by Daniel Kraus
Our party was guided through a series of locked gates. It was slow going; I examined the top levels of fencing. Medieval spikes long enough to stick a man groin-to-gullet rose from among needles so fine the Defier of Death the Astonishing Mr. Stick shuddered. Machine guns lurked like dragons inside watchtowers, implying a history of escape attempts. I could not make sense of it. A camp, even one inside which inhabitants were concentrated, was surely a school of sorts, and though I agreed that school was no fun at all, it was hardly worth hurling oneself against razored, electrified fences.
Before leading us into the courtyard, Ziereis offered a few private words to Himmler. His apologetic tone indicated that it was an especially hectic day for a surprise inspection—though still, of course, the greatest of honors and rarest of pleasures!
Perhaps because the sight was so difficult to believe, I tried instead to believe the noises. This was a lumberyard, and the clacking was blocks of wood against opposite blocks. It was, however, bone to bone: knobby elbows knocking against other elbows; ball-and-socket shoulders rattling against those of brother huddlers; swollen knees cracking like billiard balls, one to the next, a skittering chain reaction across a pocketless table. There were cries as well, sobs, shouts, and arguments, but they were as listless as smoke.
The courtyard was thronged with naked men, hundreds of them, even in their indecent multitudes too weak to defy their captors. Narrow-waisted and flared-hipped, the men resembled lithe women in winter vests, except that the vests were their own ribcages, large and overhanging concave abdomens. Their nipples were apple seeds, their genitals stems, their buttocks a T-bone chewed of meat. The fortunate ones leaned against a wall painted with the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, while the unluckier plodded about on flat feet, twig-arms outstretched against crowd currents that might take their rickety skeletons to the dirt.
I was pale; they were paleness.
I was bony; they were bones.
I was deadish; they were dead.
I made the first motion of a lunge toward the wall, but Himmler had me by the arm and guided me, firmly but gently, so that I might keep apace as our group parted the charnel horde. Guards maintained a ten-foot lee between us and the rabble; it was our casual ambling, I saw, that generated the tidal ebbs that sent bone against bone. Ziereis pointed at underfoot excrement and described the process of Desinfektion, a bit overdue, or so I gathered, due to the recent high influx of prisoners.
Oh, Reader, my callow credulity! Why, wondered I, were these men so skinny? Had the Reich hidden from its public a consumptive plague? If so, why were Nazi officers allowed to share the malignant air? Himmler, though, was untroubled. He posed polite questions and nodded at the replies. Because the words resembled English, I understood Ziereis as he proudly listed upon fingers the diverse origins of his inmates: Holland, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia.
We took his word for it. Skeletons all look the same.
The liced and typhous masses discharged a sour stench that had several of our party pressing handkerchiefs to their faces. Ziereis conceded the odor and gestured toward an archway. As we moved, a horse-drawn cart filled with potatoes began to creak through the courtyard. The starved fell upon it, eyeballs popping, fingers clawing, jaws gnashing. I hurried through the arch, was dipped into shadow, and was glad to have my screaming eyes rinsed clean of this vision of a scrabbling, gibbering hell, worse than any nightmared by Bosch or Goya.
Shimmering sunlight, goofball in its gaiety, paved our passage into a quieter industrial villa: roadways, sidewalks, brick outbuildings, chugging smoke stacks, and rows of barracks painted a mild green and accented with flower beds. Prisoners were visible down the road marching in lines but were, to my great relief, draped in striped livery that concealed any physical unnaturalities.
Bachmayer, or more accurately his German shepherds, took the lead. We strolled down the lane, and then, to indulge the straining canines, cut across a field of blowing grass. It was a long walk but a gem of an afternoon, and these Nazi officials were, after all, good Aryans, and delighted in the völkisch pleasures of watching a rabbit dart through the heather and a hawk circle overhead.
The chatter became carefree. Himmler showed Ziereis a photograph of a pigtailed little girl, and Ziereis, at Himmler’s encouragement, displayed the germinal fruits of English lessons.
“Will I watch you in Berlin, Reichsführer . . . at zwei—at two mornings—”
“Will I see you in two mornings,” corrected Himmler. “Very, very good.”
“. . . when der Führer will initiate the new zeppelin?”
“Inaugurate,” corrected Himmler. “Your English is coming along splendidly. But nein. I have other plans that must take precedence.”
Several more sentences were swapped before they switched back into German, Ziereis perspiring in relief, but I’d heard enough to send my ego a-spinning. Did Himmler’s “other plans” revolve around me? Forget that swarm of filthy scroungers; these high-rankers could be my colleagues. I observed the swagger of a stupendous cypress and wondered if it might be the Yggdrasil, right there, planted before me for my Aryan convenience.
At length we reached the crest of what I would identify, years after the fact, as Wienergraben Quarry, a tiered canyon dug 150 feet into the hillside. Trunk-sized blocks of granite cut from the stratiform terrain were lowered with rope and pulley, and then, to my disbelief, strapped to prisoner backs. That their brittled spines did not snap was one marvel; another was the two hundred stone steps they had to climb to reach the hill upon which we stood. Some collapsed to their knees beneath their loads, causing the next in line to fall, then the next, and the next.
More rabbits, thought I, darting from predator hawks.
Bachmayer chuckled at the slapstick. His dogs woofed froth as survivors of the climb began shuffling past us. Beneath loads of granite, their shirts had purpled with blood. In some cases, the blood had soaked the identifying icons sewn upon their shirts: yellow stars, brown triangles, red circles, and tragic combinations. Just frequent enough to be noticed were the pink triangles indicating alleged homosexuals. I thought of Otto Rahn—no, to hell with Rahn. I thought of von Lüth. He, no friend of Himmler, might one day find his sensational suits swapped for soiled stripes, his grizzly size winning him the heaviest cuts of rock.
If I chose hawk, would that make von Lüth the rabbit?
The remainder of the inspection I recall only through objects. Tedious ledgers filled with names, half of them struck. Wooden beams gnawed by rope burns. Examination tables grooved with drains. When the sun began to impale itself with treetops, Himmler and his posse were offered water, and they paused outside of a garbage depot to drink it. It took my distraught brain five minutes to notice the homogeneity of the refuse. Dunes of shoes. Mesas of clothing. Crags of spectacles. A promontory of gold teeth.
“Herr Finch.” His voice at my shoulder. “Are you ready?”
It took ten or twenty years, nothing to Zebulon Finch, to turn toward the Reichsführer-SS. Beside him, Ziereis was gesturing at a brick building that was flat, long, and pale of paint, with mold streaking from iron-barred windows like acid tears. It was as still as a crocodile. I could lie about anything, anything in the world, thought I, except this.
“I am not ready. No, I am not.”
Himmler smiled with parental patience.
“Would you turn away? Like Solomon from Gød?” He indicated the sidewalk. “The guards call this the Road to Heaven. Does that not inspire you? Remind you of Christ, suffering the whips of Pilate, carrying the cross that was both his death and life?”
My eyes traced the Road to Heaven to the building. Quiet as a church, thick as a hymnal. If I prayed to Him, would He appear?
“Gød?” My voice broke; I was a child, back in a pew with Abigail Finch. “Jesus?”
Himmler, close enough to embrace, whispered.
“There is a bunker in Nürnberg. You do not know of it because Udo von Lüth does not know of it. It is insulated, waterpr
oof. Reinforced against firebombing. Inside are the reclaimed treasures of the First Reich, including the Holy Lance, the spear of the blind Roman Longinus, who stabbed Jesus on his cross to ensure that he was dead. Jesus’s blood flowed and cured Longinus’s vision; thus Longinus, an Aryan, became the first Christian. The apostles, too, were not Jews but Gentiles; the story that Aryan tribes were exiled from Israelite settlements is false. Mary and Joseph, themselves descendants of King Herod’s Aryan cavalrymen, beget a son, he too an Aryan, named Jesus.”
Now Himmler did touch me, a gentle hand to my shoulder.
“So please, call to Jesus if you’d like, for he is your brother. If you prefer, call to his torturers, for they are your aunts and your uncles. Your family is all around you. Perhaps this is difficult to believe for one who has been alone for so long. But who, I ask you, feels the most alone? Kings, Herr Finch. Do you wish to be a king? It is said that whoever holds the Holy Lance holds the destiny of mankind. Constantine held it; Charlemagne held it; Hitler holds it. Count Ferdinand used to dip the lance in wine so that he could drink the blood of Christ.”
Jesus, Gød, Aryan, Jew—I had no use for any of them. But to feel blood in my body again, any blood at all?
My back hitched, though I had no tears to cry.
Down the Road to Heaven we glided. We entered the building, shooed from a door window two ogling SS, and peered through the glass. Inside was a mob of perhaps 150 naked prisoners even less capable than the quarrymen. They were old. Or young. Or crippled. Or lesioned. Some blinked at the nozzles attached to pipe traceries as if expecting a cold shower blast, while others crouched as if expecting a punch, urine spattering to cement and streaking to meet other furious streams.
We’d seen two soldiers on the roof. They wore gas masks and carried canisters of what Ziereis had called Zyklon B. Once dropped into compartments, the chemical would fill the room with cyanide. There was a Henry Ford precision to how each Nazi fulfilled his role, and I waited for the punctual drop, the expedient cloud, the prompt panic.
But then, a curious thing. Himmler beckoned a guard, who produced a key ring and undid the lock. I braced for the hinges to shriek, but the door rolled aside like vapor. Neither was the shower room loud; a shush of prayers rustled at us like autumn leaves. As in the courtyard and quarry, the bodies inside were but rough-hewn marionettes. The heads, in comparison, were inflated caricatures, each white eye the gleaming ore of the infinite, each face so taut with starvation that it appeared to grin at its own mined riches.
“Fifty-one,” said Himmler. “That was your number.”
I detected the smoke I’d seen issuing from Mauthausen chimneys, and at last noticed that it had a peculiar smell, one not altogether different than the Hitlerjugend book burning. We were all burned books in the end, realized I, skin of paper, flesh of flame, ideas of ash.
“Choose fifty-one of them,” said Himmler, “and I will see that they are deported without harm. We will test your friend’s theory. We will see what happens when we even the score.”
Dear Gød, thought I, but now I was certain—Gød wasn’t here, he’d been afraid to come. There was a revolver in my chest and a razor in my forearm. The former I would never reach in time, but the latter I could. Even so, what would I slice? The throat of this villain? The throats of as many prisoners as possible? Or my own eyes? Yes, that was best. I shut my lids so that I might preview blindness—unlike Longinus, unhealed by Jesus’s blood—but even in the dark I saw these Jews, these Communists, these men too strong of principal or too lame of leg.
“Herr von Lüth was right about one thing,” Himmler continued. “You will go far in the Reich. But first you must open your eyes. Here is the test I promised. To be Aryan is to be a king of men. A king’s job is difficult. Every day, choices. You must begin making them. Hurry, now. Night is upon us.”
Fifty-one of 150 was over one third of these people. That was worth something, wasn’t it? If I wanted a go at Hitler—and oh, Reader, I did; my wrath roared, for the camps represented an end to humanity that even I, an inhuman, could not stomach—I would need to pick my fifty-one, right now, and without emotion. Who, then, to choose? The eldest, so as to archive their libraries of experience? Or the youngest, hoping for future avengers? Neither plan was any good; I was proof that age had no correlation to goodness. Life rampaged as it would, creating saviors or genocidists with a roll of the dice.
I became neither hawk nor rabbit, but the grass over which they raced.
That did not mean I had grit enough to look Death in the face. I pointed without seeing, said “That one,” and when they dragged forth a man like luggage, limbs flopping like stockings caught outside the buckles, and asked for confirmation, I roared, “Yes, yes, that one!” I kept going—that one, that one, that one—until Himmler pulled my sleeve to tell me we’d exceeded the number. Still I kept pointing at others who, though not present, needed saving as well: Rigby and the OSS, who had no inkling of what they were up against; von Lüth, who did not fully comprehend the Reich which he served; and myself, whose enfeebled mind had nearly succumbed to the worst of ambitions.
I did as Himmler said and opened my eyes, and the world I found was as von Lüth had described, minus the mysticism: Blood and Soil, no alchemy betwixt them. Evil was not a Norbertus Hole. It was, rather, a chain of dull paperwork, a taskmaster’s accounting, a grunt’s drowsy acquiescence. Nazis were far worse than evil. They were ordinary, men who groused about supervisors and stomached the irks and ires of daily life until, presented with a stick, they picked it up with a child’s sense of banal cruelty.
Perhaps I’d been the same. Well, Dearest Reader, no longer. Even if Mauthausen was a branch upon the Yggdrasil—the only ladder I’d ever be offered with which to climb out of this world—I would refuse it. Indeed, if given the chance, I’d chop it down and burn it, my dead flesh impervious to slashing wood chips, my dry eyes invulnerable to jetting sawdust. I could feel the cold, approving, but cautious stare of the Fifty-One. Who can say if Himmler kept his word and deported them? All that is certain is that they saved me, gave me a fighting chance for my soul, and thus they would always be there, judging me, waiting for me to prove that I’d been worth it.
Before the shower room door was closed and locked, before the rooftop soldiers could drop their blue-green crystals, I disenthralled the razor blade from my arm and dropped it inside the shower. Maybe a prisoner, in this group or the next, would find it and use it. It was, at least, a tool; if one were lucky, a weapon. My lips, too, pulled back into an emaciated grin. Weapons, I was coming to believe, were the prayer books of the powerless.
Eventually I translated those words painted upon the courtyard wall.
Arbeit Macht Frei.
Work shall make you free.
It might. I had so much of it to do—nothing less than kill that bastard Adolf Hitler—and only two mornings left to do it.
XV.
BERLINERS SNIFFED THE ELECTRICAL STORM of war rolling over the Rhine, the Carpathians, the Black Forest, the English Channel. The German serfs that had for months amazed me with fortitude now humped about beneath an invisible lash. The Gestapo were on tenterhooks, and though I needed to run, I dared not. Thrice I was asked to show my Ahnenpass, and thrice the document’s particulars were copied down for later investigation. I did not care. In twenty-four hours, one way or the other, I’d be gone.
Himmler had sent me back to Berlin the next morning with Kuppisch to gather my belongings (I’d upheld Himmler’s belief that I owned a case full of oracular orbs, moon-cycle tchotchkes, and various spiritual bric-a-brac), after which I could continue to Schloss Wewelsburg, where I would become a resident, or, if you were feeling less charitable, a permanent exhibit. I had no intention of honoring the agreement. Meixelsperger needed to know that the time had come to mobilize her troops and prepare the coups, so I begged the bulldog to go fast, then faster. But road damage, worse even than it had been one day earlier, nearly cost me the sun. The bakery, fretted
I, might close before I could get there. Funny how the act of bagging up unsold Gugelhupfen and Rustikales brot might change the course of world history.
My life had been too full of wrong turns, my death even more so. This time I would head in a straight line. I entered von Lüth’s building, bolted for the back exit so as to foil Kuppisch, climbed a fence, and headed straight for the book-burning plaza, only to louse it up by turning my head to scan for Kuppisch, thereby colliding with a man. Beneath his damp, dirty clothes was a strong build; he only swayed, but I ended up on all fours. When I stood, I found swastikas pressed into my palms like stigmata—coins, which had been tossed all about the pavement.
It was the same street preacher I’d caught spewing anti-Nazi venom at the Hitlerjugend rally! My shoulders dropped, and with them, the coins from my palms. He, the luckiest turncoat alive, had not heeded my advice to desert Berlin. The eyeball not tucked beneath his pirate patch widened, and his cleft chin fell to allow a grin of recognition. He shook his rain-bloated Bible.
“Pray with me!”
Had it been six seconds since last we’d spoken, or six months?
I attempted to sidestep, but he, as always, shuffled in tandem.
“You run, but not from Gød. Sun of His goodness lights your path. But do not forget they who move in shadow.”
“Let me pass,” snarled I.
“When the führer-beasts come, faith will come alive.”
I’d have espoused Himmler’s theory of the Aryan Jesus if I thought it might jar the preacher from his doomed path. Instead, I shoved him. His gray mop tussled, his backbone rang against a lamp post.
“Quiet!” hissed I. “Do you have any idea what awaits you?”
“They, the lions,” said he. “We, the Daniels.”
