The Constant Man

by Peter Steiner

  ‘Well. It’s probably nothing really, probably routine. And nothing for you to worry about. But two SS men stopped at my apartment yesterday. They asked for a list of residents, which I gave them. I heard they did the same thing in other buildings on the street.’

  ‘Don’t the police already have the names on our residency permits?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why it’s odd.’

  ‘Well, did they ask for anything else?’ said Frau Schimmel.

  ‘Yes, Bertha, they did. They asked about several residents in particular. Gruenhaus on the third floor, Penemann on four, and you. They asked about you.’

  ‘Did they? And what did they want to know?’

  ‘They wanted to know if you were a Jew.’

  ‘Did they? And what did you tell them?’

  ‘I told them no! I said, of course not.’

  ‘But I am, Heinz. I am a Jew.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m a Jew, Heinz.’

  Heinz felt dizzy, he swayed on his feet. He went pale. He couldn’t speak. He could hardly breathe. He sat down heavily on the chair by her bed. Betrayal, confusion, and anger flitted across his face and back again. ‘But …’ he said. ‘Why …?’

  Because he was a storm trooper, Heinz had learned that morning about a planned ‘action’ in two nights. A seventeen-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan had shot and killed the third secretary in the German embassy in Paris. The Nazis had deported Herschel’s father to Poland, and Herschel, mad with grief, had gone to the embassy to kill the ambassador. Ernst Von Rath, the third secretary, came out to see what he wanted, and Grynszpan shot him.

  For Hitler, the assassination of a German official by a Jew offered an opportunity to solidify German hatred of the Jews and to advance his Final Solution. It didn’t matter that Von Rath was under suspicion and surveillance by the Gestapo. Any martyred Aryan would serve the Führer’s purpose.

  Storm troopers were instructed to ‘spontaneously’ attack Jewish-owned shops, synagogues, and homes in the early morning hours. And as many Jews as possible were to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This hadn’t mattered to Heinz when he thought he didn’t know or care about any Jews. But everything had changed with Bertha’s announcement. ‘Damn her! he said as he stormed around his apartment. ‘Let her rot in hell!’

  Heinz, who normally slept well, couldn’t sleep at all that night. He thought of how Frau Schimmel had lied to him, betrayed him. It was just like a Jew to do such a thing, wasn’t it? To lie and cheat and manipulate. She had taken advantage of him, used him for her own purposes.

  Except, when he tried to think of ways she had taken advantage of him, all he could come up with was that he had hauled her groceries up the stairs in exchange for her wonderful strudel and her sound advice. When he tried to remember what her selfish and devious purposes might have been, the only ones he could come up with were friendship and survival. To make matters worse, when he tried to conjure sinister images in his mind of Bertha Schimmel as a devious old Jew, instead he saw her kindly face next to that of Tante Jolesch, his beloved neighbor from long ago.

  At around two o’clock on the morning of November 10, 1938, a half dozen storm troopers banged on the front door of Tullemannstraße 54. When they saw Heinz come out of his apartment wearing his uniform, they yelled, ‘Open up, Kamerad!’ and ‘Juden heraus!’ Out with the Jews!

  Heinz unlocked the door. He recognized a couple of them, including Jürgen from the Three Crowns. They smelled of alcohol. Heinz had stopped going to the Three Crowns, so he rarely saw Jürgen any more.

  They swarmed up the stairs to Frau Schimmel’s door and started pounding and yelling. Heinz ran to unlock the door before they broke it down. They rushed shouting into the apartment. But Frau Schimmel was gone.

  ‘Where is she, Schleiffer?’ said Jürgen.

  ‘Damn! I don’t know,’ said Heinz. ‘The old Jew bitch was here yesterday.’

  They ran around in the apartment, bumping into each other and cursing. Some of them pocketed knickknacks or whatever else took their fancy. There was no money or jewelry. One of them, finding nothing he wanted, turned over the dresser and broke some pictures instead.

  Hearing the sound of other men yelling out on the street, Jürgen said, ‘Let’s go, men. We’ve got more work to do.’ They rushed down the stairs and out the door to rejoin the mob sweeping from building to building.

  Heinz followed them downstairs. He locked the front door. He watched through the front window. But all he could see in the darkness was the flickering light from flames somewhere down the street. Heinz set the brass umbrella stand upright again.

  He went back up to Frau Schimmel’s apartment. It was a mess. He lifted the dresser up, replaced the drawers, and maneuvered it back into place. He put the clock back on the dresser. Its face was broken but it was still ticking. A lamp had been knocked over and broken, so he stood that back up and swept up the glass shards. He swept up the glass from the broken picture frames too, and hung the pictures back up as best he could. The light from a fire in the street danced on the ceiling. He closed the curtains so he wouldn’t have to look at it.

  When he was finished, he went back down to his apartment. The curtains were closed and only a small night light was burning, so he couldn’t tell whether Bertha was awake or not. He tiptoed to his bed where she lay. ‘How was it, Heinz?’ she said.

  ‘They made a mess, Bertha. I’m sorry. They broke some things and they stole some things.’

  ‘And you?’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heinz, ‘I’m all right.’ But he wasn’t. He didn’t think he would ever be all right again.

  Bertha Schimmel – this was not her real name – stayed with Heinz Schleiffer for a week to be sure the pogrom was over. Then he moved her back upstairs. She lived for another month, growing weaker all the time, but also somehow more radiant. Her skin was pale and paper like, her eyes were huge and dark. And her hair was thin. He brushed it for her, which frightened him the first time he did it.

  When he found her the morning after she died, her eyes were closed. She looked just like she was sleeping. She had gotten her wish, to die a natural death in her own bed. Heinz knew who her doctor was and tried to contact him. But the doctor was gone, arrested along with thousands of others all over Germany and Austria.

  Heinz reported to the authorities that Bertha Schimmel, age 84, had died. She had no next of kin that he knew of. Of course, he didn’t even know her real name. So it was up to him to deal with her remains. She had wanted to be cremated and had given him money to pay for it when the time came.

  Heinz took the little urn of ashes and went with Tomas, who was home on leave, to the banks of the Isar. They stood and watched as the little cloud of ashes, changing patterns and slowly sinking, drifted downstream. A pair of mallards came in for a landing just behind the dispersing ashes and drifted along with them. ‘The funeral cortege,’ said Tomas. He looked over at his father. He was weeping.

  Heinz settled Frau Schimmel’s affairs as best he could. He cleaned out the apartment and donated the furniture to a national charity. He kept the Limoges in accordance with her wishes, although he wasn’t sure what to do with a set of fine china.

  In the top drawer of her dresser he had found letters carefully tied with string in small packets. Some from long ago were addressed to a Clara Dubinski. There was a small bundle of letters from Lola Zeff too. They were postmarked Murnau and would probably have made it easy to find her. In the end he burned all the letters without reading them.

  Even though Heinz had come to love the woman he knew as Bertha Schimmel, he had also at the same time managed to remain a devout anti-Semite. He accomplished this by means of an ungainly but effective mental somersault. To his way of thinking, the Jews were absolutely responsible for Germany’s woes. But Bertha Schimmel (and Tante Jolesch before her) were the exception. They were decent and loving people.

  Such acrobatic exceptions were perf
ormed all over Germany, so often in fact that there came to be a word for these exceptional Jews – Hausjude. The house Jew was the one that lived in your building, or the Jew of your acquaintance who was different from all the other Jews. He was generous, or their children were well behaved, or she was kind and gave you strudel. In fact, given all these positive attributes, they probably weren’t even Jews at all.

  By doing another similar mental somersault, Heinz also absolved himself of the crime he had committed by deceiving his fellow storm troopers and protecting the old Jew Bertha Schimmel from deportation or worse. If she was a good person (and therefore probably not even a Jew), then it would have been a grave mistake to allow her to be harmed.

  Heinz’s mental acrobatics came in handy yet again a few years later, in 1943, when Tomas, having left his leg behind near Stalingrad, came home only to be implicated as a member of the White Rose resistance group. He had been caught distributing leaflets denouncing the persecution and murder of Jews. Tomas had to be innocent, said Heinz (to himself), because he had fought, and been wounded and then been decorated at Stalingrad. It had to be a case of mistaken identity or betrayal by some defeatist or malevolent person, maybe even a Jew. Tomas was a war hero after all. Sending him to the guillotine would be a terrible mistake. He went to the guillotine nonetheless.

  Friedrich Grosz

  Despite the dismal weather – ice storms and bitter winds from the east – the clearing of the wetlands beyond the camp of trees and stones continued at a frenzied pace. The Dachau directorate had decided that large numbers of prisoners should be used to prepare this area for farming before spring. The prisoners who cleared the fields would then do the farm labor, if they survived. Now teams of prisoners were cutting down trees, hauling them away, digging up their roots, and pulling stones out of the frozen swampy ground.

  One morning two SS guards pulled Willi from a crew as they were being marched out to the work site. He was taken to a small windowless stone building adjoining the Juhrhaus, the squat building through which new prisoners arrived. An official car stood by the door. Willi watched his crew disappear though the gate carrying saws and shovels, preceded by kapos, and surrounded by SS guards armed with clubs and machine guns.

  Inside the building, which had once been an ammunition storage room, Obersturmbannführer Reinhard Pabst was waiting. He wore the black SS uniform and a heavy black overcoat. It was as cold inside the building as it was outside, and his breath turned to steam as it came from his nose and mouth. He had a pistol strapped on his hip.

  The Obersturmbannführer was pacing back and forth. As Willi came in, he stopped pacing and peered at Willi, trying to affect a relaxed stance, his hands clasped behind his back. Willi could see that this man was ill at ease. His body was tense and his breath came in short bursts of steam. Willi had never seen Reinhard Pabst or Friedrich Grosz before, so he wasn’t sure who this man was, although he had his suspicions. Willi stood at attention, waiting for whatever was next.

  Since his first Gestapo posting only four years earlier at Humboldt University in Berlin, Reinhard had uncovered one plot after another with skill and cunning. He had brought dozens of traitors to ruin. Dominating these wretched human beings and destroying their lives had become his passion. He believed he had made it into a science. He could not be defeated. Reinhard had taught classes on interrogation and entrapment techniques in Berlin, and had eventually been sent to Munich to teach the Gestapo there as well. Just over thirty years old and already a lieutenant colonel, he was, by all accounts, headed for stardom.

  Reinhard had convinced himself, and so explained to his students, that every interrogation should be seen as a life and death struggle between himself and the subject, ignoring, of course, the fact that his victim was essentially helpless and at his mercy. ‘The person you are interrogating is your enemy,’ Reinhard would say. ‘If he is strong, he will try to resist you. For he understands implicitly that resistance is his only hope. And so your objective is to destroy his resistance, and thus to destroy his hope.

  ‘Without hope, he is nothing. And by hope I do not mean merely his hope for survival. I mean his entire hopeful system of beliefs, the foundation of his existence – Christianity, communism, humanism, whatever it might be. If he is a Christian, you must destroy his belief in Jesus Christ; if he is a communist, you must destroy his belief in communism; if he is a humanist, you must destroy his belief in humanity. Whatever his belief system might be, it must be systematically dismembered and undermined until he sees it lying in ruin at his feet. Once you do that, you have thoroughly destroyed all hope. And once you have thoroughly destroyed hope, he will have nothing left and will be yours.

  ‘“And how do I do this?” you might ask. Here our Führer is instructive; learn from the Führer. Fear. Fear is your most useful tool.’ When Reinhard said this, he usually got a nervous laugh from his audience. At that moment they recognized the part fear played in their own lives, and how the solution, the means to ending that fear, came about when they began inflicting fear in others. ‘Fear is one lever by which you can make someone doubt his own perceptions and beliefs, deny and turn against what he has taken to be true up until now.

  ‘As human beings, we are all driven by self-interest. I learned in the course of my theological studies – yes, I was once a theologian – that even Jesus was driven by self-interest. He had a compelling need to appear virtuous. Not to be virtuous, but to exhibit virtue, to appear virtuous to others. His grandiosity – proclaiming himself the son of God – sprang from his own weakness, his need to feel superior, and that need is nothing more than a need to gain power. Humanity, charity, generosity, these are various forms of the same weakness, and they run contrary to who we actually are.

  ‘We men are power-seeking creatures. Rob a man of his power, make what was once his power yours, and he will tell you whatever you want to know, and do whatever you want him to do.’

  Reinhard Pabst believed that the Gestapo and the SS had finally given him his manhood, after humanism and Christianity had sought to emasculate him, to turn him into a eunuch, or worse yet, a woman. Humanism and Christianity were feminine ways of being: insidious, seductive, devious. And if they were not vanquished, they were then mortally dangerous.

  The Gestapo gave him the power to invoke fear in others and thus gave him absolute power over them and the liberty to do with them whatever he pleased. He believed that, thanks to the Führer, he had freed himself from all the destructive – that is, feminine – strictures society and religion had imposed upon him.

  Reinhard could tell as soon as he saw Willi that this former police detective was resolute, despite his weakened physical state. He meant to find out just how resolute he was, and, by means of his own superior interrogatory skills, to dismember the prisoner’s last remaining resolution, expose his hope as illusory, and then exterminate him. First though, he needed to find out how much the prisoner actually knew about Friedrich Grosz.

  Reinhard saw that Willi was alert and watchful. In fact, he seemed almost relaxed, seemingly indifferent to his own fate. We shall see about that, thought Reinhard. He knew that every man nursed hope somewhere inside himself, and Willi would be no different in that regard. And every man also had fear as a constant companion.

  Reinhard was right about that. Willi had hope. And he had plenty of fear too. He had faced his own fear again and again over the many months he had been in Dachau. He was fearful even now as Reinhard Pabst sized him up, afraid of the pain that might come, afraid he might be killed. But Willi had also learned that fear was about the future, about what lay ahead. And the here and now demanded his full attention. So he had learned over these months to lay his fear aside, as one might take off a hat and lay it aside.

  Willi reminded himself that he had actually wanted this meeting to come about. This was where Willi’s personal madness – his obsession with seeing justice done – had come into play. Here he was, a prisoner in Dachau, and yet he had imagined that he could somehow
manipulate circumstances and make a serial murderer come to him. And now he had actually done it. After naming Friedrich Grosz as the murderer of many women during his earlier interrogation, he had guessed that word would get back to Grosz himself, and that Grosz might be strongly tempted to show himself.

  Why not? The Gestapo was a relatively small and tight-knit organization. Willi’s accusation would make Grosz nervous and fearful. After all, this prisoner Geismeier’s allegation was a serious threat to his existence. Reinhard had to confront and deal with this threat once and for all. And now, if Willi’s hunch was right, Reinhard was here to kill him.

  Reinhard sensed something dangerous about this man Geismeier despite his ragged and emaciated being. He looked Willi up and down, walked around him, keeping his distance, as though Willi were a wild animal. Once he was satisfied that he had taken Willi’s measure, he stopped in front of him and smiled. It was not a smile so much as an imitation of a smile, a facial grimace meant to convey confidence but conveying instead uncertainty.

  When Reinhard anticipated a formidable foe – and he believed from what he knew about Willi that he would be formidable – he chose to interrogate them alone, one on one, with no one else present. He liked to imagine the two men would engage in a contest of wills. He wore his pistol, knowing it would be a distraction, that his opponent would focus on it, both as a threat and a temptation. And he was right – Willi was thinking about the pistol.

  ‘Geismeier,’ said Reinhard. It was more a statement of fact than a greeting.

  Willi did not reply.

  ‘You were once a student of Shakespeare, I understand,’ said Reinhard.

  Willi did not answer, but raised his eyebrows slightly.

  Reinhard was pleased. ‘Don’t be surprised,’ he said. ‘I probably know as much about you as you know about yourself.’ He offered Willi some biographical facts to prove his point – he knew about Willi’s parents, about the Geismeier ceramic pipe business, about Willi’s university studies, his year in England, even titles from the small library Willi had kept at Tullemannstraße when he had lived there as Karl Juncker. ‘All your books had protective dust jackets. They’re even in alphabetical order,’ said Reinhard. ‘You are an orderly man. I like that.’