by Yehuda Avner
“That’s my prisoner.” He took Dan’s sleeve.
“I’m to take him to the Gestapo,” the SS man protested.
“I saved you the trouble.” Draxler yanked Dan across the gravel to his car. He cuffed his hands behind his back and pushed him into the backseat. The Gestapo man’s breath billowed in the cold night. “You’re mine now, Jew boy.”
Draxler’s driver sped along Am Grossen Wannsee. He slowed for the hairpin before the bridge. Troopers from the Leibstandarte SS loomed around the car in their greatcoats. They glowered at Dan and the hostile features of Draxler beside him, and signaled for the Mercedes to continue.
They rolled by a pair of parked Gestapo cars and a staff car riddled with bullet holes. Three motorbikes with SS plates were leant against the hedge, their lights shattered and decals scratched. Round the corner, the Adler Trumpf was shot up too. Dan looked around anxiously for Shmulik and his boys. The Mossad attempt on Hitler’s life had surely been made here. He felt a surge of hope that Shmulik might have been successful, and an immediate snap of guilt that he had ever tried to stop the plan.
Bodies lay under blankets in a rank by the bridge. The clouds cleared from over the moon and glinted on the jackboots of the dead men. They were SS, or perhaps Wehrmacht. Or Hitler himself? No, they would have taken their Führer to a hospital, even if he were dead.
A huddle of Gestapo officers were crouched over something at the side of the wrecked Adler Trumpf. One of them stood and lit a cigarette. The others poked at the remains of two men. White in the night, their faces bore the wasted expressions of saints in a medieval church. Dan felt a surge of nausea. He recognized the faces. The Gestapo man drew on his cigarette and kicked at Richter’s devastated corpse. The dead agent’s head twisted around to face Yardeni’s body, as though he sought to pass on some final confidence.
Then Dan realized that the dead man’s unspoken message was for him, and he felt a strength in his core that dissipated his fear of Draxler and the torture chambers. He would survive, because he had a mission to carry out.
The Gestapo car accelerated onto the main road that led to the center of Berlin.
Part III
I wasn’t only issued orders. In that case I’d have been a moron. But I rather anticipated. I was an idealist.
Adolf Eichmann
Entrance to Auschwitz I, 1942
Chapter 44
Berlin, December 1941
The Gestapo made the arrests swiftly. Almost everyone who attended the Countess von Bredow’s musical soirees found themselves in the basements along Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Some got word to powerful protectors. Schulze, the Luftwaffe officer, came out alive because of the intervention of Hermann Göring, who wanted to keep the security services away from his air force. Kritzinger, the deputy head of the Chancellery, turned to his boss, an honorary SS general, who vouched for him and secured his release. The others were strung up with nooses of thin wire, hung in a row on butcher’s hooks. Their deaths were filmed to be played on the newsreels that ran before the Westerns at the cinema.
Dan Lavi waited in his cell under the Gestapo headquarters, expecting Draxler to arrive at any moment to torture him. He wondered if he was being sweated, to increase his panic. He worked hard to calm himself, to control the adrenaline that rushed through him almost as loud as the screams he heard from the other cells. He pictured Shmulik, imagined him alive, still struggling to survive, to continue his fight against the Nazis. He saw Anna, back at the embassy. Without him. He reached out in the dark and touched the hands of the Jews who came to his office for their salvation. He was ready for the torture. They wouldn’t kill him. In fact, he felt something growing in him that could never be killed.
On the second day, the door swung open and Eichmann stepped inside. He sniffed at the foul smell of the toilet bucket. “The Führer has made no mention of the presence of the Israeli ambassador at the shooting. We can assume the—the excitement of the ensuing moments erased your face from his memory, Lavi. I managed to convince the Obergruppenführer Heydrich that you came to Wannsee because you suspected the Countess von Bredow intended to carry out her atrocity.”
Perhaps I was there to help, Dan thought. But not anymore. He said nothing.
“In any case, you can leave now.”
Dan stood, unsteadily. He stumbled forward. Eichmann maneuvered quickly out of his way. “It remains a matter of Reich policy to coordinate the emigration of Jews to Israel. You may be thankful for that. Otherwise I’d have let them string you up like the rest of the conspirators.”
“I’m not a conspirator.”
“The Obergruppenführer Heydrich agrees that you may be returned to your old duties on behalf of the Reich.”
“On behalf of the State of Israel.”
Eichmann shook his head with contempt. “Hold your tongue. Don’t you realize I’m doing you a big favor? Your friend Hauptmann Brückner is the hero of the hour, of course. He stopped the old bitch just in time. Even though she was his aunt.”
A cramp gripped Dan’s stomach. He bent over sharply. The Nazis were releasing him because they needed him. For now. He retched, but there was nothing in his belly to come up. Eichmann flicked his hand and the Gestapo guard dragged Dan from the cell.
As Dan staggered down the long, white-walled corridor toward the exit, he heard Eichmann call after him: “Remember what I have done for you, Lavi.”
Back at the embassy, Anna shut out the world for a day and tended to him. Bertha Polkes fed him soup to give him back the strength he had lost in the cell, expending so much nervous energy. But the next day he forced Anna to let him get on with his work. The embassy hadn’t heard from Shmulik. He assumed the Mossad chief had been captured. He tried to prepare Devorah for the worst, but she shrugged off his attempts to talk about Shmulik’s fate.
After a week passed, he concluded that Shmulik was dead. He found Devorah in the embassy kitchen and told her Shmulik must have died somewhere out near Wannsee after the assassination attempt. If he’d been captured, then surely he would have succumbed to Gestapo torture, and the secret police would have descended on the embassy. No one could hold out against them, not even Shmulik.
Devorah snorted at him derisively. “What do you know about holding out against them?”
“I realize you love him, Devorah. But you don’t think he’s immune to—to the terrible things they do?” Dan said. “That he can’t be hurt?”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I know exactly how much he suffers. That’s why I know he’s not dead. I can still feel his pain.”
“Devorah, we have to be realistic.”
“We’re in love, Shmulik and I. Perhaps you find it hard to imagine that Shmulik can experience that emotion, but it’s very much alive in him. When he dies, I’ll know it.”
Her intensity convinced him. He touched her shoulder to comfort her. As she turned away, he caught the trace of a smirk on her lips. The triumph of a successful lie. He realized that it wasn’t a spiritual connection with her husband that made Devorah so certain he was alive. “You know where he is, don’t you?”
She left the kitchen without a word. He followed her through the lobby. They passed the group of hopeful emigrants waiting at the door of Dan’s office and descended to the basement.
“Devorah, you have to tell me where he is.”
She sat down at her coding table. “When you need him, he’ll be there.”
“In the meantime, how am I supposed to explain his absence?”
“To Jerusalem?”
“To the Gestapo.”
She gave a disgusted laugh and turned away.
For the next few hours Dan processed Jews seeking Israeli visas. As the afternoon went on, he collected the papers and went to Gottfried’s old office. Anna dozed there, with her elbows on the desk. He touched the crown of her head gently. She jolted awake.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m going over to Eichmann. Can I have the papers you’ve done so far?”
“Sure.” She pushed a pile of applications toward him and sighed. “Have fun.”
He picked up the forms, but her voice halted him. It contained a resignation and bitterness he hadn’t heard before. “What’s eating you?”
She put her hand briefly over her eyes. When she took it away, he saw no love there, only frustration and grief. “How can you even be in that man’s presence? He helped kill Wili and Hannah.”
“The Countess tried to assassinate Hitler. If Eichmann and his people hadn’t been there, someone else would’ve finished her off. Wili, too.” He packed the papers into his briefcase.
She shook her head. “Maybe they tried to kill the wrong guy.”
“They should’ve killed Eichmann? Is that what you mean? How would we get all these Jews out of Germany without him?” He brandished his briefcase impatiently and raised his voice. “Do you have an answer for that?”
She twisted her mouth and stared at her hands.
Her silence was a goad to his anger. “I have to make difficult compromises. I’m not proud of working with Eichmann. He’s an anti-Semitic bastard. But I’m proud that we’ve saved so many Jews from the Nazis. How many Jews did Shmulik save? I had to listen to this hard-line shit from him all the time. Now he’s gone, I won’t tolerate it from you.”
“I’m not asking for your toleration.” The last word come slowly, loaded with sarcasm. “You’re the boss here. You’re the ambassador. But I’m not working for you. Or for Eichmann.”
He knew he should apologize. He couldn’t do it. For too long he had swallowed everything he had wanted to say to Eichmann and Draxler and the other Nazis he encountered in his work. Now his resentment exploded. At his wife. “Do you think I like doing any of this?” he yelled. “One day I’ll pay a heavy price for this work.”
“At least you won’t be dead, like Wili.” She shouted too. She wasn’t backing down.
“Well, that could happen any fucking day, couldn’t it?”
“I doubt it. You’re too useful to them. Who would do their dirty work?”
“Is that what you really think of me?”
“I think the Israeli ambassador should be standing up to them, not stamping their papers.”
“I did stand up to them. I told them Wili would not do the concert for Hitler.”
“And then you backed down. Did you forget that?”
He slammed his briefcase onto the desk. “I didn’t forget. I’ll never forget.” Again he saw Richter and Yardeni, dead on the ground. He had known since then that he must do more than process visa applications. But he still didn’t know what and that fact enraged him.
She went still, shocked by the force of his anger.
He took a deep breath, made his voice quiet, looking for an example that would show his wife why he had to carry on as before. “What if there were thousands of sick children and someone said to you, ‘Doctor, you can save some of them. But the only way to do it is to nurture the bacillus that’s killing them all. You have to keep the germ alive, because that will help some of the children find health, and meanwhile others among them will die.’ What would you do, as a doctor, Anna?”
There was love in her expression, but also defiance. “I would remember what happens when you come into close contact with a disease.”
“No, Anna, don’t say that.”
“I would realize that it might infect me too.”
“You think I’m like Eichmann?”
“You have power. I don’t know if it’s your job as ambassador, or that you’re a citizen of a new state which suddenly has the apparatus of power. Have you been corrupted by it, Dan?”
“I have no power, Anna. No power at all. Neither does Israel.”
“Then you’d better find a way for you and Israel to get some. Or all this is for nothing.” She stood and touched her hand to her brow wearily. “Take the papers to Eichmann.”
Chapter 45
After the attempt on Hitler’s life, Eichmann’s officiousness and disdain increased, just as Dan’s ability to swallow it declined. He started carrying his papers over to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration late in the evenings, when he expected to find one of the SS deputies on duty. He preferred to avoid Eichmann’s frosty put-downs and allusions as to how much Dan owed him. On his lonely walks back along the edge of the Tiergarten park to the embassy, he had to acknowledge that he was now truly scared of the man. One dreary, cold evening, however, he found Eichmann still at the office, and full of excitement. “Herr Ambassador, it is a historic day, is it not?” He clapped his hands and rolled his shoulders in his field-gray tunic.
Dan opened his briefcase and took out the papers. “I’m glad to see the Herr Sturmbannführer in such good spirits.”
“No, no, you must congratulate the Herr Obersturmbannführer.”
So Eichmann had been promoted from Major to Lieutenant-Colonel. Jews were good business. Dan showed himself to be suitably impressed. “My hearty congratulations, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”
“But that’s just one source of my joy. There is still better news. For today, the war is truly global. Our eventual victory was never in doubt, but now it promises to be a triumph of truly millennial proportions.”
Dan stacked the papers before Eichmann. The SS officer slapped his hand down on them. “Yes, yes, I’ll get to these. But first, a drink.”
He took a glass from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured himself a measure of schnapps from a silver flask. He didn’t offer any to Dan. He raised the glass to his lips. “L’chaim.” To life.
Dan made a brief bow to acknowledge the German’s Hebrew. “What is the great event?”
“It may have consequences for your dear wife.”
Dan’s eyes flared wide.
Eichmann wagged a finger at him. “I observe from your reaction that the good lady doctor is the way to get at you. Never mind, I expect she has an Israeli passport too. As well as an American one, no?”
“She does.”
“Then perhaps it will all be fine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”
“Pearl what?”
“The base of the American fleet in Hawaii. There was great destruction, apparently. The attack itself took place within the last few hours. America will surely retaliate by declaring war on Japan, and soon Germany shall join on the side of her ally in Tokyo. I have this from Obergruppenführer Heydrich, who has just returned from the Chancellery.”
Dan swallowed hard. Even once war was declared, he couldn’t imagine the Germans would be as vicious toward American civilians as he had heard they were toward Poles and Russians in the east. Surely they would want to live alongside America? They couldn’t believe they would defeat it. Anyone who knew America’s geographic enormity, and witnessed its industrial strength as Dan had during his time at Harvard, must know that Germany couldn’t beat the US. Still, Anna was an American and a Jew. How much protection would her status as the wife of the Israeli ambassador bring her?
“Why must Germany declare war against the United States?” he said.
“We and Japan are signatories of the Anti-Comintern Pact.” Eichmann spread his hands, as if the logic were immediately evident.
“But that treaty compels you to support Japan in the event that Japan is attacked.”
“It does.”
“Didn’t you say that Japan attacked the American fleet? Germany has no obligation to support Japan in a war of aggression.”
“The Americans are the aggressors. They have violated their neutrality repeatedly in the last couple of months. Their ships have fired on our U-Boats. They concluded a treaty with Canada, a British dependency. It is the Americans who are responsible for this war. But it is Germany that shall be the victor.”
Dan touched his brow. He tried to calculate where this would leave Israel. Bitterly, he thought, perhaps the Americans would have an ultimatum for Ben-Gurion now, too.
“How
do you say it in Hebrew?” Eichmann said. “Germany and Japan are bashert. Our relationship is meant to be.”
Dan tried to avoid quibbling with the SS’s “Jewish expert” in matters of culture, but he was off-balance, and allowed himself this one correction. “It’s Yiddish, and it’s usually applied to a soulmate in love, not an ally in war.”
“Love and war are happy occasions. Shall we agree that it can be applied to all moments of celebration?”
Very quietly, Dan said, “As you wish.”
“Though, as with all things, this happy event is not without its inconveniences.” Eichmann lifted a file from his desk and waved it, an expression of modest vexation on his face. “I had sent out invitations on behalf of Obergruppenführer Heydrich to a conference at the villa in Wannsee. The scene of the recent treacherous assassination attempt against our Führer. Now I must change the date.”
“What is the subject of the conference?”
Again the Nazi’s finger wagged and his face took on a look of private amusement. “The conference must be delayed because of the diplomatic preparations for war with the United States. There is to be a speech before the Reichstag by the Führer, but our European allies must first be informed, as well as the Japanese ambassador and his staff, and there must be coordination on an administrative and leadership level of all aspects of propaganda and supply and transport. I must make my contribution to all this.”
“No doubt.”
“So I shall be sending out new invitations for a date in January. Can you imagine? A conference of only a few hours, but so much organization is required. There are ten government bodies whose representatives must attend, and six departments within the SS alone. Six, including mine. Such a lot to do.”
A conference that involved Eichmann’s department must concern the Jews. Dan ran his finger nervously along the top of his briefcase. He snapped the locks shut. “Who else must you call upon to attend?”
