The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  Yet it wasn’t until this moment, faced with the enormity of the horrors inflicted on the Jewish and other peoples by Hitler and his fanatics, that she realised how utterly evil, deliberate, and wicked the Nazis were, how incomparably mechanical and enormous were the lengths the German people went to in order to eliminate the Jews from the face of the earth.

  Intellectually, she was award of the hatred felt towards Jews in Europe through the writings of men like Luther and the music of composers like Wagner; she’d read about anti-Semitism as being the longest hatred; she knew of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, of their treatment by the Crusaders, of the horrors of the ghettos and the pogroms and Russia’s Pale of Settlement; she’d known of the degradation of the Jewish religion and culture and people; she’d learned of how the Jews always rose above the venal jealousies of their Christian neighbours because of the Jewish commandment to be educated above the ignorance which surrounded them; she knew of the closeness of the Jews because of their need to find mutual protection against the regular onslaughts which assailed them; but until now, until she stood before the flames of the martyrs in the silence of comprehension; until she came to an understood of the murderous reality of anti-Semitism; Chasca was forced to admit of her own lamentable ignorance. She had to come to terms with the fact that anti-Semitism wasn’t just a philosophical evil, but that its reality was the killing of millions and millions of human beings. Until now, Chasca Broderick had not fully appreciated the end result of the hatred of Jews.

  She’d been told that the Holocaust was the defining genocide for all time, but until she stood here, she never before truly understood why.

  She had learned of the Holocaust at school and at Harvard; she had Jewish friends and their parents had given her personal insights; she had seen the films and read the books; yet until this moment, standing on the ground where the ashes of dead Judaism was the nexus between the horrors of the past and the hope of the future; until she read of the numbingly measureless hosts of concentration camps inmates; until she saw the pictures of skeletal humanity imprisoned behind barbed wire, saw the innocent victims of European Jewry wearing degrading striped uniforms and the infamous badges of identification, saw the crisp black uniforms of the guards and the salivating Alsatians … until now, Chasca Broderick realised she was just an armchair theorist, and hadn’t known anything of truth of what the Holocaust meant.

  And she also realised that her work in exposing the murderers of Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia had suddenly become even more vital, because even though the genocide of Yugoslavia was incomparably smaller than the Holocaust, which consumed so many of Europe’s Jews, the memorial to the Jewish victims told her starkly that no murderous ruler must ever be allowed to get away with genocide, ever again … not Tudjman nor Milosevich nor Karadjic nor Idi Amin nor Saddam Hussein nor the Hutus nor the Tutsis nor the bastard tin-pot generals who slaughtered their own people in South America … nobody. Never! Ever! They must be hunted down to the ends of the earth and their evil exposed … if only for the sake of the memory of the victims, and the peace of the survivors.

  The guide who stood beside her had experienced this reaction before. It was in part shock, in part shame, in part withdrawal. Reactions of visitors depended on their background and why they had come; upon the past experiences of who was standing here, looking at the names of the camps, the numbers, the utter horror; if it was an elderly survivor, there were usually quiet tears at the memory of a life, once full of promise, now destroyed; if it was the member of a survivor’s family, the reaction would be an upsurge in anger and a rekindling of hatred; if it was a gentile, here on a trip to Israel and a mandatory visit to Yad VaShem, the reaction would depend on the age of the visitor … An old person would shake his head in horror and wonder at the cruelty of the world, a young person would withdraw and feel an sense of disbelief, of incomprehension.

  The guide, Smuel, noticed however that this American girl, this Chasca Broderick, was reacting differently from most other young gentile people. Indeed, one would have thought that her parents or grandparents were victims of the Nazi Holocaust; yet from what she’d told him, there was no such connection. But there was such a depth of anger and disgust in her eyes that he wondered whether she was one of the many children, especially of Americans, who had lately come to realise that their grandparents were born Jewish, but after the war had changed their identity and turned their backs on their religion because of the bestiality they had suffered in the name of a God who asked too much.

  He didn’t need to know and he knew not to interrupt her emotions with trite questions. When they were in a building such as this, housing the memorial to so many who had been slaughtered by such beasts, visitors only wanted to be alone with their most private thoughts. He moved away slightly to enable her to feel the protection which isolation of her horror might provide, but Chasca detected the movement and saw it for what it was, a moment of spiritual connection, of jointly sharing the intensity of emotions this place evoked.

  She smiled at him, and nodded. She had seen enough. She was resolved. She had an even greater reason now to move forward.

  Three days later, Chasca was back at Yad VaShem, sitting in the office of the Director of Records, Professor Eliezer Hofshee, an academic seconded from the Department of Modern Jewish History of Bar Ilan University. Having studied in Yale, his English was perfect, though heavily impregnated with an Israeli accent and the interjection ‘ehrr’ between every third word.

  He smiled at her broadly over his large oak desk, the document she’d given him three days earlier sitting as the only paper on its surface. After the initial pleasantries about how she was enjoying her first visit to Israel, Chasca lapsed into silence, waiting for Professor Hofshee to make his pronouncement about whether or not he’d agree to begin the process of resurrecting the reputation of this mechanic, Deutch.

  He began innocuously enough. ‘This is a very interesting document. It’s passionately written, and I congratulate you for finding it, and for making it available to us. Right now, there’s more being written about the Holocaust than at any time during the past fifty years, probably because the passage of time allows us to view the horror with a degree of dispassion. Also because it has taken survivors half a century for the memories to be sufficiently contained for them to be able to confront them. Which is why finding such an eyewitness document, written by a sufferer at the time of his experience, is so interesting.’

  He picked up the document again and re-read the opening paragraphs, as though to remind himself that he was holding the memorial of a witness. Replacing the testament on the desk, he shook his head sadly. ‘The silence is a tragedy … understandable, but a real tragedy. For nearly two generations, victims have been unable to make their grief known, have suffered in silence. When family members like children have tried to find out what happened to the parents, they were usually fobbed off with the response, ‘You don’t want to know.’ Yet there was a silent communication. If a child left something on his plate at mealtimes, the parent would say something like, ‘Finish your food; you never know when you’ll get your next meal …’

  ‘Or years after leaving the camps, the parent would be walking in a street in America or Israel or somewhere safe, and pass a dog like an Alsatian, and the parent would draw back in fear because of the unconscious or repressed memories. Or they’d recoil at chimneys belching out black smoke. And of course, the children picked up all the clues and felt guilt that their parents had suffered and they were free and safe.’

  Chasca hadn’t fully understood the depth of suffering of Holocaust survivors, nor the length of their continuous punishment. She recalled editorials in American newspapers or television programmes where well-meaning people told the Jews to ‘get over it’ or to ‘put the past behind them’ or to ‘forgive and forget and get on with their lives.’ How little they knew.

  Eliezer Hofshee continued, ‘Of course, now that the grandchildren are writing school projects abo
ut the horrors of the camps and their family suffering, much is coming out. And increasingly, academic papers are now saying how it wasn’t just a few madmen in the Nazi party who were responsible, but that every German was culpable. Certainly there was a shared communal guilt, but to accuse every German with the benefit of our present-day morality is somewhat frenzied, and I have little sympathy with this view. This autobiography you’ve found tends to support my gut instincts.’

  From the way he was talking, it was obvious that the next sentence was going to begin with the word, however …

  ‘However,’ he continued, ‘one document doesn’t allow sufficient evidence to overthrow the verdict of the legal trial of a man hanged for war crimes; and it certainly isn’t enough to elevate his memory into the status of one of the Righteous Among the Nations, which is one of the highest humanitarian honours the Israeli Government can confer on a non-Jew. People who have been honoured as the Righteous Gentiles are the sorts who worked for years in hiding Jews, saving their lives, fighting the Nazi murderers, performing individual acts of bravery, which takes them into an altogether different place in the pantheon of humanity. There are something like eight thousand such wonderful people who have been accorded this honour. These are ordinary people who, in times of unbelievable danger and difficulty, have done extraordinary things for others. Your mechanic, I’m afraid, isn’t one of them. Here is the testimony of one man who tried to alleviate the conditions in a camp to make them less inhuman. A good man, yes, but not enough to have him honoured in such a way.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Chasca, ‘if not an honorific, how’s about we try to reverse the verdict posthumously. As a lawyer representing this man, even though he’s been hanged, I’d say there’s enough evidence here to examine the prospect of getting the German government to quash the findings of the judge.’

  The professor nodded. ‘There, I’d agree with you, bearing in mind that it was more of an American court in Germany and so I’ll have to check which jurisdiction to approach. But, yes, we could certainly do something like that; however, with our relatively limited resources and with the destruction of most of the records of the Jewish community in Germany at the end of the war, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to find more compelling evidence to back up this single document.’

  He saw her face drop in disappointment. She’d built up her hopes that she could do something in retrospect. As a war crimes prosecutor, her life in Yugoslavia was fraught with political machinations from so many sides; naively she’d hoped that this could be a relatively simple procedure. But she knew the difficulties; much evidence had been destroyed within only the previous few years in Yugoslavia, making it hard enough for her to gather documentation to use against modern war criminals. How much harder then for crimes which had been covered up for half a century and more?

  Chasca looked at the man who sat opposite her. He was in his middle, perhaps late sixties, but had the virility in body and mind of a much younger man. He was the archetypal Jew, and could as easily have been a colonel in the Israel Defense Force as a rabbi; he had a face which spoke of a lifetime of study and learning, and humility was written into the lines which etched his skin. But it was his eyes which appealed to her. Intelligent, compassionate eyes in a face which was wrinkled from decades of a strong sun, yet which was a sturdy face, a fatherly face.

  ‘I’ve upset you. I’m sorry, Chasca. But here we have to deal in realities. We have tens of thousands of people every year coming to Yad VaShem, trying to regain an insight into their own or their families’ lives, which were stolen from them. We can help many to find the records of their early lives; our archivists and historians have done wonders, but there’s only so much we can do against the coordinated and systematic destruction of evidence half a century ago.

  ‘When the Nazis set out to wipe Jewry off the face of the earth, they meant to destroy not only people, but also an entire cultural history. Their intention was to leave only one monument to European Judaism intact, something like an exhibition in a museum to an extinct species of animal; that was the old Jewish part of Prague. Aside from that, all other memories of the Jewish connection with Europe were to be expunged from the face of the earth. We’ve been working to regain our heritage, and we’ve done an extraordinary job. But not even we can recreate millions of documents which were deliberately burned and destroyed with the Nazi’s systematic efficiency.’

  He looked at her fondly. She reminded him of his late daughter, killed on a border kibbutz by a Katyusha rocket fired from Syria. She had the same open and accepting expression, the same delicate smile, the same grasp on life. He suddenly felt immensely sad, sad for the senselessness of the politics of hate; it was always innocent victims like his beautiful daughter and this young man, this Yoachim Gutman, who suffered. The madmen and murderers so often escaped their rightful punishment.

  Kindly, he told her, ‘Maybe you, on your own, perhaps by going to Germany, would have a better chance of finding this man Gutman, if he’s still alive after all these years; if not, maybe he’s been fortunate enough to rebuild his life and has had children who might be able to bear witness to the decency of this German, Wilhelm Deutch. Do it for the sake of what’s right, Chasca. I can see the flame of justice burning fiercely inside you. This man, this Joachim Gutman, wanted justice. Please God, he’s still alive; try to find him. In that way, maybe we can examine again the evidence against this Deutch fellow, and see if we can undo the injustice of the verdict …’

  Nuremberg Courtroom

  Palace of Justice, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  Wilhelm Deutch felt a sense of comradeship as he sat down again beside his colleagues, and shuffled his body on the crowded bench to regain the position he had occupied prior to being ordering to stand by the judge. He’d told the judge, through him his American lawyer, that he and his colleagues were as one, inseparable, and would face their persecutors together.

  But the moment he rejoined his co-accused, he knew instinctively that by his being singled out, even though he’d redeemed himself in the eyes of all Germany, the atmosphere in the courtroom had changed. It was as though some sort of noxious odour by osmosis had somehow seeped through the German phalanx of defendants. These men had presented a united front of defiance and innocence, sitting there to defend their lives and their honour, these last remnants of the Third Reich.

  But as Wilhelm Deutch sat down again and glanced sideways at the other Germans, his heart sank. He knew that from this moment onwards, he was an outsider, that the unity of the phalanx had gone forever.

  Shoulders which had once touched now were separated by a hair’s breadth, but enough for him to know that camaraderie was a thing of the past. Nor did he fully understand what had happened. The other day, he was sure he’d instructed his lawyer that he wished to continue standing trial with the other engineers, but obviously the translator had failed to convey his wishes. Or else Wilhelm had simply misunderstood what was expected of him. No meant yes. Yes meant no.

  His co-defendants looked at him with sideways glances as he settled back on to the bench. Frowns of concern, as though they thought he was trying to be different from them … as though the bulwark of solidarity they had all shown when they were first asked to plead to the charges, the outward appearance of detachment and disinterest that they had agreed they would present to the judges and the prosecution, was about to be breached by him.

  Wilhelm had anticipated something like this would happen when his counsel suggested that he ask for a separate trial. He’d expected to be ostracised. That’s why he’d told his lawyer he would stay where he was. At the first Nuremberg trial of the leaders of the Nazis, such a separation of the defendants had been obvious to any observer. Leaders such as Dönitz and Göring and Hess had looked with disdain at lesser men like Ribbentrop and Streicher and Seyss-Inquart, the duller luminaries of Nazi brilliance.

  Now Wilhelm’s co-defendants were looking at him with hooded eyes, wo
ndering what sort of a deal this … this plumber … this gasfitter … this tinkerer with machinery … was cooking up with the prosecution.

  Wilhelm reacted angrily. What did they think? That this was a device engineered by him? He glared back, but their eyes were the unblinking eyes of snakes. Would they ever believe that he’d instructed his lawyer to deny him a separate trial? What was going on? And did any of it really matter?

  It was during the lunchtime recess that Wilhelm found out what was going on. Hasty words, American words, were spoken between his defense lawyer Broderick and the American captain of the white-helmeted guards who stood stiffly to attention throughout the trial at the back of the defendant’s dock.

  While the other men were being led out of the left gate to descend into the dungeons where gruel was served, Wilhelm was led out of the right gate. His look of surprise didn’t even scratch the surface of the wall of suspicion which had built itself between him and his fellow defendants during the morning.

  He was ushered into a private meeting room. A table and two chairs had been set up. The American guard, a fresh-faced boy who looked as though only the previous day he’d been building a haystack on a farm in Iowa, nodded to him to sit. It wasn’t a request. Guards don’t make requests. Even the most minor flicker of an eyebrow was an instruction to a prisoner. Careful observation was what made life bearable for a man in Wilhelm’s position … anticipating a command before it was made, not being screamed at for responding a fraction of a second too late.