I looked at him in surprise: “Why we? In what sense ‘we’?”
He was silent for a moment and then looked me in the eye and said calmly, “I am German. A major from the medical services of…a certain German military unit. Haven’t you noticed that under the doctor’s smock I don’t have a uniform?”
“To be honest, I didn’t think it meant anything. Some of the military nurses not only skip wearing a military uniform under their smocks but also even a bra.”
“Yes, that’s a more pleasant sight.”
“On the other hand, come to think of it, your German was immediately apparent. Unlike Sister Angela who uses about a hundred German words in an English syrup. I thought you studied it at college or something.”
He shook his head. “I studied it with my grandmother in Ottobrunn, near Munich.”
“I’m sorry if I’m asking inappropriate questions, but…it seems strange—a German major with a name like Joe Smith, who turns out to be in an American unit before the end of the war.”
For the first time I saw him light a cigarette—indoors this was forbidden for everyone, including the doctors and the nurses. He didn’t offer one to me. He said, “The English reading of my name is what does it and the American habit of reading Johann as Joe. I am Johan Schmidt, a citizen of the just-collapsed Third Reich. Whether there will be a fourth one—we don’t know yet.”
THREE
And so, my dear brother, who will read these lines, if you have the patience, learn also the story of the major from the medical services, Johann Schmidt, or if you wish, Doc Joe. It is all presented in exactly the way he personally told it to me in that quiet and fragrant dusk in Salzburg, before the blue shadows of the night started edging up the rocks toward the fortress.
And if I’m telling you, it’s not to add one more drop to the overflowing well of memories of the Sinister War, but because the vignettes and caprioles of life are all tangled up in destiny, and as I’ve already hinted to you, we understood them in one way at that time, and quite differently now, years after the war.
The denouement was approaching and only complete idiots, among whom Doctor Schmidt was not at all included, were expecting a miracle in connection with the rumor of the Führer’s new secret weapon. We know now that this was not idle chatter, and that Werner von Braun was feverishly preparing the atom bomb, but it was already late, and, moreover, a cat, thank God, crossed his path. Even the defeat of the Allies at the Ardennes did not paint a rosier picture of the imminent and inexorable end. At that time the unit in which my doctor was enrolled was to be found somewhere in northern Italy, in the Dolomites, and the Americans were crawling unstoppably up the Italian boot. This was a rather small special unit, said Doc Joe, without clarifying what was special about it, which had been completely confused by the contradictory orders of the high ranking chiefs preoccupied more with saving their own skins than with the design of a systematic plan for withdrawal.
In this cheerful situation, Major Johann Schmidt decided to commit supreme treachery against the ideals of National Socialism, and, carelessly undoing his belt, moved off on the pretext of crouching behind the bushes, waited for a suitable moment of general disorder, and bolted down through the early crocuses.
He ran through bushes, snowdrifts, and creeks, until he heard laughter and noisy English speech. Ducking down in the low junipers, Doctor Schmidt crawled toward the sounds and discovered below him, in a small clearing, about ten American soldiers, who were boiling water for coffee on a small fire they had just made. It may not be decent to speak like this about the winners, but this team was no less disorderly than that which the major had just left without even bidding farewell, in that their weapons were hanging on the bare branches or were just lying on last year’s grass. At this point our doctor jumped out from his hiding place and shouted out in a most cordial manner, “Hey, amis, Freundschaft! Hitler kaputt!”
It will remain unknown in history what exactly the Americans made of this diplomatic message, but all of them, as if by an order, threw away their metal cups and raised their arms. Some linguistic complications came up, while the doctor tried to explain that he was the one who was surrendering, and not the other way around. At this moment, from above in the bushes someone shouted: “Hände hoch!” which means “Hands up!” and the small representative part of American democracy turned out to be under the gun of a unit of SS soldiers, cleaning up the forest. The Americans had to surrender for a second time, but the exhilaration of the SS soldiers was beyond description when they found out that these ten Yankees had already been captured by one single major from the Wehrmacht, and a doctor at that! What more shining proof of the moral superiority of the German spirit over the rotten Western plutocracy!
The captured were taken to the special unit, in which Doctor Schmidt was enrolled, and he was personally given praise with the promise of being proposed for a medal of honor in the next report.
That same night, when the unit, completely soused on medical spirits, was snoring away, Doctor Schmidt unlocked the stone sheepfold, turned into a temporary holding cell for the ten Americans, and together with them fled, thus not hanging around to receive his medal of honor.
Since then, in other words, since the late winter of forty-four, Major Schmidt had been enrolled among the personnel of the American military field hospital and become “Doc Joe.” He honestly and with his by no means negligible knowledge of German medical science, which, we must admit, has more than once also proved its superiority, tried to keep the thread of Ariadne unbroken in the wounded American soldiers, the civilian population suffering from battles, or, as in our case, the semi-humans dragged out of the stinking camps.
“Well, so what?” you will say. “What do you want to hint to me with this story? When the months till the end are counted, it’s not such a big deal to act the way your doctor did. Especially if you have at least two grams of brain in your head!”
Yes, it’s true, I have to hand it to you, but still most didn’t do it, sometimes because of fear, other times because of useless hopes for a sudden change in the course of events or the imposing myths of a soldier’s duty, fidelity to vows, and all kinds of high ideals for Blut und Boden. But let me remind you as well that the Soviet boys didn’t do it either even when things seemed hopeless, or when freight cars were transporting the blocks of granite for a statue of Hitler on Red Square. There’s a difference, you’ll say, but please don’t involve me in debates about just and unjust wars, because not every soldier, with his head stuck in the mud, can make a judgment about this from the high and strict criteria of history. I only want to say that complicated and mysterious are the ways of God, in which a life-defining choice reaches the brain and the heart, and with some this happens fast, and with others, I’m sorry to say, a little slower. Some, as we know, did not let fascism into their souls, others abandoned it—some on the first day of the war, others on the last one, and some never left it at all. For those who threw away by conviction the brown shirt of this somber delusion—no matter when, sooner or later, I’ll remind you of the words of my rabbi, pronounced on a different occasion: “Let us understand them, without cursing them and without deriding them, let us leave some space, bread, and wine for them at our table.” This is what Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David said and you try to understand it!
And this is not the denouement, or call it the punch line of my story, but rather that early morning, somewhere toward the end of June, where, in our hospital room, crammed with beds, there entered an American officer and a sergeant from the military police, “MPs” as they were called, accompanied by two civilians with red bands on the sleeves of their worn-out coats. One was a big, hairy mountain fellow, the other one just the opposite—a small fellow with wire-rimmed glasses, the way printers or history teachers in poor mountain towns look. Let me tell you immediately that red bands on sleeves at that time could mean a number of different things—from voluntary citizen police, t
rying to establish order in a country, where except for the occupation armies there was no other power, to representatives of committees, anti-fascist organizations and parties, or just self-appointed temporary community units, undertaking the responsibility for drinking water or bread for the desperate and disaster-stricken population. Doc Joe, sitting on the edge of the bed as usual with his huge body bent sideways, turned his head, looked at the newcomers and stood up, slowly taking down his stethoscope.
The little fellow with the wire glasses fixed his shortsighted eyes on him, then decisively stretched his hand and pointed at him with his finger—like a strict judge, a biblical prophet, the god Zebaoth himself: “That’s him!”
FOUR
So Doc Joe was arrested and I never saw him again. One more time seized by doubts, as regular as stomach colic, about supreme justice, which eventually gives everyone what they deserve, I learned the truth from Sister Angela, and it was the following:
After the capitulation of Fascist Italy and the immediate German occupation of northern Italy that followed, a rather fierce partisan war flamed up in those mountainous places. Led by the insane paranoid idea of the “Final Solution,” the Nazis undertook arrests of Jews here too, even though it is well known that some more sober heads from the Führer’s circle were already sensing that the Final Solution was indeed not going to be late, but was moving in a slightly different direction. So somewhere in the region of Trento, a temporary transit camp was organized for Jews and other harmful elements, before deporting them. The major from the medical unit, Johann Schmidt, was taken off the rolls of his military hospital and enlisted in the “Special Unit” as a doctor who had to attest to and record in the documents the data about the medical status of the “merchandise.” With respect to this some were sent to the stone quarries of Mauthausen, and those physically unfit for this heavy labor quite a distance further, to a resort in Poland, where despite mounting difficulties, created by the rapid advance of the Red Army, they were still well stocked with sufficient quantities of the round boxes of crystals under the code name of “Zyklon B.” With the advance of the Americans the camp in Trento was quickly dissolved, and the unit was given an order to withdraw toward the former Austrian border.
This, more or less, is it. I don’t want to and I can’t judge either the degree of Dr. Schmidt’s guilt, or the sincerity of his deeds given his forced participation in the nastiness, because years later I met some doctors in Kolyma, under a polar cap, and for some of them I kept in my memory a dose of quiet gratitude for their humane attitude or just professional conscientiousness, and for others—the most simple contempt. I only know that the finger with which the little Italian pointed at Doc Joe was the finger of Retribution, but such was the time—straight-shooting, without alleviating nuances and mitigating clauses.
Later on I learned that the doctor was sentenced to eight years in Milan, even the newspapers wrote about it—some with surprise, others with satisfaction—then that he performed diligently as a doctor in the prison hospital and was granted amnesty as soon as the third year. And if now he is a pensioner in Ottobrunn by Munich and if he by chance reads these lines of mine, I would like to tell him: “Hello, Doc Joe, I know that war is a nasty thing and makes the person an accomplice—sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. I’m not the institution that hands out sentences and that’s why I only want to tell you that I remember good things about you.”
I’m convinced that someone will furiously disagree on the above topic and I don’t doubt the fairness of his disagreement, that’s why I’ll reply to him like the old rabbi: “You are right too!”
FIVE
On June 22, just like a caprice or game of chance—on the fourth anniversary of the moment when we were suddenly forced to interrupt our travels to the hills of Manchuria and our life unexpectedly went in another direction—exactly on that day I received a parcel mailed from Geneva, marked with the signs of the International Red Cross. Believe me, even before I opened the big envelope with trembling fingers, I knew that this was news from Rabbi Ben-David, and I knew what he was going to tell me. I was afraid to read it, I was picking the envelope up and putting it down, and up and down again, as if something in its contents could still change and improve. And it wasn’t easy to read through the blur of my tears, because there was a document from the International Committee on Nazi crimes in Auschwitz regarding the person Sarah Davidovna Blumenfeld, maiden name Zvassman, who died in the camp on March 3, 1943. There was an excerpt from protocol 107/1944 issued by the Military Prosecutor of the Third Ukrainian Front for the mass shooting of peaceful civilians in the vicinity of Kolodetz, South Ukraine, U.S.S.R. In addition, there was a copy of the Order for the Posthumous Decoration with the “Red Flag” medal of the fighter Yeshua (Schura) Isaakovitch Blumenfeld and the radio operator Susannah Isaakovna Blumenfeld, from the Tarnopol partisan unit, who died in battle against the fascist occupier. And in addition, there was a notice on a standard form, quickly and carelessly filled in by an unknown bureaucrat, testifying that the guard-lieutenant Blumenfeld, Isaak Yacobovitch, had not returned from an intelligence mission to the enemy’s rear in the area of Vitebsk, First Baltic Front, and should be considered missing. “This document is to serve his next of kin as…” Oh, God, for what other purpose could my boy’s death serve, if it hadn’t served already to speed up by one second, together with the other fifty million seconds, the end of this damned war!
My dear Itzik!
I managed to provide myself with the attached records, which with the generous help of a foreign correspondent you will receive through the Red Cross. I know how much you will be hurt by everything you will learn, but I’ve already told you that the fruit of empty hopes is more bitter than the saddest truth. This is how it is now all over our country, which is flooded by waves of bad news about the long-awaited loved ones who will not return.
I do not dare give you advice about what to do, because I myself am lost, as if in the bottom of a dark pit. Kolodetz is almost entirely destroyed and burnt, only its brick chimneys have survived the fire. This is what our miastechko is now—a dead forest of chimneys!
People are nonetheless beginning to return, here and there one of ours comes back. I am proud of them, because they come decorated with medals of glory in battle, but of our relatives, unfortunately, there are none surviving. Everything has to start from the very beginning, brick by brick. Because now it is Shnat Shmita.
I lifted my eyes from the letter and remembered the lessons from the Talmud: Shnat Shmita, the Seventh, the Sabbath year, when in ancient times the land was left unplowed, in order to rest and in peace to cover the dead with grass. Shnat Shmita—to everyone in the Seventh Year according to his need and everything from the beginning. This is what it had come to!
That is why I will stay here, Itzik, with my people, because I am obliged to be with them! I want to help them understand that what happened was not inevitable and might not have happened, and that the quiet resignation with which many accepted it may conceal in itself the wisdom of the past, but hardly brings hope for the future. I am not a prophet, nor a tzaddik, but a simple rabbi in an ordinary small miastechko, myself confused and torn by doubts of both celestial and earthly truths, but I would like to help people grasp the meaning of what happened and liberate themselves from being hostages to resignation and biblical dreams—just like our brave Maccabees from the Warsaw Ghetto, eternal be their memory! They have the right, our people, to all the past of the tribe of Abraham, but the future we must enter awake, with eyes open and looking forward. This is what I think.
And why am I writing all this to you? So that you know why I am staying. But you, my cherished and dearest Itzik, husband of my deceased sister and father of all my nephews and my niece fallen in battle, you are fragile, and your soul is weak and wounded, and I don’t want to see it broken like a cracked vessel in the Seventh Year. This is why I beg you: for the time being, do not com
e back. Settle yourself somewhere, by the side of a river, plant a piece of land and water it—let the grass grow.
Always yours,
Shmuel Ben-David
PS. I learned about Esther Katz as much as it was possible to learn: you remember that she was sent to take a cure, but, unfortunately, she will never return. I don’t know where her grave is and what happened to her is a great, great injustice. But the traces of her steps on the sands of my life have remained!
Sh. B.
It’s strange, but true—the stronger the blow, the weaker the pain, which comes later, much later. Maybe nature has encoded all this in the cell in order to preserve the life system. Have you noticed that at the funeral of a loved one, your mind drifts away to thoughts that are insignificant or quite inappropriate for the somber mourning ritual, as if the soul purposefully switches off its fuses, in order to avoid explosion. The sheets of paper from the big Geneva envelope were scattered on the blanket, and I was lying numb, with unblinking eyes. Indifferent grayness was stretching out in front of my inner sight—without a horizon, without a demarcation line between down and up, life and death, yesterday and tomorrow.
I don’t know how long this lasted, but my black angel tried to drag me out from the depths of timelessness and took me for a walk up at the fortress. I submitted to her like a doll, without a will of my own. The small-track railway train was not working of course, but the angel had a friend in the supply unit, who drove us up in his military jeep. His name was Jefferson—that’s right, Jefferson—and he was a hundred times blacker than Angela, but when he smiled, his white teeth flashed a hundred times whiter than her hospital smock. So, as I was saying, this Jefferson took us up, but delicately stayed with the car—maybe Sister Angela had wished it so.
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