The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  “This? It’s Cartier! My wedding present.”

  “Very lovely, I’m sure.” The butcher edged the canvas partition back, so that the rabbit was displayed in all its glory, hanging by one hind foot, a bead of ruby blood trembling at the tip of its nose.

  Irene slipped the watch from her arm.

  * * *

  —

  THE HOUSE WAS ICY. As soon as she came through the door she smashed a cherrywood Biedermeier dining chair with a hammer and fed two legs into the fireplace. Immediately, Oskar emerged from his hiding place, shrugged off the blanket he had been wearing, and settled down beside the kerosene lamp.

  “Thank God you’re back! I was half dead with boredom. So what happened today?”

  Every evening he emptied out her bag to see what food she had found and bombarded her with questions about how she had obtained each item. She had already stowed the rabbit beneath a coat in the hall rather than explain that she had swapped her watch for it. Now, fighting exhaustion, she tried to dredge up some news.

  “Old Mendel at Wannsee S-Bahn is still making jokes.”

  Berliners were famous for their sardonic humor, but now the jokes were as black and bitter as Turkish coffee.

  “He told me the fighting won’t stop until Goering fits into Goebbels’s trousers.”

  The famously fat Hermann Goering was three times the size of the cadaverous Propaganda Minister.

  “It’s true!” Galvanized by her company, Oskar was in high spirits.

  “Is it?” Irene sank into an armchair and closed her eyes. “I don’t know why they won’t surrender. Only a maniac would think Germany could win the war now.”

  “Unfortunately, a maniac is still in charge.” Oskar’s laughter was still uproariously boyish. “All right. My turn. A German citizen wants to commit suicide. He tries to hang himself but the rope is so poor it breaks. Then he tries to drown himself. But there’s so much wood in his trouser fabric that he floats. Finally he succeeds in starving himself to death…by eating government rations!”

  “I should tell that one to the butcher. When I left his shop he called out, Geniesse den Krieg—der Friede wird furchtbar!”

  Enjoy the war—the peace will be awful.

  “Not for me.” Oskar grinned, shoveling a slice of salami into his mouth, to be followed by a cold potato and two radishes, all of which she had received the day before in exchange for her half-finished bottle of Je Reviens. “When peace comes I’ll go to America. I’ll be a famous artist. You should hold on to that. It’s going to be valuable.”

  He nodded toward the portrait of her he had painted, hung above the fireplace. The other evening he had found some black paint and finally added his signature with a bold flourish. Oskar Blum.

  “What about you?”

  Her eyes were still closed. “I can’t imagine anything after the war.”

  It was true. Perhaps one day she would leave this place, but until then she and Oskar were in limbo. Her future, if indeed she had one, seemed as fragile as the snowflakes outside, wheeling silently from the leaden sky.

  Very soon afterward, that changed.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  BERLIN, MARCH 1945

  To look at, it was straight out of a fairy tale. Like many of the stations in the city, Berlin-Grunewald was modeled on something entirely unconnected with trains, in this case a castle gate, with twin turrets, a half-timbered façade, and a weather vane. Set above the spread eagle and swastika was a hefty clock with numbers picked out in gold. Medieval was the word that came to mind; even more so when the eye dipped to the crowd of travelers disembarking from a furniture truck and trudging toward the freight wagons on platform seventeen. They had already paid their fares—four pfennigs per kilometer and half that for children under ten; up to the age of four they traveled free. They had received a list of belongings each would require: two pairs of waterproof shoes, four pairs of socks, six pairs of underpants, two blankets. The rest of their property had been seized by the Reich, to be auctioned and the proceeds handed over to the Treasury. Their journey was in fact southward, to Theresienstadt, yet it was still officially described as Ost Transporte. Transport East.

  Strangely, while the misty air was filled with the barking and snarling of dogs, members of the human cargo themselves made little sound. The wailing and panicked pleading of early deportations had died out, replaced by a kind of deadly resignation. Perhaps that was because the subjects of this abject gaggle were cannier than their predecessors. Two years previously, as a birthday present to Adolf Hitler, a lightning roundup code-named Operation Fabrik had removed the last forced laborers from the factories, and Goebbels had declared the city finally judenrein. Cleansed of Jews. Since then, the Interior Ministry had organized an outfit called the Reichsvereinigung that compiled meticulous lists of all Jews—privileged Jews and half Jews—believed to remain in the city. Only a small cargo had arrived that morning—nothing compared to the transports of two years ago, when thousands would leave on a single train—and many of that day’s group had survived precariously in the city underground, either sheltered by German families or posing as Aryans. The rest were the Jew catchers who had trapped them.

  Both groups had a good idea what lay ahead.

  The whole process was running, as usual, like clockwork. The Reichsvereinigung list of this transport had been distributed, the Jews concerned notified and ordered to report to a building on Grosse Hamburger Strasse that had once been an old people’s home but was now a collection depot. From there transports were either marched through the city or brought by truck to this station and thence to work camps in Poland and Bohemia. They smelled bad: a mix of unwashed clothes, sweat, urine, and fear that made you want to shield your face or light a cigarette to obscure the stench. It would be worse on the train, with no food, water, fresh air, or facilities of any kind, but already the sides of the carriages were being clattered down and guards were pointing the way with rifle butts to the mute, trudging passengers. They were dreadfully cold in the icy air, but no colder than the logic of the people who had brought them here.

  * * *

  —

  AXEL HOFFMAN CONSULTED HIS SHEET. This was the first time he had been deputed to this action, and already things had gone wrong.

  A married couple notified to report to the collection depot had failed to appear and he had taken it upon himself to go to their address. When he arrived at the apartment he found husband and wife slumped over their kitchen table with a bottle of Veronal between them, unconscious but still alive. Suicide was a crime, of course, and no one was allowed to die without Reich permission, so Hoffman had sent the pair off to the Jewish hospital in Wedding, where they would be revived. He strongly suspected that the staff there would surreptitiously withhold treatment and assist the couple in their wish to die. Maybe they would even hasten that death. Hoffman himself had never actually killed someone, though he guessed what he was doing now—dispatching these people to God knows what future—was in effect the same. Although the Jews had been told they were going to a self-governing community where they could live in dignity, he had a fair idea that the labor camps were one-way destinations. He had no proof, but the rumors of mass killings in the camps seemed persuasive.

  With luck, soon, he would be able to turn the sword on himself.

  Someone was counting aloud. Names. Numbers. Shipments. In the same voice that one might have used for eggs or bales of straw or agricultural machinery. The people he had unloaded this morning were no more or less interesting than industrial components. Small cogs in the racial machine of the Reich.

  It was his own counting, however, that had brought him here.

  Hoffman was known for his exceptional mathematical acumen. A facility for numbers was often allied with a musical nature, and he had that too; indeed the stark beauty of numbers was no match in his mind for the soaring transports of
Beethoven, which could lift humans from whatever pit they had devised for themselves, even shield and protect them from horror and moral chaos. Yet it was his mathematical ability that was prized by the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security service, and had caught the eye of Reinhard Heydrich—dubbed by Hitler himself “the man with the iron heart.” Numerical brilliance had kept him from membership of the Einsatzgruppen, which carried out the Führer’s work in Poland, and from the horrors of active service in Russia. Numbers, formulas, statistics, and calculations had been Hoffman’s defensive shield and the desk his theater of war.

  After eight years as a paper-pushing bureaucrat he was recruited by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, and moved across to 116 Kurfürstenstrasse, to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, where Eichmann had been tasked by Heydrich with organizing the deportations. From the first Eichmann admired him—Where would the Third Reich be without decent accountants?—and set him to work. How many trains would be needed to transport the displaced? How best to schedule, refuel, and optimize journeys? Bureaucracy. Logistics. Graphs. Cost-benefit ratios. Sorting people into categories, drawing up endless lists of those to be deported. It was dull, dispassionate stuff, but vital for the proper running of the regime.

  Recently, however, irregularities had been detected. A senior official had discovered mistakes in Hoffman’s figures. There were either inadequate numbers of Jews per transport or names that had been inexplicably left off lists. Then a note surfaced, written and sent by Hoffman back in 1940. It was a letter of protest to his superior after he had seen a group of Jews being beaten with whips in Torstrasse.

  I believe all responsible officers should be reminded to carry out actions in compliance with strict standards of professional behavior.

  God knows why he had bothered, but the fact that the letter had been resurrected from the files only compounded his errors, and was enough to seal his fate.

  Eichmann summoned him, raged around his office, and fumed that he was lucky to escape imprisonment. Whining letters were a personal disappointment and mistakes were unacceptable.

  The Reich can do without accountants who make mistakes.

  This was Hoffman’s punishment.

  He was demoted to a unit carrying out roundups, visiting premises, usually at dawn, list in hand, checking reports of suspicious movement, calling on suspected Judenknechte—lackeys of the Jews—the name for citizens who sheltered them, and ensuring that they were delivered to a transport. Even now, when the war must surely be grinding to its end, there had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of Jews still lurking in the city’s nooks and crannies. Usually they removed their yellow stars or failed to attach them securely, though the authorities were wise to that. Being found with a star that was pinned on, rather than sewn, meant instant deportation. Punishment for the people who hid Jews was just as harsh.

  * * *

  —

  A HIGH SHRIEK VERY close to his ear pierced the hum and clatter of the station proceedings. Generally, Hoffman tried to blank out individual faces and regard the people he dealt with as a single brown stream of humanity, but this one insisted on being seen, bobbing out of the crowd like a crumpled leaf on the waters, wailing something about her child, her cracked and leathery face scrunched into a howl. He tried to ignore the sound but it was impossible, and his interest was piqued by the fact that clutched against her chest she was carrying a violin case.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He could tell the woman was unused to being addressed conversationally, rather than in a voice of condemnation or control. A couple of tears spilled from her eyes, as though she had only a few to spare.

  “My boy. I left him behind.”

  Hoffman had often wondered about children. He never expected to have one, but if you did, how much would you love them? More than a dog?

  “I’m sure your son will be accounted for on a future transport.”

  “This is his violin. How will he live without his violin?” she wailed.

  A fair question. But before he could answer, she was pushed aside and a sharp bark of command sliced the frozen air.

  “Silence!”

  It was Kramer. A brute of the first order. He required lightning obedience, and any Jew objecting would be struck viciously enough to be sent sprawling. Kramer knocked the violin from the woman’s hands, then stove it in for good measure with his rifle butt.

  “Back in line. Everyone will be fed at the destination. Hot soup and coffee will be waiting for you. Help us organize the transport as efficiently as possible. Move along. Your possessions have been labeled. You will be reunited with them when you reach your destination.”

  The woman brought her face close to Hoffman. She was plainly maddened with grief, but the crazed eyes were lit by a savage anger. Her spittle spattered his cheek.

  “You, Officer. I’m talking to you. When all us Jews have gone, who will you hate then?”

  Hoffman didn’t flinch.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAS FAMOUS FOR his composure, as much as for his dislike of discussing his private life. Whenever they talked about him, his colleagues concluded that his personal life began and ended with his elderly Alsatian dog, Effie, whose daily walk was the reason for his slight indications of unease whenever duty demanded that he arrive early. The less they knew about Hoffman, the more curious they were. It was plain that his head—that high vault of pale bone—contained a fierce brain. He was the son of an ambitious single mother, who had wanted him to pursue a career as a concert pianist. From the age of five that had been his life—the narrow apartment in Schöneberg, and the Bösendorfer that she had spent her inheritance to buy. When the mother fell ill with a wasting disease that cost a fortune in doctors, someone in the office heard Hoffman had given up music to study law and then taken a job with Heydrich’s outfit to look after her. Not much else was known about him. There were rumors he was keen on chess.

  A restive hammering sounded from the insides of the trucks accompanied by last-minute shouting and screaming, then the train was whistling—a long, mournful Kaddish into the misty morning—and moving off. A dark confetti of soot drifted through the air.

  He would be dead himself soon. Days, weeks, or months. He was certain of it.

  “Have we signed off this group, Kramer?”

  “Sturmbannführer?”

  “The papers.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Kramer scrambled to produce the paperwork.

  Hoffman scrawled a signature and got back in the car.

  * * *

  —

  THERE REMAINED A LONG list of reports and denunciations to check out that day, and all of them looked like nothing, except one. A Christian pastor and his family in Dahlem had been accused of shielding a teenage Jewish girl disguised as a “country cousin.” The report had come in from a long-standing member of the pastor’s congregation and appeared highly plausible. Hoffman dispensed with his aide and drove there alone. Once he arrived, he lingered in his car outside the address before he knocked. That way, as he anticipated, there was nothing to discover.

  It was dusk by the time he reached the last address, in Wannsee. Fat flakes of snow were falling in feathers to the frozen ground. He knew the street, of course. It was the location of the Wannsee House, where at a top-level conference in 1942 the total resettlement of the Jews had been hammered out. Hoffman had heard the phrase “Final Solution” being bandied about, though he had heard no one in the office defining exactly what that term meant. Nor had he inquired. Convening the conference had been one of Heydrich’s last duties in Berlin before his move to the Protectorate of Bohemia, where Czech assassins had blown him up in his car.

  This villa, however, was new to Hoffman. The information received was scant. A Jew listed for transport, one Oskar Blum, had family connections to the place. A sister had been employed
there, and although she had now been deported, reports had come in of unusual noises—banging, the neighbor claimed, or more precisely the sound of wood being hammered. Often this kind of noise was used to muffle the sound of a foreign radio station. Either way, the reports merited investigation.

  He knocked at the door.

  A woman answered, slightly flushed, pushing her hair back from her brow. At the sight of her, memories flared within him, like sparks struck from a stone.

  “Can I help you?”

  * * *

  —

  HE REMEMBERED HER. How could he have forgotten a woman like that? She was probably the most beautiful woman he had ever encountered. Her face leaped up like a flame from a guttering candle that had never quite been extinguished. Irene Weissmuller. She had scarcely changed since the night they met at Joseph Goebbels’s Pfaueninsel party. The Englishwoman had had a glow about her then, like the filament of a bulb, and the silk of her turquoise dress had shimmered like a peacock’s wing. She had been so new and innocent, so astounded at the facts he spelled out, so shocked at the brutal truth of the society into which she had recently arrived. Speaking to her had instantly and unexpectedly unleashed an intense protectiveness in him. Later, after the concert evening at the Staatsoper, he had had to restrain himself from putting his arms around her, so powerful was his desire to take physical possession of her. He had found himself telling her how to stay safe, advising her that her mail would be monitored, and cautioning her that she would be observed. It was like reading fairy tales to a nursery child. Only instead of reassuring her that the monsters and witches and ogres were fantastical creatures, he was warning her that they were real and dangerous.

  He remembered her joke about the Führer’s book—I can see why it’s called My Struggle. I struggled to get past the first chapter—a joke she had naïvely uttered to Heydrich of all people, that would, in other circumstances, merit prison or worse. He remembered Heydrich’s cold, calculated response, biding his time, darting a sniper’s glance at the oblivious, prattling, social-climbing husband, some way down the table.