“STAHYAT SMEERNO!”
Awake or asleep, it made no difference. Women
threw themselves out of their bunks, dropping down to attention so
that they seemed to have gone rigid at the precise instant of
impact with the cement floor. Half of them, as they stood there
with their arms pressed against their sides, hadn’t even opened
their eyes yet.
The guards walked along the rows checking not
so much that everyone was there—why should anyone not be there?
where would they have gone?—but simply as an exercise of authority.
A woman discovered without her shoulders properly squared or who
looked as if she might have just stopped whispering, or simply
someone of whom, for some mysterious reason of their own, they had
decided to make on example, would find herself on report and
sentenced to spend the rest of the month in the laundry room, where
the temperature never dropped below sixty degrees and the air was
filled with unbreathable, rye-saturated steam.
There were always three of them. They would
fan out through the dormitory and then collect together again at
the door, where they would shout out the orders of the day—in
Russian first, and then with a German translation. They seemed to
think they were making some enormous concession to admit that such
a language as German even existed.
Esther didn’t look at them as they made their
way down the aisles of bunk beds; she kept her eyes focused on
nothing, staring straight ahead without, apparently, seeing
anything. It had been the rule at Chelmno that a prisoner could be
beaten simply for looking at one of the SS guards, and something of
the same attitude applied here too. Attention was attention. You
weren’t even supposed to be alive, merely erect.
Filatov stopped directly in front of her. He
smiled, and she knew what to expect. It was his day to frighten
little girls.
“You have business with the tribunal this
morning, eh?” he murmured, in his hideous, undulating, Russianized
German. His face was no more than a few inches from her own, and
she could smell his breath, like stale cooking grease. He was
short, with wide, doughy features and heavy ears, and every word he
spoke somehow seemed to convey a shrouded menace. “I wonder what
you will get. How would you like to stay here with us until you are
an old lady, eh?”
Esther never moved. She never glanced at him.
He wasn’t there, and she was made of cold, white marble.
After a while he tired of the game,
straightened up and drew a long strip of paper from the inside of
his overcoat.
“You will report to the guardroom at once
after showering.” he barked. It was as if he were addressing the
entire room. “You will hear the sentence of the court at nine.”
It seemed to give him enormous
satisfaction.
. . . . .
“Come along, then,” the corporal had said.
“It’s time to clean you up. If you want to make an impression here
you’ll have to be presentable. We soldiers of the Waffen-SS are a
very fastidious lot.”
It was a joke. He threw back his head and
laughed. At intervals, as he marched her along, he would laugh to
himself, enjoying his witticism all over again.
Her first bath at Waldenburg came out of a
garden hose. The corporal held it for her. and she scrubbed herself
off with clumps of withered grass because, of course, there was no
soap.
During the time she was the General’s pet she
had a steel tub and lavender-scented crystals that foamed in the
hot water. The general had a sensitive nose and even gave her a
bottle of cologne. She had three changes of underwear and a pair of
patent-leather shoes.
The General sometimes said that he had never
been cut out to be a soldier, that actually he disliked the company
of men, which was the one absolute condition of the military life.
That would be on rare evenings when the General felt disposed to
give himself a little treat and they would spend the whole night
together and he would drink wine and play the violin. He liked to
be told that he played well—it was a vanity of his that he could
have been a great virtuoso, or perhaps, even better, a conductor,
even another Furtwängler.
“I gave up all thought of leading
orchestras to lead my division,”
he would say, smiling sadly.
“And now, as you see, I don’t even have most of my
division.”
So he would play Bach and Paganini on his fiddle and
get quietly drunk. He was not a very active lover; he preferred to
lie quietly and have everything done for him. And then he would
sleep, never stirring until nearly noon.
And in the stillness of night Esther would
listen to the faint sound of his breathing and wonder how she could
stand to live.
“The General likes his women well broken in,”
the corporal had told her as he led her away. She was still
shivering from the cold water, but he had given her a soldier’s
tunic to wrap around her. “You’ll spend a little time with the men
first, and then you’ll get the idea.”
He opened the door to one of the barracks and
dragged her inside by the arm, shouting, “Here she is, lads!
Remember we want her back in good repair.” And then he laughed, and
shut the door behind him.
She would always remember the way their faces
had looked in those first few seconds. There were seven men in the
barracks that particular afternoon, and they stared at her,
grinning hungrily. They were like animals; she thought at first
they might tear her to pieces with their teeth.
There were four barracks. For the next three
weeks she was passed from one to the next. She was the evening
entertainment. She learned everything there was to know about
men.
No, perhaps the Russians weren’t as bad as
that.
. . . . .
Filatov took her to the doorway of the
hearing room and waited with her outside in the
corridor—personally, so that they were alone together. He seemed to
think he was conferring some great distinction on her
“You must look nice for the judges,” he said,
pushing a loose strand of hair back from her face. “You want to
make a good impression.” He kept glancing around, as if afraid of
being overheard.
When the door opened, he took her roughly by
the arm and marched her through it. Suddenly she was standing in
the center of the floor, facing a long table behind which sat three
men in uniform and a woman in a khaki blouse. The woman was taking
notes, which seemed odd because for a long time no one spoke so
much as a word.
The presiding officer, who sat in the center,
directly in front of her, was a captain of artillery—she could tell
that from the cannons on his collar patches. He seemed about fifty,
hard-faced and completely bald. He didn’t even look up from the
papers on his desk when Filatov saluted crisply and stepped back to
stand at parade rest by the door
“You are Polish?” he asked finally. He was
holding a typed sheet in his hand, as if he wanted to make certain
that he had the right prisoner. After a few seconds his eyebrows
lowered into a frown. “We are informed you were born in
Kaliningrad—is that not correct?”
“I was born in Königsberg, sir. In East
Prussia. I don’t know what it is called now. I was a German until
1935, and after that I was a Jew.”
“Then you are Polish. All of that is Poland
now. You will be repatriated to Poland when your sentence is
completed, where you can work to build socialism and make amends
for your crime. What is that on your arm?”
He pointed with his pencil and, without
thinking, Esther brought her hand up to cover the tattoo just under
the curve of her right elbow.
“Is that a number? Where did you get it?”
“At Waldenburg, sir,” she answered, her voice
hardly above a whisper.
“Waldenburg. eh? Then you are lucky to be
alive.” His expression betrayed no sympathy, nothing beyond a mild,
disinterested curiosity.
And then, suddenly, something seemed to occur
to him.
“Isn’t it on the wrong arm? I always thought
the Germans tattooed the left arm.”
When she didn’t answer he appeared to lose
interest. His eyes fell as if by gravity to the papers on the desk
in front of him.
“You are accused of currency smuggling,” he
said after a long silence, just managing to glance up at her as he
finished the sentence. “You were arrested trying to pass the
checkpoint into the International Zone with twenty thousand rubles
sewn into your clothes. How do you answer the charge, innocent or
guilty?”
He had already made up his mind, of course.
Esther had been told during her first week in prison that if one
tried to plead innocent they merely doubled the sentence. She kept
her eyes on the floor.
“Guilty, sir.”
“Fifteen years. Take her away.”
The floor outside in the corridor was smooth
hardwood, but she would stumble. If Filatov had let go of her arm
she probably would have forgotten to keep walking.
“Now, you see?” he whispered. “This is what
you get for being so regal with everyone. You made a bad
impression. You will have to learn to be a nicer girl.”
But she could hardly make out what he was
saying. She was too stunned. She had no will for anything. Fifteen
years.
She would be an old woman by the time they
let her out, dried up and good for nothing. No, she would never be
able to live through fifteen years. She would die. One day she
would run her head against a stone wall and crack it open like an
eggshell. She would die or go mad.
They came to a plain wooden door with a
number painted on it in white at eye level. The number was “263.”
The paint was chipped away with age along the bottom. She had
assumed she was being taken to an isolation cell—that was what
happened here after sentencing, perhaps they were afraid a prisoner
might kick and scream or try to harm herself—but the cell doors
down here were all made of iron. She merely noted the neutral fact.
It didn’t mean anything to her. She had stopped caring about things
like that.
Fifteen years. She wished they would kill her
instead.
Filatov took a bundle of keys out of his
pocket and began fumbling with them until he found the right one.
His fingers closed over her shoulder and he pushed her inside.
When the light clicked on she saw at once
that this was a broom closet. There were shelves overhead and in
one corner a collection of shiny zinc buckets. What was she doing
here?
Then she noticed that someone had spread a
blanket out on the floor beside the rear wall. There was even a
pillow.
Esther turned around as she heard the door
slam shut behind them. There was a brassy taste in her mouth and
she felt as if she were being smothered, but she told herself not
to scream. It would do no good to scream. It would only make it
worse.
Filatov was grinning at her, no longer afraid
of anything. He was already undoing the buttons of his coat.
3
Munich, Germany: February 26, 1948
From the window of his hotel room, Inar
Christiansen could look out on an undulating sea of rubble. Here
and there part of a broken wall would rise a foot or so out of the
piles of shattered brick, like the crest of a wave, but mostly the
devastation was so complete that you might have imagined you were
looking at some harsh, stony landscape where no man had ever lived.
The bombing planes had done a pretty good job.
But then there was the hotel itself, which
had come through without even a broken windowpane. The lobby was
filled with potted palms and red velvet love seats, and if you
ordered a drink a waiter in morning coat and white gloves would
bring it to you on a silver tray. Before the war, when it was still
safe, the place had been very popular with middle-level Nazis in
town for November Putsch anniversaries or a little patronage for
the wife’s brother—Party headquarters had been just a few streets
away. Now the paying guests all seemed to be the families of
American military officers. You hardly saw a German who wasn’t in
livery.
That, at least, hadn’t changed. Germany was
still a country where you had to be wearing a uniform if you wanted
people to believe you weren’t just hanging around to see what you
could scrounge. That was why Christiansen had packed his army
greens.
He had worn them only one other time since
demobilization, to watch General von Goltz hanged at Rebdorf. Now
he needed information, and information was always easier to obtain
if people imagined you had some official reason for wanting it.
There were certain facts he had had to face
about himself, and one of them was that appearances were against
him. Big Nordic men weren’t terribly popular in Europe just at
present. Everyone had spent the last fifteen years listening to
Nazi propaganda about the Master Race, and they had a natural
tendency to jump to conclusions.
It had happened to him before. “I’m looking
for information about possible survivors of the Waldenburg
concentration camp” says the blond-haired, blue-eyed civilian with
what is obviously a shrapnel scar across the back of his left hand,
and the little clerk at the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Office
is already thinking,
Sure. You want to finish the job you
started on them there?
Suddenly no one knows anything about
anyone.
But in a Norwegian army uniform you were
Norwegian, and it was all right to be Norwegian. Why shouldn’t a
Norwegian be blond? What else should he be?
When he had been hunting down Colonel
Hagemann’s loyal subordinates from the Fifth Brigade, he hadn’t
minded looking like someone who still carried his NSDAP membership
card next to his heart—it had worked to his advantage, more than
once. But he wasn’t trying to win over old Party boys anymore; he
wanted to find one of the victims now, if she was still alive, and
he needed to appear trustworthy to people who had spent the last
couple of years listening to horror stories. He would wear his
uniform.