by David Khara
“Roman, we have to go home. Now!” Dumbstruck by a spectacle he didn’t understand, the little boy didn’t say a word. As fast as Roman’s asthma would allow, they ran back to the village hand-in-hand.
By evening, an overwhelming number of German troops were occupying the small town, whose populace made no attempt to resist. Indeed, here and there, a few inhabitants welcomed them with cheers. Grouped together and surrounded by a dozen guards with machine guns, the children watched incredulously as a strange spectacle that was beyond their comprehension took place.
The men of the village were lined up in a row facing soldiers who stood stiffer than old Bartocz’s fence posts. A peasant farmer walked by, his cap pulled down over his ears and a handkerchief clutched to his mouth, so only his eyes were visible. He stopped and pointed an accusing finger. “Him! The doctor. He’s Jewish.”
An hour later, when the sun finally dipped behind the hills, father, mother and sons emerged from their house in the square opposite the village hall with suitcases in hand.
The older brother, who hadn’t spoken for hours, shuffled closer to his parents. “Dad, it was Ignaziewski who denounced you. I recognized him, even though he was covering his face. Why’d he do that?”
The father ruffled his son’s curly brown locks. The child’s maturity filled him with pride and joy. Roman was following in his brother’s footsteps. Two fine boys. “You’re right, it was Ignaziewski. I recognized him, too. People sometimes do incomprehensible things out of fear. Or hatred.”
“But you cured his flu last winter.”
“True. But that was last winter. Things have changed. The world has changed.”
“I thought he was your friend.”
“I thought so, too. It’s human nature, Eytan. Human nature.”
The march was long and painful. For three long days, Yitzhak, Alina, Roman and Eytan Morgenstern trudged forward, flanked by armed vehicles and men. They stopped in every village, every tiny hamlet, to play out the same unchanging pantomime. They were joined by one family, then ten, then a hundred. The new arrivals’ protests soon gave way to silence and despair. The Germans showed no leniency, no compassion. Dissolved in this human tide, they finally reached Warsaw. Few of the local population dared even glance at the marchers. The soldiers had the city in a stranglehold, stifling every sign of life.
The column—herd, Eytan thought to himself—stopped. Only the sobbing of children could be heard above the rumbling tanks and deafening, repetitive thump of boots on cobblestones.
German officers designated leaders and informed them of the rules in the area where the Jews were to be consigned. The news spread rapidly through the marchers’ ranks. Some clung to the hope that this forced reorganization of their lives was only temporary. The situation wasn’t good, but it was bearable.
The following days and weeks removed any doubt as to the German occupiers’ intentions toward the Jewish community. From a few hundred, the population of the small area rose to a few thousand and eventually reached three hundred thousand people.
At gunpoint, the Jews were forced to put up a perimeter wall, building their prison within the city. The streets filled with a motionless crowd, bystanders of their own tragedy. Sitting on sidewalks, old folks bartered mementoes of a life of hard work for cigarettes and food. Filth took over, as scarce water supplies made basic hygiene impossible. Cramped living conditions didn’t help matters. In the Morgenstern’s apartment, twenty people eked out an existence in a space intended for four. The family didn’t complain. The last to arrive were packed into damp cellars overrun by rats and vermin. Infections proliferated, and disease was rampant.
The guards of their pestilential prison provided nothing except one meal a day. And what a meal! Thin gruel and a slice of stale bread. Absolutely insufficient for the old folks and children huddled around cold, desperately empty pots. Malnutrition ravaged the inhabitants. A typhoid epidemic spread terrifyingly fast.
Despite frequent, brutal raids orchestrated by the Germans, Yitzhak Morgenstern and other doctors set up makeshift infirmaries in the least putrid cellars. Illegal schools bloomed in apartments that were deserted during the day. Education had become a crime. The death of the mind preceded that of the body.
The grown-ups’ defiance and determination to maintain the shaky façade of normal life inspired the children to make their own small contribution. A small group led by Eytan loosened bricks in the northern section of the wall. Ingeniously, they opened up a tiny passage to the outside world. No adult could get through. But it enabled them to orchestrate a nightly plunder of bread and vegetables.
Roman had just celebrated his sixth birthday. He was losing strength, because the foul air aggravated his asthma, but he was as cheerful as ever and followed his brother everywhere, except when Eytan led his brigade, as he called it, on a raid into the city. That evening, the little boy pleaded with his older brother to take him with them. “Simon’s only six,” he argued reproachfully. “And you let him come.”
“It’s too dangerous, Roman. You have to run fast without stopping. It’s not an old farmer who’ll be chasing us if we’re spotted. Stay here and keep watch. If nobody notices you, you’ll have won a point, OK?”
Sulking, the little boy hunkered down to keep lookout from the protective shadow of an electricity pole while the gang got to work removing the red bricks from the wall.
Fog inexorably wreathed the sleeping ghetto like a ghost, infiltrating every nook and cranny and protecting the boys in their perilous but heroic undertaking. The Germans’ unbending discipline had its advantages. The arrival of their patrols could be predicted to the nearest minute. They were machines. Their punctuality delighted Eytan, whose watch had been confiscated, along with the meager goods the family had been allowed to bring with them. He had learned to keep perfect time in his head.
A few apples and some warm bread, furtively passed through a gap in the window by a sympathetic old lady, were the expedition’s only spoils. They had only a few minutes left to get back into their open-air prison. A gentle but glacial breeze blew through Warsaw.
The children flitted down the street like shadows on the walls of the building at the street corner opposite the ghetto. One by one, they made the frantic thirty-yard sprint to the tiny gap in the wall. As always, Eytan was last to go.
On all fours, peeking through the hole, Roman waited for his brother while the others grabbed the bricks, ready to cover their tracks as fast as possible.
The breeze picked up, and harsh gusts of wind blew through the rundown streets and avenues of the occupied city, brutally dispersing the fog. As he ran, Eytan dropped three apples, which bounced off the sidewalk and scattered on the cobbled road. He scrambled to pick up the precious food whose curative properties his father constantly praised.
Roman peered up and down the street. The distinctive sound of boots on pavement warned of the soldiers’ imminent arrival long before the patrol came into sight. Then, behind Eytan, four soldiers smoking cigarettes emerged from the mist, rifles over their shoulders. Two of them held German shepherds on leashes. For fear of giving away the location of the hidden passage, Roman didn’t cry out. Instead, without hesitation, he ran toward his brother who was still ten yards from safety, gathering the last apple.
Cursing his clumsiness, Eytan looked up and immediately recognized his brother’s frail silhouette and awkward running style. A gunshot rang out. Roman kept running. A second gunshot covered the dying echo of the first. The little boy crumpled face-first on the ground.
Despite the barking dogs and screamed orders, Eytan rushed to him. Tenderly, he raised the little head, placed it on his lap and brushed aside the curly brown locks. Those closed eyes would never open again. Pain seared Eytan’s stomach. He opened his mouth and waited for a cry that never came.
A rifle butt sent him flying. On his side, dazed, Eytan saw a boot slam twice into Roman’s corpse. He would join his brother in a few seconds. Death would be a release.
The patrol’s commanding officer hesitated before giving the order to shoot. Two machine guns pointed at the boys like snakes seeking the best angle of attack. Finally, a decision was made. Solid hands grasped the child. He was hauled away through the dark streets, intermittently illuminated by shapeless, dirty haloes of light from the tall street lamps. Through blurred eyes, Eytan saw the tailgate of a green truck identical to those he and Roman had seen arriving in their village a handful of months earlier, when life still had meaning. Around the vehicle, spotlights shot through the darkness. Forlorn rolls of barbed wire protected it from a nonexistent revolt. He was thrown aboard like a bale of straw loaded on a farmer’s flatbed. He rolled across the metallic grooves in the floor of the truck, surrounded by motionless men and women—silent, petrified, waxwork figures.
Four soldiers climbed up, and the truck juddered away. The elder Morgenstern boy slumped into welcome unconsciousness, leaving behind him the insane and evil grown-ups’ world.
But that merciless world, devoid of affection, devoid of the slightest trace of love, revived him. Eytan was shaken around like a rag doll. He opened his eyes and winced in the dazzling light aimed at the back of the truck, from which a guard expelled him with a series of kicks. He nearly fell on the rocky ground, but his agility kept him upright and provoked sarcastic whistles of admiration from the soldiers gathered around the tailgate.
The sight before the boy’s eyes wrenched his gut. He watched helplessly, with no chance of comprehending, as men, women and children were unloaded like livestock from trains and lined up facing the guns of cold, expressionless soldiers. The jagged outline of tall chimneys scarred the sky, pumping out nauseating smoke. The landscape of posts, barbed wire and barrack huts was an ode to hatred and destruction. The barked orders of the guards drowned out the silent sobs of a tortured people.
Eytan expected to join the cohort of prisoners, but a German grabbed his arm and dragged him over to a group of three men in white coats, who were chatting and even swapping jokes as they smoked their cigarettes. The soldier’s heels clicked together, and he launched into an incomprehensible explanation. One of the doctors—whose stethoscopes convinced Eytan of their function—nodded toward a small stone building nearby. Eytan was whisked away. Inside the building, as he sat on a stool, his head was shaved, and a number was tattooed on his forearm. The pain was nothing, compared with the humiliation. Torn from his parents, separated from his little brother, deprived of the freedom he loved, he was now stripped of his identity, his status as a child and, worst of all, his humanity. Treated like an animal, he refused to give his persecutors the satisfaction of seeing him cry or struggle in vain and took refuge behind a wall of silence, withdrawing deep into himself.
The man in the white coat examined him thoroughly, tested his reflexes, took measurements and carefully noted everything on a brown card that he pinned to the boy’s sweater.
Ten minutes later, Eytan was escorted across the railroad tracks and loaded into a curious train composed of a locomotive and single car. Inside, about twenty children gazed at the new arrival. Most were huddled against the wooden sides of the car. A few were in tears. As soon as Eytan was aboard, the heavy door slid shut.
A long, painful journey began. Yet another.
The last one.
The children sought a sign of affection, a hint of love, in the eyes watching them, but Eytan soon realized that love had been banished from this place. In turn, he banished the questions that assailed his mind. How? Why? The answers were no use to him. Their existence was no longer their own. An animal intended for the slaughterhouse received more consideration. Understanding was impossible. Like the reasons for the second tattoo, whose brutal and painful application resulted in fearful beatings for those who cried. All for three extra numbers! Eytan tugged at the sleeve of his sweater and knotted it with his handkerchief, the only possession that the guards, reluctant to handle snotty-nosed kids, had deigned to leave him.
The new camp offered them the sight of more barbed wire, watchtowers and endless rows of wooden barracks. The first snows were beginning to stick. The sun shone and reflected on the immaculate white expanse but brought no warmth. Seeing the building toward which they were being herded, one of the kids screamed for joy. After all, aren’t doctors kind and considerate? And the man at the top of the steps staring at them, arms crossed, who could he be if not a doctor?
The child’s only reward for his show of enthusiasm was a smack on the back of the head so violent that it propelled him face-first into the snow. In German, the doctor sternly rebuked the guard, who sheepishly fell back, while the medic hurried down the steps to the boy. He carefully turned him over and examined him, without returning the child’s smile. They both stood up. The man’s dark eyes locked onto Eytan’s hostile glare. A wink and a sentence in Polish. A single sentence that defined a whole life. “I don’t want any damage to come to my rats.” Eytan clenched his fists hard enough to break his knuckles. That’s what they were to him. Rats.
As they were marched into the building that was a hospital in name only, Eytan passed by the doctor, who had returned to his position at the door. With no regard for the possible punishment, including death, he announced in the calmest, coldest voice possible, “Some rats bite.”
The man in the white coat smiled, then closed the doors of a place that adults called hell.
CHAPTER 38
I’m floundering in a lunatic asylum. They’re all absolutely out of their minds, but Pops takes the cake. I’m going to be murdered by a bunch of maniacs. We all go through tough times, but I’m breaking all records in the life’s-a-bitch category. “Cut out the Subject 302 bullshit. It’s ridiculous. If you were Bleiberg, you’d be ninety-five years old at the very least. You barely look older than sixty. I’m not buying your half-assed story.”
“My formula stops the aging process. In the case of a subject who is still growing, the process stops around the age of twenty-eight, at the peak of his or her physical development. The subject will suffer no loss of faculties over time until natural death occurs around the age of one hundred or one hundred and twenty, according to my calculations. However, if the subject is already over thirty, the aging process is frozen at the time of the injection. Amazing, don’t you agree?”
“You nutcase!” I feel such pure hate for this guy, the insults are going to get a lot worse if he keeps this up. Pops comes over. One more step, and we’re in making-out range. He whispers, “Do you know that the dermatologist Daniel Cornelius Danielssen made several attempts to contract leprosy to prove it was infectious? Do you think I hesitated for a moment before injecting myself with the mutagen? That is the cost of scientific progress. Now imagine a human being whose movements are so swift and precise, they’re imperceptible to the naked eye. You can never beat that kind of agility and speed. This human’s reaction adapts to the requirements of any given situation. Imagine a human who never loses control of his emotions, who always makes the right decision at the right time. Does that not remind you of someone?”
I glance at Eytan. Bleiberg approaches the giant. He grabs his right arm and roughly tugs the bloodstained sleeve of his shirt up to his elbow. Eytan winces in pain but doesn’t cry out. A letter and six figures are tattooed on his forearm.
“Allow me to introduce Eytan Morgenstern, a Polish Jew who at the age of eight the Nazis sent to the new camp at Auschwitz. Selected by the guards who used medical criteria defined by my team, he was transferred to Stutthof, my research facility, to become…”
Bleiberg lets go, takes one step sideways and repeats his demonstration with Eytan’s left arm. This time, the tattoo consists of three figures. Three, zero, two.
“…Subject 302. My first masterpiece.”
Eytan lowers his head toward the old man. His face is a portrait of infinite contempt. “By claiming it’s a vaccine, you’re going to inject the whole planet with your shit, aren’t you? Money doesn’t interest you. So why? And why now?” Eytan doesn’t sp
eak the words, he spits them out.
“If only you knew how wonderfully proud you make me. I’ve been following your exploits for years. Ever since your mission with the commando unit assigned to abduct Eichmann in 1960. How old were you then? Twenty-seven? It’s amazing. A half-century later, and you don’t look a day older. Look at what awaits you, my dear.” Bleiberg cups Jackie’s cheek with one wrinkled hand. She stares at him in disgust. It looks like she’s fighting the urge to spit in his face.
He comes back over to me, looking smugger than ever. “To satisfy the fantasies of Himmler and his clique, my first experiment incorporated minor subsidiary mutations, such as increased growth and, in Eytan’s case, a modification of hair color. I turned his brown hair blond. Even as a child, he couldn’t stand it. Something tells me that he didn’t grow used to it as he got older.”
He glances at Eytan. “How long do you spend shaving your head and face every day?
No answer. The giant’s silence pains me. I never thought I’d see him so distraught that he couldn’t speak. Eytan Morg knew more about the Bleiberg Project than he was letting on. He was the Bleiberg Project. But how could you blame him for keeping silent about this monstrosity? Anyway, are there words strong enough to describe the inconceivable?
I’m sick of this. “Shoot us and get this over with. If it weren’t for your gorillas, you shriveled little shit, I’d beat you to a pulp.”
“I don’t want to kill you, Mr. Corbin. Perhaps not, at least. And this will answer your question, Eytan. The mutagen has a life of its own. Each organism reacts differently. We had to carry out tests on a massive scale. A handful of enlightened dictators around the world allowed me to work in total secrecy on political prisoners. I am now able to say that thirty percent of the subjects survive the treatment. The rest die within two minutes, three for the most resilient. Science will decide your fate, not I.”
