A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  There is also the matter of the Kommissar’s Jewish driver. Am broad-minded about personal morality. Hope Ganz’s superiors at the Reichkommissariat headquarters in Minsk and way up in Riga are equally well disposed to him.

  Also waiting for me, home, with only half hour before guests arrive, Sergeant Jasper, the young Wehrmacht sergeant attached to my office. Seemed distraught, and agreed with uncustomary quickness that he needed a drink. That afternoon he’d visited the ghetto down by the river—he was not supposed to, but some of the Wehrmacht did because there were so many Jewish artisans. Jasper had gone there to collect his shoes from a cobbler who had been resoling them. (Black market leather, of course, as I pointed out to Jasper, but with a smile, hoping to settle him down.) The cobbler had been in a state. Said there was rumor that SS had asked city authorities, Mayor Kuzich, myself, to assist in the roundup and execution of Jewish population of Staroviche, and that the city authorities had agreed. Jewish deputation had been to see Kuzich that morning (Kuzich had told me of this meeting). Though Kuzich had reassured them and told them he would emphasize to the Germans the good work the Jewish Council had done in levying taxes among Jewish population, a lot of concern among the Jews. Some of the Gentile townspeople Jasper spoke to before coming to see me had also heard the rumors. A greengrocer told Jasper, “Everyone ought to wait till the Russians are finished off, because those Jews have powerful political friends!”

  Jasper looked at me steadily across the desk. “Herr Kabbelski,” he said, “tell me if it’s true.”

  Told him calmly that it was. Observers here from all over Ostland. It would be a model action. Could see him swallowing, trying to deal with his outrage, the same outrage which he had the grace to recognize I felt on many levels as well. Told him there would be exemptions for a small number still considered essential workers. Lest he think of the cobbler, I said, “Oberführer Ganz’s driver for example.”

  “But, sir,” he said. “It isn’t possible in the technical sense to finish so many people in a day.”

  Told him that after some study and on the advice of his own people, especially Brigadeführer Ohlendorf of Special Action Group D, I now knew it to be possible—that it had already been done in Bialystok, Vilna, Pinsk, and Brest-Litovsk—places where the technique had been developed. It had not always worked as well, one could say as properly, as it would tomorrow. Some operations further north where Belorussian policemen, stoked with too much liquor, behaved like barbarians, molesting women, sodomizing children. Even not all Jasper’s people behaved well, though they’d been in training for this sort of operation for a long time.

  “They are not my people,” he said, choking with grief.

  I felt both pity and anger for him. “Then who are your people, Sergeant Jasper? I know who mine are!” And I gave him a short history lesson, nothing he wouldn’t already have known as a European scholar, but something to soothe him. If Germans thought they had a Jewish problem, what about we Belorussians? The tsars cramming Jews into these western provinces, forbidding them to live or move outside them, forbidding them to live even in the countryside! The result? Minsk 41 percent Jewish, Rovno 56 percent, Pinsk 64 percent, Brest-Litovsk 44 percent, Gomel 44 percent, Bobruisk 40 percent, Staroviche 31 percent. And were they good Belorussian nationalists? They couldn’t give a damn. Stayed put and did business no matter who came to town. Anti-German by sentiment, anti-Belorussian because they considered our hoped-for nation a pale of barbarous peasants. No question that there were partisan cells among them, and that if the slightest thing went wrong with the German offensive against Moscow, those cells would become dangerously active. An alien mass in the midst of the endeavor of our two races, German and Belorussian. Taken as read by us nationalists that there could be no Belorussian Republic while this unreduced mass remained. Reminded him further that we followers of Ostrowsky had always made ourselves clear on that point to the Reich Security Central Office—we were in this whole affair for the sake of Belorussian independence. So I knew who my people were. Was sorry if he was having temporary trouble identifying his.

  Mentioned too that I could understand his natural instinct to rush down to the ghetto and spread the word through his cobbler. Two possible results: the cobbler still unable to believe it, and—strangely for such an artful race—the Jews have always found it hard to believe the worst of the Gentile world; second, the cobbler spreads the word and causes a riot. Truckloads of Belorussian police, German Field Police, Special Action people and a few Wehrmacht units waiting by in the alleys off Bryanska Street to guard against exactly such a disturbance. So whole thing would be done whichever way—either brutally and frontally as a result of an indiscretion by Sergeant Jasper, or mercifully and professionally tomorrow.

  Finally told him not to be self-indulgent. How did he think I felt? At ease? With the supreme test of my soul, my manhood, due to begin at 3:00 A.M. the following morning? Ganz and my wife and children, together with Kuzich’s family, to leave very early, at first light, for a picnic in the other direction. If he thought he would have a problem tomorrow, he ought to join them.

  Very angry with him when he did not appear at the dinner table but later turned up in the hallway after all the senior officers had gone off to their beds. Apologized and said he had stayed on in my office, as I’d suggested (though I didn’t mean for the whole damned dinner), and fortified himself with liquor. Promised he would be at his desk at police headquarters the next morning.

  Now 11:30. Will go into tomorrow on two and a half hours’ sleep. Suppose that’s true of all history, that it’s achieved on inadequate rest.

  12

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  Staroviche was a city and oblast, or province, sitting southeast of Minsk in a bend of the Pripet River. However hackneyed the sentiment, I can say that there I spent the three happiest years of my childhood. We lived in a solid and ornate villa. It stood in its own garden and, whatever was happening beyond its brick walls, was its own adequate planet. Only in the summer of 1942 did my mother and sister and I leave it to holiday near Riga on the Baltic. Even though increasing anarchy in the streets of Staroviche would reduce its usefulness to us, we enjoyed too the expensive Hoetsch automobile which went with my father’s status as police chief of the city and region, and a chauffeur named Yuri, who wore the blue uniform of the Belorussian police. Since children do not watch the calendar, the summers of the garden in Drozdy Street seemed longer than whole decades now, and the winters with their early darkness hardly shorter.

  Our best friend in the three years our family lived in Staroviche was Oberführer Willi Ganz. Ganz was Kommissar of the oblast, or (as the Germans said) the Bezirk, of Staroviche, the same region of which my father was Belorussian police chief. My mother and I became very attached to him, more than to any of the other official guests who came to our place. He was the most sincere of all those German officers and functionaries who liked her landscapes. My sister and I began to call him Onkel Willi, without being asked to, without any embarrassment, practically from the first visit he made to our house.

  I remember once when my mother was praising Oberführer Ganz for the sincere interest he showed in us children that my father said, “Perhaps he laughs too easily.” But he himself laughed when he said it. When I think of poor Ganz after all this time I remember not a set of features but his laughter, which wasn’t maniacal on the one hand or careful and mannered on the other. It was like the laughter of a man who doesn’t have an enemy in the world. And this from an SS Oberführer, member of a legion of which the world has ever since made a bogey.

  He was of medium height, athletically built, and beginning to lose his black hair from a rounded, expansive skull. He was the sort of adult who liked to produce little presents from his pocket at times when bedtime is close and a child thinks the main delights of the evening are over. My sister and I became infatuated with Ganz, as far as I can remember, late in the summer of my parents’ return to Belo
russia. (To us children it seemed like a return too, though we had never been there before.) The Soviet Union was about to fall—everyone knew that and was excited by the idea, and the atmosphere of cosmic carnival the news created was universal. The Soviet Army had been decimated. We had visible proof of that—two great mounds beside the Staroviche-Baranovichi road under which, as even my sister and I knew, though our parents were not the type to bring such brutal facts to our attention, lay the two Russian brigades who had tried to fight the Germans for Staroviche. Everyone was quoting the saying that the Russian defeat was so absolute that all the Germans had had to do was kick in the door and the whole rotten structure had tumbled in. News that Stalin had been killed by his own people in besieged Moscow was expected daily.

  It was safe at that stage for a German official to accompany the wives of the newly installed mayor and police chief of Staroviche, together with the children of both women, on a picnic to the Brudezh forest north of the city. The mayor by the way was Franz Kuzich, one of those whose families had holidayed with us at Puck. Kuzich came from a Germanophile family, and his three children also carried German names—Ruta, Bernhardt, Kirsten. They were all knowing adolescents. Bernhardt did not share even the same jokes as I did, would not have been seen dead laughing at them. Kirsten was a year older than my sister Genia and used that margin as an excuse for cutting her dead.

  Ganz’s picnic was a triumph for us because the Oberführer wouldn’t allow any of the Kuzich children’s air of higher wisdom and knowledge to prevail. If they wanted to play with Ganz, Ganz wanted to play like a child. Therefore they had to consent to become children again. I remember still how I loved the man for delivering us like that, for making us fashionable with the Kuzich children, who might be unfashionably overweight like their mother but whose opinions meant everything to Genia and me. Ganz wanted hiding games and chasing games; and as I ran, the woods blurred, a delightful deep-green haze; and when I hid, I caressed the bark of the larch trees and the birch; and as Ganz’s pursuing laughter bounced from branch to branch, I thought, This is Belorussia, this is why we had to come back, to make childhood possible.

  Once I ran, looking the other way, shoulder-first into Ganz, who grabbed me by the shoulders and clamped me to his chest. He wasn’t wearing his coat and his shirt was white and fragrant. I could smell his perfume, a mild, male-smelling perfume, and behind it a further musk. This must be the way warriors smell, I naively thought. He released me only to clamp me by both ears again and drag me nose-first against his chest. “Little Radislaw Kabbelski,” he said emphatically. “You are a blessed child. Let Onkel Willi wish that in all the world’s blood and lies you will hear only kindly voices.” Then he kissed my forehead and let me go. I could not have been happier if he had elected me President.

  Later that same delightful day I skidded around the edge of a knot of berry bushes to find one of Ganz’s soldiers urinating there, a man nearly as old as Ganz, one of Ganz’s headquarters people detailed to guard our picnic against the remote chance that a few of the world’s last Communists should decide to attack it.

  “Forgive me, mein Herr,” he said, buttoning as fast as he could.

  That also was why we came back. To be mein Herr in our own country. I decided to show the soldier that I was indeed a person of influence. “Is Sergeant Jasper here today?” I asked in German. I had—like many Eastern Europeans of the era—four languages. “Not today, mein Herr,” said the soldier.

  Sergeant Jasper was the only German I had seen weeping that triumphant summer. I felt so endowed with authority at Ganz’s picnic that if Jasper had been in the forest I would have gone to him and asked him what had been upsetting him, more or less inquire why he was marring this golden time. Jasper was an NCO from German Army Intelligence and had been attached to my father’s staff. If any left-behind Russians were found in the woods by my father’s navy-blue-clad policemen, Jasper was to interrogate them. Any captured Bolshevik partisans and bandits were also to be milked by Jasper. Earlier in the summer I had heard my father praising him to my mother. A bright boy, said my father. It was a pity he wasn’t commissioned, my father declared, because it diminished his standing with the SS officers.

  There had been a party at our house the night before the picnic. It had been a really big affair to honor certain SS and SD officials from Minsk.

  Among the guests of whom even I was aware was an SS man all the way from Riga, another from the Kaunas office of that same Reich Security Central Office which had paid all our hotel bills on the Baltic, and Dr. Kappeler, an important section head in the Ministry of the East, or Ostministerium. Local diginitaries included the aging, heavy-drinking garrison commander of our town (who my father thought was a fool, but he knew that everyone in the German Army who was not a fool was presently in front of Moscow); our Kommissar, the beloved Willi Ganz; my father’s deputy Beluvich, an old faithful of the Belorussian dream, my father said, for whom the great chance had come too late; Mr. Kuzich, our mayor; and the head of the Staroviche Gestapo.

  Everyone seemed to have brought a wife or a lady friend except Oberführer Ganz, and to an eight-year-old boy Ganz’s failure in this regard was a generous sign that the people he had really come to see were my mother and Genia and me.

  One of the minor guests was Sergeant Jasper, who came earlier than anyone else and asked the servant who opened the door if he could see my father. My father came downstairs at last and gave Jasper an interview in the study, from which they emerged just in time for my father to greet the other guests. Genia and I were allowed to pass around the trays of hors d’oeuvres, a trick which brought inordinate applause from all the visitors. Even as we toted the trays we kept our eyes on two men—Beluvich, my father’s deputy, and Ganz—for they were the prodigious drinkers in the company. Beluvich and Mrs. Beluvich drank vodka in a quiet, industrious way until their faces bleared and they could not finish sentences. Then they would try to light cigarettes—that was the comedy sequence Genia and I did not want to miss.

  Ganz drank cognac, and instead of blunting him it seemed to refine him, till his eyes were glittering and all the women gathered around him to listen to his jokes. All the other German officers were more restrained, even the youngers ones, as if they were under orders not to drink too much or yield to Ganz’s liveliness. I took their resistance as only another instance of the astounding tedium of adults.

  In the crush I did not notice Jasper at all.

  Genia and I did not have a place at the table, but we watched from the hallway, from the bottom of the stairs, while the Catholic bishop of Staroviche blessed the food. The Orthodox bishop had, to everyone’s surprise, after some years of persecution by the NKVD and a jail sentence, left with the retreating Soviets, and a new bishop had not yet been elected. The bishop’s departure was taken as a sign of a characteristically Russian perversity, of the same type shown by those two slaughtered Russian brigades who lay along the Baranovichi road.

  After the grace everyone sat. My father drank his borscht very quickly, made excuses to the Ostministerium man from Kaunas on his right and the SS man from Minsk on his left, and rose to call his chief servant, an ancient and loyal Belorussian whom he had found in Staroviche when he first arrived with the officers of Vorkommando Moscow, just behind the first wave of panzers. We saw my father whisper at the old man and point out an empty space at the bottom of the table. We realized it was Sergeant Jasper’s place and that Father was sending the servant to find him. This qualified with me as delicious drama, as it did also with Genia, though she tried not to admit it.

  We followed the servant as he went searching down the corridor, in my father’s study, in the solarium. He opened the kitchen door, and Genia and I recognized there—among a number of other drivers, military and civilian—Kommissar Ganz’s chauffeur Yakov drinking coffee. Most of the Jews of Staroviche lived in a barricaded section of town. I found out later that there were more than eight thousand of them crammed in there, between Braslawski Street and th
e river. Yakov was one of the few who had outside jobs and lived outside the barricade. He sat quietly among the SS chauffeurs, not volunteering his name.

  But Jasper wasn’t in the kitchen. The old servant, with the Kabbelski children in pursuit, found him on the top landing near my bedroom, sitting on the floor, his collar unbuttoned, a flask of spirits between his knees and weeping awesomely, steadily, stuttering and stammering his grief, on and on.

  The servant began to speak to him and Jasper answered quietly. We heard him say, “The children, the children,” a number of times, and we began to fear he meant us. We must have given off a flurry of alarm, because the old servant turned to us—he was discovering for the first time that we were behind him—and hissed, “Clear out. He’s not talking to you.”

  In the context of that glorious evening, with the prospect of tomorrow’s picnic, it astounded me that anyone under our roof could be unhappy.

  I remember Jasper now more as a representative of that generation of Europeans who were all forced at great pace to learn a fierce amount about themselves and their fellows during those years in the furnace.

  13

  “Listen,” Stanton said outside the Kabbels’ place at the end of a shift. The first frostiness of the season was in the air, and Delaney liked that, the arrival of daylight brought with it more the elation of survival. “Listen, you reckon that girl and her brother might be making it together?”

  Delaney, gouging for car keys in his pocket, stiffened. He wanted both to hide his face and hit Stanton. Instead he heard himself ask why.

  “I went for a leak,” said Stanton, “and the outside toilet’s buggered, so I used the one in the house. All these paintings of the two of them done by Warwick himself. She’s wearing the security company’s bloody baggy shirt and they’re staring at the bloody camera—or at the brush I suppose you’d say. And there’s a wave behind them. He’s bloody good at waves, gets the marbling exact.” By now Stanton was speaking more hesitantly. He could tell his theory had somehow outraged Delaney; he was abashed at having violated some sensitivity in his friend. Then he got peevish. “Christ, you might as well know these things.”