The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  On Gerda’s last trips to Paris, her face tan and her legs pale, the friends most active in the SAP had urged her to be careful.

  “Nothing happens to me!” she said curtly. “I work for the right newspapers, I know the right . . . ”

  No one had had the courage to reply that the “right people” were among those they were starting to fear. And so she hadn’t noticed their intense unease or had chosen to ignore it, something she excelled at. With a nimble gesture she picked up the camera sitting on the table in front of her: from now on she’d work not only with the Leica but also with a movie camera that Capa had gotten from Time-Life, “you know, the famous American newsmagazines . . . ” This had driven them to congratulate her and, in part, calmed them. Gerda held the camera in the palm of her hand and gazed at it with the tender joy of one looking at a kitten so young it’s still cross-eyed. “You understand how useful to the cause my Leica is, right?” she concluded with a disarming smile.

  No, they didn’t feel like asking if she was completely aligned with the Communists, given that they were in Paris and she was returning to burn on the battlefields. And yet many of them would have liked to leave as volunteers; even a girl as prudent as Ruth was ready to go. For months she had been making time to take a nursing course, but when she finished the course she had been told it was too late. “Anyone who goes to Spain does so on his own. Our party doesn’t vouch for anyone.” Not even a Red Cross nurse? No, not even.

  Willy had run into Ruth, who was furious with the heads of the SAP and the absurd logic of parties and party factions, exasperated that it was repeated, over and over, even now that the Spanish people were dying every day in bombardments. “Look,” she had said to him, pulling out the latest issue of Regards, whose cover displayed a photo of Gerda’s under the accusatory headline “Guernica! Almería! Et démain?” It framed men and women at the gates of the hospital in Valencia, where victims of the bombing in mid-May had been brought. The report spoke of a “dress rehearsal for total war,” and Gerda’s photos showed corpses dumped on the checkerboard tiles: a boy in short pants, a naked man only partly covered by the bloody sheet, an old woman in black, maybe alive maybe dead, on a stretcher jumbled in with others. “They don’t need just photographers down there,” Ruth had said, scowling, incapable of letting out a drop of rage or disappointment. “Ach Scheisse!” Willy hadn’t asked if the heads of the SAP had persuaded her not to go or if she herself had reluctantly given it up.

  Thoughts can suddenly make a leap that catapults them outside the track they’ve been running on for years. William Chardack had often said to himself, and had repeated to his wife, that he had had undeserved luck. “You should thank comrade Stalin, dear, if the FBI can’t create more than so many troubles for me!” His wife had only to shake her head to make him understand that it wasn’t nice to mock her fear with that exaggerated black humor. But it was by chance that in Leipzig he had wandered into the orbit of a workers’ faction included on Stalin’s blacklist, a fact that the USA had also noted. All his friends had been close to the SAP, and so Willy had, too. All his friends (no: almost all), even the former leaders he had avoided naming to the investigating official, were still alive and getting by. So the SAP had been their salvation. The reasoning had the completeness of a logical demonstration. The flaw appears only now, as he thinks back to Ruth, who would have liked to save some lives and instead had feared for her own. All his friends (yes, all: including him) had thought that it was crucial to win in Spain, win at all costs, win period. But just Gerda, the only one who didn’t give a damn about the dangers, the considerations or anything, except arriving in the right place at the right time, had gone in the end and had remained.

  Dr. Chardack is sweating too much, he’s getting too lost in memories that are no longer a pleasant accompaniment to a Spaziergang, and so he accelerates decisively toward his goal.

  Mastman’s Delicatessen is an institution frequented principally by families who want to make their children happy and enjoy being able to put them to bed already fed. The delicious kosher hot dogs and the crispy potato latkes sell fast, along with the rounded slices of home-made Apfelstrudel snowy with powdered sugar. To buy some pieces of that famous sweet he would have to go past the few tables on the sidewalk, where mothers are forcing children to finish their meals, feeding the smallest or thinnest, cleaning up the bits left over on the plates themselves. And there he stops. He sees the big pans of strudel in the window, but he stops. He smells the wave of familiar aromas every time the door opens, the din of voices among which he distinguishes intonations, words, single phrases. He looks at the boys with the yarmulkes on their heads, who’ve been in a separate group since kindergarten.

  “I’m going backward,” he thinks. “I’m going rückwärts, like a crab.”

  If he went into the place now and asked for srree pieces of Apfelstrudel, they would answer happily in what they assume is their common mother tongue.

  “Sorry, my Yiddish is very poor,” he would say.

  “No problem, but with that accent we wouldn’t have thought so,” they’d respond.

  “I’m from Germany,” he would anticipate the question.

  “But you are Jewish, right?”

  Fair, he’s not fair, tall, he’s not tall, and he has a bulbous nose of a certain impressiveness. Dr. Chardack could even lower his underpants (hadn’t it been the master proof in the Thousand-Year Reich?), but the others wouldn’t understand why he’s never taken a day off for the High Holy Days, and has never appeared in the synagogue.

  Dr. Chardack often repeated that he was a man of science, and therefore detached from every religious practice and belief, until he understood that his imported formula, validated by centuries of enlightenment, had no purchase there in America. Science is science, they allowed, but the community you grow up in will never be a conference in California. What was he supposed to answer: that in fact yes, a community could exist without feeling that it belonged to a congregation or an original race? There was no way to be understood, never mind. But if they invited you for the Thanksgiving turkey, and then they invited you for Passover, what the hell were you supposed to do?

  In Korea he had patched up a young soldier who, recovered enough to be able to speak, had explained to him with feverish eyes that the chosen people had been punished for high treason and, given the importance of the mission, the rest of the world had unfortunately had to get involved. Without Hitler, the Jews would have abandoned the laws of the Lord, would have become reds or at least atheists, and the Communists would have won overwhelmingly, so now they had to be kicked out of this country in the ass end of nowhere.

  Chief Surgeon William M. Chardack was astonished to find such ideas in the head of a boy from some tiny town in the Corn Belt who, before ending up in the Army, had never encountered a Jew. But he had already discovered that there were rabbis who preached similar absurdities, when—it must have been ’47 or ’48—a traveling companion he’d parted from at Ellis Island had recognized him in the tumult of the garment district in Manhattan.

  After asking how he was, Sussmann had assailed him with his torments. The discomforts, the solitude: he had never been observant, but he had tried to show up at the temple with the age and the concerns of his Orthodox neighbors. He had followed them on Yom Kippur and had been dumbfounded by the rabbi’s speech: the elimination of Israel had failed, baruch Ha-shem, but what day could be more suitable for recognizing in that dreadful martyrdom a warning from on high?

  Sussmann trembled, very agitated, on the sidewalk crowded with people and rolling hangers being pushed toward the trucks parked along Seventh Avenue.

  “They’ve got an axe to grind, like all priests, Herr Sussmann, forget it . . . ” Dr. Chardack had interrupted him.

  “Please, let me finish!” Sussmann had begged him.

  That rabbi had stated first that human intelligence would never be at the height of the L
ord’s designs, but some facts are facts. Conversions and mixed marriages had spread, in Germany. And the uncontestable facts didn’t end there. Marx was a German Jew, Freud a Jew from Vienna, and Einstein had even won the Nobel Prize for the discovery that everything is relative. “Consider how many children of our people have become their followers or disciples!” the rabbi cried breathlessly. “Everything began in the place where the abandonment of the Torah was most serious; and the catastrophe nearly assumed the dimensions of the Flood.”

  Sussmann had fought in Belgium until 1918, had returned alive by a miracle, had opened an artisan’s workshop in Cologne, and after the racial laws were in place had divorced, by mutual consent, his wife, who later died there in the bombings, when he had just settled in America.

  The man, crying in front of a fleeting acquaintance (how old must he be: about the same age as his father?), had embarrassed Dr. Chardack. So he said goodbye to Sussmann, repeating that idiots exist everywhere, and had gone into a shop, where he looked at himself in his new three-button suit, a consistent man, a free man. Religion was not my problem. And the problems that his new fellow-citizens created for themselves about his origins, his style of life and of thought, were laughable compared with what he had experienced in Europe. It was enough, at that moment, to give up the strudel and walk another stretch of Hertel Avenue. It wasn’t worth it to waste more time there.

  Dr. Chardack is beginning to realize that his life in Buffalo resembles that flat street, provided with everything, which allows him to keep going straight. No one can recognize him there, the way Sussmann did in Manhattan, to remind him of things that the Jews of the East, gathered at the tables of Mastman’s, don’t even dream of talking about. Besides, his history isn’t reducible to the list of who has died or faded into the notions of deportation, internment, end. In many cases he doesn’t even know whether they disappeared through the chimney or only from his horizon. There wasn’t much hope for his father’s Jewish employees, or for the fur trade in general, that universe contained in the courtyards of Leipzig’s broad central avenue, the renowned Brühl. And his story wasn’t the same as that of many of his traveling companions, who had been registered as “Hebrew” under “RACE” or “PEOPLE” by the immigration inspectors in the Port of New York, a hand correction that wouldn’t have dismayed him so much if, emerging from the line of “alien passengers,” he hadn’t had the Statue of Liberty, colossal, before his eyes.

  How many classmates, aunts and uncles, cousins of varying degrees had ended up in the camps? What had happened to the parents and relatives of Gerda Pohorylle? She had chosen the work and the name, and had died in a cruel and stupid accident, yet in a war that, with her images, she wanted to win for all. She had fallen among comrades who had gone to fight against fascism: it didn’t matter what “RACE” or “PEOPLE” they belonged to.

  How many of his Leipzig friends and acquaintances had gone to Spain? Among the habitués of Friedrich-Karl-Strasse, among the students and young workers who hung around Georg Kuritzkes? How many hadn’t avoided the Lager and its extreme consequences? Dr. Chardack has no idea. But there’s a name that slips out there on Hertel Avenue, where it seems a mangled American word: Sas.

  A remorseful volunteer in the Great War, a physique toughened by work (steel mills in Saxony, naval shipyards in Hamburg), hands capable of denying anatomy and the proletarian epic to rest on a piano and set up a music school. The Dachshund had envied him only the Zündapp motorcycle that at a certain point Gerda had begun climbing onto for the illegal job of distributing leaflets. He had marveled that he wasn’t jealous when he saw her hold on to Sas’s back and vanish with a “Later!” on Pfaffendorfer Strasse, as if they were going on a country outing. But it was all so urgent in that period, and they got along very well, Sas and Gerda, although they were so different in appearance and past. No one would ever have imagined that that affinity would get them to the same goal.

  Sas was arrested in Leipzig in ’33 (as Gerda was, a little later), had ended up in Sachsenhausen for a year, then was released from the concentration camp and rearrested in Berlin. He was guillotined in the Plötzensee prison in Berlin, along with a handful of boys whom he had taught harmony, solfege, and the illegal use of the mimeograph machine. Ruth had told Willy in a letter dated May 1943. He had been an anarchist, radical socialist, member of the KPD, the German Communist Party (also for love of Dina, it seemed), expelled as a dissident from the KPD. How to explain it to the Americans? If you mentioned German resistance, they associated you, if you were lucky, with the group of aristocratic officers who, out of patriotism, had tried to bring down the Führer, but not before July 20, 1944. How could you explain that what little resistance there had been was thanks to the Communists, or people whom the Americans saw as the same?

  Someone like Gelbke, for example. Called the “red doctor” but highly regarded in all Leipzig, he had used the flow of patients to and from his clinic to make it a connecting point for people who had to hide or flee abroad. He had managed, and had gotten away with it, along with Dina. Merely the decision to stay with a Jewish wife, who knows how, required a nerve that had evaporated in the majority of Germans under the first rays of the swastika sun.

  No, the Americans couldn’t understand that everything had started long before, when it wasn’t yet a matter of life and death and the ideas opposed to the Nazi lie were not simply a defensive reaction.

  For Georg Kuritzkes, with that revolutionary upbringing, it had been easy. But Willy and his Jewish friends from bourgeois families were, with those same ideas, in opposition to their parents. Judging despicable their compliance with living quietly (“Who keeps the business going, who pays the suppliers and the salaries?”), pathetic the unrequited love for Germany, myopic and comforting the conviction that being excluded from certain spheres was only a detestable inconvenience. It was natural to feel superior to the old people, as it was to join forces with contemporaries who held the same views. And then there was her, the young woman who had had on her head a beret in the latest fashion, and had been transformed into a combatant in a very short span of time. How had she done it? Time, it’s true, had been proceeding straight toward the end of the line since she arrived in Leipzig. But she walked beside it with that aerial gait, free to turn the corner and disappear like a dream, a stylish chimera. That was the girl who enchanted him. And when the spark of a more flammable substance came to the surface, Willy Chardack, after a moment of distress, preferred not to see it.

  One of those uselessly revelatory moments went back to the early days, yes, it was 1930 and still cold. The fantastic girl from Stuttgart wasn’t yet used to sitting cross-legged on the floor of Georg Kuritzkes’s attic (those legs showed up better in the light coming from the dormers than on Dina Gelbke’s dusty carpets) and Willy was glancing at her. Her slender neck extended under the perfectly tamed bob à la garçonne, her lips, redefined in red, were pressed into a line like an attentive pupil, her eyes emitted flashes of disdain, intermittent glimmerings that stirred up the green of the depths.

  While they discussed the difficulties of organizing a National Youth Day in Leipzig, and the necessity of involving progressive students who were outside the party factions, Georg became nervous and stood up. How was it possible that they remained so blind and blocked, he said in irritation, when the majority of the workers in the third-largest industrial city were still inclined not to be divided between those who had kept their jobs and those who had lost them, were still united by the awareness that their poverty was due to capital and its servants, who were busy everywhere. In Germany the capitalists had made money on the war, profited from the hyperinflation, prospered in the golden years. But Chancellor Brüning certainly wouldn’t make the steel barons pay for the damage of the crisis that had followed, still less Hindenburg and the other generals, who should have had their possessions seized and been sent to the farthest estate available to shoot exclusively at wild boar. No way! The paras
ites in uniform and the manufacturers of cannons concurred in making the German people bear the debt of the war that they had incited. And since Brüning was their docile tool, the vise of his draconian cuts crushed the working class, including the veterans who had been sent to the front as cannon fodder and had come out alive.

  Georg looked at Gerda, Gerda looked at Georg, and, as she raised her eyes to him, her gaze softened, like someone waiting for the continuation of a story told by a great narrator who never relaxes his grip on his listeners, never lets the atavistic fear that leads to the epilogue oppress them.

  Thus the wolves had arrived. They had multiplied owing to the mistake of underestimating them, of believing them fierce but primitive beasts, of confusing them with German shepherds, animals that could be tamed, exploited at one’s own convenience. They wouldn’t have gone near the houses if the country hadn’t been so hungry. It was no longer only the lower middle class, the disabled, the lumpen, and the criminal underworld who were snared by the brownshirts. In every factory, warehouse, construction site, blast furnace that closed or cut production and personnel, the mass of the proletariat collapsed. Hunger was an evil counselor, and despair even worse. Hunger and despair worked for the fascists and their no longer very secret supporters. The ladies of high society were already competing to see who could gorge Hitler, in the face of the workers reduced to poverty by their consorts.

  “Let him choke! Get a fish bone stuck in his throat!” Gerda had cried.

  “Everybody knows the gentle butcher doesn’t eat fish or meat . . . ” a high-school classmate had retorted, opening up a tumult of comments.