The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  “We had stolen a case of hand grenades, and someone had managed to buy half a dozen rifles from somewhere—probably from the Ukrainians, who were running a black market in food and could be counted on to do anything for the right price. I was one of those who broke into the storage hut where the petrol was kept. The plan was to burn the whole camp down, kill as many of the Germans as possible, and then scatter before reinforcements arrived.

  “I will never forget the moment I heard the first series of explosions. I expected to die in the next few seconds, but I have never known such joy. And then, all at once, the southern watchtowers shot up in flames, and I was part of a mob running for the antitank barriers. We didn’t think—we ran. To stand still was to die, so we ran, not looking to the right or left, not caring that the bullets were as thick as hornets and that men were dropping all around us, merely running. Our very souls were in our legs.

  “The antitank barriers were simply low concrete pylons with tangles of barbed wire strung between them. Our masters hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of a mass escape attempt; once in a while some poor devil, driven most of the way out of his mind by despair, would make a rush for the fence, but usually the Ukrainians with their machine guns would cut him down before he had covered thirty meters. The defenses were deemed adequate.

  “But not on that day. The watchtowers were burning, there were snipers in the windows of the barracks and the kitchen, and hand grenades seemed to be going off everywhere. The Ukrainians had other things to think about. I don’t suppose they managed to kill more than one in seven of us before we reached the outer barrier.

  “Of course, the first ones there became hopelessly tangled in the wire. They didn’t have to wait to be shot; those of us behind simply trampled them to death. We clambered over the bodies of our comrades, living and dead, just as if they were blocks of wood. The momentum was irresistible. Nothing could have stopped us—we hardly knew where we were or what we were doing. We were mad with desperation.

  “And when we were outside the camp—‘outside the camp’; the words themselves, had we breath to say them, would have sounded as unreal as ‘flying to heaven’—when we were outside, we ran. There were woods two, three hundred meters ahead, so we ran for them. No one stopped until a bullet found him or he dropped with exhaustion. The Germans would bring in reinforcements soon enough—we knew that. The Germans had dogs and flamethrowers, and the strength of men who had not had their lives bled away from them a drop at a time. So we ran for the covering darkness, scattering in as many directions as we could.

  “Perhaps six hundred out of a thousand lived to be free that first day and night. A year later, when the Russians finally came, I don’t suppose there were more than forty of us left. The winter, starvation, and Polish peasants who would sell a Jew to the Germans for ten zkotys and the satisfaction of doing God’s work—they saw to it that not many survived. And the soldiers, who would hunt us the way they might have hunted grouse, for the sport of the thing. And finally, and worst of all, Colonel Hagemann. We were among his first assignments in Poland, and within his limits he was a very effective officer.

  “But, as I have said. I was in Treblinka for ten months.”

  Leivick glanced down at the plate bearing his half-eaten dinner—the sight of it made him feel faintly sick. He picked up the napkin and used it to wipe his face, wondering why he was talking like this. The story had laid buried deep inside him all these years—what could he possibly gain by telling it now, and to Christiansen?

  “Would you have a cigarette?”

  Christiansen dug a pack out of his shirt pocket, shook out one cigarette for Leivick and then one for himself, and then lit them both with a paper match. His handsome, rather brutal face revealed nothing, neither sympathy nor distaste, not even annoyance—nothing except the simple fact that he understood what was being said to him. But he did, in fact, understand. That in itself was rare enough. That perhaps was reason enough.

  The cigarette was stronger than Leivick had expected and seemed to burn his tongue. He was even beginning to feel slightly dizzy. It was just that he was out of practice, of course; he had lost the habit during the war years, when tobacco had been an unimaginable luxury—it might as well have been ambergris. But this seemed the night for returning to old patterns.

  “I won’t impose on you by describing my experiences in that place,” he said, breathing out the stale white smoke, perfectly conscious that he was being less than fair. “Suffice it to say that I arrived at the railway siding with my whole family and the full moral burden of civilized Europe. When I crawled out, over the corpses and barbed wire, I took nothing with me except my life. I was psychologically equipped to survive—in that respect, I was more than a match for Hagemann. So, I survived.

  “That first night I found a great thicket of blackberries. It was too heavy to see into, so I crawled inside and slept on the muddy ground. I waited there all night. I didn’t care how badly I got scratched up. Sometimes I could hear a faint scream in the distance, more often the sound of rifle fire.

  “With the dawn, after I had eaten a few handfuls of berries—they weren’t quite ripe and by the end of the day I was doubled up with cramp, but they got me through and that was enough—I decided I couldn’t risk staying any longer in one place, so I was on the move again. I headed straight into the sun—I couldn’t think of anything to do except to try reaching the Russian lines. They were over six hundred kilometers east at that time, but there was no way I could have known. One direction was as good as another.

  “It was about seven-thirty that morning when I realized I was square in the middle of a German patrol area. The first time I heard a twig snap I threw myself to the ground in some high weeds and waited, my heart pounding inside my chest so that I thought I might die from the pain of it. They’ll kill me now, I thought to myself. In twenty minutes I’ll be dead. When I finally saw one of them, I had to stuff my hand into my mouth to keep from crying out.

  “He was alone, and he didn’t seem to like being outside on a steamy August morning. He held his rifle by the strap, letting the butt drag along in the soft earth. He was weary and bored and obviously thought the whole affair was a waste of time. Why should anyone be out in the woods chasing after a gang of runaway Jews? Why should anyone care?

  “Finally—and who would have believed such a thing could happen in the German army?—he sat down on the ground with his back against a tree, set his helmet down beside him, and lit a cigarette.” Leivick flourished his own, leaving a narrow circle of smoke hanging in the air. “He was—what is the expression the Americans use?—he was ‘goofing off.’

  “How long does it take someone to finish a cigarette? Three minutes? Four? I had exactly that much time to cross perhaps thirty meters of ground on my hands and knees. If I made a sound, if my sleeve brushed against a dead leaf. I was dead. If this man’s sergeant or one of his comrades came along, I was dead. If for any reason at all the poor devil turned his head, I was a corpse. On my hands and knees I crawled, like an animal. I think I must have been half mad, because I wasn’t afraid. I was going to kill this man—that was all I could think about.

  “When I was five meters away, I could smell the tobacco smoke. When I was three, I could bear him breathing. When my shoulder was almost touching the bark of the tree, I reached around, locked my hands together over his throat, and started to pull.

  “You, of course, know all about what it is like to strangle a man, don’t you, Mr. Christiansen. I suppose, like everything else, it loses some of its terror with repetition, but that was my first time. I leaned into that tree so that my arms held it and the German’s throat both, and I tried to squeeze them both down to nothing. I think I may actually have heard his neck break, but after all these years I can’t be sure. If I did, that was the only sound he made, but you should have seen his face when finally I could bring myself to let go. There was a little trickle of blood running down from his left ear. But, of course, I’m no
t forgetting you know all about that sort of thing.”

  He smiled, not at all unkindly, and ground out the cigarette, which had burned its way down almost to his fingers. Christiansen offered him another, simply by holding out the pack, but be shook his head. They might have been strangers, waiting together for the rain to stop.

  “He was only a boy. I don’t imagine he could have been more than seventeen. That fact registered itself on my brain, but it meant nothing. Years passed before I felt even a twinge of regret, or remembered that quite possibly he had known nothing of what was being done in his name. I stole his uniform—it was loose on me, can you imagine? And he was a slender lad. I stole his rifle, his boots, even his cigarettes. I left him where he was, dressed in my camp clothes, and I started to march east.

  “I passed two or three more soldiers—at a distance, fortunately—and I waved to them and went straight on. I never stopped until late that afternoon, by which time my guts felt as if they might burst, but by then the Germans were far behind me.

  “For a month I lived on what I could steal. The Poles were used to renegade Germans, and little disposed to argue with the barrel of an infantryman’s rifle. If I found a soldier alone, I killed him and took his ammunition and his hand grenades if he had any. Finally I crossed paths with the Resistance.

  “You had to buy your way in. I had a rifle, two hand grenades, and four boxes of cartridges—the Resistance was glad to have me. That was my introduction to the art of war, that autumn and winter with the partisans. In the spring, just as the weather began to turn hot, the Russians crossed the border into Poland. In June I was sitting in the field tent of a Major Govorov, drinking what passed for coffee and listening to the shortwave for news of the British and American landings at Normandy. We kissed each other and cried. We were as happy as children.”

  “And how does this bring us to Hagemann?”

  In the moment of silence that followed, Christiansen rose from his chair, as quietly as a specter, and took a fresh pack of cigarettes from the carton that was lying open on the chest of drawers. Leivick watched the massive shoulders hunch as the soft explosion of the match lighting glowed behind his cupped hands, and he found himself thinking, No one will ever catch this one with his back comfortably against a tree. Faglin was right to counsel discretion, and Faglin is not a timid soul. Some men are harder to kill than others.

  Because those were the choices. If Christiansen could not be persuaded to throw in his lot with them, they would have to kill him. For one thing, he would know too much.

  Because he would have to be told the truth about Hagemann. After all, they were asking him to restrain himself, to resist the temptation to take the next plane to Damascus—where, after all, Christiansen might fancy his chances of survival a shade more than the Mossad did; or his chances of survival might interest him less than his chances of success. He had to be persuaded that something of importance might be gained by waiting.

  And that object would never be achieved with a few short declarative sentences: “Hagemann presents a threat to us for this-and-this reason, and we need him alive because of these-and-these political and military considerations.” What would keep him from answering, “Why should I care about that? My business with Hagemann is personal—why should anything else matter to me? I won’t give up my revenge for an abstraction.”

  No, it couldn’t be managed that way. The reasons were good ones, good enough to satisfy any decent man, but they had to be made real to him. So he had to know everything.

  And on that, perhaps, might hang more lives than just his own.

  “I was in a position to discover a great many things while I was with the Russians,” Leivick said finally, when Christiansen had sat down again. Somehow it was impossible to talk to the man while he was towering over one like a patriotic monument. “I could speak German and English, a good bit of soldier’s Polish, and even it little French, and they had need of interpreters. Beyond that, the regimental political officer had sent a full report on me to Moscow, and it would seem I fit into certain plans for the future that were being concocted there. I was a Czech, and a lawyer with government experience. The Russians knew they were about to fall heir to the whole of Central Europe, and they were going to need collaborators to help them rule it. They had an interest in effecting my conversion.

  “Need I say more? I had no objections to calling myself a Dialectical Materialist, and I wanted to stay alive. The central thing to remember about the Communists is that they think anyone who isn’t for them is automatically against them and a fascist into the bargain. I had not the slightest inclination to end up lying in a ditch with a bullet through my head. I learned to speak Marxist jargon and let them believe anything they liked. The result was that I was trusted, up to a point.

  “I began to see that point on the horizon the day I let it be known that I had served with a partisan group which had come in contact with elements of the Fifth Brigade, Waffen-SS. Suddenly I found myself being interviewed in a farmhouse outside Lublin by a pair of grim-faced hoodlums from the NKVD who had been flown in from Moscow for no other purpose. We talked for three days. During the whole time I had no idea whether I was under arrest or not.

  “‘Did you ever capture any of them?’ they asked. ‘No, of course not,’ I lied. ‘The Resistance didn’t take prisoners. What could the Germans have told us that we didn’t already know better ourselves? The only time I ever saw a German soldier in custody was once after we had ambushed a small patrol outside of Czyzew, and he only lasted an hour. A farmboy with a personal grievance to settle cut his throat.’ ‘Are they still deployed in that sector?’ ‘No.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘We stopped seeing that particular sleeve patch on the tunics of dead infantrymen.’ ‘When did they withdraw?’ ‘It’s difficult to say. Sometime after the winter, I should think.’

  “Three days they kept me at it. I never knew there were so many ways of asking the same set of questions. We would sit around a kitchen table, and they would scribble little notes back and forth to each other. Once I summoned up enough courage to ask them why they were so curious about this one unit. ‘Merely routine intelligence reconstruction, Comrade. We like to know the terrain.’ And then the two of them exchanged a look that would have peeled paint. After that I left the questions to them.

  “One of the greatest gifts a man can possess is a capacity for telling convincing lies. If a lie is to hold up it has to be both detailed and consistent. It is not enough if it is like the truth—it must be the truth, only slightly deflected. One has to be able to believe it oneself.

  “I will never be sure, but I think during those three days I came several times within an eyelash of disappearing into some NKVD dungeon. I think perhaps the only reason I am alive today is because I managed to convince my inquisitors not only that I knew nothing worth knowing but that I hadn’t a suspicion that there was anything to know.

  “‘Did you ever hear anything concerning the Fifth Brigade’s activities after leaving your sector? Any gossip in camp—that sort of thing?’ ‘No.’ ‘Don’t you find that a little strange? How do you explain such uncharacteristic silence?’ ‘I am a Czech Jew. Need I say more?’ I remember I grinned defiantly into the brute’s race. The Russians are very touchy about anti-Semitism—on the one hand they think we’re all Trotskyites, and on the other they think they are being anti-Party if they show it. ‘I speak a little Polish, enough for work purposes but not enough to make listening to long personal reminiscences very comfortable. Besides, the Poles would never entirely trust me.’ That half-lie probably saved my life.

  “Because, as it happens, I had heard a few rumors—nothing very specific. But how was it to my advantage to confess knowledge of such things? In wartime it is dangerous to be the bearer of secrets.

  “I am not now laying claim to more than the casual fund of speculation that is any fighting unit’s common property in wartime. We too wondered what had happened to the Fifth Brigade. They were exhausted, of course, and dow
n to a shadow of their full operational strength. But it was not the usual practice to reinforce such units, generally they were simply allowed to bleed to death. So we were surprised when suddenly this one unit was withdrawn instead.

  “The most popular theory—and the one, as it happened, closest to the truth—was that their commander, your General von Goltz of blessed memory, had somehow wangled his way back into Himmler’s good graces and was happily out of the combat area. The hot topic of speculation was what the General had done to earn his ticket to safety.

  “The one thing we did know, although its significance escaped us at the time, was that von Goltz’s departure from Poland was preceded by a rash of arrests. The northwestern part of the country was virtually cleared of certain categories of technical personnel—chemists, pharmacists, brewers, the entire surviving faculty of the medical college at Claiystok.”

  “Brewers?” Christiansen raised his eyebrows, which had the effect of making him seem to come awake with a start. “What would the SS want with brewers. Were they thirsty?”

  It was impossible to tell from his expression whether he was making a joke or not.

  “Brewers know about mixing vats and steam pipes and cooling chambers—the whole apparatus of high-temperature chemistry on an industrial scale. And the SS was in the manufacturing business, and they needed slave labor with the proper qualifications. What they had in mind was a trifle more complicated than beer, but the principle was much the same.”

  Knitting his hands together tightly across his stomach, Leivick wished he had another cigarette. He was conscious of a certain excitement, even a certain pleasure in his grotesque narrative, and it made him feel uneasy. He did not like reducing any part of that vast collective suffering to the neat rhetoric of a detective story, but somehow it seemed unavoidable, as if to understand the thing and to trivialize it were indistinguishable acts.