The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “A sore throat, Kommandant? That’s an odd complaint for this time of year.” Hehl pressed a stick on the Commandant’s tongue. “Say ‘ahh’.”

  “Ahh.”

  “It’s not red.”

  “It’s almost autumn,” Strauss said. “My allergies usually kick in.”

  “It’s not like you to complain about a common malady.”

  Hehl felt the Commandant’s throat.

  “You took the training at the Hygiene Department?” Strauss asked.

  “Which part?”

  “Racial purity,” Strauss said. “From the Reichs Sippenamt.” Reich Office of Genealogy.

  “The subject came up, but it was not emphasized.”

  “No?”

  “It made people uncomfortable,” Hehl said. “They left it as a given. A Jew is a Jew, an Aryan is an Aryan.”

  “Did they define Aryan?“ Strauss asked.

  “In what way?” Hehl said.

  “Well—by percent purity. Did they ever mention how much Pole or Negro, or even Jew a person could have before they considered that person a non-Aryan?”

  “Race mixing was not expressly discussed. But it troubled the Reich.”

  “How?” Strauss asked.

  “A half-Jew could never serve,” Hehl said.

  “What about a quarter Jew?”

  “Probably not.”

  “A tenth Jew?”

  “How could you ascertain who was or was not one-tenth a Jew?” Hehl asked.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Strauss said. “Didn’t they teach you?”

  “No.”

  Strauss sat on the exam table staring at his feet. Hehl wrote notes in the Commandant’s medical file.

  “You know Vienna,” Strauss asked.

  “Do I know Vienna,” Hehl said.

  “You loved her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I loved her too. My family is from there.”

  “I knew that,” Hehl said. “What an honor to be part of such a family.”

  Strauss hesitated. “Perhaps not,” he said. He hesitated again. “Some discoveries have been made—some skeletons have come tumbling out of our closets.”

  Hehl kept writing. “Anything titillating?”

  “You can’t say anything to anyone. It has to remain between us.”

  “Always.”

  “It seems we have some Jews in our bloodline.”

  Hehl didn’t look up. “Jews?”

  “Yes. Distant relations on my father’s side.”

  Hehl stared down at the paper in front of him. “How distant?”

  “I don’t have all the information, but it looks like Strauss Senior’s grandfather.”

  Hehl looked at his watch. He wrote.

  “All those notes for a sore throat?” Strauss said.

  “Ja,” Hehl said. He noted the day, time, and precise wording of the Commandant’s confession. “What was his name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The Jew in your bloodline.”

  “Johann Michael Strauss.” He stood. “From Hungary. I believe he converted, but to Catholicism.” At the door, Strauss turned to the doctor. “What do you think?”

  “You’ll be fine. Just allergies.”

  “About my family,” Strauss said.

  “Trivia,” Hehl said. “No one will care.”

  “It makes my heart sick to think about Vienna,” Strauss said.

  “Mine too,” Hehl said. “But I know I will return.”

  The doctor took the Commandant’s medical file back to his office and wrote “Johann Michael Strauss, Hungary” in it.

  AFTER TWO MORE VISITS WITH HIS SECRETIVE patient, Hehl was not sure a child was growing in Greta Strauss’ belly. But he was sure she had a lump growing in her breast.

  “You need to go to Berlin,” he told her one bright October morning.

  “What will they do there?”

  “Operate, probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “I can’t be sure—I’m not a surgeon. It’s most likely benign, but surgery is the only way to tell.”

  “What do I tell Franny?”

  “The truth.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I can tell him if you want me to.”

  “No,” she said. “What about the baby?”

  “This early an operation shouldn’t affect a baby. But stay off the horse,” Hehl said. “You don’t want to fall. You don’t want a miscarriage.”

  “You’re not even sure I’m pregnant.”

  “Just to be safe,” Hehl said.

  Greta left the doctor and went to the stables. She saw Jakub brushing the horse. “Saddle him,” she said. She mounted the horse and they went outside the camp, through a back way toward the valley. Jakub walked beside the horse holding the reins.

  “You’re looking well fed,” Greta said to Jakub.

  He looked at her, above him on the horse. She had dark hair in a nation of the fair. She looked ahead, at the sun on the hills.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said. “But I don’t believe in that.”

  They walked past some tall plants with broad, dying leaves along the road. The leaves were gray with ash. Jakub slowed. Greta saw him looking at the leaves. They walked ahead, to a shady clearing beneath some trees. Greta lay forward and turned her head and rested it on the horse’s mane.

  “What am I going to do?” she said.

  Jakub sat on a rock and looked past her, toward the hills that rose from the valley. Greta sat up. She swept her hair back and turned away. She spoke to the hills.

  “I’ve always been in control,” she said. She turned toward Jakub. “Why is this happening? We were so happy before.”

  She slipped over and took Jakub’s hand. She was shaking. She looked down at him and parted her hair with her other hand. She felt warm. Her neck flushed and her face felt hot and she thought it was from tears.

  “Go on back, huh?” she said. “Go on back now. I think I want to be alone for awhile.”

  Forty Six

  On June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion at Normandy Beach landed Americans on the European front. From Normandy, under the command of Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, allied troops spread across the western part of the continent. By July, Hitler’s high command was in enough disarray that senior officers including Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and General Henning von Tresckow tried to assassinate him at Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s secret Easter Front headquarters. By August, allied forces had retaken most of France, liberating Paris on August 24th with the help of the French Underground.

  The Germans were in retreat on several western fronts by September, but in the east, at 8:00 p.m. on October 2, Germany declared victory over Warsaw with the “capitulation declaration” signed by General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and emissaries of General Bor. The Germans evacuated Warsaw, sending fifteen thousand fighters, five thousand wounded, fifty thousand “dangerous elements,” and one hundred fifty thousand innocents to any camps that still had space.

  AN ENGINE PULLING TWELVE DECREPIT passenger cars rounded the knoll that opened the panorama of the Koscieliska on the outskirts of Melinka. The cars carried survivors of the latter days, people who had eluded capture until this late in the war. In the fall of 1944, these survivors included members of underground groups who spent days and nights in hollows and tunnels and bunkers, drinking dirty water and eating rodents and mangy cats. Latter day survivors also included “enemies of the Fatherland.” These were political dissidents; Catholics; Communists; Red Army POW’s; gypsies; and people with chronic or debilitating diseases such as multiple sclerosis or Crohn’s colitis.

  Stragglers from the failed rebellion in Warsaw were survivors of the latter days. Mostly Jewish or Polish women, conventional wisdom labeled them whores. Whores were likely to survive, the convention maintained. Soldiers needed whores. Rebels needed whores. Whores would be fed, sheltered, fucked and protected.

  The train slowed and the people abo
ard looked through dirty, scratched windows. They saw delicate Melinka nestled in the valley Scott Fitzgerald made famous with boozy letters to his editor and a few movie producers (some even visited and photographed the Koscieliska to scout locations). The unmolested village idyll provided soldiers at the camp a nearby place for rest and recreation. On those rare visits from spouses and girlfriends, they were able to treat their girls to the wonderful surroundings, rather than the woeful center, of their daily awful lives.

  Himmler ordered Organisation Todt to place a “resettlement camp” near Melinka in a nod to the success of Theresienstadt, an SS-run Czech ghetto with a happy face—well-stocked dummy stores, cafes, schools, gardens, even healthy-looking people—designed to deceive Red Cross ambassadors and newspaper reporters. After all, look what the British press had stirred up in Parliament about Britain’s dreadful neglect of the Poles in Warsaw. Bad press, Hitler knew, could force otherwise circumspect leaders to act. The Führer also knew that one front alone does not win a war. The propaganda front had always been a fundamental component of the Nazi strategy and Hitler waged a public relations blitzkrieg.

  During the so-called Great Terezin Embellishment, Theresienstadt “guests” enjoyed a children’s opera, Brundibar, while the SS filmed The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews, a propaganda pastiche that showed ghetto Jews living well under Hitler’s benevolent protection. The film’s director, Kurt Gerron, was a cabaret performer and actor who appeared with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. After filming wrapped and the ruse ran its course, the Nazis sent cast and crew to Auschwitz, where they executed Gerron and his wife on October 28, 1944. The film was posthumously edited into short propaganda “bites.”

  To maintain the Melinka ruse, Himmler ordered a “don’t shit where you work” policy that was more pragmatism than propaganda. Heinrich Petersdorf had been brilliant in its implementation, helping make camp Melinka a model of death by design. To make the village more accommodating, Petersdorf immediately squelched or assuaged any outbursts there by his staff. He sometimes attended Fr. Waleska’s Catholic mass, especially on holidays. He ordered community involvement. Guards and kapos helped villagers fight fires or dig drainage canals after spring floods. To prevent messes on the tracks, Petersdorf stationed guards along the railroad before, within, and after the village. These “trackers” kept constant watch on the trains. Where before they shot anyone jumping from windows or cattle doors, now they sent a special team of kapos to track the fleeing escapees and bring them back, dead or alive, but quietly. They scooped up anyone who landed beneath a locomotive’s steel wheels, loaded the body aboard an unmarked van, carried it into the camp, and burned it.

  On the issue of cattle cars—a death camp cliché—Petersdorf ordered that no livestock vehicle ever enter camp Melinka. Designed for life, not death, livestock cars provided unparalleled opportunities for escape and created a circus-like atmosphere. Hands, feet, heads, hair, faces, even whole bodies dangled between the planks in these cars. Asses stuck out and people shit and pissed their way through the village. Crowds of adults and children cheered, watched, jeered, and helped—by throwing food, running alongside and grabbing hands, aiding escapes, taking valuables for “safe keeping,” and sometimes dying themselves. Instead of livestock cars, Petersdorf used Hehl’s requisition skills to arrange that only passenger cars or solid boxcars with no windows or openings made inmate deliveries to the Melinka Resettlement Facility.

  The major’s public relations proved effective. The villagers remained, if not warm to his men, at least tolerant. Merchants didn’t close shop and vanish when they saw soldiers coming. Whores were available. Complaints from local gmina councils and powiat men by way of the Reich to the desk of Franz Strauss were rare.

  “PULL. PULL. PULL. PULL.” NAKED MEN YELLED from an outdoor swimming pool of painted concrete littered with fallen leaves. They drank beer and laughed on this warm October afternoon. The pool sat a few meters from a closed metal door, where Corporal Walkenburg and other guards tugged on large handles. Von Kempt supervised.

  “You packed it too full,” one of the men in the pool yelled. “Dumb fucks.”

  “You packed it too full,” von Kempt repeated sarcastically. He pointed with his riding crop. “Get your boot up there and push off the wall.”

  Walkenburg stuck one foot against the wall and wrapped his slender hands on the handle.

  “You other men—hold onto him.”

  One man wrapped his arms around Walkenburg’s waist. The other man wrapped his arms around the waist of the first man.

  “Ready, children,” they heard from the pool.

  “Can I tell them to shut the fuck up?” Walkenburg said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” von Kempt yelled back. “Now open this son of a bitch.”

  “You girls need help?”

  Von Kempt turned and saw two of the men from the pool standing wet and naked on the concrete. “Get your fucking clothes on.”

  “Ja wohl!” The men in the pool saluted and laughed.

  The door moved.

  “It’s coming, lieutenant.”

  “About time. The next moron who overloads this will be inside it.”

  The door groaned backward and an arm flopped out.

  “Get a grip around the sides—over here, over here.”

  Three men gripped the side of the door and pulled. One of the naked men stepped up and grabbed the top edge.

  “You stink.”

  “Me?”

  “Drunk fuck.”

  They pulled the door back and bodies tumbled out. They were naked and the women had no hair. Shit smeared their skin and blood caked their ears and eyes and the hollow spots around their noses. Bruises and vomit covered their cheeks and lips. There were children with their skulls pushed in and fingers with hair and blood and bits of mortar embedded under the nails.

  Von Kempt stepped away. “Bring the trucks around.”

  AFTER SELECTIONS, A LINE OF SHIVERING PEOPLE crammed an outdoor tunnel made of bricks on two sides and covered with an arched barbed-wire trellis woven with pine branches and leafy camouflage from the forest beyond the valley. Some people cried and some talked; some trembled or knelt; some prayed. Others stood motionless, staring blankly at sparse strokes of sunlight through the branches and the leaves.

  Those at the beginning of the line heard a commotion and looked toward the end. Kapos with shears went from woman to woman, cutting hair and saving it in baskets. One barber—a thin, nervous woman—came to a red-haired beauty with locks to her ass.

  “What are you doing?” the beauty said.

  “You won’t be needing it,” the barber said.

  “What? Of course I’ll need it!”

  The barber’s hands shook as she raised the shears. “No.”

  “I’m going to have a shower. I’ll have it all clean.”

  The barber took the beauty’s hair and she kicked and fought. The barber stepped back. “Stop it!” the barber said. “You’re all fools. Stop fighting before it goes worse for you.” She raised her hand to the red head again.

  “Don’t touch me, bitch!”

  The barber whistled. Two guards pushed up the line. They grabbed the red head and took her away from the others. They smashed her head three times hard into a wall of stone.

  “Give me the scissors,” one of the guards screamed.

  The barber hesitated.

  “Give them to me!”

  She handed them over. They grabbed the beauty’s hair and cut it. The guard gave the hair and scissors to the barber.

  “No one wants a bloody wig,” the barber said.

  “It’s red,” the guard said. “Who’ll notice?” They dragged the beauty away.

  The line moved. People in the back saw those in front entering a cavernous chamber with a light. They heard the guards calling back and forth.

  “Can we get everyone in?”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone—can we get everyone in?”

 
“Tightly.”

  “Sardinenpackung?”

  “Nein!”

  “Okay. That’s fine.”

  The chamber swallowed the line.

  “We’ll have the showers on momentarily.”

  All this business about hair: there were lice and the first thing they would smell when the doors closed was a de-licing compound, the kapos explained. Everyone knows lice live in hair. The guards closed the doors. A private carried a canister of Zyklon-B crystals up a ladder. He walked across the roof of the chamber and gave the canister to Corporal Walkenburg. The corporal whacked the canister with the sharp end of a hammer. He slid open a slot on the roof and poured the crystals through.

  Against the light in the chamber, people saw the crystals fall, like sleet, clear and clean. They smelled the odor and though they were packed tight, they knew they would be clean. The lights went out and gas rose from the floor. The men on the roof heard the first cries as death entered the room. They heard the struggle, the strong trying to climb over the weak, hands pounding and digging the walls with screams and anger or angry resignation. The men on the roof checked their watches and did what they always did at this time—they opened a second slot in the roof and yelled down encouraging words.

  “Up here. Fresh air. Up here.”

  “Breathe,” a private said. “Disinfect your lungs.”

  They watched faces appear near the opening. They saw eyes and noses, mouths and cheeks; the top of a head and a brow; the veins in a passing neck. They saw hands and shirtsleeves, collars and buttons. Teeth. If they saw a gold filling, they would make a mental note and complain it had been missed. They heard coughing become choking and choking become retching.

  But through the sour little opening, they couldn’t see a father crush his son, or an old woman pinned to the floor and trampled. They couldn’t see people clawing the walls, embedding their nails until their fingers bled. They couldn’t see a mother using her mouth to give her daughter air. They laughed at the ones they did see and shoved them back with the butts of their rifles.

  “Breathe,” the guards said. “Breathe. It will all be over soon.”