War and Remembrance (162 page)

“Shut your dribbling asshole,” Rahm says in an oddly unemotional way, “and get out of here this instant, if you want to live.”

“Herr Kommandant,
I don’t value my life much. I’m old and not well. Kill me, and you’ll have to explain to Herr Eichmann what became of his window dressing. Torture me, and if I survive, what impression can I make on the Red Cross? If you cancel my niece’s summons, I guarantee our cooperation when the Red Cross comes. I guarantee she will do no more foolish things.”

Rahm presses a buzzer and picks up his pen. The adjutant opens the door. At Rahm’s murderous glare and dismissive gesture with his pen, Jastrow rushes out.

The square in front of the HQ is a mass of blossoming trees. As Jastrow emerges on the street, the sweet smell fills his nostrils. The band is playing the evening concert; at the moment, a waltz from
Die Fledermaus.
The moon hangs red and low over the trees. Jastrow staggers to the outdoor café, where Jews may sit and drink black water. As an Elder he can walk past the queue of waiting customers. He falls in a chair, and buries his face in his hands in exhausted relief. He is alive and unhurt. What he has accomplished he does not know, but he has done his all.

Searchlights blaze down on the lawn from the roof of the Hamburg barracks. Blinded, frightened, Natalie snatches up her sleeping son. He whimpers.

“On your feet! Form a queue by threes!”
Ghetto guards are stalking the
lawn and yelling.
“Everybody out of the barracks! Into the courtyard! Queue up! Hurry up! On your feet! Line up by threes!”

Transportees swarm into the courtyard, hastily pulling on clothes. These are the foresighted ones who have reported in early to grab bunks, knowing the SS has cleared the barracks for use as an assembly center. The two thousand or more Jews who lived there are gone, staying wherever they can.

Word sweeps among the transportees,
“Exemptions!”
What else can be happening but that? Everybody knows by now about the excessive summonses. The Elders, led by Eppstein himself, are trooping into the courtyard, as guards set up two tables on the cleared grass. Transport officials sit down with their stacks of cards and papers, their wire baskets, their rubber stamps. Commander Rahm arrives, swinging a swagger stick.

The line of three thousand Jews commences a shuffling march around the yard before Rahm. He points his stick to exempt this one and that. The freed ones go to a corner of the yard. Sometimes Rahm consults the Elders, otherwise he simply picks handsome men and pretty women. The entire line passes in review, and starts around again. It takes a long time. Louis’s legs give out, and Natalie has to sling him on her back, for she is dragging the suitcases, too. As she comes around again, she sees Aaron Jastrow address Rahm. The commander menaces him with the stick and turns his back on him. The march goes on and on under the floodlights.

Suddenly, tumult and confusion!

The guards shout, “Halt!” Sturmbannfiihrer Rahm is bellowing obscenities and swinging his stick at squirming, dodging transport officials. There has been some kind of miscount. A long delay ensues. Whether Rahm is drunk, or the Jews at the tables are incompetent or terrorized, this botch with people’s lives has now gone on past midnight. At last the line starts moving again. Natalie trudges in a hopeless daze, following the back of a limping old lady in a ragged coat with a black feathery collar, the same back that she has been trailing for hours. A rough tug at her elbow all at once spins her stumbling out of line. “What’s the matter with you, you stupid bitch?” mutters a whiskered guard. Commander Rahm is pointing his stick at her, with a sneering expression.

The floodlights go out. The commander, the Elders, the transport officials leave. The exempted Jews are trooped off into a separate bunk room. A transport official, the same redheaded man who distributed summonses, tells them that they are now “the reserve.” The commander is very angry about the bungled count. There will be another tally tomorrow when the train loads up. Till then they are confined to this room. Natalie spends a hideous sleepless night with Louis slumbering in her arms.

Next day the official returns with a typewritten list, and calls out fifty names to proceed to the train. The list is not alphabetical, so until the last
name is read off, the tension on the listening faces deepens. Natalie is not called. The fifty unfortunates pick up their suitcases and go out. Another long wait; then Natalie hears the wail of the train whistle, the chuffing of the locomotive, and the clank of moving cars.

The redheaded man looks into the room and shouts, “Pile your numbers on the table and get out of here. Go back to your barracks.”

Sick at heart as she is about the people on the train, especially those with whom she spent the night, taking Louis’s number off his neck gives Natalie the greatest joy of her life.

Aaron Jastrow waits outside the barracks entrance amid a crowd of relatives and friends. The reunions all about them are subdued. He only nods to her. “I’ll take the suitcases.”

“No, just pick up Louis, he’s exhausted.” She lowers her voice. “And for God’s sake, let us get in touch with Berel.”

At the mica factory about noon, a few days later, a ghetto guard comes to Natalie and tells her to report to SS headquarters at eight in the morning with her child. When the workday ends, she runs all the way to the Seestrasse apartment. Aaron is there, murmuring over the Talmud. The news does not seem to upset him. Probably she is due for a warning, he says. The SS knows, after all, about the scheme to alert the Red Cross, and she is the only one of the group left in the ghetto. She must be humble and contrite, and she must promise to cooperate from now on. That is undoubtedly all the Germans want of her.

“But why Louis? Why must I bring him?”

“You brought him there last time. The adjutant probably remembers that. Try not to worry. Keep your spirits up. That’s crucial.”

“Have you heard from Berel yet?”

Jastrow shakes his head. “They say it may take a week or more.”

Natalie does not close her eyes that night, either. When the windows turn gray she gets up, feeling very ill, puts on the gray suit, and does her best with her hair, and with touches of color from her dry old rouge pot, to look presentable.

“All will be well,” Jastrow says, as she is about to go. He looks ill himself, for all his reassuring smiles. They do something unusual for them; they kiss.

She hurries to the children’s house, and dresses and feeds Louis. As the clock on the church strikes eight, she enters SS headquarters. The bored-looking SS man at the desk by the door nods when she gives her name. “Follow me.” They go down the hall, descend a long staircase, and walk through another gloomier hall. Louis, in his mother’s arms, is looking around
with bright-eyed curiosity, holding a tin soldier. The SS man halts at a wooden door. “In here. Wait.” He shuts the door on Natalie. It is a windowless whitewashed room, with a cellar smell, lit by a bulb in a wire mesh. The walls are stone, the floor cement. There are three wooden chairs against a wall, and in a corner a mop and a pail full of water.

Natalie sits on a chair, holding Louis on her lap. A long time goes by. She cannot tell how long. Louis prattles to the tin soldier.

The door opens. Natalie gets to her feet. Commander Rahm comes in, followed by Inspector Haindl, who closes the door. Rahm is in black dress uniform; Haindl wears the usual gray-green. Rahm walks up to her and roars in her face, “SO, YOU’RE THE JEWISH WHORE WHO PLOTTED AGAINST THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT! YES?”

Natalie’s throat clamps shut. She opens her mouth, tries to talk, but no sounds come.

“ARE YOU OR AREN’T YOU?” Rahm bellows.

“I — I —” Low hoarse gasps.

Rahm says to Haindl, “Take the shitty little bastard from her.”

The inspector pulls Louis from Natalie’s arms. She is losing any belief that this is really happening, but Louis’s wail forces hoarse words out of her throat. “I was insane, I was misled, I will cooperate, don’t hurt my baby —”

“Don’t hurt him? He’s GONE, you dirty cunt, don’t you realize that?” Rahm gestures at the mop and the pail of water. “That’s for cleaning up the bloody garbage he’ll be in ONE MINUTE. You’ll do that yourself. You thought you got away with it, did you?”

Haindl, a squat burly man, turns Louis upside down, holding one leg in each hairy hand. The boy’s jacket hangs around his face. The tin soldier clinks to the floor. He utters muffled cries.

“He is DEAD,” shouts Rahm at her. “Go ahead, Haindl, get it over with. Rip him in half.”

Natalie shrieks, and rushes toward Haindl, but she trips and falls to the cement. She raises up on her hands and knees. “Don’t kill him! I’ll do anything.
Just don’t kill him!”

Rahm, with a laugh, points his stick at Haindl, who is holding the wailing child upside down still. “You’ll do anything? Fine, let’s see you suck the inspector’s cock.”

It does not shock her. Natalie is nothing but a crazed animal now, trying to protect a baby animal. “Yes, yes, all right, I will.”

Haindl takes both of Louis’s ankles in one hand, holding the whimpering boy head down like a fowl. Unbuttoning, he pulls out a small penis in a bush of hair. On her hands and knees, Natalie crawls to him. The exposed penis is limp and shrunken. Odious and unspeakable as all this would be if she were sane and conscious, Natalie only knows that if she takes that object
in her mouth her child may not be hurt. Haindl backs away from her as she crawls. Both men are laughing. “Look, she really wants it,
Herr Kommandant,”
he says.

Rahm guffaws. “Oh, all these Jewesses are cocksuckers at heart. Go ahead, let her have her fun. German cocks is what they want most.”

Haindl halts. Natalie crawls to his feet and raises her mouth to do the horrible thing.

Haindl lifts a boot, puts it in her face, and pushes her tumbling backward on the floor. Her head hits the cement hard. She sees zigzag lights. “GET away from me. Think I’d let your Jewish shit-mouth dirty my cock?” He stands over Natalie, spits down at her face, and drops Louis on her stomach. “Go suck off your uncle, the Talmud rabbi.”

She sits up, clutching at the child, pulling the jacket away from his purpled face. He is gasping, his eyes are red and staring, and he has vomited.

“Get to your feet,” says Rahm.

Natalie obeys.

“Now LISTEN, Jew-sow. When the Red Cross comes, YOU will be the guide for the children’s department. You will make the finest impression on them. They will write you up in their report, you will be such a happy American Jewess. The children’s pavilion will be your pride and joy.
Ja
?”

“Of course. Of course. Yes.”

“After the Red Cross goes, if you’ve misbehaved in any way, you’ll come straight here with your brat. Haindl will tear him in half like a wet rag before your eyes. You’ll clean up the bloody crap with your own hands and take it to the crematorium. Then you’ll go to the hut of the POW road gang. Two hundred stinking Ukrainians will fuck you by turn for a week. If your whore’s carcass survives, you’ll go to the Little Fortress to be shot. Understand, cunt?”

“I will do everything you say. I’ll make a wonderful impression.”

“All right. And one word about any of this, to your uncle or anybody else, and you’re
kaputt!”
He shoves his face directly into her spittle-wet face, and howls with a corpse-smelling breath, so loud that her ears ring, “DO YOU BELIEVE ME?”

“I do! I do!”

“Get her out of here.”

The inspector pulls her by the arm out of the room, up the stairs, along the hall, and shoves her, with the inert child in her arms, out into the square glorious with spring blossoms. The band is playing the morning concert, selections from
Faust.

Jastrow is waiting when she returns. The child, his face still smeared with vomit, looks stunned. Natalie’s face sickens Jastrow; the eyes are round
and white-rimmed, the skin dirty green, the expression one of deathbed fright.

“Well?” he says.

“It was a warning. I’m all right. I must change my clothes and go to work.”

He is still there a half hour later, when she comes out in her threadbare brown dress with the child, who is washed and seems better. Her face is dead gray but the hellish look has faded. “Why aren’t you at the library?”

“I wanted to tell you that word has come from Berel.”

“Yes?” She grasps at his shoulder, her eyes wild.

“They’ll try.”

* * *

(from
World Hofocaust
by Afrnin von Roon)