Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  18

  Your father hasn’t yet forgiven you, reported his wife the next time he visited; and even though he didn’t know what he hadn’t been forgiven for, the knowledge of being in the wrong came as easily as ever. Towering over her, he shot her that look which she would never see as anything other than stern; and then he waited.

  For cutting off his little story, she explained.

  Oh, said he, placing another log upon the fire. The one about the Jew they caught.

  He knew how it must have been for that Jew, because it had already happened to him twice, the first time back in 1936, that time he’d sent out the seven thousand anti-Nazi religious pamphlets and then they took him away in one of the Green Minnas, where through a small square barred window on the righthand side he saw clouds, darkness and windows; then it was right face and forward march with the others into Columbia House where the Blackshirts tortured him with wet horsewhips. In 1938, because they absurdly suspected him of monarchism, another Green Minna carried him to a concentration camp, where he quickly learned to tell the smirking doctor: I fell downstairs.—In short, he overcame all his previous ideological errors. A certain Gestapo man had gotten him out, but his father had also helped by insisting that Kurt Gerstein had always been a sincere anti-Semite. He’d never forget those weeks at Welzheim, his vacation they called it; and in particular the thing which he’d never tell anybody about, the thing that the-men had done to him. Of course all this had taken place back in the days when we still played around, when we beat them instead of liquidating them. Once upon a time, Röhm’s portrait still hung in all our concentration camps. Then we shot Röhm and got serious. We commenced Operations Reinhard and Barbarossa, and set up shop at Belzec.

  His wife said: You really ought to apologize.

  As you wish, Friedl, he said, and he went up to Ludwig Gerstein’s room. Didn’t he owe his life to his father twice over?

  Ever since he was a little child, his father’s presence had always reminded him of Berlin’s Zeughaus, which is square and reddish-tan, an immense stern cube studded with figures.

  The old man was lying down. Half-opening his eyes, he gazed at his son with wolfish hostility. There was nothing to do but kneel down, kiss the father’s hand, and beg his pardon: You know I’ve always been a bundle of nerves, and what with the war . . .

  His father gazed at him stonily.

  Inspired, the blond man leaned over and whispered: Not to mention my secret work . . .

  This won the day. His father said: I do forgive you, Kurt. And now we’ll never talk about it again.

  Thank you, father. Once again, I’m sorry I—

  Nowadays people are trying to accomplish so much. I trust that you also are doing your utmost.

  Yes, father.

  For whoever desires the Grail must approach that prize with the sword, his father recited, and Kurt Gerstein nodded submissively.

  And have you been traveling? What do they tell you about the situation on the Ostfront?

  Shall we talk about it by the fire, father? Friedl’s soup should be ready about now—

  Just tell me this, Kurt, before we go down to the others. From what you’ve heard, will Paulus be able to hold out?

  I can hardly say, said Gerstein, and then at once, perceiving the ghastly fear upon his father’s face, he amended himself: The Führer has promised us that Fortress Stalingrad will never be conquered.

  You’re right, his father said after a pause. That’s the only way to think about things now. Now we’ll go down to the others.

  Seeing them descend the stairs together, his father’s arm around his shoulder, Elfriede smiled with gladness, and he suddenly thought: Why, how much like Berthe she looks!

  (Well, but after all, Berthe was her sister.)

  His three children, pale and dispirited, ate their soup in silence. Friedl said: Now you must tell us where you’ve been, Kurt.

  Minsk. Did you get my letter?

  Not yet, she said steadily

  Is it pretty bombed up? asked his father.

  I’m afraid so. There’s not much good to say about that place.

  Well, after all, it was under Jewish domination for so long. Have all the Jews fled, or are they still causing trouble?

  They’ve been evacuated, he said bitterly. This is excellent soup.

  His son Christian said: Vati, I’ve heard there’s a lot to eat in Prague. You go to Prague, don’t you?

  Yes.

  Did you bring us anything from Prague?

  Let your father eat, said Elfriede. Can’t you see how tired he is?

  Vati, someday will you take us there?

  After the war, he replied with his head in his hands.

  How many castles do they have? And what colors are on their flag? I’m doing a project about flags for school.

  Their flag is the swastika now, of course. What on earth have your teachers been telling you?

  He didn’t bring home good marks this time, Elfriede announced harshly, and Gerstein knew that he, the absent man, was failing all of them. Charity begins at home, runs the proverb, and he was spending his charity far, far away, on a race whose extinction no one would even remember! Leave the dead to bury the dead, as Scripture says. For a moment he imagined bringing his family to Prague on a holiday, or taking Christian at least, so that the boy could see the ornate towers, the curving stone balconies flying our long crimson buntings whose swastikas make us all proud; it wasn’t Germany, but those devils who—

  Vati, next time you go to Prague will you please bring us something really good to eat?

  Christian, said Elfriede, but not as sharply as she might have, you know better than to speak to your father that way! Say you’re sorry!

  Sorry, Vati. Vati, what do they have to eat in Prague?

  He wanted to please them. He said: Well, sometimes there’s roast duck.

  With red cabbage?

  That will be enough, said Ludwig Gerstein. Try not to be angry at him, Kurt.

  I’m not angry, father. Why is it so dark in here?

  It’s not dark. The fire’s very bright.

  No, it’s those blackout curtains. What a ridiculous regulation! The Allies have devices with which they can pinpoint their targets in the dark . . .

  Don’t be a defeatist, Kurt!

  Nobody said anything until the soup was gone, and then Christian asked in a low shy voice: Vati, may I please see your cap?

  Smiling with relief, Gerstein took it off and passed it across the table. He remembered seeing soldiers as a small boy, and longing to be one.

  I like that death’s head! laughed the child.

  Silly! You’ve seen it before!

  Please, Mama, let me look at it just a little bit more!

  Let him, Ludwig Gerstein decreed. It won’t do the lad any harm.

  Vati, when I grow up can I be in thelike you?

  Surely, said Gerstein, trying not to burst into tears.

  19

  In 11.42, they closed Belzec, having liquidated half a million Jewish-Polish bandits. They burned the bodies, shot the work-Jews and burned them, too, demolished the installations, and interred their final report in a folder stamped with the invocationThen they motored back to Lemberg to celebrate in one of the restaurants for Germans only.No Poles Admitted.Truth to tell, Belzec had never been any more than a fifty-mile practice march, so to speak; the real campaign must be waged at Auschwitz, whose public name is Camp A. Good blond-Oberstrumführer Kurt Gerstein was in on it from the first; with his colleagues he sang “Erika, We Love You,” a melody very popular with our Panzer troops at Stalingrad; and this Gerstein had a beautiful voice; he was said to have been a Christian youth leader once, so doubtless he’d led many a choir in his time. Come to think of it, he resembled a choirmaster with his strangely delicate eyes and fine lips like a girl’s, his face almost as fair as the twin lightning-bolts like pallid gashes in the darkness of his right collar-tab; he cut a very dashing silver-and-black appearance; the way he
carried himself, with his head thrown back, seemed confident at first, but then the backflung head began to strike any thoughtful observer (fortunately for him, in this world there are few of those) as the sort of stance which might be taken by, say, a Polish hostage standing before the firing squad; in our experience it is rather surprising how frequently such racial chaff actually tries to be brave; well, brave or not, they know the bullet will enter the forehead—if they’re lucky—so while the eyes gaze at us levelly, and sometimes the mouth can even smile (no matter that the smile lacks three teeth), the head creeps backward, unknown to itself, striving in its primitive way to gain another inch of distance from fate.

  With his fine comrades he marched down Krakow’s streets, all of them singing “Erika, We Love You” in perfect time, accompanied by the pleasing clink of their steel boots on the cobblestones, and at that moment only he of all of them remembered the pits full of dead Jews stinking and brownish-yellow like the earth which rains back down upon the snow after another mortar explodes at Stalingrad. Siegfried the bankrupt tavernkeeper’s son was out of cigarettes (he’d just completed two weeks’ “sharp arrest” for smoking in the motor pool); Kurt Gerstein gave him a whole pack of them. Albrecht the former assistant cashier wanted to send his mother some gold bars which he’d providentially found; Kurt Gerstein telephoned Captain Wirth, and it was arranged. Handsome Heini and Karl, who’d first met in prison back in ’32, were sulky because instead of having more fun with P-girls, they must now deliver some documents all the way to the Central Office for the Jewish Problem in Bohemia and Moravia; dear blond Kurt Gerstein offered to make the journey himself.

  He was trying to read the newspaper, whose front page presented Ribbentrop jutting out his chin in imitation of the statues in his renovated Foreign Office; that meant that there was no news at all, no good news at any rate. He wanted to finish the article about Ribbentrop, but they wouldn’t let him. They were his children. Heini, who’d grown newly enthusiastic about our national literature, kept hounding him about Tristan, which to save time the boy was reading in a modern German version. He’d finally gotten as far as the verse where Tristan the Amorous sets out to help Dwarf Tristan regain a mistress raped away into a foeman’s castle. They slay the evil knight, along with his six brothers; that part’s all right, but Dwarf Tristan dies in the process, and Tristan the Amorous gets wounded in the groin with a poisoned spear. Only Isolde can save Tristan, and she won’t arrive in time. Handsome Heini wanted to know the significance of the poisoned spear. Why did it have to be in the loins? What was all that about? Perhaps, wondered Handsome Heini aloud in an innocent tone, Kurt Gerstein could explain something about knights who’d been wounded in the loins.—Instead, Kurt Gerstein led them in “Three Riders Rode Out to the Gate,” after which they decided that Kurt Gerstein was really very nice; they got drunk and embraced him, the way our truehearted soldiers do. They drew their revolvers and clattered them down on the café table, laughing at everybody’s terror. Then they swore blood brotherhood with each other, sweet blond Kurt Gerstein included: they all pricked their fingers with theirdaggers and mixed their blood with his!

  In our medieval romances, brother battles brother because identity’s hid behind each closed visor. But these young men all wore the same armor as he; their honor was their loyalty. He pretended to be their brother, and they didn’t see his face. As long as it was dark he couldn’t see their faces; he prayed that Captain Wirth wouldn’t turn on the light. And he wished that he knew how to play cards, because that would have made them happy. They murdered innocently, because they’d been told to murder and because they were stupid. How could Christ Himself blame their bloody hands? They invited him to drink beers with them and watch leg shows at the Wintergarten as soon as the war was over. They asked him which film actress he preferred, In-grid Lutze or seventeen-year-old Lisca Malbrum, and he smiled and said there was a certain Berthe whom he never stopped thinking about; when they asked who she was, he sang one more round of “Erika, We Love You.” He led them in Heil Dir im Siegerkranz. They thought he must have lost those three teeth in a street fight; they knew he’d been with the Brownshirts, just like the legendary Barricade Otto. And that made them love him all the more.

  Now, across the tanned skull of a shaveheaded Pole, he spied an-man slipping his arm around a U-blonde as they passed down the angling twisting street to get swallowed by a bar’s awning. He laughed, his eyelid twitching, and muttered: Geheim!

  Finally he got away from them. (As Friedl kept telling him, your fanatical convictions are making you unhappy, Kurt.) He was very sorry, but now he must answer the call of duty. They thought him a sanctimonious ass; he never knew how to have fun.

  In the town of Owicim he met Captain Wirth, who was drinking beer from a dead family’s soup tureen which was a conch shell inset in herringbone-patterned silver; and Captain Wirth told him, “between you and me,” how the new crematoria, built with truly Germanic perfection by Topf und Söhne, were nearly doubling their rated capacity of four thousand five hundred and seventy-six corpses (Captain Wirth had memorized this figure), at which Gerstein (already calculating: eight hundred a day makes twenty-nine thousand two hundred a year, excluding the occasional open pyres of two thousand a day, which makes . . . ) laughed and shouted: Serves those Jews right!—then his eyelid twitched, which did not make Captain Wirth suspicious in the least because our huntsmen do develop mannerisms indicative of the stress of the heroic work.—Remember to keep this close to your chest! sniggered Captain Wirth. After all, even the Russians seal their radio equipment before a secret offensive . . .

  And then we turn on the light—

  What’s that? Now, have you met Haupsturmführer Professor August Hirt? I don’t give a shit about most of those eggheads, but Professor Hirt is a real down to earth, Volkish sort of fellow. Just duck when he shoots his jargon at you. You should meet him, Gerstein. He’s just started a Jewish skeleton collection . . .

  20

  After the collapse of Fortress Stalingrad, the mood became even fiercer, the zealots more numerous, just as in the course of certain diseases the blood’s thrombocyte content actually increases after bleeding. It was necessary to proceed with the most radical measures. Those who knew us best, namely, our fiendish enemy on the Ostfront, characterized the German temper as wandering between the antipodes of bitter resistance, bordering on unthinking rashness; and timidity shading into morbid cowardice.

  The way I look at it, said-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, leniency in dealing with the Jews would be as fatal as hesitation in eliminating a Russian bridgehead.

  Well spoken, young man!

  As a matter of fact, no matter how eloquent this Gerstein might be, some of us were beginning to follow a different line now. Exterminate the Jews? By all means! But first let’s squeeze some cash out of them. Soon Auschwitz would begin to turn a profit.

  It was at this time that the Dutch engineer H. J. Ubbink visited Gerstein’s apartment in Berlin and took the tale of Belzec to London. No one would believe it. Even Ubbink himself no longer believed it and took to referring to Gerstein as “the holy fool.” So another German summer came unmolested, and the holy fool, whom “Clever Hans” Günther now dispatched on an inspection tour of Chelmno, escaped by the slenderest margin being compelled to take his place on the wide-spaced line of-men shooting down Jews, while sunshine consecrated the shooters’ toadstool-helmets. Thanks to their hard work, there’d never again be a Poland.—This mass butchery is against German tradition, said Dr. Pfannenstiel, who was there for his own research. Thank Heaven for the gas chambers!—The shooters narrowed their eyes at that. The gas chambers were out of order that day, and they felt overworked. One fellow named Sorli had to make do with a misfiring Nagant; he could have done the job faster with his leather whip! Dr. Pfannenstiel exasperated him. He didn’t much like the look of Kurt Gerstein, either, not that Gerstein had even said anything, but when there’s a war on one gets pretty good at sizing up one’s fellow ma
n: Is he steely enough for our time? Sorli told Gerstein right to his face that he must be one of those rear echelon assholes who expect other people to get their hands dirty. (Dr. Pfannenstiel was of a similar opinion, but the way he put it was more literary: In our national epic, Siegfried won Brunhilde for Gunther and some say even deflowered her for him, so weak was the latter king. We truehearted workers are Siegfrieds, not Gunthers! Isn’t that correct, my dear Gerstein?) By then the entire squad was of the opinion that maybe Eichmann should be informed about Kurt Gerstein’s attitude. With healthy fanatical race-hatred, Gerstein, laughing as loudly as he could, started kicking the face of a dead Jew. He said: Looks like that Yid fell downstairs!—That appeased them; he’d kept the faith. Sorli liked him then. They all drank schnapps afterwards. Sorli bragged about this and that—more grist for Gerstein’s indictment. Sorli was also a man of culture; he couldn’t stop talking about the time he’d seen Lizzi Waldmüller back in 1930; it had been “Traum einer Nacht” at the Nollendorfplatz. Then it was time to shoot another batch of Jews. Surely this time at least Kurt Gerstein would show his truehearted metal! . . .

  How could Gerstein go on? And yet the blond man is said to have secretly flown to Finland to inform people there of the Final Solution. He returned exhausted and terrified to that office of his with Hitler’s likeness on every wall, Signal magazine on the coffee table, and on his desk a small photograph, inscribed by its subject to Kurt Gerstein, in brotherhood, of-Oberdienstleiter Viktor Brack, whose grey, abnormally lean face displayed both the misery of old age and a certain native stoniness; Brack was a very decent man, really, a correct man, and a go-getter, too; he if anyone was the genius of Operation T-4, which was why the Americans would hang him on 2.6.48; Gerstein had told him once, at crazy, suicidal risk to himself: Herr Oberführer, something about you, your smile actually, reminds me of my late sister-in-law . . .

  The telephone was about to ring. The telephone would send him off to Auschwitz. He opened the new issue of Signal and read an article about conditions in America: Negro schoolchildren were intimidating their teachers in several larger cities. Even the Americans were beginning to see that measures might be necessary. In the courtyard,were shouting and then another truckload of prisoners went clattering away over the cobblestones as the typist from the motor pool brought him his ersatz coffee. There was no air raid today. Right there in front of her, he prayed.