Authors: Leon Uris
“Then it might not have been Dr. Kelno.”
“Yes.”
“Do you see your sister quite often in Jerusalem?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve talked about all of this, particularly since you were contacted for testimony in this case.”
“Yes.”
The robes slipped off Sir Robert’s shoulders as he was driving with excitement despite his desire to keep restrained.
“Now both you and your sister are vague and contradictory on a number of points and particularly the dates and time lapses. There is questionable testimony on whether you were taken in by stretcher or wagon ... whether Dr. Tesslar sat on your right or your left or at your head ... whether the table was tilted ... whether or not you could actually see a reflection in the overhead lamp ... who was in the room ... how many weeks you spent waiting in Block III after your irradiation ... what people were saying in Polish and German ... you have testified you were quite drowsy and your sister testified she was awake ... you are not absolutely certain your injection was given in the waiting room.”
Highsmith dropped the paper to the table and leaned forward holding the rostrum with both hands and cautioning himself not to raise his voice.
“I suggest, Madame Halevy, you were quite young and all of this happened a long time ago.”
She listened closely as Dr. Leiberman told her everything back in Hebrew. She nodded and said something back.
“What is her answer?” the judge asked.
“Mrs. Halevy said that Sir Robert is probably correct about her discrepancies on many points but there is one thing that no woman can forget and that is the day she knows she is unable to bear her own child.”
14
H
EMLINES WERE UP IN
Czechoslovakia. Prague openly displayed her Western heart as well as her Western-oriented thighs. It was the most liberal Communist country, seeing its most liberal days. Flocks of tourists moved in and out from the West in buses and by rail and airline.
Even the landing of an El Al Israel jet created little stir. After all, the affection of the Czechs for their Jewish population and the State of Israel was well established. From the days of Jan Masaryk at the end of the war there was a sincere mourning for the seventy-seven thousand Czech Jews murdered at Teresienstadt and the other extermination camps and it was Masaryk himself who defied the British and allowed Czechoslovakia to be a staging and transit point for the survivors of the holocaust attempting to run the blockade to Palestine.
This El Al flight would have drawn scant attention except that one of the passengers was Shimshon Aroni, whose arrival triggered the usual speculations at police headquarters.
“Jalta Hotel,” he said to the driver of an Opel taxi.
They turned into a swarm of vehicles, trolleys, and buses on Wenceslaus Square and checked in at the reception desk. It was four o’clock. Two hours should get things moving, he thought.
A small single room, the smallest. His life had been lived in small single rooms hunting escaped Nazis. Prague had remained the only decent city among the Communist countries but since the murder of Katzenbach, it too took on a sick smell.
His battered bag was opened and its contents put away in minutes. Two million air miles. Two million miles of hunting and hounding. Two million miles of vengeance.
He walked over to the square on a now familiar pilgrimage, first to the U Fleku Beer Garden. Israeli beer was not so good. In fact, it was rather bad. When Aroni traveled before retirement he had a chance to taste good beer, but lately he had the scant satisfaction of the local product at home. U Fleku, an enormous drinking hall, had the best beer in the world Pilsener to Bohemia.
He gloried in three glasses and studied the crowd and the girls and their short skirts. Czech and Hungarian women were the best. In Spain and Mexico bulls were bred for their courage. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia women were bred for love-making. Subtle, frantic, imaginative, irrational tempers, magnificent sweetness. What a bore it all has been, Aroni thought. He had been too busy hunting Nazis for serious love-making and now he was getting too old, almost seventy, but not that old. No use of dreaming. His trip to Prague precluded a romance.
He mentally converted the Czech koruna into Israeli pounds, paid his bill, and continued on to the Charles Bridge that spanned the Vltava River with its great stone railings adorned every few feet by the statue of a grim saint.
Aroni’s step slowed as he walked toward Staromestski—the Old Town—for here were the memories, the pitiful remains of a thousand years of Jewish life in Central Europe. The Staronova Synagogue, the oldest in Europe, dating back to 1268, and the Klaus cemetery, with thirteen thousand broken and crooked tombstones going back to before the time of Columbus.
Aroni had seen the old graveyards in Poland, in Russia, in Roumania, largely unkept and vandalized. At least here was a parcel of sacred ground.
Graveyards. The death place of most Jews was the unmarked mountains of nameless bones of the extermination camps.
The Jewish State Museum held a few relics of fifteen hundred villages profaned during the Nazi occupation and the Pinkas Synagogue carried a grisly memorial.
Read the names again, Aroni. Read them again and again ... Terzin, Belzec, Auschwitz, Gliwce, Majdanek, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, Izbica, Gross-Rosen, Treblinka, Lodz, Dachau, Babi-Yar, Buchenwald, Stutthof, Rosenburg, Piaski, Ravensbruck, Rassiku, Mauthausen, Dora, Neuengamme, Chelmno, Sachsenhausen, Nonowice, Riga, Trostinec, and all the other places his people were murdered.
Seventy-seven thousand names of the dead on a synagogue wall and the words,
PEOPLE BE VIGILANT
.
Aroni returned to the hotel at six o’clock. As he calculated, Jiri Linka waited in the lobby. They shook hands and made to the bar.
DINER’S CLUB WELCOME
, the sign of peace and progress proclaimed.
Jiri Linka was a cop, a Jewish cop. He looked like a cartoon of an iron curtain policeman. Aroni ordered a Pilsener and Linka a shot of slivovitz.
“How long since you’ve been to Prague, Aroni?”
“Almost four years.”
“Things have changed, eh?”
They conversed in Czech, one of Aroni’s ten languages. “How long will your comrades in Moscow permit you such happiness?’
“Nonsense. We are a progressive Soviet country.”
Aroni grunted through rivulets of wrinkles. “I stood at the Charles Bridge today and looked into the river ... Katzenbach.”
Linka turned quiet as Aroni made reference to an American member of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee whose mission it was to liberate Jews. He was found dead, floating in the river.
“First they’ll get the Jews,” Aroni said, “and then the Czechs. You are seeing too many good things from the West. I predict you’ll have the Russian Army in Prague within a year.”
Linka giggled. “I thought you retired. I thought maybe you came this rime to go to the spas and take a mud bath.”
“I am working for a private party. I want to see Branik.”
Linka puckered his lips and shrugged at mention of the head of the secret police. Aroni was one of the best men in the business and never sought out things foolishly. In all the years he had come to Czechoslovakia he had been content to work through channels.
“I want to see Branik tonight.”
“I think he is out of the country.”
“Then I leave tomorrow. I have no time for a run around.”
“Maybe you’d like to talk to someone else?”
“Branik. I’ll be waiting in my room.” He left.
Linka drummed his fingers on the table, finished his drink, snatched his hat, and hurried out to the square. He hopped in his small Skoda Octavia and raced toward headquarters.
15
T
HE FIRST OF THE
male victims, Moshe Bar Tov, was called over from the consultation room. He entered the court with an air of defiance and appearing somewhat awkward in a good suit. He gave a small wave to Abraham Cady and David Shawcross, then glared down hostilely at Adam Kelno, who declined to meet his eye. Kelno appeared tired, quite tired for the first time.
Moshe Bar Tov had been the first to respond to Aroni’s search, and it was he who brought the others in and was their obvious leader.
“Before we swear in this witness,” Anthony Gilray said, turning to the press, “I must express concern and distress over a report that came in from a Jerusalem newspaper describing one of the witnesses as a woman in her early forties with two adopted children, slightly set and formerly from Trieste. Now people in Jerusalem, and I understand they are following this trial closely, are apt to identify this lady. I reiterate that there should be a refraining from any kind of description of any sort.”
The offending journalist, an Israeli, busied himself with notes and did not look up.
“Dr. Leiberman, you are still under oath and will continue to be for any other witnesses in Hebrew.”
Brendon O’Conner conducted the examination as Tom Bannister studied it all from a marbleized pose.
“Your name, sir.”
“Moshe Bar Tov.”
“And your address?”
“Kibbutz Ein Gev in the Galilee of Israel.”
“That is a collective settlement, a large farm.”
“Yes, many hundred families.”
“Did you change your name at any time, sir?”
“Yes, my former name was Herman Paar.”
“And before the war you were from Holland?”
“Yes, Rotterdam.”
“And you were deported by the Germans?”
“Early in 1943 with my two sisters, my mother and father. We were transported in cattle cars to Poland. I am the only survivor.”
In contrast to Thomas Bannister, Brendon O’Conner examined impatiently with the voice of a Shakespearean actor. Bar Tov showed steel over the death of his family.
“You were tattooed?’“
“Yes.”
“Will you read your number to the jury.”
“One hundred fifteen thousand, four hundred and ninety and a denotation as a Jew.”
“And what happened to you at Jadwiga?”
“I was sent to work with other Dutch Jews in an I. G. Farben factory making shell casings.”
“One moment,” Gilray interrupted. “I am not defending any particular German manufacturer. On the other hand there is no German manufacturer here to defend himself.”
Dr. Leiberman and Bar Tov engaged in a conversation in Hebrew.
“The court would like to know, Dr. Leiberman, exactly what is transpiring.”
Dr. Leiberman turned red. “Your Lordship, I’d rather not ...”
“I shall place it in the form of a request for the time being.”
“Mr. Bar Tov says he will gladly send you a copy of the Jadwiga War Crimes Trials in English from the Kibbutz library. He insists he worked in an I. G. Farben factory.”
Anthony Gilray was perplexed and at an unusual loss of words. He fiddled with his pencil and grumbled, then turned to the witness box. “Well, tell Mr. Bar Tov I appreciate his special knowledge of the situation. Also explain to him that he is in an English courtroom, and we do demand complete respect for the rules of this trial. If I interrupt it is certainly not out of any desire to protect the Nazis or the guilty, but to adhere to normal conduct of fair play.”
After this was told, Bar Tov knew he had his victory and nodded to the judge that he would behave.
“Now, Mr. Bar Tov, you worked in this, er, particular munitions factory for how long?”
“Until the middle of 1943.”
“How old were you at the time?”
“Seventeen.”
“And what happened?”
“An SS officer came to the factory one day and began choosing certain people, myself and several other Dutch boys of about my age. We were taken into the main camp of Jadwiga and placed into Barrack III of the medical compound. After several weeks the SS came and took us away to Barrack V. There was myself and five other Dutchmen. We were ordered to undress in a waiting room. Then, after a time I was taken into a room with an examination table and told to get on it on all fours.”
“Did you ask why?”
“I knew and I complained.”
“What were you told?”
“I was told I was a Jewish dog and I had better stop barking.”
“In what language?”
“German.”
“By whom?”
“Voss.”
“Who else was in the room?”
“SS guards, Kapos, two others who were either doctors or orderlies.”
“Can you identify any of them other than Voss?”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
“I tried to jump off the table and was hit a blow on the side of the head. I was still conscious but too hurt to struggle against three or four of them who held me on the table. One of the orderlies held a piece of glass under my penis and the doctor or someone in white shoved a long wooden stick like a broom handle up my rectum forcing me to eject sperm on the glass.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Are you serious?”
“Quite serious. Did it hurt?”
“I screamed for mercy to every god I knew and all the gods I didn’t know.”
“What happened after that?”
“I was dragged bodily into another room and while they held me, they put my testicles on a metal plate on a table. Then, an X-ray machine was directed on one of my testicles for from five to ten minutes. Afterward, I was returned to Barrack III.”
“What was the effect of all this?”
“I was very dizzy and I vomited constantly for three days. Then, some black stains appeared on my testicles.”
“How long did you remain in Barrack III?”
“A number of weeks.”
“Do you know for a fact that your friends got the same treatment?”
“Yes and many other men in the barrack.”
“You say you were quite ill. Who took care of you?”
“Dr. Tesslar and, because there were so many Dutch in the barrack, a prisoner, a Dutch prisoner assisted. His name, I remember as Menno Donker.”
“How long did you remain in Barrack III before you were removed again?”
“It must have been November.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I recall talk of liquidating the ghettos around Poland and hundreds of thousands being shipped to Jadwiga West. It was so many the extermination facilities couldn’t handle them. There were executions by a firing squad going on all the time outside our barrack, shooting and screaming all the time.”