The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  She was surprised. “You know the term?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  So that was the way it was going to be. He thought she was a pampered girl from a family who’d had the foresight to get out early and had connections to people like Russ Bennett. He thought she was here on a lark, a kind of grand tour of postwar misery.

  “But my point is not too many Bryn Mawrtyrs want to leave jobs at swanky magazines to come to this bombed-out hellhole to look for needles in a haystack. Or to put it another way, to find Germans with sufficiently clean hands to run the press and publishing operations of the supposedly new Germany. What attracted you?”

  “I didn’t leave the swanky magazine. It left me. Now that the men are coming home, the girls are being sent back where they belong. Only I don’t really belong anywhere, so when I heard the Occupation had several million Fragebogen to sort through and not enough personnel who read German, I decided to sign on.”

  He looked across the desk at her. “So you’re inspired by patriotism?”

  She smiled, though she had a feeling her expression didn’t look any more genuine than his. “I’m not about to break into an imitation of Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America,’ but I am grateful to the country for taking me in, my brother and me both.”

  “And what about the country of your birth? No residual fondness for Germany before it became the Thousand-Year Reich?”

  “Not an iota. Not even before it became the Thousand-Year Reich. I hate Germany, past as well as present, and all things German.”

  He leaned back in his swivel chair and shook his head. “That’s what I was afraid of. Let me tell you something about our operation here. Some of our best denazifiers—an absurd term too close to fumigators, if you ask me—are German Jews. Chaps who got out of Germany before the war and became American citizens. They not only know the language, they have a sense of the psyche. They can read expressions and equivocations and evasions better than the Yanks who are fluent in the language but didn’t grow up in the culture. Needless to say, the Germans hate them. There’s even a rumor that during the war they guided American bombers to pinpoint their old hometowns. Rubbish, of course, but let’s not forget these are people who have been buying the big lie, the bigger-the-better lie, for thirteen years. The problem is we’ve had complaints, and not only from the Germans. Overzealousness is the way our people phrase it, and I don’t have to tell you that some of them have their own, shall we say, preconceived ideas about certain groups of people. So a word of caution is in order. We strive for fairness. I don’t want to lose some of my best people because one of them gets carried away and word comes down from the brass no more German Jews in the denazification business. Now let’s get to work.” He leaned forward, picked up a fat handbook bound in gray cardboard, and held it out to her. “Military Manual for Control of the German Press and Publishing Industry” was written on the cover.

  “Take a look at it. Not that it’s likely to be much use. Pure military gobbledygook. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these things speak English,” he said in his own King’s version of it. “But it will give you an idea of what we’re supposed to be up to here. The idea is that you can’t build a democratic state without a free press and publishing industry. Simple premise, right? Except that neither is likely to be free if they’re run by Nazis. So part of our job, the part you’re going to be working on, is to weed out the undesirables. How we manage to do that is where it gets dicey. We interview people. We go over their Fragebogen, though often as not their answers on those questionnaires are pure fiction. ‘Were you ever a member of the Nazi Party?’ ‘What’s the Nazi Party?’ One of these days a customer is going to walk through that door and say, ‘I voted for the National Socialists in 1932 and was an enthusiastic member of the party right up to the moment the dear Fuhrer did himself in.’ That’s the day the entire office gets snookered on my dime. But until that halcyon moment, it’s our job to hand out various clearances to fill certain jobs in the newspapers and magazines we’re supposed to be helping them establish. Or not.” He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and his hands in the air. That was when she saw it. The pinky and ring finger of his left hand were missing. She glanced away, then back, then away again. In the hospital in Philadelphia where she’d volunteered during the war, she’d seen worse mutilations, far worse, but for some reason his threw her. She supposed that was because she hadn’t expected it. He was an officer sitting behind a desk, not a boy who’d come home on crutches or a stretcher, though he must have seen his share of field hospitals and surgeries during the war. If he noticed her reaction now, however, and she had a feeling he did, he gave no sign of it.

  “There are five categories.”

  With the thumb and index finger of his left hand he grasped his right pinky. Again her eyes veered away, then back. Now she wondered if he was trying to make her uncomfortable.

  “Exonerated or non-incriminated,” he went on. “They all claim that, of course.” He moved on to his next finger. “Followers or fellow-travelers. Then less incriminated.” He continued to work his way through the fingers of his good hand. “Activists, militants, profiteers, and incriminated.” He reached his thumb. “Major offenders. The problem is a lot of these Krauts who rate pretty high on the infamy scale were upstanding members of the community, more’s the pity for Germany, and even worse for us. They’re also the ones who know how to run a newspaper or magazine or publishing house, because they’ve been doing it for the past thirteen years. And if they wanted to keep doing it during those thirteen years, they became members in good standing of the Nazi Party. The others, the ones who managed to keep their skirts clean, were either small beer no one cared about or are dead.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Improvise. Use your judgment. Maybe even, God forgive me, your intuition. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough. You can sit in on my interrogations today. But come along, I’ll show you your office first. And introduce you to the others.” He started for the door, then hesitated. “You said America saved you and your brother both. Your brother isn’t by any chance the David Mosbach who works with the DPs and survivors?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “You mean the business with the dollhouse yesterday?”

  “Meer told me about it. According to him, your brother rode in like the cavalry.”

  She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It was one thing to be suspicious of her. Russ Bennett and those strings again. But he had no right to be sarcastic about David.

  “He’s doing good work over here,” she insisted.

  “I never suggested he wasn’t.”

  He opened the door and they stepped into the waiting area. Several dozen supplicants sprang to their feet and strained toward them, as inexorable as the tide to the moon. Sutton didn’t seem to notice the reaction. Head up, eyes straight ahead, he cut past them. She followed but couldn’t help glancing around. The anger was palpable. So were the misery and despair. Without intending them to, her hands clenched into fists. She would not be taken in by the suffering. They had brought it upon themselves.

  “I couldn’t have done that a few months ago,” he said when he’d led her into another office and closed the door behind them.

  “Done what?”

  He took a cigarette from the breast pocket of his jacket, put it between his lips, took out his lighter, and lit it, all with his right hand. “Ignored them. Behaved as if they weren’t human.”

  “What makes you think they are?”

  He shook his head. “Nice to know you took my little sermon about fairness to heart.”

  The office held a desk with a chair behind it, two in front of it, and a leather club chair wedged into the corner. It was a lot like his, only smaller.

  “The club chair is for when you have doubts about someone and want one of the others to sit in on the interrogation. The others bein
g Theo Wallach from Hamburg, Werner Kahn from a village near Stuttgart, and Jack Craig, who learned his German at Yale. Needless to say, they don’t always agree, and when they don’t, I get to play referee.”

  He walked around the desk. “Come here.” He waited until she was standing beside him, then leaned over to show her a button fixed to the inside of the well of the desk. “That rings in the guardroom. If you have any trouble, even a suspicion of trouble, press it and the MPs will be here on the double.” He started toward the door, then stopped and turned back. “One more thing I should mention. If you get a scientist or expert technician who wants permission to start publishing again, send him straight to me. It’s our job to expedite those chaps before the Russkies can get their hands on them. Understood?”

  “Perfectly.”

  He stood looking at her for a moment. “I can’t tell if you’re going to turn out to have a sixth sense about the Krauts, Captain, or if you’re in over your head.”

  That made two of them.

  * * *

  She spent the day sitting in the club chair in the corner of Major Sutton’s office as Germans filed in and out. Few of them noticed her. They were too busy sizing up the officer behind the desk who would determine whether they were destined to run a newspaper or edit a magazine or clear rubble. That gave her plenty of opportunity to scrutinize them. She studied their expressions and watched their movements, subtracted years from their faces and added weight to their bodies, ignored their shabby civilian clothes and imagined them in uniform: not the ubiquitous gray-green Wehrmacht uniform but the more ominous black of the SS. She’d made a mistake with the girls on the way to school that morning. Longing had clouded her vision. But from now on, she was going to be clear-eyed. Besides, those two faces from the railroad station were as sharp as a photograph in her mind’s eye, especially the younger one. She’d know those sizzling electric blue eyes anywhere, and she’d seen the perfect classical features on statues in the Greek and Roman galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the railroad station, she’d been horrified that she’d noticed how handsome he was. Over the years she’d tried to put the blame on the God she no longer believed in. Only a practical joker would paste a face like that on evil.

  She hadn’t come to Berlin to track down those two. She knew the odds of that were unlikely. Still, it would be an added bonus if she happened to. As she sat in the corner of Major Sutton’s office, she imagined sitting behind the desk in her own as one of them walked in, frightened, groveling, lying through his teeth. And she imagined herself catching him in his lies, exposing his crimes, meting out his punishment. She had to keep tugging her mind back from the fantasy to the business at hand.

  Some of the customers, as Major Sutton called them, came in bowing and scraping, others strutted; some waited to be invited to sit, others took a chair as if they were throwing down a challenge; some leaned forward eager and ingratiating, others sat erect, their faces arranged in masks of disdain for these barbaric Americans; some glanced nervously at the questionnaire on the desk as if it held a nasty surprise, as if they hadn’t filled it out themselves, others ignored it ostentatiously.

  The fifth or sixth customer—she’d lost count—came bowing into the office. He was short and carried a walking stick in one hand and a Tyrolean hat with a feather in the crown in the other. The walking stick was missing its knob and the hat was battered, but he was keeping up appearances.

  He stood waiting for Major Sutton to indicate a chair. When he did, the man bowed again to her, then to Sutton, and taking the fabric of his trouser legs between thumb and forefinger, hitched them up as he sat. It was hard to imagine that they could get more wrinkled than they were, but he was making it clear to them that he had his standards.

  Sutton glanced at the Fragebogen on his desk, then at the man.

  “You’re a printer, Herr Moller?”

  Herr Moller admitted that he was.

  “A member of the union?”

  Herr Moller shrugged. “One had to be to work.”

  “A member of the Nazi Party as well?”

  “I never joined the Party.”

  “Are you certain? We have ways of checking.”

  “I have no interest in politics, Colonel.”

  “Please don’t inflate my rank, Herr Moller. I’m a Major, as I think you know.”

  “Forgive me, Major. I have no interest in politics.”

  “Wasn’t that perhaps irresponsible, in view of what was going on?”

  Herr Moller nodded eagerly. “Ach, I can see that now, Major, but at the time I was a young man. And I was in love. Engaged to be married.”

  “I see.”

  Herr Moller leaned forward in his chair. “May I tell you about my fiancée, Major? She was Jewish.”

  The eagerness of the confession, even the way he pronounced the word Jewish, as if, like medicine, it tasted bitter but possessed healing qualities, made her want to slap him, but Sutton leaned back in his chair with his left hand in his pocket, crossed one leg over the other knee, and sat listening with that easy insincere smile.

  “She was a beauty. And so cultured. I’m no philistine, Major, but this lady, this angel, put me to shame.”

  “So your wife is Jewish,” Major Sutton said.

  The man looked startled. “Oh, no. No, Major. We never married.”

  “Why not? How could you let a girl like that get away?”

  The man shrugged. “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. It forbade relations between Germans and Jews. I was opposed to the law of course. But what could one do?”

  “I’ve been at this for three months,” Sutton said after the man had backed out of the office thanking him, “and I don’t think a week has gone by without at least one of these customers bringing up his beautiful, cultured Jewish girlfriend or fiancée. Before the war the Fatherland must have been crawling with comely museum- and concert-going girls of the Jewish persuasion.”

  “You think that’s impossible?” she asked.

  He closed the folder and swiveled his chair to face her. “I was questioning the veracity of the Krauts, Captain, not the likelihood of comely, cultured Jewish girls.”

  “Yet you gave him a fellow-traveler classification. Despite that ridiculous story about the Jewish fiancée.”

  “We can get them for party membership or lying on their Fragebogen,” he said turning back to the desk, “but not for toadying.”

  It went on that way all morning and well into the afternoon. One after another, they told their tales of what Sutton called the three I’s—innocence, ignorance, and impotence. They had been listed as members of the Nazi Party without their knowledge. They had sent their children to an elite boarding school run by the SS only because there was no room in the public schools. They hadn’t really published an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party rag, at least not knowingly. It had been lifted from another, more respectable newspaper. Through it all Sutton sat listening, trying to distinguish, he admitted to her when she questioned him between customers, the outright liars from the mere equivocators, the people who had made off with Jewish property from those who really had intended to store it for safekeeping, those who had avidly hounded Jews from those who had merely averted their eyes. And through it all he remained cool, distant, infuriatingly polite. Only once did he lose his temper. No, not lose his temper, merely permit himself to become engaged.

  The applicant wore a tweed hunting jacket that must have been fashionable in its day, and expensive, but the fabric was fraying and the empty right sleeve was pinned to the shoulder. He took one of the chairs in front of the desk without being invited to and launched into a chronicle of what he, what the entire nation, had suffered under the Allied bombings. Family and friends killed, the beloved home he—and his father before him—had been born in destroyed, his priceless stamp collection lost, his body, as they could see, maimed. He shrugged his right shoulder in case they hadn’t noticed the pinned empty sleeve.
She saw Sutton begin to take his hand out of his pocket, then change his mind. Poor Germany, the man repeated again and again, poor Berlin, poor Herr Lang. He referred to himself in the third person.

  Calmly, as if he were looking for a pencil or a fresh pack of cigarettes, Sutton opened a drawer, but instead of a pencil or a pack of cigarettes, he took out a photograph. She caught a glimpse of it as he handed it across the desk to Herr Lang. It was one of the pictures taken when the troops had liberated the camps. Bodies stacked like cordwood was the phrase everyone used, but she refused to. The inanimate analogy was another kind of murder. The fact that those people were dead did not mean they had never lived.

  “If you want to talk about loss,” Harry Sutton said quietly, “perhaps you’d like to discuss Dachau.”

  The man glanced down at the photo. “That, as you must know, Major, is a photograph of victims from your bombings of Dresden.”

  Sutton sat staring, his jaw tight as if he was locking in words. He held it that way for a moment, then relaxed, marked something on a card, and handed it over.

  “What did you rate him?” she asked after the man had left.

  He swiveled his chair to face her again. “Follower or fellow-traveler.”

  “After that comment about Dresden?” She was incredulous.

  “We can’t get them for self-pity or stupidity or recalcitrance any more than we can for toadying. Sometimes I think it would make just as much sense to flip a coin. And be twice as fast.”

  “Or perhaps it might make more sense to remember what these people did.”

  “All of them?”

  “Nobody ever voted for the National Socialists, but somehow they won elections. No one ever went to a rally, but in the newsreels those stands looked pretty full and the roar of the crowd was pretty loud.”

  “Collective guilt?”

  “More credible than collective innocence.”

  “I suppose you have a point. But then again so did our friend with the Jewish fiancée. ‘Was könnten wir denn tun? ’ Forget ‘Deutschland über Alles.’ That’s the new German national anthem. ‘What could we have done?’ And maybe they have a point.” He leaned back in the chair and studied her. “What did you do?”