thing, the necessary thing for the Reich, for all of mankind. But he could not stop the queasiness rising up in his throat. It cannot be right, he thought, to dispose of so many potential workers while they still might be useful to the state.
Thus, he was much relieved when Wippern assigned him to Camp B, the work camp. It was actually the harder job, which is no doubt why Wippern gave it to him, but now, at least, he might be spared the sight of so much waste.
The cows were becoming restless, full of milk. Heshel Rosenheim got up from his stool and walked over to the stalls. There were no milking machines on Naor, they milked by hand, and he thought he could do it as well as anyone. He grabbed a bucket and slid it under Rifka. There were only five cows, and their milk was mostly used by the kibbutz. They made kefir, curds, simple cheeses, butter. He grabbed a teat and started
to squeeze. She jumped a little, but he got it under control, and soon was milking smoothly. He felt calm again, peaceful.
It is not that he had forgotten. One cannot forget such a thing. It is that he had never associated it in any way with himself. He had been an observer, that’s all. He had done the numbers. And, in fact, until tonight he had mostly remembered about the hours and hours of paperwork, if he thought about it at all. It was just one day in the life of those days. People were killed in the camps every single hour. The gallows were never empty. Every night the gas chambers were filled to overflowing. And there was never a single second that the crematoria ceased belching out their fetid plumes of human smoke. It was normal. It was nothing to worry your head about. Yet the three people shot by the side of the road at Yad Mordechai had made him see it differently. Terribly differently.
He recalled now a little detail. Those trenches had to be dug up a few days later. It was the stench. And for health reasons, of course. So they ordered the few Jews left to dig it all up and set fire to the bodies right there in the trenches, and when that was done (he knew this because he logged it in his books) the bones were crushed to powder, and the ash and the bones together were loaded into burlap sacks, and the sacks were put in the warehouses, and in the warehouses the sacks were stamped with the word FERTILIZER, and the fertilizer was put on trains, and the trains took it to farms in Germany and Poland, in France and Belgium, in Italy and Greece.
He remembered Moskovitz, back in the D.P. camp, picking up some dirt in her fingers and saying how the very earth was sullied—what did she say? contaminated? cursed?—he could not recall. But he thought, yes, it is true, there is not an inch of soil in all of Europe unsanctified by Jewish blood.
Rifka kicked a little. He had been squeezing too hard.
“Easy, girl,” he said.
Tears began to roll down his cheeks—at the thought of hurting her.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the cow, rubbing her haunches and making little cooing sounds in her ear. “Sorry girl, I’m sorry.”
CHAPTER 22
I put down the journal and walked out onto the catwalk. The cars with their American flags and Mogen David bumper stickers were back in their assigned spaces. The first evening of Rosh Hashanah had come and gone. I wondered if it meant anything. I wondered if God’s book was really open, and if He was thinking about all these people who owned these cars, and if it really mattered to Him what they did or thought or said. I doubted it highly. The time of judgment was supposed to be upon us. I found myself laughing at this.
I would have liked to call the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Or Mr. Kaufman at the Holocaust Archives. I would have liked to set the wheels of supposed justice in motion. But what justice? God loved him.
They had slept through the crime of the century—both of them, God and my father. They had felt no pain. Why should either of them wake up now?
And, of course, in the world of Nazi criminals Heinrich Mueller was as insignificant as one of his beloved Sachertorten. Even if the Allies had captured him back in 1945, he probably wouldn’t have done any time. He was just a bookkeeper, they would have said. He was as nobody as anyone could ever be. A nothing. A zero. Not worth the time. And if, today, in some incomprehensible act of revenge, they did deport him, so what? He wouldn’t even know he’d left the country. He lived in the world of Leberknoedel and jam-filled cookies now, as if none of it had ever happened. It was too late for justice. Too late for anything.
I saw it all so clearly. He was a coward, that’s all. And stupid. If he’d just let himself get caught in the first place, he’d have had a normal life. If he had just been a little less clever, I might have been born in Hamburg or Bremen and not been raised on his manna of bitterness and guilt.
I wanted God to come down as a pillar of fire, reach out with His awesome hand in fury and vengeance and erase my father’s name from the annals of man. Like Amelek. Like Pharaoh. Like Haman.
It was a hot, sticky night. The breeze that tried to cool our little stretch of Florida had given up. Even the breeze knew it was hopeless. I could hear the alligators crying in the canals. Frogs were clinging to the walls of the building, and two palmetto bugs were casually making their way along the edge of the walkway like an elderly couple at the mall. They seemed to like each other. They made me think of my mother and father. My father. God had chosen him, that’s all there was to it—if there was a God, that is—chosen him to bear the guilt for all of them. For all of us. Perhaps he was the reason the world had been able to move on, to free itself from an endless cycle of retribution and bloodshed. Perhaps he was a Just Man.
I must be going nuts, I thought.
I looked at my watch. It was two in the morning. I was drunk with sleeplessness, that’s all.
But I was too restless. I got into the car again, and this time I drove to Lake Worth, crossed the causeway to the ocean, and parked near the beach. I climbed down onto the sand and took off my sneakers and socks, and, holding my shoes in my hand, I made my way out to the surf. The moon was full, the stars were out in full regalia, and I could see far along the beach a world of shadow and foam. The lights from the boardwalk spilled onto the sand here and there in garish swaths of sickish yellow and sallow green. The water splashed on my feet and tugged at my toes as it sucked its way back into the sea. As the surf retreated, it left behind rows of shells and bits of stone, which in daylight would be brightly colored and shiny. I had forgotten seashells. We didn’t have much of that back in San Francisco, where the ocean guarded its treasures more closely. I picked up a few, then threw them back, wondering about the creatures that once lived in them. Where did they go, once they gave up their little happy homes?
The ocean seemed to have no end, but I knew that somewhere out there was Cuba, I mean, if I turned my head to the right—but I was looking straight out into the darkness, and straight ahead, if I remembered my geography, was…was…I wanted to say Spain, but that wasn’t correct. It was Africa. Liberia. Senegal. The Ivory Coast. A place as distant and foreign as any place could be, and it was right in front of me, invisible only because my eyes couldn’t see that far, at least not in the dark.
All I could think of was sailing away toward that nightmare of foreignness, to a land where no one would know who I really was.
I turned to go back to the car. Walking along, I noticed a conch shell half buried in the sand. It was mostly broken, but I picked it up anyway. I didn’t know why. Probably because the exposed, pink insides reminded me of something. I sat for a few minutes in the car with the motor off, trying to repress the anxiety that was rising in me. Without thinking, I lifted the conch to my ear, and was surprised that, broken and partial as it was, I could still hear the echo of the ocean in which it had once lived. To me, that was beautiful. I sat there with the windows rolled up, listening to this little version of the ocean for a long time, while outside, the sea itself pounded against the shore in absolute silence.
CHAPTER 23
I had already taken all the pictures down from the walls—the Chagall print of the old Jew wrapped in his black-striped tallis, the tapestry of Jerusalem as it might have appeared in the days of Solomon’s Temple, the little watercolors of Arab shepherds resting their flocks among the cedar trees. Now I moved the couch away, revealing the rest of the wall, which, hidden from the sun, was two shades darker than above. I stood back and admired the smooth, vaguely salmon-colored space (“White Rose,” Mother had called it), and thought of one of those war rooms in cop movies, where they tack the clues up on the wall. That was exactly what I had in mind. I opened a fresh roll of masking tape—the man at the store promised me it wouldn’t pull off the paint—and reached for my first piece of evidence.
It was a family photo, but whose family was not entirely clear. I believed it to be a photo of my grandparents. I had found it in a box of dozens of antique photographs of people in European dress, almost entirely from the turn of the century. In this particular photo, the resemblance of the
sitters to my father—the sharp nose and long earlobes of the man in the picture, the soft, sleepy eyes of the woman—was uncanny. They might as well have jumped out of the picture and pinched me on the cheek, crying, Bubele!—my dear little grandson! Although they might also have said “Liebchen!” instead of “Bubele!” for the couple was rigorously nonsectarian. The woman sat rigidly on a divan, and the man stood beside her, one hand rakishly poised on his hip, the other protectively, or perhaps possessively, guarding the back of the sofa. The difference in their postures was remarkable. She was stiffly upright, head reared back like a horse on a short rein, shoulders erect, and though her legs were hidden under a long, flowing hem, her bosom was prominent enough to strain the lace of her bodice. Her hair, too, was perfected in a tight bun with but a single strand escaping round her left ear. She might have been the picture of nobility, had she not been so relentlessly bourgeois. He, on the other hand, slouched in a cocky, relaxed posture, bright-eyed and radiating energy. Frozen though he was in time, you could feel him fidget, anxious to get going. I could practically hear him cracking jokes between his teeth, ready to fly once the powder flashed. Perhaps I took after him. Behind these two disparate figures was a painted backdrop of trees and parkland. What an odd aesthetic, I thought, to put a divan in a park. I wondered what they were trying to convey—and did in fact convey to each other—that had become lost in the ruin of generations? I stared in wonder at the photograph, looking for its clue.
I found it in the beautifully and rather self-possessed imprint embossed in the lower-right-hand corner of the dark gray cardboard frame into which the photo had been set: Adolf Zucker, Photograph, Hundestrasse 15, Berlin.
Very well then, my grandparents—for who else could they be?—had lived in Berlin. I taped the photo to the wall, in the very center of the wall, in fact. Beneath it, I pressed a sticky Post-it on which I had written: Grandparents. Berlin. Year? Greta. Wilhelm. Then under that, in parentheses, I added: (Golda? Velvel?). My father had at different times called them by different names.
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