“I will never be sure, but I think during
those three days I came several times within an eyelash of
disappearing into some NKVD dungeon. I think perhaps the only
reason I am alive today is because I managed to convince my
inquisitors not only that I knew nothing worth knowing but that I
hadn’t a suspicion that there was anything to know.
“‘
Did you ever hear anything concerning
the Fifth Brigade’s activities after leaving your sector? Any
gossip in camp—that sort of thing?’ ‘No.’ ‘Don’t you find that a
little strange? How do you explain such uncharacteristic silence?’
‘I am a Czech Jew. Need I say more?’
I remember I grinned
defiantly into the brute’s race. The Russians are very touchy about
anti-Semitism—on the one hand they think we’re all Trotskyites, and
on the other they think they are being anti-Party if they show it.
‘I speak a little Polish, enough for work purposes but not
enough to make listening to long personal reminiscences very
comfortable. Besides, the Poles would never entirely trust me.’
That half-lie probably saved my life.
“Because, as it happens, I had heard a few
rumors—nothing very specific. But how was it to my advantage to
confess knowledge of such things? In wartime it is dangerous to be
the bearer of secrets.
“I am not now laying claim to more than the
casual fund of speculation that is any fighting unit’s common
property in wartime. We too wondered what had happened to the Fifth
Brigade. They were exhausted, of course, and down to a shadow of
their full operational strength. But it was not the usual practice
to reinforce such units, generally they were simply allowed to
bleed to death. So we were surprised when suddenly this one unit
was withdrawn instead.
“The most popular theory—and the one, as it
happened, closest to the truth—was that their commander, your
General von Goltz of blessed memory, had somehow wangled his way
back into Himmler’s good graces and was happily out of the combat
area. The hot topic of speculation was what the General had done to
earn his ticket to safety.
“The one thing we did know, although its
significance escaped us at the time, was that von Goltz’s departure
from Poland was preceded by a rash of arrests. The northwestern
part of the country was virtually cleared of certain categories of
technical personnel—chemists, pharmacists, brewers, the entire
surviving faculty of the medical college at Claiystok.”
“Brewers?” Christiansen raised his eyebrows,
which had the effect of making him seem to come awake with a start.
“What would the SS want with brewers. Were they thirsty?”
It was impossible to tell from his expression
whether he was making a joke or not.
“Brewers know about mixing vats and steam
pipes and cooling chambers—the whole apparatus of high-temperature
chemistry on an industrial scale. And the SS was in the
manufacturing business, and they needed slave labor with the proper
qualifications. What they had in mind was a trifle more complicated
than beer, but the principle was much the same.”
Knitting his hands together tightly across
his stomach, Leivick wished he had another cigarette. He was
conscious of a certain excitement, even a certain pleasure in his
grotesque narrative, and it made him feel uneasy. He did not like
reducing any part of that vast collective suffering to the neat
rhetoric of a detective story, but somehow it seemed unavoidable,
as if to understand the thing and to trivialize it were
indistinguishable acts.
“But the important thing,” he went on,
breaking his sentence with a sharp intake of breath, “the important
thing is that none of those men were ever heard from again.”
He made a dismissing gesture with his left
hand.
“Of course, in those days that was not an
uncommon fate. The number of people who disappeared from Europe
between 1939 and 1945 runs into the millions, and I don’t suppose
there is any great mystery about what happened to our brewers and
professors of anatomy. There is a trench, about fifty meters long,
just inside the eastern perimeter of Waldenburg concentration camp;
the Russians dug it to bury the corpses of the inmates, who had
been machine-gunned to the last man just two days before they would
have been liberated. Doubtless that is where one would search for
them.”
For an instant Christiansen looked as if
someone had struck him. His eyes widened suddenly and he actually
flinched—one could have imagined he felt the ghosts of those
machine-gun bullets passing through his own body. The hand lying on
his left thigh clenched and then relaxed, as if of its own accord.
For the first time Leivick noticed the broad, flat scar and
wondered how it had come to be there.
And it came to him with the force of a
revelation that even in this short time he had grown quite fond of
Christiansen, that, if it proved to be necessary, it would cost him
no small amount of pain to order his death.
“So perhaps now the connection becomes dear
to you?” he said, smiling coldly, a little astonished at the tone
his voice had assumed. “The SS were in the game for high
stakes—they couldn’t afford any witnesses. But there was one, of
course. There always is at least one.”
“But not among the camp inmates?”
“No, not among them. They had all been
silenced.”
There was a clock ticking somewhere. Leivick
resisted the temptation of looking for it—probably Christiansen had
some sort of alarm on his night table, and, in any case, it wasn’t
important. By now, Faglin and Hirsch were probably wondering what
had happened to him. In a while he would have to telephone them, or
they might come to break down the door.
“No, but there were the soldiers themselves,
the men-at-arms of the Fifth Brigade. And soldiers of a routed army
have a way of being captured by the enemy. It was from one of these
that I learned what had happened to General von Goltz and his
men—and got my first inkling of how they had been occupying
themselves at Waldenburg.
“It was early April of 1945. The Russians
were already in possession of the Berlin suburbs, and the German
defenses had nearly evaporated. I was with an armored unit about
twenty miles from Dresden. I had the job of interrogating
prisoners. The poor little fool was trying to make his way home to
Gorlitz and his mother when we nabbed him. He had gotten rid of his
uniform right enough but had carelessly retained his SS identity
papers—Private Hugo Scheidemann, Fifth Brigade. He was as good as
dead as soon as he fell into our hands.
“But you know the SS—at every level, they
always think they can arrange something for themselves.
‘What
will happen to me?’
he asked.
‘I expect you will be shot in
an hour or two,’
I told him pleasantly.
‘We don’t mean to be
rude, but we’re in a hurry.’
“I remember he grabbed my sleeve with a kind
of spasm. It made me look at him, actually look at him. for the
first time. I suppose he was about twenty-one or -two, with silvery
brown hair and the face of a schoolboy.
‘
I know a secret.’
he told me, in a
stifled, panting voice, and I thought to myself,
Yes, I’ll bet
you do.
The SS had turned them into passing fair butchers
sometimes even before they had learned to shave. Yes, I had no
doubt he knew more secrets than just one.
“‘
Why don’t you keep your secret,’
I
told him.
‘Carry it with you to the grave, where it will be
safe.’
I couldn’t help myself. I kept wondering if he could
have been one of those who had made such sport of hunting down my
comrades from Treblinka, God forgive me.
“‘
But I know about Waldenburg,’
he
answered, his eyes pleading.
‘Surely you must have heard of
Waldenburg—they were up to something important there. I could tell
you. Surely the Russians will be interested enough to. . .’
“He couldn’t finish his sentence, of course.
He hung his head, as if suddenly grown ashamed. I said nothing. I
merely waited in silence, thinking of those two stony interrogators
from the NKVD, wondering if I was about to learn why they had been
so concerned with everything I could tell them about the Fifth
Brigade.
“‘
I saw people killed there,’
he went
on, and then paused again, perhaps this time for dramatic
effect.
“I don’t suppose I looked terribly
surprised—why should I have been? Why should anyone have been
surprised at anything in those days, let alone that the SS had
killed people at a place called ‘Waldenburg’? I should have been
surprised to hear the name of yet one more death camp to add to so
many others? No, it was a trifle late for that. At any rate,
whatever reaction he had been waiting for, he didn’t get it.
“‘
But not in the ordinary way—nor with
bullets, or anything like that.’
He shook his head. Clearly he
put great importance on this one point. I was beginning to
entertain the idea that perhaps his wits were turned.
‘They had
a special chamber—it was an experiment, do you see? They would do
people in batches of five.’
“‘Do’ people. That was just the way he
expressed it.
“‘
A friend of mine took me to see one day.
I didn’t know anything about it before that. I only found out by
accident.
’ Yes, of course. The poor boy, how could I have
imagined anything else?
“‘
But the way they looked when they came
out. . .’
“A tremor seemed to pass over him. I don’t
believe he was acting. I don’t believe he was that clever. The
memory seemed to rise up before his eyes like Banquo’s ghost, so
perhaps he did have a conscience, although, finally, it seemed to
have made very little difference.
“‘
You and I have seen enough dead
bodies.’
he said, taking me into his confidence. It was a
delicious moment if one had a taste for farce
. ‘The corpses came
out stiff, like iron pokers—just rigid, and with their arms and
legs all twisted.’
He paused for a moment and caught his
breath, and suddenly, at that moment, I knew I wouldn’t even try to
save him. I didn’t want to. His confidence in my influence was
misplaced, so it made no difference, but in an instant I had come
to hate him for the way he seemed to be trying to number himself
among the victims—for that, and for burdening me with his
horror.
“‘
And their eyes—yes, their eyes.’
His
hand was still resting on my sleeve, and he began, in the most
tentative way possible, to pull me toward him, as if he wished to
whisper this last and most significant detail directly into my ear.
‘A dead man’s eyes get large—the black part in the middle, I
mean—but not these. Their eyes were shrunk to nothing, as if they
had been staring into the sun for hours. As if their eyes had
clouded over altogether.’
“‘
Yes. That’s very interesting,
’ I
said—or something like it I suppose.
‘I’ll see the division
commander hears of it right away.’
It did no harm to let him
live in hope for another hour.
“I think he was proud of himself, in some
perverse way. As if he had demonstrated that his powers of
observation were of a very high order and therefore he deserved to
live. I felt rather differently about the matter. You see, he had
just imparted to me a secret that would, if I was less than
careful, end my life as well as his.
The soldier who was standing beside me spoke
no German, for which I was suddenly grateful. I smiled at the
promising youth, turned to my companion, and said to him in my
villainous Russian,
‘See to it that this one is shot with the
first batch. There’s nothing to be learned from him.’
“Are you surprised, Mr. Christiansen? No, I
don’t suppose you are. War makes us all very practical. Still, I
wasn’t taking any chances.
“That night I borrowed a truck. No one
minded—the fighting was winding down almost to nothing. I told the
duty officer I had business in Dresden and would take my chances
going through the lines. I was very mysterious about it. He merely
shrugged his shoulders. I was associated in his mind with
Intelligence, and hence the NKVD, so he wasn’t interested in asking
questions. I went straight down the main road, dodging around the
bomb craters. I never encountered a single German soldier who
thought fit to challenge me, not once, all the way to Bayreuth. As
soon as I got there I changed out of the Russian uniform I had been
wearing and became, once more, a refugee. The truck had enough
petrol to take me to Wurzburg, where I knew I would be safely
inside the American zone. I was not interested in taking
risks.”
Leivick stood up—his knees felt as if they
might crack under the strain, but he couldn’t have sat still
another moment. It had been a long and anxious day and he was
tired, tired and frightened. Because now the moment was upon him
when he would have to tell the final, terrible secret. He wondered
where they would all be in an hour’s time.
“We have kept very complete records of the
various camps,” he said, standing beside the window and looking out
on the undulating sea of rubble that was just visible in the
broken, piecemeal light that seemed to seep from the hotel like sap
from a wounded tree. It was not a view he much admired. “We have
our refugees, and friendly sources among the Americans, even the
British—even, come to speak of it, among the Russians. We know what
they were doing at Waldenburg. We know the whole history of the
work carried on there.
“It began in 1936. A German chemist named
Schrader was trying to develop a new insecticide from organic
phosphorus compounds. He found one that worked beyond his wildest
dreams—so well, in fact, that it couldn’t possibly have been used
in agriculture. In a solution of just one part per two hundred
thousand, it was deadly. When he and his assistant began trying to
produce the substance in quantity, they became ill themselves: they
found they had difficulty breathing, and their eyesight became so
poor that they couldn’t see at all by artificial light. Finally
they had to abandon their research to save their lives.