by Annette Hess
“Trying to portray him as a resistance fighter now, are we?” the blond man interjected sardonically. The attorney was not deterred and added that he wished to call a witness to attest to his client’s disposition.
“The defense wishes to call the witness Priess to the stand.”
“Priess? There’s a different name in your written request,” the chief judge said.
“Just a moment . . .” The White Rabbit searched one of his documents for the name. “Yes, Priess is her maiden name.”
Maiden name, Priess. Eva felt as if someone had pulled the chair out from under her, the floor, the entire world. The defense attorney’s voice sounded over the loudspeakers.
“The defense wishes to call the witness Edith Bruhns to the stand.”
Eva stood up and clutched the side of the table. Everything was spinning. The blond man turned to her, his brow furrowed. Eva’s mind was racing: David must have said something! Given her away! But why as a witness for the defense? It couldn’t be! Eva sank back into her chair and caught someone’s eye in the crowd—the wife of the main defendant was watching her, squinting out from under her little hat like a mouse, a triumphant mouse.
“The court grants the request of the defense,” the chief judge now declared.
The blond man leaned over to Eva. “Bruhns? Is she in any way connected to you?”
But Eva just stared at the double doors being opened by the bailiff.
“MY NAME IS EDITH BRUHNS, née Priess. I live at three-eighteen Berger Strasse. I am a restaurant server by profession.”
“Frau Bruhns, when did you arrive at the camp?”
“September 1940.”
“And in what capacity?”
“I was accompanying my husband, who served as the cook in the officers’ mess.”
“How much did you know about the camp?”
“Only that prisoners of war were held there.”
“And what more did you discover on location?”
Edith remained silent. Someone called out from the gallery. Eva thought she heard the words “Nazi whore.” But maybe she was just hysterical. Up there at the witness stand, not three meters away, sat her mother. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry. She had put on her black suit, which she only wore to funerals. She was serious and pale. She bore herself as if she were onstage, but Eva could see she wasn’t acting—she was making an effort to be honest. She had placed her handbag in front of her, the handbag Eva had emptied so many times as a child and the contents of which she knew by heart: a comb, a handkerchief, eucalyptus lozenges, hand cream, and a wallet with the most recent photos of her children. Eva’s heart raced. Her mother’s voice reverberated throughout the hall. “I discovered that normal people were imprisoned there too. I mean, who weren’t criminals.”
“Did you not wish to leave, then? You had two young daughters.”
“Oh, I did,” Edith responded. “I told my husband that he should request a transfer. But then they would have conscripted him. They were desperate for soldiers at that point, you see. He feared for his life, and I stopped trying to persuade him.” She once witnessed a woman being shot, because it happened directly beyond her yard. She figured the woman was trying to flee. Eva could see the yard, the neighbors’ rose bed, the fence, the woman crumpling. She looked at her mother, here in the auditorium, and recalled the last time they’d visited the municipal building together. The play The General’s Trousers had consisted of little more than lewd one-liners, but they couldn’t help laughing and kept egging each other on. That was an entirely different lifetime. Edith was now telling the court that she first learned about the gas chambers from the main defendant’s wife. They were neighbors. She called her attention to the smell.
“Does that mean you were also acquainted with the main defendant?” the chief judge asked.
“Yes, we encountered each other from time to time. Outside the house or at social events.”
The defense attorney now stood and fumbled in the folds of his robe for the pocket watch he no longer possessed. Then he glanced at his wristwatch.
“Ma’am, did you encounter each other at the camp officers’ Christmas party?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall a specific incident from around that time?”
Eva saw her mother duck her head, trying to shrink like a child who doesn’t want to be seen, but knows: I’ve been spotted.
“I’m not sure what you mean.” Edith grimaced. She looked like Stefan when he was lying.
“Is it not true that on the following day, you filed a complaint with the Reich Main Security Office against the main defendant?”
“I don’t remember.”
Edith stared straight ahead. She hadn’t looked at Eva once. The room filled with whispers. The hands on the large wall clock ticked audibly. Five o’clock. Normally at this hour the chief judge would adjourn proceedings till the next day. Instead, he asked incredulously, “Frau Bruhns, you don’t remember? Surely you are aware of what such a complaint could mean at that time.”
The blond man leaned over to Eva and whispered, “Are you related to the witness?” He looked at her intently. Eva blanched and shook her head repeatedly.
The chief judge, the man in the moon, asked loudly, “Why did you denounce the main defendant, Frau Bruhns?”
At that, Edith Bruhns turned to face her daughter, as though taking her leave.
EVA RAN DOWN THE SIDEWALK, the evening commuter traffic beside her flowing like a dirty river of metal. Everyone in the auditorium that day now knew that in December ’44 her mother denounced the main defendant after he criticized the speech the propaganda minister had delivered to the Volkssturm militia in Berlin. Among other things, the main defendant said, “That firebrand is contributing to Germany’s demise.” Her mother had quoted this line in court. She composed the letter together with her husband and sent it off, although it could have meant a death sentence for the main defendant. An investigation followed, and the defendant with the raptor’s face was demoted, but then came peace. Peace! Eva was thrown backward—she started crossing the street, but now stood face-to-face with the hood of the car that had just hit her. She checked her body, which appeared unscathed, then looked at the furiously gesticulating driver behind the windshield. The man tapped his temple at her madly with one hand while repeatedly honking with the other. Then he leaped from the vehicle and rounded the front threateningly.
“I’ll turn you in! I’ll turn you in if there’s a single scratch!”
Eva watched the way he feverishly examined the car’s pristine body, the way he checked the paint from every imaginable angle above and below, smoothing his hand over it. He was wearing a checkered hat that was too small for him. Eva recovered from her shock and began to laugh.
“I don’t know what’s so funny, miss. This car just came from the factory!”
Eva couldn’t stop. She walked away laughing, covering her mouth with her hand as her eyes filled with tears and she struggled for air. She didn’t calm down till she reached German House. She stopped out front. On the other side of the street, a dark-haired woman was pushing a stroller over the sidewalk, then maneuvered it into the entrance of the apartment building there. Before the door closed, the woman noticed Eva in the distance and waved warmly. It was Frau Giordano. It seemed the family had managed to buy a new stroller with the money collected at German House. Eva entered the stairwell.
Inside the apartment, Eva went to her room and hauled her big suitcase out of the wardrobe. She fetched her toiletries bag from the bathroom and packed clothing, her dictionaries, a few favorite books, the folder containing her identification papers, and a photo she took from the wall above her desk. It was a picture of Stefan balancing Purzel on his head. Purzel looked unhappy. There was a knock on the door. Ludwig, wearing his white chef’s coat, came in; he was out of breath, as if he had charged upstairs from the kitchen, and he looked at the suitcase.
“I told your mother she should tell you beforehand. But she said it wasn’
t even certain the court would call on her. And then she would have caused an unnecessary commotion.”
Eva noticed a little fleck of green stuck to her father’s cheek. Probably parsley. She turned her back on him and didn’t respond. She added the hat and her blue notebooks to the suitcase and closed it.
“Where on earth are you going to go?”
Eva passed by her father wordlessly. As she stepped into the hallway, the front door opened, and her mother entered. She was in miserable condition and had clearly been crying. Her eyes fell on the suitcase in Eva’s hand.
“Let’s talk, Eva.”
Eva shook her head and went for the door.
“Please,” her father said.
Eva set down her suitcase. “I don’t want to live with you anymore.”
Edith stepped up to Eva. “Because I testified for the main defendant?” she asked in despair. “But they just arrested him! My testimony didn’t even help. And I had to respond to the summons.”
Eva looked at her mother in disbelief; she was playing dumb, refusing to comprehend.
“Child! You’re acting so . . .” Ludwig started. “You’re making it seem like we’re murderers,” he stammered.
Eva gazed at her father, at his white jacket and soft red face above it. “Why didn’t you do anything, Father? You should have poisoned every last one of those officers!”
Edith reached for Eva’s arm, but she recoiled.
“Eva, they would have shot him then. And me. And you and Annegret.”
“And child,” her father said, “it wouldn’t have made a difference. They would have just sent new ones to replace them. You wouldn’t believe how many of them there were. They were everywhere.”
Eva lost control. “‘They’? Who’s ‘they’? And you, what were you? You were a part of the whole. You were ‘them’ too! You made it all possible. You may not have murdered anyone, but you allowed it. I don’t know which is worse. Tell me which is worse!”
Eva looked at her parents standing there so pathetically and waited for an answer. Edith just shook her head, turned, and went into the kitchen. Ludwig searched for words but found none. Eva picked up her suitcase, effortlessly pushed past her father, and opened the door. She left the apartment and stumbled down the polished staircase, through the lower entranceway, and out of the building. Two boys were approaching on the sidewalk, Stefan and his best friend, Thomas Preisgau.
“Eva, where are you going?” Stefan asked.
Eva gave Stefan a quick squeeze. “I’m going on a trip.”
“For how long?”
Eva didn’t answer, but grabbed her suitcase and hurried away as fast as she could. Stefan watched her in alarm.
Annegret had been lying on her bed, a bag of pretzel sticks on her belly, and listening to everything as she chewed. When she heard the door close, she got up, the nearly empty bag slipping to the floor, and went to the window. She watched Eva leave. Her pretty little sister. She started to cry, then angrily pounded the windowpane once with the palms of her hands. “Just go, then!” Annegret pressed her forehead against the cool glass, sniffed, and thought, It’s better that she go, she wouldn’t leave us alone, making such a fuss about the past, playing the great moralizer, clearly clueless about the shortcomings of human nature! Annegret couldn’t see Eva anymore, and she turned away from the window and picked up the pretzel bag. She dumped the remaining crumbs into her cupped hand. She slowly licked them up and thought about her conversation with Hartmut Küssner after he caught her in the act. They went into one of the examination rooms, and Annegret confessed that in the past five years, she had employed various means to infect nineteen male newborns and babies with E. coli to nurse them back to health. Doctor Küssner’s face was ashen with horror and disgust. She had killed a child! But Annegret swore that she had nothing to do with Martin Fasse’s death. She hadn’t given him anything. She had only ever chosen babies she knew were stable enough. He had to believe her! Annegret begged him, pulled her hair, and threw herself at him as he turned to go report her to the director. She would go with him, she stammered. To Wiesbaden or wherever he wanted. Live with him, bear his children. But he couldn’t destroy her life. Doctor Küssner shook her off and left the room, but he took a left down the hallway, rather than a right toward administration. Annegret had been consumed with fear since, but so far, she hadn’t been called in. She knew that Hartmut wanted nothing more than to believe she didn’t have a child on her conscience.
The light blond-haired man sat in his office with his colleagues. They were working on the criminal charges. Dirty coffee cups perched atop towers of file folders, their saucers overflowing with stubbed cigarette butts. The enormous skeleton of the new building next door was visible through the windows. Tarps flapped in the wind. The construction site appeared deserted, as though the owners had unexpectedly run out of money. The blond man observed one of the younger lawyers, who was searching assiduously through a statute book, and thought of David Miller, who had vehemently declared at the start of the trial that nothing short of a life sentence could be sought for each defendant. Every last one of them had committed murder! The young prosecutor was now saying that the most they could likely prove was complicity in murder—according to German law, the main perpetrators were the uppermost commanders of the Reich. Furthermore, the defendants would all plea superior orders, which was difficult to repudiate. Several in the office nodded, and the blond man said yes, requesting life sentences would not be possible in all cases. He waited, but no one challenged him. David had left a void. There was a knock on the door, and then Eva peeked in.
“I don’t mean to interrupt.”
The blond man stood and waved her in. “Come in, Fräulein Bruhns, we’re finished for the day.”
His staff rose and filed out of the office, every last one greeting Eva warmly as they passed. The blond man gestured toward a chair. Eva sat down and said that she was sorry, but she would no longer be able to continue working in the trial.
“Your fiancé again?”
“No, it’s because of my parents.” Eva then confirmed the suspicions the blond man had expressed during Edith Bruhns’s testimony. Eva confided that she could no longer meet anyone’s eye in the courtroom. She carried her parents’ guilt within her. The blond man said that, from a legal stance, that was nonsense. One couldn’t view an entire nation guilty by association. Besides, it would be difficult to find a replacement for her. Eva remained resolute and got to her feet. The blond man didn’t push her any further. All he could do, then, was to thank her sincerely for her good work. Eva said that she had just one final request. She wondered whether he could find anything out about a certain prisoner. His name was Jaschinsky. His number had been 24981. The blond man jotted down a note and said that he would be in touch.
Eva took the elevator down. As she crossed the foyer, she noticed a thin woman in a strikingly bright coat outside the glass door, running her finger down the doorbell nameplates. Eva had seen this woman before, outside the municipal building. She had been standing outside at the end of proceedings one day, clearly waiting for someone. Eva stepped outside and asked the woman if she could help. Sissi looked up.
“Where is the public prosecutor’s office?”
“Who are you looking for?” But Eva already knew the answer; she could see the concern in Sissi’s eyes.
The two women walked through a park set back from the street. The first yellow leaves of the season spiraled down around them. Eva told her about the trip. That she was with David that night, that he was distraught, and that she stayed by his side. She didn’t include that she slept with him, but after a quick sidelong glance at Sissi, she realized that there was no hiding it from her.
“We’re not a couple,” Sissi said. “But I’m very fond of him, and he likes me. And my son doesn’t mind him. That counts for a lot.” After a pause, she added, “Do you think he took his life out there somewhere? Or will he come back?”
Eva was silent and thought
of the telex that had arrived two weeks earlier from the local police in Poland, which she had translated: a male body was found in a swamp not far from the camp. The condition of the body, however, was such that identification of the deceased was impossible. One of the authorities even suggested it had been lying there for years. Eva refused to believe it was David. The blond man also had his doubts. Eva told Sissi that David lost himself to that place. But that he would come back someday.
When they arrived back at the entrance of the park, Eva smiled. “You know, the thing is, he’s got to come back! He still owes me twenty marks.”
But Sissi remained solemn and opened her purse. She pulled out her wallet and said, “I can pay it off.”
“No, thank you, that wasn’t what I meant,” Eva insisted, refusing the offer.
The women shook hands good-bye. Eva watched Sissi walk down the street. It took a long time for the colorful coat to disappear. Like a bouquet of flowers upon the ocean, it rocked up and down, up and down, till a wave came and washed over it.
AUTUMN ARRIVED. Eva had rented a room in a boardinghouse run by two older women. One of the women, Frau Demuth, was never around, whereas the other, Frau Armbrecht, was all the more curious about this unmarried young woman. The furnishings in her room were tossed together carelessly, and the window opened onto nothing more than a whitewashed firewall. That didn’t bother Eva, though. She started working for Herr Körting at the agency again. Of the girls who had worked there a year earlier, the only one left was Christel Adomat, who had a crooked nose and smelled bad. All of the others had gotten married in the meantime. Eva interpreted in meetings and business discussions, and back in her room, she translated contracts and instruction manuals at her narrow desk. There was a job for her once at Schoormann’s, but she asked Christel to take it. Eva tried not to think of Jürgen anymore. She continued to follow the trial; she bought the daily papers and read that the evidentiary hearing had concluded. Following closing arguments, the prosecution sought life sentences for fourteen of the defendants, including the Beast, the “Injector,” the medical orderly, the pharmacist, and the main defendant. The defense then requested acquittals, in particular for those who had engaged in the selections. Eva had to reread the passage several times to understand what it was the White Rabbit argued: that these men had clearly acted in opposition to extermination orders and saved a great many lives by virtue of their selections. He also entered the plea of superior orders, stating that the accused had been soldiers acting according to prevailing law. In the boardinghouse common room, crowded with furniture, Eva watched a televised interview with the attorney general. “For months, prosecutors, witnesses, and spectators have awaited a humane word from the defendants,” he said. “It would cleanse the air, if a single humane word were finally uttered—but it has not been uttered, and it will not be uttered.”