“I can tell you how to find him,” he said
finally, his voice thick, as if the noose were choking him already.
His eyes cast about the room; he seemed to be looking for a way to
escape. “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t owe him anything—I thought you
were from him, come to clean me away. Maybe if you kill him, I can
start to sleep at night”
“Then tell me where to find him.”
“Not where—I have not seen the Colonel in a
long time and he keeps his movements a secret. But I can tell you
how to find him.”
He forced himself to smile. His lips drew
back from his teeth in a grotesque manner. They were in each
other’s confidence, he seemed to be suggesting. Hagemann was the
common enemy.
It was a lie, of course. There was a network
that kept the survivors of the Fifth Brigade safe and solvent.
There was money to procure new identities for men still hunted by
the Allied War Crimes Commission, money to finance new lives—how
else had “Herr Bauer” come by his tobacco shop?
But what difference did any of that make?
Gerhart Becker wanted to live.
“What can you tell me. Sergeant?”
“There is a girl. . .”
His sentence trailed off as he heard
Christiansen’s dry, mocking laughter.
“No—really—there is a girl I’ve heard he’s
looking for. He—”
“Half the men in the world are looking for a
girl, Sergeant. And you know as well as I that the Colonel’s is not
precisely a romantic disposition. I’ve heard all the stories. There
were probably hundreds of girls.”
But something in the way Becker kept twisting
his head from side to side, as if he were trying to saw through his
neck with the catgut noose, made him stop laughing.
“Go on then, if you must. Tell me about this
girl.”
“She is a Jewess. She was his mistress—in the
camp.”
“Waldenburg?”
“Yes. She was the General’s before that. The
General gave her to him. My colonel was obsessed by her.”
“If she was at Waldenburg, she’s probably
dead.”
“No.” Becker swallowed hard. He seemed to be
telling the truth. He wanted to be believed. “The General made sure
she got away alive. She is alive somewhere—you have only to find
her and Hagemann will come to you. Even if he has to follow you
into hell itself.”
“Why? What’s so special about her?”
“I don’t know.”
Egon Hagemann in love? Christiansen didn’t
believe it. But he believed Becker’s story. A girl. A girl who had
probably lost herself somewhere in Europe, who could be anywhere.
Who could be dead, for all Becker knew.
Still, it was more than he had had that
morning. He was perhaps a step or two closer to the Colonel
Hagemann who had butchered his family, who had. . .
“What is her name, this girl?”
“Esther. . . Rosensaft, I think. Esther
Rosensaft”
“You
think
?”
“That was her name. Esther Rosensaft. He
called her ‘Saftag,’ though she was a little stick of a thing. It
was his joke.”
“I will strip the flesh from your bones,
Sergeant—a piece at a time if you lie to me.” Christiansen showed
his strong white teeth in a fierce grin, although he never moved
from the steamer trunk. “Nothing in the world will be as hard as
your death if you don’t tell me everything you know. Believe me,
Sergeant, I would enjoy making you die by inches.”
“There is nothing else!” Becker gasped and
sweated and told the truth. He was just a little man after all—he
wouldn’t have had the courage to lie in the extremity of his
life.
“I’ve told you everything. God, don’t do it
to me—please let me down. I’m no one. I never killed anyone.”
“You were there. You let it happen without a
word. You helped your colonel—you’re helping him still. Don’t plead
your innocence to me.” Christiansen stood up slowly, giving the
impression that his legs had grown stiff from disuse. “But I won’t
make it too bad for you—I won’t leave you here to linger in agony.
I’ll merely carry out the sentence of the court.”
When Becker saw what was coming, his chest
heaved wildly and his neck seemed to swell as he rocked his head
back and forth. He tried to speak, but at first only a strange
gurgling sound came out.
“No!” he screamed—the tiny basement vibrated
with the word. “No! You can’t—I thought you were from Hagemann!
Hagemann was going to—”
But the words stopped with a jerk as Becker
kicked his legs in the empty air. His back arched and the catgut
ground against the sewer pipe as he trembled and twitched and tried
to open his mouth wide enough to let in a breath.
Christiansen had pulled the chair from under
him.
2
Vienna, Austria: February 24, 1948
Esther woke up with a start, followed at
once, even before the first surprise had worn off, by a wormy
feeling of anxiety. It was happening more and more, almost every
night now. She had been dreaming about the guard.
The wooden bunks in Cell Block West were four
tiers high and as narrow as coffins. A prisoner lying in her bed
could hardly see two meters in any direction—one closed one’s eyes
and the thought came of its own bidding: this is what it will be
like in the grave.
The prison lights were never turned out, and
the windows were too small and too high up to make a difference. So
inside it was always the same murky gray, in which even the
guards—even the guard who haunted her, who was sometimes one man
and sometimes another, who was real even when she was awake—even
the guards hardly seemed to cast a shadow.
It was like being dead. They were shadows
themselves.
She had been inside only four months, and
already Esther was quite sure she would go mad if she had to stay
locked up here much longer. There wasn’t even the fear of death to
remind one that there might be some value in living. There was only
poor food and cold and not enough sleep—never enough sleep—and the
terrible grayness of everything. It was worse than the ghetto at
Lodz, where she had still had her family, or even the camps. In the
camps she had been alternately pampered and terrorized. Everything
a human being can lose, she had lost there—parents, innocence,
belief in God, the right to think of herself as a human being.
Everything except life and the will to keep it. But now she was at
the end of her strength. She was no longer afraid of death. That
was what made this place so terrible.
For two years and eight months, she had been
free. She couldn’t face going back behind locked doors—not now, not
after relearning that there was such a thing as freedom. She had
been eleven when they walled up the ghetto, and then it had been
five years of scratching out enough to stay alive and trying to
keep from being swept into oblivion when the Germans came looking
for people to work to death or shoot in batches or send to the
ovens. For five years she had prayed for the war to end, but this
time there would be no American soldiers in strange uniforms to
hand out rice and milk and tell everyone it was safe to think of
going home. No one was going to drive the Russians out.
But perhaps it was only her own wickedness
that made prison so impossible to bear—it was wicked to think that
anything could be worse than the camps. At Chelmno her mother and
father had been gassed, and at Waldenburg there had been
Hagemann.
Esther lay in her bunk, her eyes closed,
waiting for the sound of footsteps. One never knew the time here
except by the orders one heard—five-thirty a. m., wake up and wash;
ten a.m., assemble for first meal; six p.m., assemble for second
meal; sometime between eleven and midnight, go to bed. The rest was
filled with roll calls, work, punishment, roll calls,
interrogations, roll calls. . . It was an endless treadmill.
And always there was the guard. Sometimes he
was gone for hours, even days at a time, but always he came back.
Sometimes he would merely watch her—she could feel his eyes on her
everywhere—and sometimes, quite suddenly, he would be beside her,
talking in that low, insinuating, faintly threatening voice of his.
And sometimes he was not content merely to talk. She could put up
with being mauled, but of course it wouldn’t end there. He was just
nerving himself up for the inevitable. She knew perfectly well
where it would end.
But at least this one was no Hagemann to
strip her clothes off in handfuls and shoot at her with his pistol
as she tried to run away. She could still hear the smack of the
bullets hitting the trees, spattering her with pieces of pitchy
bark. Once he had found an abandoned quarry and she had cut and
bruised her feet until she could hardly stand, but each time she
stopped scrambling over the broken stone Hagemann would open fire,
the bullets burying themselves in the ground between her legs or
ricocheting off unpredictably. And finally, when none of that
mattered anymore, when she was too exhausted even to be afraid,
when she would have liked to die, she would look up and there he
would be, standing over her, laughing.
“I love to see you willing to be reasonable,
Esther,” he would say. And, with the pistol still in his hand, he
would begin unbuttoning his trousers.
And when he was finished, and she was allowed
to limp back to the camp, she would wonder why it had to be this
way. Why did she have to be hunted down and shot at and frightened
to the verge of madness before he would allow her to yield to
him?
Nothing could be worse than that. This was
like death, this prison, but death must be worse. And the discovery
that one is capable of anything if only it will keep death off,
that was the worst of all. The Russians could turn life into death,
but nothing they would do could match the horror of what Hagemann
had made of her at Waldenburg.
But now the morning was close at hand—or what
passed for morning in this place. The guards would come soon. A
shout and the sound of a truncheon banging against the door frame,
and everyone would scramble numbly to attention in their cotton
nightdresses. They would stand there like that, half awake,
blinking stupidly, their feet bare against the icy floor, for
perhaps three quarters of an hour while the roll was taken and
retaken. It was the invariable routine of the place, its purpose
unknown, it having perhaps become a purpose in itself.
If one listened, it was possible to hear the
guards’ boots outside on the tile corridor. It was better to be
awake and listen, so as not to be caught completely by surprise. It
was horrible to be jarred out of sleep by the barking guards—it was
like awakening into a nightmare.
All the guards here were men. It was a
women’s prison, but the guards were men. The first officer of her
cellblock was named Filatov.
Sometimes, while she stood at attention
beside her bunk, Filatov would walk by, stop, take off his glove,
and run his hand over her body, slipping it inside the neckline of
her nightdress or along the sides of her flanks, touching her with
his hard fingers in all her private places—if a prisoner could be
said to have any private places. If she, Esther Rosensaft, Jewess
and harlot, hadn’t lost all right to think of this body as
belonging to herself.
In her dreams sometimes she would become
confused and Filatov would become Hagemann, or the two would blend
together. She would be standing at attention and all at once it
would be Hagemann there beside her and the finger that was running
over the curve of her breast would become the muzzle of a pistol.
It was because of this, more than anything he had done to her
himself, that she hated Filatov.
But, of course, that was ridiculous because
Filatov was merely a man taking advantage of his position, and
Hagemann had been something altogether different. Filatov might
have a wife who was a shrew, or perhaps no wife at all. All he
wanted was a little sex—and not to sacrifice his position of
authority. So he threatened, in a way that was almost like
pleading, and watched her, and. sometimes, took off his glove. The
day would come when he would feel that he was powerful enough—or
she sufficiently overawed—to claim more, but for the moment he was
content merely to slip his hand inside her dress.
It was best not to look at him, not to smile,
but to stand quietly like a shadow, not to resist or yield, and
finally he would lose interest and pass by. She had not been raped
yet—it happened sometimes here, so she had been told, but so far
not to her. She had been here four months, and she had not been
raped. If she ever was, she would not resist—it was pointless to
resist. She would not weep or even cry out. She would keep the rage
inside, where it would not show. She would hate Filatov in the
privacy of her heart, and for the rest pretend she was made of
marble. It was easier that way, as she had learned from the
Germans.
But four months were four months, and still
Filatov had not summoned up the slight courage it would require to
do as he liked. So perhaps the Russians were better than the
Germans.
But it was better to let them do as they
wished—no matter what it was—better than to starve and die.
. . . . .
At Chelmno she had dug potatoes—that was the
work that permitted her to live while others died. Every morning,
through the summer mud, in the icy, lightless winter, they would
march out to the fields—five kilometers in each direction—and work
for fourteen hours. Some girls had to carry stones until they
dropped to the ground and the blood bubbled at their lips as they
tried to catch their breath. Those died quickly. The others were
worn down, month after month.
And one day, on the march back to the
barracks, she had dropped her hoe and, when she reached over to
pick it up, had fallen down herself. She couldn’t get up. She tried
and tried, but she couldn’t. She had been at the camp long enough
to know what that meant. A couple of her friends managed to drag
her back in time for the evening roll call, but the next morning
she was part of a line of women threading their way to the gas
chambers. In the morning they called your number, and you were
condemned.