Authors: Paul Grossman
Of course, the Nazi Party was far from running Germany. The larger their movement grew, the more cracks appeared within it. The other day stormtroopers had wrecked their own headquarters, furious at their meager sausage rations. Berlin police had to be called in before they killed each other. Anything could happen.
“For God’s sake,” Vicki’s mother interjected, handing around helpings of Black Forest cake, “it’s Papa’s birthday. Must we really?”
“Mom’s right,” Vicki said, taking the knife from her. “Let’s talk about the family. How’re Tante Hedwig and Onkel Albrecht?” She cut a piece of cake for Willi.
“Perfectly fine.” Vicki’s mother adjusted her beads. Despite her vindication she still seemed uncomfortable. “But do you remember that nice young couple next door to them, the Liebmans? So terrible. The other morning, right at the breakfast table, he dropped dead.”
Vicki put down the cake. “You mean the pharmacist? With the glasses?”
“Thirty-nine years old. Finished his toast and just keeled over.”
Vicki flashed a look at Willi. “How awful.”
* * *
The sun was already dipping westward when they hugged Erich and Stefan good-bye and closed the door on the Gottmans’ Mercedes, wishing them a bon voyage. As the car sped off, Ava waved happily, thrilled whenever she got a chance to mother those kids.
Walking from the park amid lengthening shadows, Vicki inched nearer, then slowly, surely, slipped her fingers into Willi’s, waves of relief spreading through his body as her head leaned against his shoulder. They stopped and embraced and stood there a long time.
“Oh, Willi. I’m so afraid of losing you.”
“Shhh. I’m not going anywhere.”
“But you never—”
“Shhhh.”
A few minutes later, waiting for the streetcar, the sun had dropped behind the trees and a cool breeze picked up. Vicki put her hand in his jacket pocket while Willi kept it warm. Gazing across the busy avenue, he saw the many smokestacks rising from the
Central-Viehof,
and for a moment felt the world was as it ought to be.
Then something began pounding at his brain.
Drums.
And trumpets. Ringing glockenspiels.
Rounding the corner, a brown-and-black wall appeared down Landsberger Allee, backing up traffic, drawing crowds—uniforms four abreast, boots shaking the pavement, swastikas on bloodred banners. Clean, sharp, flawless, their precision reminded Willi of the Tiller Girls that night at the Admirals-Palast when Josephine Baker had appeared, the spectators equally dazzled now by the uniformity of movement.
Drawing directly in front of them finally, these ranks, they saw, were not composed of well-disciplined young men, but children. Willi’d witnessed them before—youthful legionnaires behind whom Germany was supposed to fall in line, tossing leaflets, marching in the Sportpalast—but never up so close. They barely had peach fuzz on their chins. Some looked no older than Erich, drums almost as big as they. But their faces were like steel traps slammed shut, eyes fiery furnaces, as if they knew nothing, saw nothing but the most bitter enemy ahead.
Not unlike the look Irmgard and Otto had the morning Heinzie died.
Poor, sweet kid next door. Willi’d rescued him from the flames that night, but unlike Erich and the others, he’d never come to. The narcotics von Hessler’d pumped through his body had sent him into a coma from which he never emerged. When he was finally gone, the explosion of anger from their neighbors’ mouths made their prior confrontation seem cordial. The severing of relations, they’d repeatedly stressed, had been nothing but a matter of self-preservation. With their only son’s death, though, some ancient hatred burst to the surface as if from the bottom of a deep, dark well.
“It’s true what they say, then—you
are
only out for yourselves. You manage to save Erich, but our boy is dead. Chosen ones!”
“Madness,” Vicki said now of the neat-combed hair and grimacing faces storming by. “I don’t understand, Willi, what is it they want? Another war?”
“They’re not even old enough to remember the last one,” Willi said, pulling her closer. Holding her tightly, he began to see not merely the mechanized rows of defiant youth but all the homeless, hungry children of Berlin. The nine- and ten-year-olds lined up in the Linden Passage. The miserable faces at the peddlers’ market, behind their barrels of slop. The wretched butchered prisoners in the Köhlers’ chambers of horror. Even little, round-cheeked Heinzie Winkelmann, cracked across the face. All the punishments, the canes and whips, the sticks and spankings. The brutal insistence on submission.
I’d rather have a dead son than a disobedient one
.
“Willi, please, can’t we go?” Vicki clenched his hand.
He took her arm, ready to walk, but the streetcar finally clanged around the corner and they jumped on board. Grabbing seats, they could see them outside, these furious children, and hear them shaking earth and sky with their song:
We are the joyous Hitler youth!
Our leader is our savior
The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone
We want to be pagans again!
Epilogue
WINTER 1947
BRITISH MANDATE, PALESTINE
Sun beat down on Dizengoff Circle, the modern heart of Tel Aviv. In the planted oasis at its center, well-dressed couples pushed baby carriages or relaxed on benches in the shade of palms, watching the fountain dance. Beyond the greenery, long avenues lined with angular white buildings rolled up the turquoise coast—a glistening new metropolis.
Willi took a deep breath. The top of his head was burning. Yet again he’d forgotten a hat, he realized. In the eight years since he’d been in the Middle East, he still couldn’t remember half of what he was supposed to: the sun, the heatstroke, that Dizengoff wasn’t Kurfürstendamm. That January here was like August in northern Europe. As much of a fish out of water as he sometimes felt, though, how much lighter and freer Tel Aviv was than Berlin.
Whatever was left of his old hometown anyway, he mused.
Not that trouble hadn’t followed him here. He inched into the shade as he waited to cross Ben Ami Street. If it ever came to all-out conflict, he knew there’d be no escaping this time. For one thing, both the boys would be in it.
Erich and Stefan had joined the Haganah, the underground army of Jewish Palestine. Erich, twenty-five, named Eitan now, was with the intelligence services, a chip off the old block, training for work, Willi was sure, behind enemy lines. Stefan, who’d changed his name to Zvi, was twenty-three and in the Palmach, the most elite “strike force” unit. Willi was hurrying to meet him now, on one of the rare weekend leaves Zvi got from Beit Keshet, a secret training camp in the Galilee.
But passing a news kiosk just a block from their meeting place, Willi’s feet froze to the pavement. My God. His throat parched painfully. Plastered across the morning papers: that face.
Grabbing a copy, he sank onto a bench, reading. The caption called her Ilse Koch, but there was no mistaking that pockmarked skin. Those dead gray eyes. She
had
made it down the smoky staircase all those years ago.
Now her infamy was worldwide.
Quickly, he ascertained from
Ha’aretz
that after fleeing the burning tower in the
Viehof
that night in 1930, the youngest Köhler had slipped across the frontier into Poland and cocooned herself in German-speaking Danzig until the spring of ’33, when her kind seized power in Germany. Then she flew back on butterfly wings. Married a handsome SS colonel. Became a Kommandant’s wife at one of the premier concentration camps. Now she and her husband were both facing war-crimes charges. Ilse Koch was said to have been so insatiably cruel that those she tormented had dubbed her the Bitch of Buchenwald. Some of the acts she’d been accused of included, Willi read with a mounting vertigo, having inmates skinned alive for tattoos and using their flesh for making …
He let the paper slip to his lap.
My God, he thought.
Handbags and lampshades.
* * *
Under twirling electric fans, Café Esther was crowded with Tel Avivians from around the world. Egyptian Jews with wide lips. Polish Jews with bright blue eyes. Loud, laughing Romanian Jews, decked out in jewelry. And
Yekkes
such as himself, Willi thought—German Jews, fussy and fastidious, sipping tea not from glasses but regular china cups, thank you.
Quickly surmising his son had not yet arrived, he sat at a corner table and tried to relax, but couldn’t suppress ugly memories of the Köhler siblings. Just last month, the Tel Aviv press had published pretrial testimony for the tribunals being prepared against Nazi physicians in Nuremberg. In them, he’d been shocked to discover the ghastly destiny of Ilse’s older sister, Magda. A fate shared most ironically with her twisted business partner, the mad Dr. von Hessler.
Both had wound up at the Berlin-Buch Psychiatric Hospital, Ward 6, for the criminally insane, where von Hessler had not surprisingly managed to talk his way out of custody in the mid-1930s, and nearly succeeded in getting his Tower of Silence rebuilt. Some in the regime very much supported his work, wanting it resumed on a far grander scale. But the one-eyed doctor apparently hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut about the fallacy of Nazi racial theories and wound up, once the war began, reinstitutionalized.
In the winter of 1940, all inmates in Ward 6, Berlin-Buch, were among the early participants in something called Aktion T4, for the mentally ill. Patients deemed “unworthy of life” were led into rooms disguised as showers and gassed with carbon monoxide. The cheap, clean death von Hessler himself had so enthusiastically embraced for his boy guinea pigs came back to return the favor—and went on to be a prototype for the extermination of millions.
* * *
Willi looked at his watch, impatient but not concerned by Zvi’s tardiness. He’d learned by now the Middle East did not run on German clocks. Taking a slow sip of tea he remembered how long each second had felt during those twenty-three hours von Hessler’d had his son. The genius scientist with his damaged frontal lobe had at least correctly forecast the memory loss: to this day Erich remembered nothing of his kidnapping. He never forgot what happened that morning on the terrace with the Winkelmanns, though. It marked the beginning of the end for them in Germany. For all of them.
Beneath the slowly turning fans, the kind, bright eyes of Dr. Weiss wafted through Willi’s mind. In those last years before the Nazi takeover, the deputy president of the Berlin police had sued Joseph Goebbels twenty-eight times for slander, and won each case. To no avail. Goebbels became one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, and Weiss—a truly great figure in the history of German law enforcement—was forced to run for his life, a disenfranchised exile, destined for obscurity.
“
Slicha.
Inspector Kraus, I expect?”
A slender woman in her mid-thirties, dark hair swept under a yellow scarf, eyes like shiny olives, was standing over him suddenly, clutching a handbag.
“The maître d’ asked me to let you know you got a call from Zvi.” She frowned sympathetically. “I’m sorry. He can’t make it today after all.” She lowered her eyes, embarrassed, it seemed, to have to bear such sad news.
“Thanks very much. I appreciate your telling me.” Willi nodded, knowing very well that in Zvi’s line of work, plans changed like the wind. The woman didn’t leave, though. In fact, she pulled up a chair and sat rather near.
“It’s not why I came, Inspector. I’m just passing it along from that guy.”
Moishe the maître d’, whom Willi knew well, nodded from the front of the café.
“I see,” Willi acknowledged, noticing she was beautiful, her taut frame and tan complexion reminding him of some desert gazelle that could keep its footing even on the rockiest precipice. “Then how can I help you, Mrs.…?”
“I’m a social worker with the Jewish agency. My name’s Leah.” He caught the faintest hint of lavender on her neck. “Something happened I need to speak to you about.” The olive eyes cast a quick glance behind her shoulder. “A week ago.” They fixed back on Willi. “Just like that”—she snapped her fingers—“one of my clients lost her memory. She went to sleep with it, but the next morning woke up and recognized no one, not even herself.”
“How awful. Did she have a stroke? You’ve taken her to a doctor?”
“Don’t patronize me, please” came a prickly response.
This Leah, Willi’d already discerned, was what they called a sabra—a Jew born in the Holy Land, named for the cactus that sprang ubiquitously from the driest soil here, prickly on the outside, sweet, supposedly, within.
“She’s seen top specialists. More than one. Everyone agrees it wasn’t a stroke. And everyone agrees there’s no other explanation for it.”
“So, why come to me?”
She smiled vaguely, her dark eyes softening. “Because I heard you specialized in such things. Medical mysteries. At least take a drive to Beersheva with me and see.”
Something in the glistening look she gave him pulled a chord in Willi’s heart and threw him back in time. He could practically still feel that crisp autumn day in the Berlin park. Grandpa Max’s birthday lunch. That frightening Hitler Youth parade. When they’d gotten back to Wilmersdorf, he’d taken Vicki out to dinner, then spent the rest of the evening at home, making love for the first time in weeks. How tender it was. How passionate and playful. And in retrospect, how grateful he was to have no idea it would also be the last time.
Next morning Vicki met a friend at a café on Joachimstaler Platz. She was sitting near a window when a truck jumped the curb. A piece of glass slashed her carotid artery, and she was gone in under a minute.
“Beersheva isn’t my jurisdiction, Leah. Sorry.” He averted his eyes.
Her hand reached across the table, gently touching his arm. “It won’t take long. Please. It’s important. She lives in the middle of the desert in a settlement surrounded by enemies, with very little protection. It would have been easy for someone to sneak through the fence and—well, I don’t know what they could have done.”