“Release the mothers,” she said. “I will stay with the children.”
I was suddenly aware that the hubbub of shrill voices had died out. Everybody was looking at us: the mothers, clutching their spawn; the local policemen; the two SS men.
“Do as she says,” I ordered.
She addressed the mothers in Ukrainian. I don’t know what she said; the translator later claimed not to have heard. And the women, who had been tearing their hair and banging their heads on the wall, got up quietly, one by one, kissed their children, and went out. None of the children cried as they clustered around the nurse.
I don’t know what prompted me to do it. I had my lunch with me, a hunk of rye bread and a piece of salted pork wrapped in a newspaper. I offered it to the nurse.
She looked at me but did not touch the food and I felt a strange burning in my eyes, as if her disease had communicated itself to me.
“You should know better than offer me salt, Untersturmführer,” she said. “The children are quiet now. Do you want them to start crying again?”
I stared at her stupidly. I don’t know how long I would have stood there, destroying my self-respect as a German officer, had not the translator tugged at my hand. It is an index of how lost I was that I was actually grateful to him.
In the morning the policemen took the children to the slaughterhouse where they were terminated. They went quietly and without fear. The nurse refused to be parted from them. She was terminated too.
Why should I be surprised that she knew the legend? This is where they all originated, those venomous, debilitating, polluting superstitions, here, in the miasma of the shtetl. It is not surprising at all that she knew the legend of the astri, a ghostly nurse who takes care of orphans. The astri’s true face, monstrous and ape-like, is only revealed when she is forced to taste salt.
This was the only story I had liked as a child.
February 5, 1943
Laura is pregnant! Finally! I can confess now that I had started worrying . . . An SS officer whose wife is childless can kiss his career goodbye. But everything is going to be fine now.
Her letter was less enthusiastic than I expected: vague fears, feminine shilly-shallying and damp hints of depression. I wrote back to her immediately, trying to sound reassuring but firm. I am a little disappointed in her.
I am going to call my son Günter, a good Germanic name.
March 12, 1943
Today we are cleaning up the “small ghetto”. No exemptions this time, no skilled workers to preserve, no Mischlinge to beg for mercy. Everybody, everybody must go!
The sky is feverish-bright with the reflection of fires. There are no more than three thousand Jews left but somehow this action seems to be going on forever.
I have been handing out triple doses of sleeping pills. We are overtaxed and undermanned; there are too many of them.
In the morning I walked along the main street. The snow was gray with red veins. The pavement looked as if a giant garbage bin had been upended over the entire town. Rags and open purses trampled into the slush; a dirty baby shoe; a pacifier; a rat; a half-eaten apple.
Suddenly I noticed a scatter of black spiders crawling on the sidewalk. I stopped and looked down: these were twisted Hebrew letters, a large “Aleph” among them.
I fairly jumped up. Fortunately, nobody saw me tiptoeing around the Jewish gravestones that Kremer had ordered to be used for pavement. Eventually I got a grip upon myself and walked straight. The writing was obscured by the dirty slush anyway.
The burial crew sat on the sodden ground, guarded by Klemke. One of them looked at me. Arkady, a stonemason by trade.
“My wife, son, and daughter are dead,” he said, painstakingly stringing German words together. It is horrible to hear them speak; as if a mouse in a mousetrap addressed you with a plea for mercy. Klemke barked something and pulled the trigger, striking the iron fence a couple of meters away.
“Stop it, you idiot!” I yelled.
The fence consists of dense ironwork perched on widely spaced stone pillars. The ironwork ends about twenty-five centimeters off the ground. I heard shuffling at the same time as I saw the heads of mounted policemen appear above the fence. I idly watched the feet passing by, trying to guess their owners’ sex and age. It was not difficult. The gaping shoes of old men held together by twine; the dainty sandals of girls, the toes curling inwards from the cold; the pomponed booties of children, their bright colors dimmed by dirt. And then I saw something else.
Mixed into this procession of feet that crawled past me like a weird caterpillar were bare extremities so deformed they appeared scarcely human. They resembled a bird’s scaled talons, except they were of a size no living bird could match. Grayish or sand-colored, with a rudimentary spur, they scratched the pavement as their owners passed along the fence. There was more than one pair.
“Halt!” I yelled and run to the gate.
The column dissolved into a confused melee, the people turning to watch me with wild or apathetic eyes. The policemen grumbled. But I was not to be deterred. I ordered the prisoners to stand in a row and went along, examining their feet. I did not care that I must have looked like a crazed Prince Charming looking for his Cinderella. I looked for something far more beautiful: scientific truth.
I reached a slender youth and stopped before him. Dark curly hair, thick lips, a typical Oriental physiognomy. He was barefoot and his feet, heavily splattered with mud, looked no different from everybody else’s. But as I looked at him, something peculiar happened, a moment of double vision, as if a different body flickered into being, superimposed itself upon this young vermin, his real body that was in no way human.
I told him to stand aside and went on. Passing twice along the row, I discovered three more: two women and a boy. I told the policemen to proceed with their task and took the specimens to the dissecting room.
One of the females was a girl of about sixteen, the other an older woman, between thirty and thirty-five. The boy was about six. They all appeared undernourished and suffering from skin diseases. As ordinary a group of Jews as one is likely to encounter, with nothing to distinguish them from their racial brethren. But I knew what I had seen and my heart was racing wildly in presentiment of a major discovery.
I gestured the policeman out of the room and addressed the four as they stood against the wall, nude, with their crossed hands covering their genitals.
“I know who you are,” I said, not bothering with the pretense that they could not understand my German. “I have penetrated your disguise. I am the first one to see what the Führer has divined in his genius: that the Jews are shape-shifters, alien parasites taking on a human form to deceive and destroy. If you tell me how you do it; how you manage to adhere to your form even after death, maddening our soldiers; how you insinuate yourself into our families, mate with our women; I will let the four of you live. In fact, I guarantee you will survive as precious proofs of the rightness of our cause. You will not be allowed to breed, of course, but you will be well taken care of. I give you my word.”
They exchanged glances. And oh, how my heart drummed when the girl addressed me in my own language, a fluent, beautiful speech, and yet tinged with something indescribably alien, as if a rock or a tree cried out in human voice.
“You are destroying our people anyway,” she said. “What proof do you need?”
“I want to know the truth!” I responded.
“The truth is in the eye of the beholder,” said the child.
“No!” I protested. “The truth is absolute and I have dedicated my life to serving it.”
“Is this why you take the lives of others?” asked the youth.
“I take no human lives!” I cried. “I’m not a murderer! Show me who you really are! Show me your true faces!”
“You’ve tasted the sweetness of the letter,” said the woman. “You may see.”
A strange shudder went through the four of them, a ripple as if the ice-cold air in the roo
m suddenly boiled with heat haze. And then they began to change. Their flesh flowed together like mud, off-white and pink, the gleaming bones poking momentarily through the viscous flood, and then the streams separated and crawled up the bony frames like a congeries of fat snakes, interweaving and clothing the skeletons anew.
Their trunks retained a roughly human appearance, but the skin was of a dead pinkish-gray, thick and pitted like orange peel. The overall impression was of the bodies melted down and congealed in random shapes. But below the hips even this residual humanity was lost: the trunks were perched on scrawny chicken-like legs and splayed fleshless feet with curving talons, scrabbling in the dust on the floor.
Their faces . . . Scaled skin tightly stretched across deformed skulls, lash-less watery eyes with a brilliant, icy flame burning in each pupil, slit-like mouths, stretched open by pointed fangs. And yet, the most horrifying thing was precisely the degree to which they retained their deceptive individuality, so that one could still recognize in these beastly masks a young girl’s sullen prettiness, a woman’s tired resignation, a teenager’s desperate courage, a child’s pathetic bewilderment.
I surveyed this ultimate proof of the rightness of our cause, this acquittal from the charge, which I had never quite dared naming to myself. This was the moment of justification. But such is the deviousness of the enemy that precisely at that moment I was overcome by a shameful, unmanning flood of pity. I pitied them in their monstrous nakedness as I had not pitied the women, the children, the old men, the babies, the wounded soldiers, Arkady with his dead family, the bullet-riddled mother buried with her living son . . .
“You recognize us,” said the woman. “You know who we are”.
“Of course! You are Jews!”
“No, we are Jews’ nightmares. We are the demons of the people you’re destroying. We have preyed upon them for millennia. We have been nourished by their fears; we have eaten their desires. But now their fears and desires are ashes. Your madness is consuming our people like a raging fire. And we have to go down with them, to be their comfort in darkness, for they have no other.”
“I don’t believe in demons!” I cried. “It’s another of your filthy deceits. But science will dispel your lies! Science will reveal you for what you are!”
“You don’t believe in demons, Klaus?” said the boy. “How come? You believed in us well enough after you ate a cookie with an Aleph on it. Don’t you remember me? I used to be your playmate, little Klaus. I used to come at night and we’d play hide-and-seek. Don’t you remember how you spread flour on the bedroom’s floor one night and next morning there was a giant chicken’s footprint in it? But Father didn’t believe you, he laughed at you, and you were so angry you tore up one of his Hebrew manuscripts. He spanked you. And afterwards you didn’t want to play with me, little Klaus, you turned away and threw a pillow at me when I came in . . . ”
I don’t know how my gun leapt into my hand. I don’t know how I pulled the trigger. I don’t know which of them fell first.
But I remember as I stood in sudden silence. It’s not too bad, I keep telling myself, dead they would be as much proof as living, I only need to start autopsy and preparation immediately . . .
I dropped the gun and knelt over the bodies.
Lying in the spreading pool of blood were four ordinary executed Jews, a youth with a bullet hole in his forehead, a young girl, a woman, and a child. All naked, all starved and filthy, all dead.
I think I screamed at Kremer who came in, having heard the shots. I pulled him toward the bodies; I lifted their sore-covered feet and pushed them in his blank face. And he did not even bother to shame me or bring me to my senses. He turned around and walked out.
November 15, 1943
I am on home leave. It’s fortunate since Laura is about to give birth.
Our reunion was not all I had hoped it would be. Why do women have to swell like sacks of rotting grain in pregnancy? Yes, nature would have her due, but does it have to include blotched skin, dull hair, bloated ankles, bad temper, and random tears?
I didn’t tell her this is a compassionate leave. After my supposed nervous breakdown, I was given a pep talk and told, in a sickeningly false paternalistic tone, “to make the SS proud with my newborn son”. Unofficially they also suggested I should pop the next bun into the oven as soon as possible. Not bloody likely!
I am not mad! I saw what I saw!
[Later the same day]
Laura went into labor. I sent for Frau Richter, the neighborhood’s best midwife. She is the bedroom now with Laura. I’ve steeled myself for a long wait. I don’t expect an easy birth; she’s let herself go physically and she is hysterical and frightened. I expect her to start screaming every moment now.
But I won’t go outside. I’ll do my duty as a German father, even if she is less than a German mother. Perhaps my fortitude will rub off on her.
Strange; the midwife has been inside for over half an hour and I hear no cries. Everything is quiet, deadly quiet. Perhaps I should go in—I’m a doctor, after all.
The door opens, Frau Richter stands on the threshold, beaming:
“Herr Schlosser,” she says, “come and see your son!”
November 23, 1943
I’m to be court-martialed tomorrow. I’m lucky: normally an SS Court of Honor would sentence me to death. But I can expect clemency. They say that Reichsführer Himmler himself has been troubled by reports about the psychological deterioration of Einzatsgruppen members. He now puts his trust in gassing.
Yesterday I had a visitor, another sign of special consideration. Father.
He came in and I was struck by how old and thin he looked, yellow skin hanging loosely on his face like a rumpled suit.
“So, Klaus,” he said, “it was too much for you, after all”.
“No!” I spat. “I want to fight! I’m not a deserter. I hope they’ll send me to the front. I don’t care for my rank; I’ll go as a simple soldier, as long as they give me another chance to fight the enemy!”
“The war is lost,” he said softly.
“This is treason!”
“What will you do? Denounce me? Will they listen to you, a . . . ”
“A madman? Don’t be afraid to say it, Father. I know what they think of me. And I know I’m perfectly sane. It’s just that I’ve seen the truth, which they still cannot accept. They mouth the Party line but they refuse to believe what they say. But they’ll see it one day, and I’ll be vindicated.”
He looked at me, those pale washed-out eyes in the nest of wrinkles.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “A madman would be easier to talk to.”
“Never mind! I don’t want to discuss metaphysics with you. I just want to see Günter. Ask them to bring him to me.”
“Günter?”
“My son!”
“Your son’s name isn’t Günter,” said Father. “It’s Adam.”
“What kind of name is it? It’s not a German name!”
“This is what his mother wanted to call him”.
“Laura? You talked to Laura?’
“Of course. We became very close during her pregnancy. She asked me to take care of my grandson. She was afraid she’d die in childbirth. How ironic!”
I should have known. Father, dripping poison into Laura’s ear, polluting her weak mind with his Jewish tales . . .
“Father,” I said, “I saw them.”
“Who?”
“Your Jewish demons. Creatures from the stories you told me. The astri, the vampire nurse; the chicken-footed ghosts; and . . . and Lilith, the succubus, who gives birth without pain . . . ”
Yes, I saw her. When I walked on trembling legs into the birthing chamber where my wife lay in bed, radiant, her face unmarred by labor, her eyes clear, and the midwife swaddling the loud baby and babbling on about the miracle, the easiest birth she’d seen in her thirty years, no pain at all, just came out as sweetly as you please, like a cork from a bottle . . . And Laura, smiling
at me . . . And then her puffy cheeks thinning out, adhering to the diamond-sharp bones, her blue eyes paling to the unnatural transparency of ice, her blond hair turning as white as the pillow on which it was spread . . .
I didn’t shoot my wife. I shot Lila, Lilith, the eternal deceiver. That they found Laura’s body riddled with bullets proves no more than the seemingly human bodies buried in the mass graves in the East.
I expected Father to react as they all did, with the mingled horror and pity, which are the emotional alms thrown by the sane to the mad. But he didn’t.
“You saw them?” he asked seriously.
“Yes, I did. And I killed them I killed all of them. They are no more.”
Father smiled a tired, pale smile.
“You killed the demons of the Jews,” he said. “But Jews still live. And now you’ve become their demon. When they wake up at night, it’s you they’ll see in the darkness. You’re a Jewish bogeyman. The last and the most horrifying of them all.”
I gaped at him. He got up.
“I’ll take care of Adam,” he said. “I’m sorry, son”.
[Undated]
Is he right? Is the war lost? Will our struggle to rid humanity of parasites come to nothing?
I have questioned myself again and again, and my conscience is clear.. I am not a murderer! I am not a baby killer!
If the proof eluded me, then it is the scientist who failed, not the science. Another will come and show the world what I’ve seen.
And yet, as I’m lying here on the stinking bunk bed, I keep seeing my father, walking into a billowing yellow cloud. He is carrying a swaddled baby. Adam. His name begins with an “Aleph” in Hebrew: I still remember that much, a poisonous, accursed knowledge that permeates me like dirt, like sweat. I will never be rid of it, no matter how hard I try.
My father and my newborn son disappear into the cloud. And I follow.
There are still Jews there, I know. A people cannot live without its demons. And so here I am, going east.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 21
