by Hanna Krall
Axel von dem B. was sitting with his back against a tree; “young Quandt,” wounded in the same skirmish, was resting his head on Axel von dem B.’s knees. He was referred to as “young Quandt” to distinguish him from his father, old Quandt, an owner of large textile plants. Young Quandt’s mother had died when he was a child, and his father had married a girl named Magda. They hired a private tutor for the summer vacation, a man whose name was Józef Goebbels. When the vacation came to an end, the teacher disappeared together with Magda. For this and perhaps other reasons, young Quandt was not a fan of the Nazis.
Lying with his head on Axel von dem B.’s knees, young Quandt said that he was dying and that those Nazis are all criminals.
“You’re not in such bad shape,” Axel von dem B. tried to comfort him, but Quandt knew that it was bad and kept repeating that all those Nazi criminals ought to die just like him. “And the sooner the better. The later they die, the more awful will be their end.”
Quandt died toward morning, and Axel von dem B. made sure he got a second revolver. He was twenty years old, he had come through his first battle, and he had lost two friends. When they moved on, he held a revolver in each hand and felt quite jaunty.
The commander of his regiment noticed him. “We,” he said, “in our family, do not have to give proof of our courage. We are courageous,” and he took away the revolver that Axel von dem B. was holding in his left hand.
“In our family” meant that Axel von dem B. and the commander of the regiment, von und zu Gilsa, were members of the same family—the great German aristocracy.
Axel von dem B. went through the entire Polish campaign and part of the Russian campaign with this commander. They spent the winter of 1940 in Włocławek. One day, they were informed that the civil administration had designated a quarter into which all the city’s Jews would be resettled; the Jews had the right to bring with them only hand baggage.
“What a scandal!” The commander was indignant. “What sort of cretin thinks up such things! First thing tomorrow morning I am going to see Frank in Kraków and tell him everything.” (He knew Frank from the Berlin Olympics, when he’d been the commandant of the Olympics village.)
A car was ready for him in the morning, but a moment before his departure his adjutant said, “And what if it wasn’t a cretin? What if this is … German policy?”
“Do you think it might be?” Von und zu Gilsa hesitated, and then ordered the car returned to the garage. (Later he was named commandant of Dresden. The morning after the Allies’ memorable bombardment of the city, he was found dead; his daughter assured people that it was not a suicide.)
They were in Włocławek until spring; in the spring they set out toward the East, and in June 1941, on the morning of the twenty-second, at 3:15 a.m., Axel von dem B. crossed the border into Russia.
He knew that Russia was ruled by Bolsheviks. He knew that there were camps there and that Stalin was a murderer. In a word, he knew that they were fighting against communism and that everything was as it should be.
(Everything was as it should be in connection with Poland, too, especially after Gliwice. No one imagined that the incident in Gliwice had been a German provocation. It was believed that the Poles had lost their nerve; they began it, and it was necessary to respond; everything was as it should be.)
The Russians greeted them with bread and flowers. They, too, believed that the Germans were bringing liberation. Soon, they would be disenchanted; the foreign sonofabitch turned out to be even worse than their homegrown sonofabitch.
That is exactly what Axel von dem B. said during a lecture in Washington, at the Rotary Club, soon after the war. Then one of those present stood up and demonstratively left the hall. Axel von dem B. assumed that this expressed disapproval of his views, but it turned out that it was a protest against his use of the word “sonofabitch.” They were among the most refined Washingtonian company, and it was not customary to use such words there.
He marched through Smolensk and as far as Desna; he was wounded six times—in an arm, a leg, and his lungs; each time, he returned to the front from the hospital. In the autumn of 1942 he was in the Ukraine. It was west of the Dniepr, near a river whose name he does not remember, but which flowed into another river, which he also does not remember.
The name of the town was Dubno.
8
People in Jewish Dubno had nicknames. They were used more often than their surnames, and were remembered better. People said, “Ida from Eggs, Beniamin Billy Goat, Beniamin Carpenter, Henia Goose Maid, Red Załman, Black Załman, Crazy Hańcia, Chaim Nouveau Riche, Red Motł, Mechł Beanpole, Jankł Kugel, Nisł Medic, Szołem God Forbid, Motł Water Carrier, Black Basia, Teacher Aba, Wise Icek, Icełe Shotglass, Ester Waitress, Aszer Cymbal Player, Iser Leatherworker …”
Iser was definitely a leatherworker, Icełe picked up shotglasses, but Szołem? What event could “God Forbid” be connected with?
Or Crazy Hańcia? Did she have lunatic ideas? Or maybe she was possessed? Maybe, like the mad, wailing Jewish woman from Sochaczew, she would say, “Why do I cry? If you only knew what I know, you would lock up your shops and cry with me.”
The people who bore those nicknames are no more.
The people who wrote The Memory Book are no more.
There is no one left to ask.
9
Axel von dem B. was a staff officer in Dubno. The regimental commander was Ernst Utsch.
Axel von dem B. had a horse. He would ride out into the countryside. (The area was beautiful: the Ikwa River, an oak and fir forest …) Sometimes he rode out in the direction of the old airfield.
One day, during one of his rides, he noticed an enormous, rectangular pit on the airfield. He thought it was probably intended to make it impossible for enemy planes to land. He was surprised: any sort of obstacle laid across the runways would have sufficed. And he turned his horse around.
The next day, the regimental commander was paid a visit by the chief of the civil authority, the Gebietskommissar. After he left, Utsch said that the Gebietskommissar needed soldiers for some sort of action; they were supposed to man a cordon around the entire airfield. Utsch refused; he was not permitted to get involved in civil administration. For a while he and Axel von dem B. pondered what sort of action they were talking about. This was the first time they had heard the word “Aktion” in a puzzling, unclear context.
A couple of days later Axel von dem B. was told that something strange was happening at the airfield.
He got on his horse.
He saw the rectangular pit.
In front of the pit stood naked people—men, women, old people, and children.
They were standing in a single file, one behind the other, just as people stand in any normal line, for milk or for bread. The line was about six hundred meters long.
At the edge of the pit, his legs dangling inside it, sat an SS man. He had a machine pistol in his hand. He gave a signal and the line moved forward. The people walked down into the pit on stairs that had been carved into the earth. They lay face down, one beside the other. The SS man fired. A moment later, he signaled and the line moved forward. The people walked down into the pit and lay down on top of the bodies that were already lying there. Shots rang out and the SS man signaled. The line moved forward …
It was a warm day, one of those warm, autumn days that occur in October.
The sun was shining.
Naked women were carrying naked infants. Men led children and stumbling old people by the hand. Families embraced each other with their naked arms.
No one screamed, cried, prayed, begged for mercy, or tried to run away. Between the series of shots an ideal silence reigned.
There were eight SS men. One of them did the shooting. The rest were waiting, perhaps for him to get tired.
Axel von dem B. went back home.
The action at the airfield lasted two days; three thousand people were shot.
The evening of the third day Axel von d
em B. heard footsteps on the stairs and someone knocked at his door. Someone he knew, a clerk from the regiment’s staff, came in.
He said, “I was in a restaurant. The Gebietskommissar is giving a dinner for the SS men from the Aktion. The big, fat one is sitting next to him. I heard what he said. He said that they’re going from town to town like this. The local authorities prepare everything, the trucks, the cordon, the pit, and then they drive in and kill. He said that he himself has already killed thirty thousand Jews. He said that he was promoted to commander for this … Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” Axel von dem B. said. “Go to sleep.”
The clerk left. Axel von dem B. heard the old wooden stairs creaking under his footsteps.
An hour later the stairs creaked again and the clerk knocked at his door.
“Forgive me if I’m bothering you, but I did a couple of arithmetical calculations. If there are eight of them, and if each one kills thirty thousand people, then they can—over how long a period? three months? four?—they can kill A MILLION. Are you listening to me?”
“Go to sleep,” said Axel von dem B.
In November, the Gebietskommissar again gave a dinner, this time on the occasion of All Saints’ Day. He invited Ernst Utsch, but the commander declined and sent Axel von dem B.
He was seated next to a woman whose husband was a farmer in the Ukraine. He asked her if she knew about the action. She knew. She also knew that soon there would be no more shooting. There would be trucks that would take care of everything with fumes.
“It’s so the methods will be more humanitarian,” the woman added.
Axel von dem B. did not ask for whom the methods were to be more humanitarian—the SS or the Jews. He assumed it was for the SS, because the killing tired them out.
He told the regimental commander about everything.
“So, Adolf Hitler has taken away our honor, too,” said Ernst Utsch.
Axel von dem B. did not ask what had taken away the regimental commander’s honor. He understood that after everything they had learned, they would continue to live, normally, just as they had up till then. They would sleep, eat, digest, and breathe. They would pretend that they don’t know. Knowing everything, they would not know.
Three months later Axel von dem B. decided to kill Adolf Hitler.
10
The ghetto in Dubno was organized in April 1942, during the Passover holidays. It was located on Sholem Aleichem Street and adjoining streets alongside the Ikwa River. During the liquidation of the ghetto, people threw themselves into the river, which was deep and fast. Chaja Fajnblit from Rybny Lane, who had been unable to bear children for fourteen years after her wedding and had given birth to her first child during the war, drowned the child and swallowed poison herself. Drs. Ortmanowa and Kagan took poison. Lejzer Wajzbaum hanged himself. Some people tried to hide in the thickets beside the Ikwa, but every so often the Germans set fire to the rushes.
On Yom Kippur, the Jews who were still alive gathered in the house of old Sykuler. The house was next to the Ikwa. The prayers were led by Cantor Pinchas, the shochet. After the prayers people came up to him and said, “Reb Pinchas, may we see you in health a year from today.”
The remaining Dubno Jews were murdered in October, on Simchat Torah—the Day of Rejoicing in the Torah.
11
Three months later he decided to kill …
A decision to kill the Führer of the Reich must take a little time. Especially when one is twenty-three years old. Especially when one is an officer who has sworn loyalty to the Führer.
He felt no hatred. His thinking was cold and simple. Hitler is the incarnation of a myth. The myth has to be destroyed in order to defeat the crime.
He told a friend about his decision. He was Fritz von der Schulenberg. As a university student he had been interested in Marxism; later, he associated with the national socialists; later still, he joined the opposition movement of Claus von Stauffenberg, the future organizer of the assassination attempt of July 1944. (During the trial following upon that attempt, the prosecutor kept addressing him as “criminal” or “scoundrel Schulenberg.” Once, when he addressed him as “Count,” Schulenberg interrupted him: “Scoundrel Schulenberg, if you please.”) He was hanged in August, 1944, a year and a half after his conversation with Axel von dem B. When Axel had told his friend that he was prepared to kill …
12
In June 1943 they were in the outskirts of Leningrad, a few kilometers from Tsarskoe Selo and the first front line. It was the season of white nights; one could read until morning without turning on a light. (“Pishu, chitaiu bez lampady”—“I write, I read without a lamp”—wrote Alexander Pushkin, a student at the lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo.) It was evening. The sky was the color of skim milk.
They were sitting and drinking coffee in the regimental staff’s offices, a wooden villa that served also as the commander’s quarters. They had brewed the coffee with hot, Soviet cognac, which they received in their rations along with cigarettes. This coffee was called café diabolique. The commander left to inspect the front line. They sat and talked among themselves. It was not a serious conversation—neither about the war nor about politics. Just chatter, really, as would be expected when drinking café diabolique at night, when the sky is the color of skim milk.
Suddenly, little Bronsart got up from his chair. He pulled his revolver out of its holster. He aimed at the portrait of Hitler that was hanging on the wall—and fired. His aim was perfect. It is hard to say why he did that; they hadn’t been talking about anything serious, after all. Obviously, little Bronsart didn’t like the Führer, and that’s all.
A deathlike silence ensued, of course. Everyone looked at the Führer with the hole in his head and thought about the same thing: Was the hole in the wooden wall behind the portrait deep, and was everyone in the room a friend?
The silence was broken by Axel von dem B. who asked Richard, the regimental adjutant, if there wasn’t a spare portrait somewhere. To which Richard, the younger brother of Heinrich (the one who had died on the second day of the war in Bory Tucholskie), replied that unfortunately there was one portrait per regiment.
The silence filled with anxiety. In the meantime, Richard spoke up.
“We’ll think about it later. Before we fully understand what happened, let’s each of us do the same thing.”
He took out his revolver and aimed at Hitler.
After him, Axel von dem B. fired.
After Axel, Klausing—or maybe von Arnim …
What they did with the bullet-riddled portrait, and what was hung on the wall instead, Axel von dem B. could not remember. It was not his problem; it was the duty of Richard, the adjutant, to take care of matters with the regimental commander. Fortunately, he possessed an exceptional diplomatic talent and was suited to smoothing out unsettling affairs.
Bronsart von Schellendorf died near the Neva River one month afterward.
Friedrich Klausing was wounded and sent back to Berlin. Later, he became Stauffenberg’s adjutant. He was hanged in July 1944.
Ewald von Kleist survived, but Richard insists that Kleist wasn’t with them then.
In any event, three men survived: Axel von dem B., Max von Arnim, who is retired now, and Richard von Weizsaecker, who is the President of Germany.
13
In the autumn of 1943 Fritz von der Schulenberg informed Axel von dem B. that conspirators were looking for an officer to kill Hitler during a presentation of new uniforms. This was about the winter uniforms for the Eastern front. The current uniforms, as had become apparent in the course of battle, were not appropriate for Russian conditions. New models were designed and Axel von dem B. was to model them for Hitler. Himmler and Goering were also to be present at the showing. Since the defeat at Stalingrad the three of them were rarely seen together, so this was an exceptional occasion.
Axel von dem B. was splendidly equipped to act as model.
He knew the Eastern front and he
could provide Hitler with essential explanations. He had been decorated with orders and battle crosses. He was tall, handsome, and represented the Nordic type.
Axel von dem B. told Fritz Schulenberg that he agreed.
All the books on the anti-Hitler opposition in the Third Reich mention Axel von dem B.’s agreement. In 1943 “no other German officer, even in opposition circles, was in a position to raise his hand against the Führer.” Some men referred to the will of the nation, which continued to be enchanted with Hitler. Others spoke of their Christian principles. Still others, known at one time for their courage, “were in no position to do something like this.” (They would not have been in a position, to use Richard von Weizsaecker’s words, to abandon the straight and narrow human path of Christian orthodoxy to seek a road cutting across the labyrinth.)
After the war, Axel von dem B., a student of law at the University of Göttingen, lectured to his colleagues. The Nuremberg trial was in process and his colleagues did not believe what was written in the newspapers; they thought it was an error or propaganda. Axel von dem B. told them about Dubno.
“And you saw this?”
“I did.”
“It was Germans who did that?”
“Germans.”
The lecture appeared in the university newspaper. It bore the title, “An Oath and Guilt.” Axel von dem B. explained why he decided to attempt the assassination. He spoke about the oath he had taken to his leaders. He said that this oath is an agreement between two free people in the presence of God, but it was permissible not to adhere to it if the leader himself breaks it. And the leaders of the Third Reich had profaned and betrayed the oath.
Therefore, Axel von dem B. told Fritz Schulenberg that he agreed.
