The Locket

by Evans, Mike

  They disappeared into the bedroom and I took a seat by the window in one of the chairs across from the dining table. A steward brought me a cup of tea, which I sipped slowly while the Austrian countryside moved past the window. The railcar rocked gently from side to side and the wheels clacked over the rails with a rhythm that soothed my mind and calmed my soul. Perhaps Adolf is doing me a favor, I thought. Would it really be so bad to live in Linz at his expense and endure the pain of his occasional visits? Many are doing things to survive that they would never dream of doing otherwise. Is selling my body any worse than typing his reports and passing myself off as a German? Haven’t I already sold out?

  As we continued down the tracks, my earlier resolve to rebuff Adolf ’s advances began to wane and I was to the point of agreeing to his arrangement when the train slowed. Out the window I saw the village of Geretzbach. Two boys were playing in the street, laughing and kicking a ball. They seemed to have not a care in the world, as it should be. And all at once I saw the Averbuch children, their eyes wide with fright, then the sound of the gun, and the next moment they were lying with their parents, blood oozing from their bodies onto the pavement. Then I remembered Papa and Mama. Adolf sent them to the camps, along with Stephan and David. How could I ever get into bed with a man who would do such a thing?

  A steward appeared at my chair. “Did you need something?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I’m fine now.”

  When we arrived at the station in Linz, Heydrich departed the bedroom by the exit at the end of the car. Moments later, Adolf emerged and gestured for me to follow. He appeared calm and not the least affected by what had previously transpired between us. I walked to the front, where he offered me his hand and helped me from the railcar to the station platform.

  A black Mercedes automobile was parked near the station building with a driver standing near the front bumper. Adolf led the way and we walked toward it. The driver opened the rear door and held it while Adolf crawled onto the seat and slid over to the opposite side. I got in next to him and soon we were driving from the station.

  We rode through the streets in silence, Adolf staring out the window, until we turned onto the street where we’d lived before. As we idled past our house, he glanced over his shoulder at me. “It still looks the same.” I nodded without looking. He turned back to the window. “A little tired and run down, but much the same as when you left it.”

  “Nothing is the same as when we left it,” I said softly.

  He placed his hand on my thigh. “Life must go on, Sarah.”

  My heart jumped at the sound of that name. More than a year had passed since I had heard it. He turned to face me. “You should reconsider my offer,” he whispered. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime for you. And it is the only way I can help. If you stay at the office, someone will eventually learn your real name and then they will know who you are. Hilda at the boardinghouse is already suspicious.” My eyes opened wide at the mention of her name. “Yes,” he nodded. “You know that she suspects something.”

  “Hilda should mind her own business.”

  “It is her business to keep an eye on everyone staying there.” “And Claudia?”

  The mention of her name took him aback. “What about her?”

  “Is she there to keep an eye on us, too?”

  He leaned against the door. “You should not concern yourself with Claudia. What she does is none of your business.” “Is she one of your mistresses, too?”

  Adolf grasped my wrist and squeezed it tightly. “Listen to me,” he said through clenched teeth. “You are a Jew, living in a land controlled by the most powerful army in the world. And I am an officer of that army. You will never speak to me this way again.” He released his grip and turned away.

  Seeing the neighborhood where we once lived had the opposite effect from what Adolf intended. He hoped that by showing me the street and our old house I would be moved by nostalgia to agree to his arrangement. That seeing those familiar places would bring to mind memories of a glorious past, a past he would suggest I could reclaim by becoming his concubine. Instead, it only served to remind me of how I was very much alone in the world. Everyone I loved was gone and the houses where they once lived cried out to me, reminding me of all that happened to us when the Germans took over.

  Just past his old house, Adolf began to talk again. “Do you remember the day you came to our house and I was sitting on the front steps?”

  “Yes,” I answered grudgingly.

  “Your grandmother had just died.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “And your father yelled at me.” “He yelled at everyone,” Adolf chuckled. “You had a locket.” He turned away from the window to look at me once more. “Whatever happened to it?”

  “It was lost,” I lied. “When your soldiers came for us it was lost.”

  He stared at me a moment before replying, “That must have been very traumatic for you.”

  I looked him in the eye. “Not as traumatic as what happened to my parents.”

  His face went cold. “What do you know about them?”

  “I know my mother was sent to Auschwitz.”

  The muscles along his jaw flexed. “You have been in my files.” His face turned red. “You could not know that any other way.” He jabbed his finger in my face. “You have been looking through my files.”

  “I’m in your files every day,” I said sarcastically. “It’s my job to prepare reports and place them in your files.”

  He wagged his finger at me. “But you did not prepare a report for your parents.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know everything that happens in my camps and in my office.” He slapped me in the face with the back of his hand. “I would never make you do such a thing. Requiring you to fill out a report about your own parents would be cruel.”

  “And killing them wasn’t?”

  “I am only doing my job,” he snapped. “That is all. Just doing my job.” Finally he admitted that they were no longer alive, but hearing it from him failed to give me the satisfaction I thought it would. Instead, I was outraged at his lack of remorse. He had no sense of shame or guilt. Worse still, he viewed the slaughter of my parents, people he knew and understood, as simply doing his job. Right there, in the back seat of the car, I wanted to kill him and I imagined myself doing it in the most grotesque manner. Surely that would give me the satisfaction and justice I craved.

  The driver took a circuitous route along the river, back to the center of town. There we came to a stop at a building that stood ten or twelve stories tall. Adolf climbed from the car and handed the driver a note, then started toward the building entrance. I followed after him, unsure where we were going or what would happen next.

  Inside the building, Adolf waited at the elevator for me to catch up. We stepped inside and he stood silently watching the dial above the door as the arrow moved past numbers for the floors. We rose higher and higher in the elevator, and my heart beat faster and faster. I had heard stories of women in Vienna who were accosted by soldiers, raped repeatedly, and then tossed out the window of an upper floor. I was worried that might happen to me but had little option other than to keep moving forward.

  When we reached the top floor, the elevator attendant opened the door. We stepped out to a hall and Adolf led the way. At the end of the hall was a door and through it we entered an apartment. The main room had windows from floor to ceiling that looked out on the city and afforded a view of the Austrian countryside that lay to the east. It was decorated with richly appointed furniture and paintings on every wall.

  “This would have been yours,” he made a broad, sweeping gesture. “You could have spent your days enjoying the view and eating the best food available.” He turned to look at me, expecting to see I was crushed with disappointment, but I was certain he had no intention of keeping me for long in such a place. He only wanted to indulge his lust with me, and when he grew tired of me I would be d
iscarded like the workers in the camps and replaced by another. Still, the thought that I could have lived there in comfort gave me pause to wonder if I had made the right decision.

  Adolf moved to the right and as my eyes followed him I saw a doorway leading to the kitchen. It was painted white and had cabinets on every wall. A counter beneath them ran around the room with a stove at one end and a sink at the other. He opened a cabinet, took out a bottle of beer, and flipped off the top with an opener from a drawer near the sink. Then he turned up the bottle and took a long drink.

  Bottle in hand, he came from the kitchen and swaggered over to one of the windows. He unbuttoned his jacket and tipped his head back, taking another drink. Then he swallowed and pointed out the window, gesturing with the bottle. “You see that column of smoke rising in the distance?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is smoke from the crematorium at Mauthausen.” He paused for a sip from the bottle. “We control the quarry there. Do you remember it?”

  “I remember hearing of it,” I nodded.

  He took one more sip from the bottle. “That is where they died.” He said it in an offhanded way, as if telling me about the weather.

  “Who?”

  “Your father, and your brother, and that idiot Stephan.”

  A lump formed in my throat. I swallowed hard and struggled to maintain my composure. “And my mother? What happened to her?”

  “She was a woman,” he shrugged. “Nothing more worthless than a Jewish woman, except for a Jewish child. She was sent by train to Auschwitz and gassed upon arrival. Her bones were crushed and scattered in a field near there.” He looked at me with disdain and contempt. “You’re just like all the others,” he snarled. “I thought you were different but you’re not. You’re just a Jewish whore using nothing but your Jewish tricks on me and everyone else. You think you can survive that way, but I promise you, you cannot.”

  “When have I ever tricked you?”

  “First you embarrass me on the train in front of my superior and now I find you have been going behind my back, plundering through files that you had no permission to see.”

  “You gave me permission when you gave me the job.”

  With a flick of his free hand he slapped me in the face, this time harder than before. “Do not talk to me that way, you insolent little girl!” He leaned closer and looked at me with an accusing eye. “What else have you done?” When I didn’t answer, he slapped me again. “Answer me when I’m talking to you! Have you been corresponding with that boy Claus? Is that it? Did you take him to your bed before he left for the front?”

  “We had dinner once.” As hard as I tried to prevent it, tears streamed down my face. “Just once.”

  “How am I to believe anything you say to me now?” “It’s the truth.”

  “You are a Jew. A weak, sniffling Jew. You know nothing of the truth. Only tricks and spells. That’s all you know.” His eyes opened wide. “And you almost fooled me.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “You almost tricked me into getting in bed with you, just as you tricked Claus. Only I was more taken in than he. I was ready to set you up in a place of your own. Make you my mistress. Defy the Führer’s orders and the laws of the Reich. You made it seem like my idea but it was all your doing.”

  “Are you crazy? Listen to yourself.”

  But he just kept going. “You thought that if I had sex with you I won’t do to you what I’ve done to the others.” He grabbed me and threw me onto a sofa that sat facing the windows. “We could do it right here, right now!” He reached for his belt to unbuckle it, then the door opened. He paused with his hand on his belt, took a breath, and lowered his voice. “I could have you right here, shoot you in the head before you got your clothes on, and never think of it again.”

  While he was speaking, three soldiers entered the room and stood near the kitchen doorway. Adolf straightened his jacket, squared his shoulders, and nodded over his shoulder to them. “This is what you came for,” he said, pointing to me.

  One of them grabbed me by the arm and pulled me from the sofa. I struggled to my feet, and another soldier grabbed me from the opposite side. Together they pushed me across the room. As we neared the door to the hallway, Adolf stepped in front, blocking the way, his face all but touching mine. “I rescued you from certain death,” he whispered. “Gave you a place to live. Kept you safe. But you have chosen to repay my acts of kindness with insults and embarrassment. You are nothing to me now and there is no one who can save you.” He nodded again to the soldiers and they led me out to the hall.

  When we reached the first floor, they hustled me from the building. They lifted me off my feet and hurried across the sidewalk toward a car parked at the curb, with me dangling between them. Without a word between them, they threw me onto the back seat, slammed the door shut, and shouted to the driver. Moments later, the car started forward.

  From Linz, the driver took me east, along the river, and I knew where we were going. Adolf was sending me to the same place he sent Mama, Papa, and all the others—Mauthausen. And if he had his way I would meet the same end. After all, I was nothing but a Jewish woman now.

  When we reached the camp, the driver brought the car to a stop near the main building. A guard opened the car door and I was led inside. After a moment, a woman came with a clipboard and asked for my identity card. I handed her the card Adolf had prepared for me and she added my name to the handwritten daily census list. I had seen those lists many times before and knew that in a day or two, Claudia would transfer the information from it to an official report form. I wondered if she would even recognize my name as she typed it on the sheet.

  The woman with the clipboard disappeared into an office and I could hear them discussing among themselves why a German citizen with the name Ellen Krupp was sent to the camp. Someone placed a phone call and I heard voices.

  “Jewish sympathizer,” someone said.

  “Sympathizer? They send sympathizers here?”

  “She was caught plundering the files of Colonel Eichmann,” the first voice said sharply. “She will get what she deserves.”

  After that, the woman with the clipboard returned and led me out the back door. I followed her across the yard past the crematorium with its solid brick walls and tall smokestacks. Smoke rose from them and a foul odor hung in the air. Ash drifted down to the ground like snowflakes, but no one paid it any attention.

  On the pavement outside the building, workers sorted through piles of clothing. Next to them, others were busy stacking empty suitcases on the bed of a truck. In the shadow of the building, corpses were piled high, awaiting the ovens, while men with dental tools searched their mouths for gold and silver fillings.

  Because the crematorium was full when I arrived, I was not executed that day. Instead, I was assigned to the camp’s only female barracks. Only slightly better than the housing for common prisoners, it held women who were part of the Sonderkommando—prisoners who worked the body-disposal detail at the crematorium—and female prisoners who were forced to work as prostitutes in the camp’s brothel. Even though Jewish women were officially fit for nothing, it seemed the German soldiers had no problem using them for their physical pleasure.

  The barracks overseer, a Jewish woman named Gila from Vienna, assigned me to a bed and I made my way toward it. One of the guards saw me and suggested I might make an attractive prostitute, but the overseer shook her head. “Special orders,” she said dourly. Everyone seemed to know what that meant and from then on they had very little to do with me, though one or two tried to be friendly. I would find out later what they already understood.

  The next morning I was awakened before dawn and rousted from the barracks with the Sonderkommandos. We ate breakfast in the lee of our building, a remarkably rich fare of sausages and potatoes. Prisoners who worked at the crematorium, it turned out, were afforded better meals and subjected to far fewer beatings than most inmates, an attempt by the Ge
rmans to buy their silence. They knew the details of the killing process and saw firsthand the soldiers who were involved, all of which the Nazi command wanted kept secret. Later I learned that, as an added security measure, most of the Sonderkommandos were murdered every four or five months and replaced with new ones selected at random from one of the arriving trains, but right then I was just glad for the extra calories.

  At eight that morning, the first train arrived. We stood by while soldiers separated the women and children from the men. The men were marched off to a separate part of the camp. Women and children were led from the rail platform downstairs to an underground chamber just a few meters from the tracks. Once below ground, they were forced to strip naked under the pretense of taking a shower. They dutifully did as they were told and packed into the chamber shoulder to shoulder. When the room was filled to capacity, a guard locked the doors and donned a gas mask. Soldiers on the floor above dropped canisters of poisonous pellets down specially designed shafts into the chamber. Within thirty minutes they were all dead. Then we were sent in to remove the bodies and clean the room. It was an awful task and I threw up three times during the first session.

  The routine repeated itself two more times before noon, then we took a short break while the German soldiers ate lunch. Women in the barracks were only provided breakfast and supper, but they were allowed to eat at noon from their own stores of food, most of it taken from the belongings of people killed in the chamber. They offered me a tin of fish, but I refused. The smell of food, with the odor from the ovens and images from the chamber, made me nauseated.

  By the middle of the afternoon, bodies were piled in the sun outside the building, awaiting cremation. Still, the trains continued to arrive. I watched as more people were unloaded and wondered what the guards would do with them. After the men were taken away, the women and children were led in a steady procession down the road and into a patch of woods outside the fenced area of the main camp. I tried to ask where they were going, but no one would tell me.