“Of course, the first ones there became
hopelessly tangled in the wire. They didn’t have to wait to be
shot; those of us behind simply trampled them to death. We
clambered over the bodies of our comrades, living and dead, just as
if they were blocks of wood. The momentum was irresistible. Nothing
could have stopped us—we hardly knew where we were or what we were
doing. We were mad with desperation.
“And when we were outside the camp—‘outside
the camp’; the words themselves, had we breath to say them, would
have sounded as unreal as ‘flying to heaven’—when we were outside,
we ran. There were woods two, three hundred meters ahead, so we ran
for them. No one stopped until a bullet found him or he dropped
with exhaustion. The Germans would bring in reinforcements soon
enough—we knew that. The Germans had dogs and flamethrowers, and
the strength of men who had not had their lives bled away from them
a drop at a time. So we ran for the covering darkness, scattering
in as many directions as we could.
“Perhaps six hundred out of a thousand lived
to be free that first day and night. A year later, when the
Russians finally came, I don’t suppose there were more than forty
of us left. The winter, starvation, and Polish peasants who would
sell a Jew to the Germans for ten zkotys and the satisfaction of
doing God’s work—they saw to it that not many survived. And the
soldiers, who would hunt us the way they might have hunted grouse,
for the sport of the thing. And finally, and worst of all, Colonel
Hagemann. We were among his first assignments in Poland, and within
his limits he was a very effective officer.
“But, as I have said. I was in Treblinka for
ten months.”
Leivick glanced down at the plate bearing his
half-eaten dinner—the sight of it made him feel faintly sick. He
picked up the napkin and used it to wipe his face, wondering why he
was talking like this. The story had laid buried deep inside him
all these years—what could he possibly gain by telling it now, and
to Christiansen?
“Would you have a cigarette?”
Christiansen dug a pack out of his shirt
pocket, shook out one cigarette for Leivick and then one for
himself, and then lit them both with a paper match. His handsome,
rather brutal face revealed nothing, neither sympathy nor distaste,
not even annoyance—nothing except the simple fact that he
understood what was being said to him. But he did, in fact,
understand. That in itself was rare enough. That perhaps was reason
enough.
The cigarette was stronger than Leivick had
expected and seemed to burn his tongue. He was even beginning to
feel slightly dizzy. It was just that he was out of practice, of
course; he had lost the habit during the war years, when tobacco
had been an unimaginable luxury—it might as well have been
ambergris. But this seemed the night for returning to old
patterns.
“I won’t impose on you by describing my
experiences in that place,” he said, breathing out the stale white
smoke, perfectly conscious that he was being less than fair.
“Suffice it to say that I arrived at the railway siding with my
whole family and the full moral burden of civilized Europe. When I
crawled out, over the corpses and barbed wire, I took nothing with
me except my life. I was psychologically equipped to survive—in
that respect, I was more than a match for Hagemann. So, I
survived.
“That first night I found a great thicket of
blackberries. It was too heavy to see into, so I crawled inside and
slept on the muddy ground. I waited there all night. I didn’t care
how badly I got scratched up. Sometimes I could hear a faint scream
in the distance, more often the sound of rifle fire.
“With the dawn, after I had eaten a few
handfuls of berries—they weren’t quite ripe and by the end of the
day I was doubled up with cramp, but they got me through and that
was enough—I decided I couldn’t risk staying any longer in one
place, so I was on the move again. I headed straight into the sun—I
couldn’t think of anything to do except to try reaching the Russian
lines. They were over six hundred kilometers east at that time, but
there was no way I could have known. One direction was as good as
another.
“It was about seven-thirty that morning when
I realized I was square in the middle of a German patrol area. The
first time I heard a twig snap I threw myself to the ground in some
high weeds and waited, my heart pounding inside my chest so that I
thought I might die from the pain of it
. They’ll kill me
now
, I thought to myself.
In twenty minutes I’ll be
dead.
When I finally saw one of them, I had to stuff my hand
into my mouth to keep from crying out.
“He was alone, and he didn’t seem to like
being outside on a steamy August morning. He held his rifle by the
strap, letting the butt drag along in the soft earth. He was weary
and bored and obviously thought the whole affair was a waste of
time. Why should anyone be out in the woods chasing after a gang of
runaway Jews? Why should anyone care?
“Finally—and who would have believed such a
thing could happen in the German army?—he sat down on the ground
with his back against a tree, set his helmet down beside him, and
lit a cigarette.” Leivick flourished his own, leaving a narrow
circle of smoke hanging in the air. “He was—what is the expression
the Americans use?—he was ‘goofing off.’
“How long does it take someone to finish a
cigarette? Three minutes? Four? I had exactly that much time to
cross perhaps thirty meters of ground on my hands and knees. If I
made a sound, if my sleeve brushed against a dead leaf. I was dead.
If this man’s sergeant or one of his comrades came along, I was
dead. If for any reason at all the poor devil turned his head, I
was a corpse. On my hands and knees I crawled, like an animal. I
think I must have been half mad, because I wasn’t afraid. I was
going to kill this man—that was all I could think about.
“When I was five meters away, I could smell
the tobacco smoke. When I was three, I could bear him breathing.
When my shoulder was almost touching the bark of the tree, I
reached around, locked my hands together over his throat, and
started to pull.
“You, of course, know all about what it is
like to strangle a man, don’t you, Mr. Christiansen. I suppose,
like everything else, it loses some of its terror with repetition,
but that was my first time. I leaned into that tree so that my arms
held it and the German’s throat both, and I tried to squeeze them
both down to nothing. I think I may actually have heard his neck
break, but after all these years I can’t be sure. If I did, that
was the only sound he made, but you should have seen his face when
finally I could bring myself to let go. There was a little trickle
of blood running down from his left ear. But, of course, I’m not
forgetting you know all about that sort of thing.”
He smiled, not at all unkindly, and ground
out the cigarette, which had burned its way down almost to his
fingers. Christiansen offered him another, simply by holding out
the pack, but be shook his head. They might have been strangers,
waiting together for the rain to stop.
“He was only a boy. I don’t imagine he could
have been more than seventeen. That fact registered itself on my
brain, but it meant nothing. Years passed before I felt even a
twinge of regret, or remembered that quite possibly he had known
nothing of what was being done in his name. I stole his uniform—it
was loose on me, can you imagine? And he was a slender lad. I stole
his rifle, his boots, even his cigarettes. I left him where he was,
dressed in my camp clothes, and I started to march east.
“I passed two or three more soldiers—at a
distance, fortunately—and I waved to them and went straight on. I
never stopped until late that afternoon, by which time my guts felt
as if they might burst, but by then the Germans were far behind
me.
“For a month I lived on what I could steal.
The Poles were used to renegade Germans, and little disposed to
argue with the barrel of an infantryman’s rifle. If I found a
soldier alone, I killed him and took his ammunition and his hand
grenades if he had any. Finally I crossed paths with the
Resistance.
“You had to buy your way in. I had a rifle,
two hand grenades, and four boxes of cartridges—the Resistance was
glad to have me. That was my introduction to the art of war, that
autumn and winter with the partisans. In the spring, just as the
weather began to turn hot, the Russians crossed the border into
Poland. In June I was sitting in the field tent of a Major Govorov,
drinking what passed for coffee and listening to the shortwave for
news of the British and American landings at Normandy. We kissed
each other and cried. We were as happy as children.”
“And how does this bring us to Hagemann?”
In the moment of silence that followed,
Christiansen rose from his chair, as quietly as a specter, and took
a fresh pack of cigarettes from the carton that was lying open on
the chest of drawers. Leivick watched the massive shoulders hunch
as the soft explosion of the match lighting glowed behind his
cupped hands, and he found himself thinking,
No one will ever
catch this one with his back comfortably against a tree. Faglin was
right to counsel discretion, and Faglin is not a timid soul. Some
men are harder to kill than others.
Because those were the choices. If
Christiansen could not be persuaded to throw in his lot with them,
they would have to kill him. For one thing, he would know too
much.
Because he would have to be told the truth
about Hagemann. After all, they were asking him to restrain
himself, to resist the temptation to take the next plane to
Damascus—where, after all, Christiansen might fancy his chances of
survival a shade more than the Mossad did; or his chances of
survival might interest him less than his chances of success. He
had to be persuaded that something of importance might be gained by
waiting.
And that object would never be achieved with
a few short declarative sentences:
“Hagemann presents a threat
to us for this-and-this reason, and we need him alive because of
these-and-these political and military considerations.”
What
would keep him from answering,
“Why should I care about that? My
business with Hagemann is personal—why should anything else matter
to me? I won’t give up my revenge for an abstraction.”
No, it couldn’t be managed that way. The
reasons were good ones, good enough to satisfy any decent man, but
they had to be made real to him. So he had to know everything.
And on that, perhaps, might hang more lives
than just his own.
“I was in a position to discover a great many
things while I was with the Russians,” Leivick said finally, when
Christiansen had sat down again. Somehow it was impossible to talk
to the man while he was towering over one like a patriotic
monument. “I could speak German and English, a good bit of
soldier’s Polish, and even it little French, and they had need of
interpreters. Beyond that, the regimental political officer had
sent a full report on me to Moscow, and it would seem I fit into
certain plans for the future that were being concocted there. I was
a Czech, and a lawyer with government experience. The Russians knew
they were about to fall heir to the whole of Central Europe, and
they were going to need collaborators to help them rule it. They
had an interest in effecting my conversion.
“Need I say more? I had no objections to
calling myself a Dialectical Materialist, and I wanted to stay
alive. The central thing to remember about the Communists is that
they think anyone who isn’t for them is automatically against them
and a fascist into the bargain. I had not the slightest inclination
to end up lying in a ditch with a bullet through my head. I learned
to speak Marxist jargon and let them believe anything they liked.
The result was that I was trusted, up to a point.
“I began to see that point on the horizon the
day I let it be known that I had served with a partisan group which
had come in contact with elements of the Fifth Brigade, Waffen-SS.
Suddenly I found myself being interviewed in a farmhouse outside
Lublin by a pair of grim-faced hoodlums from the NKVD who had been
flown in from Moscow for no other purpose. We talked for three
days. During the whole time I had no idea whether I was under
arrest or not.
“‘
Did you ever capture any of them?’
they asked.
‘No, of course not,’
I lied.
‘The Resistance
didn’t take prisoners. What could the Germans have told us that we
didn’t already know better ourselves? The only time I ever saw a
German soldier in custody was once
after we had ambushed a
small patrol outside of Czyzew, and he only lasted an hour. A
farmboy with a personal grievance to settle cut his throat.’ ‘Are
they still deployed in that sector?’ ‘No.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘We
stopped seeing that particular sleeve patch on the tunics of dead
infantrymen.’ ‘When did they withdraw?’ ‘It’s difficult to say.
Sometime after the winter, I should think.’
“Three days they kept me at it. I never knew
there were so many ways of asking the same set of questions. We
would sit around a kitchen table, and they would scribble little
notes back and forth to each other. Once I summoned up enough
courage to ask them why they were so curious about this one unit.
‘Merely routine intelligence reconstruction, Comrade. We like to
know the terrain.’
And then the two of them exchanged a look
that would have peeled paint. After that I left the questions to
them.
“One of the greatest gifts a man can possess
is a capacity for telling convincing lies. If a lie is to hold up
it has to be both detailed and consistent. It is not enough if it
is like the truth—it must be the truth, only slightly deflected.
One has to be able to believe it oneself.