The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  Her feet were on a stand of large rocks. She stepped off the rocks and kicked through the water and turned the two of them toward the shore. The water became murky and when she lowered her feet to walk, she felt nothing. She struggled to keep them afloat and moved a little farther and lowered her feet again and again felt no bottom.

  “Shit,” she said.

  She moved them back to where she knew the rocks made a solid footing. She saw the rocks through the water and lowered her feet and stood, supporting Karl in about five feet of water. She saw his eyes open and close.

  “Can you stand? Try to stand.”

  She was weakening and having trouble keeping him afloat. She felt him support himself barely. She looked up, at clouds trying to close the sky. She looked at Karl. She rested. Then she began pulling them toward the shore. In a few meters, the current grabbed her and pulled her under. She fought and tried to touch bottom but the water was deeper. She panicked. She couldn’t see Karl but she didn’t remember losing him. She stretched her arms and swam, toward the Sun, where she saw it penetrating the water’s surface. The current pulled her down again and she felt faint and breathless. Her arms flailed and her legs felt numb.

  “I’m going to die,” she thought. She panicked and fought her way toward the surface but the current pulled her back. She thought about Karl. She prayed. “We can’t die. Please, don’t let us die.”

  She saw the surface recede and she felt helpless in the river’s grip and she thought against all good sense to let the current carry her. It would swirl and sweep and carry her down and drown her and take everything away. It would bring the end and the cloudless sky and the rainbow after the storm. She let the river carry her and it carried her, to three feet of water over smooth gray pebbles, about two meters out from the shore.

  VILLAGE

  Forty Three

  Frau Strauss stood by the window in her bedroom on the second story of the Commandant’s quarters, looking toward the Dolina Koscieliska. She saw the reflection of the moon on the greenhouse glass.

  “Come back to bed.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “I want to hold you,” her husband said.

  She looked outside at the grounds. “No one cares what you do here, do they?”

  Strauss slipped out of bed.

  “It’s pathetic,” she said.

  He took his wife’s shoulders. “Is that why you shot that woman? Because no one would care?”

  Greta turned to her husband. “Why did she come to you? Were you in love with her? Did you get her pregnant?”

  “Gretty. That’s absurd.”

  She looked away.

  “Why did you come here?” Strauss asked.

  “To be near you,” she said. She wriggled away and went to the door. “I hate this,” she said. “We had a life.”

  Before he could say anything, she slipped out the door. He heard her step down the stairs and then he heard nothing.

  MORE ARRIVALS THAN USUAL DE-TRAINED at Camp Melinka. Young soldiers with rucksacks slung over their shoulders or hanging at their sides stepped off a rail car and stood outside the gates. They slept as the train entered the camp and now they rubbed their eyes and looked around. They covered their noses and some laughed uncomfortably. One boy dropped his hand from his nose and took a deep breath.

  “Pussies,” he coughed to the others.

  “New personnel—over here. Line up.”

  An SS Blockführer, corporal or Unterscharführer rank, stood a few feet inside the gate. The new recruits lifted their bags and fell in. “Follow me,” the Blockführer said. He was a big man but walked quickly. The boys slowed and looked around. The boy who breathed deeply felt his knees give out and he toppled. The others stopped and ran to him.

  “Leave him,” the Blockführer yelled.

  “Leave him, Herr Unterscharführer?”

  “He’ll come around.”

  They turned a corner and almost stumbled into a pile of corpses. Two more collapsed.

  “Tough lot,” the Blockführer said.

  They started to walk and one boy felt something grab his pant leg. He stumbled. He saw an arm, outstretched from the corpses, and a head with two eyes barely open. The woman had surprising strength in her grip.

  “Please,” she said.

  The boy looked at her.

  “Pull me out,” the woman said. “Just pull me out.” She struggled to breathe. She gathered more of the boy’s pant leg and held it. “Please,” she said.

  The boy reached down but the Blockführer grabbed his arm. The Blockführer raised his rifle and thrust it butt-down toward the woman’s head. The boy yelped. The Blockführer missed and raised the rifle again but something stopped him. Jakub Chelzak held the Blockführer’s arm in a wicked grip.

  “What?” The Blockführer tried to pull back. Chelzak was thin. His arms were thin and his hands were big and bony. The Blockführer was used to tossing these people aside—they never weighed much, they were weak. But he couldn’t retrieve his arm.

  “You want to die?” the Blockführer asked. He tried to bring his arm to the rifle, but Jakub tightened his grip.

  “Pull her out,” Jakub said.

  The Blockführer hesitated. He yanked on his arm, but Jakub squeezed.

  “Pull her out!” Jakub said.

  “Pole—I can’t understand you.”

  “Ziehen Sie sie heraus!” Jakub said.

  “You’re crazy,” the Blockführer said. Jakub tightened his grip and the Blockführer winced. “All right,” he said.

  The Blockführer handed his rifle to the recruit and put his arms under the woman’s shoulders and pulled her free from the heap of bodies. She gasped. Her naked, skinny body lay white in the sun.

  “Now what?” the Blockführer said.

  “Unterscharführer.”

  The Blockführer turned. He clenched his teeth. Petersdorf came up to them. “What are you doing?”

  “Dealing with a situation, Herr Stürmbannführer,” the Blockführer said.

  “Where are your men?”

  “The men are here.”

  “Give me the gun,” Petersdorf said. “What is this prisoner doing here?”

  “She needs water,” Jakub said in broken German. “We were taking her to the infirmary.”

  Petersdorf looked at the Blockführer. “Ja, it’s true,” he said. The recruit nodded.

  Petersdorf whistled at two passing soldiers. When they came up, he pointed at the woman.

  “Take this to the infirmary,” he said. To Jakub: “I have a job for you.” To the Blockführer: “Get back to your men.”

  Jakub and the major walked across the camp together. They came around to the stables, where one horse lived. They went into the stable to the stall.

  “Kommandant’s horse,” Petersdorf said. “I want you to feed him, brush him, keep him clean. It’s a better job than the infirmary.”

  Jakub understood generally what the major was asking. Petersdorf looked at him in the shadows and picked up a brush. He approached the horse and ran the brush over the long hair along the side of its neck. Jakub watched the major’s slender, delicate hands. Petersdorf handed the brush to Jakub and straightened his jacket.

  “If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. He looked down at his boots. “I can’t help any of this. No one can, especially not a Lilliputian like me.”

  Jakub looked at the hay and dust streaming in the sun.

  PETERSDORF WALKED ACROSS THE GROUNDS and into a large, rectangular yard surrounded by barbed wire. Warehouses bordered the yard on three sides. The major turned and walked past three mountains. On a mountain of trunks, suitcases, purses, kit bags, and parcels, stagnant water shimmered in oily pools. Ten thousand blankets molted on the second mountain. Full size blankets formed an organized bottom. Couch and divan blankets and blankets for legs near a warm autumn fire girdled the heap. Baby blankets—pink and blue, quilted and woolen, softer and rougher, wound round and round to the summit.
A treacherous pass marked the third mountain—of baby carriages, wagons, and other wheeled things that periodically broke loose and plummeted, causing assorted injuries, including a broken shinbone and two broken fingers. Petersdorf entered a far office where clean young women with red, healthy cheeks sat reading lists to Dr. Hehl.

  “Neunzig und sieben thousand sets of men’s clothing; siebenzig und sechts tausend sets of women’s undergarments; neun tausend girl’s dresses; drei tausend kilograms women’s hair.”

  With each entry, Hehl banged the keys of a khaki-colored Burroughs service-issue adding machine. Petersdorf looked at it.

  “How did you manage that?” he said.

  Hehl looked up. “Stürmbannführer—I didn’t even hear you.”

  The physician started to stand. He looked old in his bifocals, but he was only twenty-seven.

  “Don’t get up,” the major said. He looked at the inventory lists. “What are you intending for this stuff?”

  “What I can’t sell, I trade.”

  “For what?”

  “This adding machine,” Hehl said.

  “How did you get an American machine?”

  “Soldiers need socks,” Hehl said. “And blankets.”

  “Since when did our soldiers start carrying American adding machines?”

  “Not our soldiers, Major.”

  “What?”

  “Kommandant likes caviar,” Hehl said. “You like vodka. That smelt from the other night—you think the Reich provided it?”

  “I didn’t think about it,” Petersdorf said. “Now that I am, I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

  “The Reich takes all the metal, all the tin, all the leather, all the rubber.”

  “Trading with the enemy is treason.”

  “Treason?” Hehl stood up. “You’re going to tell Kommandant and his lovely wife no more Belgian chocolates, no more English kippers, no more Russian caviar, and no more American books?”

  “Who has time to read?”

  “Kommandant reads two books a week. He just finished A Farewell to Arms—in English.”

  “A farewell to arms,” Petersdorf said. He looked at the inventory lists again. “These women?”

  “From the village, major.”

  Petersdorf looked at the teenagers. They smiled and blushed.

  Hehl sat. He started punching numbers again. “What about the stigmatic?” he said.

  The major looked at Hehl.

  “What can I trade for him?”

  The major smirked and shook his head.

  “I have some interest from the Commissariat of Research,” Hehl said. “They could get us things here.”

  “I’ve seen no evidence of any stigmata,” Petersdorf said. “Only hearsay and a few church records.”

  “That’s enough,” Hehl said. “They’re interested.”

  “Get rid of the carriages,” Petersdorf said. “That pile is a danger.”

  Hehl kept typing.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Ja, Stürmbannführer. I heard.”

  Forty Four

  In November of 1002, Emperor Henry II donated sixteen thousand square kilometers of land to the ruling house of Austria called the Wienerwald, or “Vienna Woods” on an official deed. Its low trees and gentle hills wrap Vienna with a forest five times larger than the combined boroughs of New York City.

  “A culture is no better than its woods,” the poet W. H. Auden wrote, and eight hundred years after Henry’s donation, the Vienna Woods—where Auden spent the last part of his life—became a centerpiece of imagination for the lights of western culture. In the Woods, Beethoven composed his later symphonies; Schubert wrote sonatas and his famous Lindentree; Mozart composed The Magic Flute; and Johann Strauss immortalized the forest in Tales from the Vienna Woods.

  Legends grew with the trees. Here, the tales tell, Beethoven first realized he was going deaf when, on one of his frequent walks, he could no longer hear the birds. Franz Kafka, scholars say, spent his only happy time with a woman in the Woods—perhaps his only happy time ever—four days with Milena Polak.

  Emperor Franz Joseph tried to lure back his wayward wife Elizabeth with Mayerling, a magnificent Wienerwald hunting lodge. If that legend is true, it is one of the bitterest ironies in European history. At Mayerling, Crown Prince Rudolph—the Emperor’s depression-prone son—shot himself and his seventeen-year-old mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, in the head. The crown prince committed this murder-suicide at the end of a singular year: 1888-1889. That year, Strauss wrote his Emperor Waltz; Sigmund Freud coined the term “subconscious”; and Clara Hitler gave birth to Adolf.

  Joachim Hehl leaned against a spruce on a hill in the Woods, reading the Physician’s Prayer by the 12th century Jewish scholar Maimonides:

  Almighty God, Thou hast created the human body with infinite wisdom. Ten thousand times ten thousand organs hast Thou combined in that act, unceasingly and harmoniously, to preserve the whole in all its beauty…

  A young man with small spectacles, a woman thin to emaciation, and two nondescript children walked by, chattering down a path snuggled against the hillside. They distracted Hehl and he looked away from the prayer and considered, for the seventh time that day, the role into which he would soon be forced: conscript. His stomach gnawed. A doctor in the Reich became “Herr Doktor,” a title bestowed most often by a subordinate—an enlistee, a nurse, or a prisoner. More doctors went to the camps than to the front or anywhere else.

  The Nazi master plan sold the camps as medical research facilities where physicians became caretakers of the German gene pool. The Nuremberg Public Health Laws enacted for the “Protection of German Blood and German Honor” gave doctors control over marriage, birth, education, employment, Nazi party membership, and professional status. Doctors enforced eugenics laws that mandated sterilization of some 350,000 people with inherited disorders. They classified individuals with physical handicaps, mental disorders, and chronic illnesses as Lebensunwertes Leben—unworthy of life—and referred them for Sonderbehandlung, or special treatment—a euphemism for euthanasia at the end of a phenol-filled syringe plunged into the heart.

  Hehl put in for service to the dismal science, where he could paper-push economic regulations based on studies of how “racial hygiene” influenced labor costs and productivity. But he had little likelihood of landing such a coveted desk job, usually reserved for conscripts with political connections.

  Hehl first read the Physician’s Prayer in his Philosophy of Medicine class during the second year of medical school.

  Yet, when the frailty of matter or the unbridling of passions deranges this order or interrupts this accord, then forces clash and the body crumbles into the primal dust from which it came.

  “The ‘frailty of matter.’ The ‘unbridling of passions.’ The ‘derangement of order.’ What an apropos description of—our own age.” Naturally the instructor, Professor Dr. Auster, a Jew, would see things in this way at this time, Hehl thought. “Will forces clash?” he asked the class. “Will bodies crumble into the primal dust?”

  Was National Socialism the natural order or a derangement of it?

  “A derangement, of course.” Auster sat with his lunch on the lawn next to Hehl and Fritzie Heiderich. “But I’d never say that in public.” The day was bright and blue in May. “National Socialism is a disease and war is the sickness it will spread,” he said between bites.

  “Interesting,” Fritzie said. He sipped a beer. “Hitler, then, is a bug?”

  “More hideous than Gregor Samsa,” Auster said.

  “I’m immune,” Fritzie said. He chewed, swallowed, and looked at Hehl.

  “Him, too.”

  “No one is immune,” Auster said. “You have to vaccinate yourself.”

  Hehl, lying on the grass, shaded his eyes from the Sun.

  Fritzie had to chew before he could speak. “How?” he asked.

  Auster considered. “If I knew that,” he said, “I doubt I would still be here.�
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  Thou hast blest Thine earth, Thy rivers and Thy mountains with healing substances… Thou hast endowed man with the wisdom to relieve the suffering of his brother...

  “So who was this Maimonides, who dared suggest man was endowed with the wisdom to relieve suffering?” Auster scratched the name “Maimonides” with a stubby chalk on a black board. He followed with “12th Century. Scholar. Physician to the Sultan of Egypt. Wrote numerous books on medicine. JEW.”

  “First and foremost, Maimonides was a Jew,” Auster said. “That means all of you who do not wish to hear about the wisdom of a Jew are permitted to leave this classroom with no penalty whatsoever. Remember, though, that you’ve been listening to the wisdom of a Jew for the past three months.”

  That none of forty students left—or even stood—was a testament to the times. National Socialism had not yet conquered Viennese academe, and Theo Auster’s popularity among his students was undeniable. He considered nothing too sacrosanct or above challenge—including his own ethnicity (he did not, however, practice a word or a wit of the Jewish faith).

  “Why do I say Maimonides was, above all, a Jew?” Auster paused. “Because he was steeped in Judaism.” He waved his hands. “It was him and he was it.” He stalked across the room. “Judaism was what he was about.” He handed a stack of papers to the first student. “Pass this around, please.” He spoke to the rest. “Maimonides’ biography and his famous Physician’s Prayer—sometimes attributed to Marcus Herz, a German physician, but I don’t believe that for a minute. Maimonides wrote it and I expect you to read it and comprehend it for tomorrow’s discussion.”