A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Ganz fantastic—parties are his especial gift. Got out his violin and played the famous theme from Midsummer Night’s Dream, even thoughMendelssohn, grandson of a Jewish philosopher of assimilation, is scarcely on the approved repertoire for SS Oberführers.

  Anyhow, really waltzed the theme along, and the boy’s eyes glittered in a way that would have brought pure joy to any parent if it were not—as I say—for the omens which surround us. The Russians counterattacking in the Don bend—Comrades Vatutin, Rokossovsky, and Eremenko. German Sixth Army now isolated in Stalingrad, and if that place falls, far as it is from Staroviche, increase in partisan activity will stretch us till we squeak. SD documents say 65,000 partisan operatives are loose in the Ukraine and Belorussia. A German debacle in the Don bend could double that figure. Ganz still pushing the Wehrdorfer and the plausible concept that when the SS and SD try to get even with a village which has harbored partisans by sending in the Correctional Battalions composed of German, Austrian, and Hungarian psychopaths, partisan numbers are actually swelled (vide the assassin of Mrs. Kuzich).

  And in the midst of all these monstrous balances, my son listens to jazzed-up Mendelssohn with such certainty of a bright future. Have such certainty myself, though by now a little tainted. Was just about to leave and return to office when Wehrmacht sentry came pounding in. Something in the Herr Kommissar’s garage across the courtyard had exploded. The place was in flames. Asked was it partisans but was told consensus among my police (including my driver Yuri), who were fighting fire with Yakov, was that a can of shellac had exploded.

  All the children clamoring to attend fire, but self and Danielle forbade it. Self, Ganz ran downstairs. Saw string of German soldiers and Belorussian police handing buckets across the courtyard until they reached Yuri’s hands, who threw them into the face of fire surging through open doors of garage. Ganz’s driver Yakov stood by screaming orders at Yuri—I could not catch what he was saying. In the end though Yuri tipped three buckets of water over his head, cursing the Jew as he did it. Yakov then stopped pestering Yuri and, taking a breath like a man about to dive, raced into the banks of chemical-looking smoke. “Shit my aunt!” screamed Ganz uncharacteristically. “Leave it, leave it!” He ran across the courtyard. The bucket line had heard his roar and thought he’d been talking to them. On orders from the Kommissar they were quite willing to let a garage burn down. Level with Yuri and staring at the revived flames, Ganz yelled, “Pour it on, you fool!”

  Saw that the children had now arrived despite orders, and Danielle grabbed Radek and tried to cover his eyes in case Yakov ran out of garage burning.

  Ganz’s limousine all at once emerged from fire and smoke at perhaps 35 km/hour, nearly skittling poor sweating Yuri. It rolled two-thirds of way across courtyard and braked. Yakov toppled from it, wheezing horrendously, hacking and retching. Ganz stood by him clapping his back and occasionally lifting his right arm upward as if Yakov had just won a race or a prize fight. When Yakov breathing well enough to stand upright, Ganz pulled him to him by the shoulder and kissed him on the side of the face. There was nothing sexual in the kiss. Nonetheless Ganz ill-advised to break his country’s race laws in front of so many men.

  If anything, fire added to Radek’s excitement in the day. Got home that evening to find wife upset. Seems Hirschmann the tutor has been showing children his Iron Cross as a means of acquiring leverage over them. Radislaw started on Danielle in Ganz’s car, the one rescued by Yakov, on way home. All the more embarrassing for the revived and scrubbed Yakov being the driver. Hirschmann and his wife exist through my intervention—most of the rest of their shipment has “gone east.” Seems Radek reminded of Hirschmann by sight on way home of fifteen Jewish escapees being marched down Bryanska Street, a sight in which Yakov may well read his own potential fate. Radek on seeing them began to weep and cry out, “If I ask Daddy as a special birthday present will he let Mr. Hirschmann stay? Mr. Hirschmann is a hero and killed twenty Americans.”

  Shall speak to Hirschmann—that part easy. What to say to Radek, how to explain the limits of my influence? What does Radek know of SS activities. Possible of course for children in a sense to know more than they actually know they know.

  If Hirschmann has told the children anything distressing it’s the end of him.

  19

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE.

  Meeting called by Ganz at provincial hall. Present: Dr. Kappeler of Political Section of Gestapo from Kaunas; Bienecke and Harner of the SS and SD, Staroviche; the present garrison commander Lustbader, an elderly colonel who tells me his men had a frightful time in the Voronezh sector six weeks back. General Golikov destroyed 70 percent of this paternal old gentleman’s battalion, now being brought back to strength by conscripts who arrive daily in Staroviche, not bad-looking men though a few older than me—Germany not yet at bottom of its remarkable barrel though. Lustbader not likely to survive another such shock however as the one he suffered on the Don, so can’t help hoping he’ll never be posted to front again.

  Also present at Ganz’s meeting: Mayor Kuzich, the widower; Daskovich, whose administration of the armed village of Krotinitsa has provided him with some interesting insights on what should be done in the Belorussian countryside; my aging deputy Beluvich. Subject of meeting: forthcoming clearance of ghetto and relocation of inhabitants in labor camps.

  Ganz said he was as devoted to solution of Jewish question as anyone—“hard and ready” was the way he put it. But there were standards which civilization had the right to exact. There should be no extraction of gold fillings from prisoners’ mouths—we should all be above such animality. Though there were established channels through which the property of prisoners could be dedicated to the war effort, personal looting was not to be countenanced. Many instances of such behavior last year when Staroviche Jews expelled from ghetto and sent to site in the forests near the Gomel road. Bedding and items of jewelry taken for personal use—the delinquents included some of my men, some of Bienecke’s SS squads, and some army personnel involved in the action.

  Resented this reference to my men, because my control of their behavior very firm on that occasion. Fully aware that Ganz mentioned my men first just to salve Bienecke’s vanity, because his men and some of the Wehrmacht did loot. Ganz simply massaging the unfounded German sense of superior morality, confirming the image of us as temporary barbarian auxiliaries. Let it pass for moment.

  Ganz further complained of reports of sexual license at certain execution sites—assaults on partisan women captured in the raid on the barn at Bonachev, for example. (Raid carried out by the Staroviche SS assisted by a platoon of my police under one of my deputies.) He was aware of frightful excesses committed against forty Latvian Jewish women who had turned up in Staroviche as part of a transport the previous spring.

  “These acts carried out by our Latvian or Belorussian allies?” asked Bienecke with apparent innocence.

  Ganz: “By members of our own corps, Hauptsturmführer Bienecke. Acts unworthy of German manhood. Acts of literal sadism.”

  I was beside young Harner and saw him write on his pad, “Acts unworthy of the culture which produced Offenbach and Mendelssohn.” Knew then Ganz would be better to keep silent.

  Bienecke said, in way that seemed conciliatory, “With respect, Herr Kommissar, I don’t think administrators understand the stress that operates within a squad of men assigned to these sorts of duties. We are faced with inhuman tasks and required still to retain our humanity. Many of our men are heads of families, older than is desirable for combat purposes. Others are boys, but of the type who lack the fiber or initiative for conventional battlefields. What can I say—it is not always possible to wage war as a philosopher would. Schopenhauer and Kant are not members of the Security Forces, even though many of the leaders and senior officers of the Special Action Squad are doctors of philosophy and divinity. Now the men of the Special Action Squads have a particular cross to bear. They do thei
r duty and are reproached by a variety of administrators with such terms as ‘sadism.’ It is their fault, it seems, if the world’s estimation of Germany is ruined. So not only are they faced with the necessity of performing particularly nasty jobs [here Bienecke suddenly became more heated], but they have to be the target for mudslinging. I protest most emphatically against the Herr Kommissar’s last accusation.”

  Ganz stayed calm throughout. “Leaving that aside for a moment, though I should warn Hauptsturmführer Bienecke that I have testamentary evidence to support the accusation he finds objectionable, there are instances not only of barbarity but of what is worse from a military and political point of view: folly. The fifteen wounded Latvian Jews who recently crawled their way out of a mass execution site and, on being recaptured, were led covered with mud and blood through the center of the city to the Mogilevska Street prison! I don’t believe that this didn’t happen, since guests of mine—including two children—saw the procession while being driven home from my apartment, and were naturally very distressed by it. The effect on the civilian population of such wanton and careless displays can be guessed at. We are virtually confessing that we cannot do these things humanely. That first of all. We are also encouraging partisan recruitment. My point is, gentlemen, that to the benefit of all of us I would like the Bezirk, or oblast, of Staroviche to act as a lighthouse of wise and humane policy. I am grateful to Dr. Kappeler that he found the time to be here for what I consider a crucial discussion on this very concept.”

  Ganz put his argument. Recent report of anti-terrorist sweep in Sluzk region shows 9,500 supposed partisan sympathizers slaughtered and 492 rifles discovered. These were characteristic figures for such sweeps. In what could be called by other names but what he himself chose for the moment to call excessive zeal, said SS and Belorussian raid in the Sluzk area might have justifiably unearthed some 750 partisans and partisan informers to match the 492 rifles. But the Security Forces had liquidated thirteen times the credible number of people it should have. The Belorussian countryside abounds, says Ganz, with such instances of extreme reaction. In the Mogilev area certain leaders of the Security Forces boasted of the destruction of 150 villages. It is the witnesses of this sort of behavior, and the tithe of survivors, who turn to the partisans as to their only recourse.

  Dr. Kappeler spoke next. Said there was good reason in the Herr Kommissar’s argument. But what about the partisans themselves? They thought so little of their fellow countrymen that they had planned to poison the water supply in Vilnius. If they wished to recruit a village that had thus far proved loyal, they killed Wehrmacht or SS men in the area just to invite retribution on the place.

  All the more reason, said Ganz, not to play into their hands with excessive retaliations.

  Kappeler said in emphatic scholarly way he didn’t entirely agree. These tricks were amply described in the press and on the radio and the populace was warned not to be taken in by them. But have you seen some of these villages? Ganz protested. Only the priests are literate and possess a radio!

  “I take it then,” said Kappeler, “that in the Bezirk of Staroviche you have pursued an active policy of engaging the assistance of the clergy at village level, as outlined in the December 1941 directive of the Political Section of the Ostministerium.”

  Ganz now sighed too dramatically and called both on myself and on young Daskovich to comment on the role of the priests in maintaining social order in the villages. Daskovich was very happy with his relationship with the Orthodox priest in Krotinitsa, a pastor actively committed to the survival of his flock. The man was capable, said Daskovich, of drawing on an Ostministerium directive for a sermon text. He was a strong Belorussian nationalist, and regularly took the line with his flock that the hope of nationhood could only be fulfilled through cooperation with Christian Germany in an unremitting attack on Jewish Bolshevism.

  My very point, said Ganz, is that hundreds of such right-thinking people had been slaughtered in retributive actions carried out by the German penal battalions, by the Latvian militia, by our corps of 20,000 anti-Bolshevik Cossacks, by the Kaminsky Brigade, which, while annihilating villages, wears the St. George Cross, red on white, the symbol of Belorussian nationalism. It is not the people who die who are a problem to state security. It is the proportion of survivors who see the White Russian nationalists and the Germans as suddenly less desirable than the Bolsheviks, who abandon the Cross of St. George for the Red Star. And for each one who makes that shift, units which could be more profitably engaged at the front have to be detailed for anti-terrorist action.

  Ganz then called on us all therefore to show restraint and wisdom. Wants this policy of moderate severity and judicious but civilized force to operate within the limit of Ostministerium and Reich Security Central Office directives. He is grateful to Dr. Kappeler for coming over to Staroviche to attend our meeting and hopes that the Political Section will watch with interest the successes achieved by the Security Forces operating in the Bezirk of Staroviche under the twin policies of strength and moderation.

  Cannot help but feel Ganz ill-starred. Behind him lies a divorce—his wife was Viennese—and a slightly tainted career—from 1937 till February 1940 he was Kreisleiter of Bohemia. He may have displayed there the same fulsomeness of speech so odious to servants of the state such as Dr. Kappeler. In any case Staroviche is something of a demotion.

  His argument has some force, and might have an outside chance of being implemented if it were not for this evening’s events. Young Daskovich ambushed and killed on the forest road back to Krotinitsa. Have just been out to the site, for all the good that does. A low stretch of road with slushy snow on it, that whorish snow which will turn to ice tonight and to mud tomorrow. The forest never looked more dangerous, not even in a child’s nursery story where forests are always full of imps and deep threat. It’s a squalid stretch of road to lose someone like Daskovich on, a man so young and educated and coherently nationalistic. Hauptsturmführer Bienecke likes to say the 42 percent of Belorussia controlled by partisans is all solid forest and so doesn’t count. But when you’re out there in a foul dusk beside D.’s corpse, that 42 percent becomes a very weighty figure.

  Amazed at the vehemence of my wife’s reaction to tonight’s news. She barely knew Daskovich except as a peripheral guest, the young man from Kuzich’s office who was brighter than Kuzich. Clearly D.’s death just another piece of bad news to go with all the other bad news, but this was the item which drove her over the limit. Wept pitiably and needed sedation, but would not go to sleep until I’d prayed with her—insistent on that, one decade of the Sorrowful Mysteries for the repose of D.’s soul, an Act of Contrition for ourselves, the enunciation in her case slurred by the dose of brandy and laudanum.

  She rarely paints in the garden now, rarely goes out there with the children and the easels unless Ganz drags them all out. That is why I am glad Hirschmann, for all his faults, is still in the ghetto. Can’t be denied he provides companionship for my besieged children.

  20

  Danielle’s standby for the control room was Bernadette, a plain girl in her late twenties who went to the WEA with Danielle, worked in some state government department, and was saving to buy a spinster’s unit in North Parramatta. Delaney knew these details from Stanton, who flirted with, disarmed, and teased Bernadette in a way which Delaney thought proclaimed too clearly “You’re no threat. No one will raise a knife for you.” Bernadette was willing to be called in an emergency at any hour, and the blinding of Scott Kabbel with paint was an adequate emergency.

  Danielle Kabbel arrived at Westmead Emergency almost as soon as the column of defenders from Golden Style. Delaney saw her appear in the lobby as Scott Kabbel was forced down yelping with fright and the pain of his seared eyes onto a gurney. Delaney himself sat crookedly in a seat in the waiting room, favoring his shoulder and wondering if he could play on Sunday. Past rows of empty chairs, Danielle ran to the gurney’s side as it disappeared behind a curtain, lunged and m
ade transitory contact with Scott’s hand, and was satisfied, as if her touch and her scent were enough for her injured brother.

  Likewise she said nothing to Kabbel, but came and stared into his eyes. “They don’t know yet,” the Kabbel patriarch said simply. “He took photographs of the vandal which any superintendent of police will find hard to ignore.”

  Stanton’s doubting voice seemed sacrilegious cutting in. “They’ll challenge them as evidence,” he said.

  “Evidence,” said Kabbel—the voice sounded fierce but came out tremolo. “It’s not for evidence he took these photographs. I have no hope in court in these mad days. I give the photographs to Golden Style, who send copies to the police. Who say to the barbarian, ‘Enough, Stevo!’ I am not interested in transforming the dungheap into gold, dear Mr. Stanton. Only in moving it from one corner of the farmyard to another. I shall arrange an X ray for Terry.”

  He announced it like a hospital functionary, but he did not yet move, instead planting a muscular kiss on the middle of Danielle’s forehead. Delaney flinched. Easy! he nearly said, fearing that the shield of bone beneath the girl’s forehead was thin as a membrane. As often as he’d envisaged putting his mouth to her brow he had never imagined such a pile-driver kiss.

  “You understand,” Kabbel continued to his daughter, “they won’t know anything until they have put dye in his eyes to tell the extent of the burns. They can’t use anything strong, anything chemical, since it would react with the acids and alkalis in the paint.”