David Morrell - League of Night and Fog

by League of Night

  David Morrell - League of Night and Fog

  Copyright 1987

  Author's introduction

  The League of Night and Fog stands on its own, but it also has an interesting relationship with two of my earlier novels: The Brotherhood of the Rose and The Fraternity of the Stone. They form a loose series that had its inspiration at the start of the nineteen eighties, when I learned about a male orphanage in theUnited States that was modeled after a military academy The boys wore uniforms, practiced precision marching, and learned about weapons. The literature they studied was about war. The history they learned was about battles. The mathematics they were taught had military examples and applications. So indoctrinated were the students that when the time came for them to graduate from the orphanage's high school, it was taken for granted that they would join the military. Recruiters from the various military branches came to the campus, much as IBM or Xerox sends representatives to universities, competing with each other to get the best candidates.

  Someone familiar with the orphanage told me that inVietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive most of the previous year's graduating class had died in combat. To say that I was intrigued would be an understatement, for I, too, had been in an orphanage. Shortly after my birth, my father, an R.A.F bombardier, had been killed in the Second World War.

  My mother had worked as hard as she could to earn a living and raise me on her own, but the social services that we're used to now weren't in place in the mid-forties. Eventually, circumstances forced her to put me in an orphanage for a time. My mother preferred to forget those trying years, so I'm not sure about the time frame. My guess is that it happened in 1947. I would have been about four. My memories are of marching with other children from the dormitory to the refectory to the church to the playground to the dormitory; of standing in line on Sunday afternoons while a nun gave each of us a weekend treat, a handful of sugarcoated popcorn; of trying to escape twice to find my mother and being found wandering along a country road; of leaving clothes that needed to be mended at the bottom of my bunk when I went to sleep and finding them repaired when I woke up; of wondering who the woman was who came to reclaim me. You can understand, then, how my imagination came to attention when I learned about the military male orphanage. What if? I thought. What if two boys at a similar orphanage (Saul and Chris, one Jewish, one Irish

  Catholic) were befriended by an elderly man who came to visit them, who functioned as a foster father, who brought them gifts, took them on trips, and arranged for them to have special martial arts classes in addition to their military training? What if that elderly man belonged to the CIA and, against the knowledge of his superiors, was teaching children to love him and molding them to be assassins? Mideastern terrorists have long used a similar method of recruiting children whose parents have been killed by enemy counter strikes of stoking the hatred within these children and teaching them the violent skills by which they can vent their hatred. In the plot I was contemplating, however, the motivation for killing would be love, not hate. Saul and Chris, so hungry for affection, would do anything that their 'father" asks.

  Because the ancient symbol for silence and secrecy is the rose (in the

  Middle Ages, secret meetings were held sub rosa, literally under a dangling rose), the novel (my first big thick one) came to be called

  The Brotherhood of the Rose. I enjoyed writing that novel so much, its twists and turns, its exotic background, that I wanted to do another like it But a sequel was out of the question. Chris had been killed by his foster father, and Saul, having achieved revenge, had come to the end of his story. But what if I invented a character somewhat like

  Chris? Not a ripoff. Not a carbon copy. A legitimate self-sustaining character who shared two things with Chris: his orphan status and his religious commitment. Chris had once been in a monastery. That is where we first meet this new character. Drew Mac Lanein the next book in the series. The Fraternity of the Stone. A former intelligence operative. Drew is in a hermit order, doing penance for sins he committed in the name of his country, when an assault team invades the monastery, killing everyone inside in an effort to get Drew and ensure his silence. But silence about what? Surviving, Drew leaves the monastery and, after six years, rejoins the world, not knowing who the president is or what cell phones are, but determined to find out who killed his fellow monks. This book, too, gave me great satisfaction, and so once again I decided to write something like it But this time I knew of a way to use Saul from the first novel. He needed a foil. Why not Drew? Why not have Saul and Drew meet? As they pursued a common enemy, a new brotherhood would be formed. Thus the book would be a rarity: a sequel to Brotherhood and a sequel to Fraternity. A double sequel. And the completion of a trilogy, although a reader wouldn't have to be familiar with the two previous books in order to understand this one. But what would the novel be about? Because Saul had eventually settled inIsrael , I began to associate him with the effects of the Holocaust. One of the ways in which the Third Reich enforced its reign of terror was to make dissidents vanish into what the Nazis called "the night and the fog." The relatives of those who disappeared endured a perpetual state of anxiety about their loved ones and kept worrying that they themselves would be next. Thus, by eliminating isolated political enemies, the Nazis controlled a much larger group.

  Suppose a handful of elderly men, with no apparent association with each other ∧ except for no apparent reason, seemingly at random in widely separated places all over the world. Suppose the father of

  Saul's wife is one of those who have disappeared. Suppose that, upon closer investigation, it turns out that each of these elderly men can be linked in some way to the Holocaust. Suppose that "the night and the fog" has returned. Because the previous titles in the series had a

  "something of the something" construction, the title for this one came easily: The League of Night and Fog. Because the previous books had each begun with a historical prologue intended to add texture and depth to the contemporary events I was imagining, I set about researching the

  Holocaust and distilling the main events that led up to it. Four parts of a prologue, each with "night" in its subtitle, document the steps that made the unthinkable possible. If I had any doubts as to whether the subject I had chosen was suitable for a thriller, they were quickly eliminated when I asked my literature students (I was then a professor at theUniversityofIowa ) what they knew about the Holocaust and was startled to discover that they had little knowledge of the horrors that had happened. It wasn't their fault. Knowledge doesn't come to us spontaneously. Each generation has to be taught. The four part fact-filled prologue to this novel was my attempt to pass on the message. Fans of the series often ask if I'll ever add another novel to it. The book's conclusion invites a continuation, after all. One plot element dangles. Saul and his wife still face an uncertain enemy.

  Drew, part of the new brotherhood, pledges his help. He "touched his new friend's am. His eyes were hard with determination, yet bright with love.... 'Let them come.' " I enjoy open-ended conclusions. They make me feel that characters I've had fun with continue past the final sentence, that a book may have ended, but its characters live on. That was my intention here. But the tug of the characters was powerful, and

  I did indeed begin a fourth novel in the series. Wrote a hundred pages, in fact Unfortunately, the novel refused to go farther. Why?

  Because my life had been torn apart. The theme of orphans no longer spoke to me- Shortly before The League of Night and Fog was published in 1987, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from septic shock as the consequence of an infection he had suffered after a bone-marrow transplant
that, it was hoped, would cure his out-of-control bone cancer. Instead of being a semi orphan who wrote about the search for a father, I became a father torn apart by the loss of a son. The latter theme now occupied my imagination. With Matt's death, my fascination with the world of the brotherhood had ended. Thus The League of Night and Fog reminds me of my innocence. When I recall the unburdened mind and emotions that created it, I feel nostalgic. All books are children of its author. This one comes from a brighter time. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did returning to it.

  David Morrell Santa Fe , 2000

  PROLOGUE.

  FOUR SHADES OF NIGHT

  THE long knives

  A phrase invented by the Nazis, the Night of the Long Knives, refers to the events of the night ofJune 30,1934 , inAustria andGermany.

  Hitler, having achieved the tides of chancellor and dictator, still needed to gain the remaining position that would give him absolute power overGermany --the presidency. Determined to remove all obstacles, he flew secretly toMunich. There, accompanied by his personal bodyguards, he arrested at gunpoint his main rival and former friend, Ernst Rehm.

  Rehm, the chief of the so-called Brownshirts--a terrorist paramilitary unit of the Nazi party, officially known as Sturmabteilung or Storm

  Troopers, SA for short--had sought to merge his four-hundred-thousan member force with the German army and consequently (so } Hitler alleged) take overGermany. Hitler, anxious not to '} lose the support of the army, even more anxious to rid himself of competitors, executed Rehm and several ambitious j Brownshirt officers. ; Not satisfied with half-measures, the Fflhrer decided to ; eliminate other threats as well.

  While Rohm and his staff were being shot inMunich , Hitler's close associates Himmler and Goring conducted a similar purge inBerlin. Among those executed were the former chancellor ofGermany , unfriendly police and state officials, and dissident executives of the Nazi party. Hitler later claimed that seventy-seven traitors had been killed in order to prevent an overthrow of the German government. Survivors of the purge insisted mat the actual number was over four hundred. A postwar trial inMunich raised the total even higher--beyond one thousand. The significance of the Night of the Long Knives is two-fold. As a consequence of the terror that Hitler created, he did gain the final crucial title of president and, as absolute ruler ofGermany , steered his nation toward the obscenities of the Second World War. Beyond that, his use of bodyguards in executing his rivals raised that group to a stature that equaled and eventually surpassed the power of RQhm's paramilitary terrorists. In time, the guards numbered more than a million. Just as Rohm's Brownshirts, Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers, were known as SA, so Hitler's Blackshirts, Schutzstaffel or elite guard, were known by their unit's initials. But unlike SA, initials remembered today by few, the initials of the Blackshirts remain synonymous with depravity. The hiss of a snake. The rasp of evil.

  SS.

  broken glass

  Also known as Kristallnacht or Crystal Night, the Night of Broken Glass refers to events onNovember 9, 1938 , throughoutGermany. Two days earlier, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a minor diplomat at the German embassy inParis , in retaliation for the deportation of grynszpan's family and 23,000 other Jews fromGermany to

  Poland. Grynszpan's intended target had been the German ambassador to

  Paris, but von Rath attempted to intervene and was shot instead.

  Ironically, von Rath had openly criticized Nazi anti-Semitic attitudes and was scheduled for disciplinary action by the Gestapo. No matter--a

  Jew had killed a German official, and Hitler took advantage of the incident. Publicly claiming that the assassination had prompted anti-Semitic riots throughoutGermany , he privately gave orders for the as yet nonexistent riots to occur. These "spontaneous demonstrations" were organized by Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the SS.

  After Nazi mobs enthusiastically completed their work on the night of

  November 9, Heydrich was able to give a preliminary report to Hitler that 815 Jewish shops, 171 Jewish homes, and 119 synagogues had been set on fire or otherwise destroyed; twenty-thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps; thirty-six were killed, another thirty-six critically injured. These figures turned out to be drastically underestimated. So widespread was the destruction that everywhere streets were littered with fragments from shattered windows, hence the expression "the Night of Broken Glass." Concluding his report, Heydrich recommended that the best course to follow would be for the insurance companies to settle the Jews' claims in full and then confiscate the money and return it to the insurers. My information is that claims for broken glass alone will amount to some five million marks... As for the practical matter of cleaning up the destruction, this is being arranged by releasing Jews in gangs from the concentration camps and having them clean up their own messes under supervision. The courts will impose upon them a fine of a billion marks, and this will be paid out of the proceeds of their confiscated property. Heil Hitler!

  The Night of Broken Glass represents the start ofGermany 's undisguised state-directed pogrom against the Jews. Though many foreign governments--and even some executives within the Nazi party--objected to the atrocities committed on Kristallnacht, no one did anything to stop them or to ensure that they weren't repeated and in much worse degree.

  the night AND fog

  The Nacht und Nebel Eriass or Night and Fog Decree, one of Hitler's personal edicts, was issued onDecember 7,1941 , the same dayJapan attackedAmerica 's naval base atPearl Harbor. Directed against

  "persons endangering German security" and specifically against members of resistance groups in German-occupied territories, it proposed that execution was not itself a sufficient deterrent against anti German threats. Psychological as well as physical force was necessary. Thus, not all agitators would be killed upon discovery; many instead would be transported to an unknown location, their destiny never to be learned by outsiders. Friends and family members would forever be kept in suspense.

  As the edict stipulated, "The intimidating effect of these measures lies

  (a) in the disappearance without trace of the guilty person, (b) in the fact that no kind of information must be given about the person's whereabouts and his fate." Those tempted to participate in anti-German activity would fear that they, like their loved ones, would disappear within the night and the fog. An example of how this decree was carried out occurred in 1942: the fate of thevillageofLidice , in

  Czechoslovakia. in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,

  Nazi- soldiers surrounded the village and shot every male within it, ten at a time. It took all day before the executions ended. The women of the village were transported to the concentration camp at Ravensbriick inGermany , where they died from weakness or were gassed.

  But the children of the village, ninety of them, simply vanished into the night and fog. Relatives in other villages could not find a trace of them.

  the dark night

  OF THE soul

  OnJanuary 20, 1942 , six weeks after the Night and Fog Decree, Hitler ordered his senior SS officers to attend a special conference inBerlin for the purpose of organizing the Final Solution to what the Fuhrer called "the Jewish question." Anti-Semitic riots and laws, intended to force the Jews to leave German territory of their own accord, had been only partially successful--most Jews had been reluctant to leave their homes and businesses. Massive deportations too had been only partially successful--the process took too much time and was too expensive. But now the ultimate extension of Crystal Night was set in motion.

  Extermination.

  Mass executions by firing squad were uneconomical due to the cost of ammunition. A cheaper method, that of cramming victims into trucks and killing them with engine exhaust, was judged unsatisfactory because not enough victims could be asphyxiated at one time. But asphyxiation itself was not at fault. The problem was how to do it efficiently. In the spring of 1942, the death camps be
gan.

  These were not the same as concentration camps, where huge numbers of people were squeezed together into squalid barracks from which they were marched each day to factories to work for the German war effort. As a con se- b quence of brutal workloads, insufficient food, and unsanitary conditions, most occupants of the concentration camps did indeed die, but death was not the primary purpose for which prisoners had been sent to these work camps. Slavery was. The death camps, however, had no other function than to kill with the utmost speed and efficiency. There were killing centers at some concentration camps,Auschwitz and Maidanek for example, but the exclusive death camps numbered only four. All were situated inPoland : Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Treblinka. As

  Treblinka's commandant, Franz Stangi, confessed, it was Dante's Inferno.

  The smell was indescribable. The hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. All around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls--whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside--weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music.

  In the fifteen months of its existence, from July of 1942 to September of 1943, the camp at Treblinka exterminated one million Jews--a sixth of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust. When the camp was at its most efficient, twenty thousand people were killed each day, a statistic that becomes even more horrible when one realizes that all of these executions occurred in the morning. The rest of the day was devoted to disposing of the bodies by burning them in huge open pits. At night, the flames were allowed to die out, the nauseating smoke to drift away, so the next morning's victims would not be alarmed by the unmistakable stench of incinerated corpses. 2