Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  At this point he leveled a finger at me, called me an errand boy and shouted that he knew damned well what the wall meant.

  “Enlighten me, Herr Frank.”

  “You know fucking well what I mean, and what you mean, and what everyone from Hitler down means. The Jews are going to have to disappear.”

  I suggested he inform me precisely what he meant.

  His face was an inch from mine. His breath was foul. His eyes were blazing. “Disappear. What the hell does a Jew-free Europe mean, Dorf? Where are we sending them? To the moon?”

  This time I did not bait him. He was closer to an ultimate truth than I care to admit to myself, or at least to articulate—even to the vassal king of Poland.

  “Maybe I have a stronger stomach than you,” Frank bellowed. “Maybe I don’t pussyfoot the way Heydrich does. But I told my men not long ago, it might be a problem to shoot or poison the three and a half million Jews in Poland, but we’ll sooner or later take measures that will lead to their annihilation.”

  “I know you did. It was against orders.”

  “Orders, shit.”

  But he had given me a start. We use code words so often, walk around ultimate solutions, suggest things to one another without spelling them out, that Hans Frank’s blunt words staggered me. To fortify myself, I fell back on something Eichmann has taught me—if in doubt, obey. Mass murder is not a pleasant prospect. But what if it is not truly murder, but a protective measure, a prophylactic against contamination? I kept these rationalizing thoughts to myself. Such subtleties would be lost on a Hans Frank.

  He was complaining now—collapsed in his great carved throne of a chair—that he’d be forced to do our dirty work, and he didn’t like the idea. When the time came, he said, he’d “rub our noses in it.”

  I could not resist taunting him about his bloody boasting—and his curious insistence on “justice, legal methods.” Like a patient schoolteacher, I quoted Heydrich to him. Old notions of justice are finished in the Third Reich. We, the police arm, decide what is just, what is unjust.

  “The face is the face of Dorf, but the voice is the voice of Heydrich,” he said.

  I let him think I took this as a compliment. We drank cognac, and he tried to be conciliatory. I’d thrown some fear into him. He was to keep his mouth shut about “annihilations,” wall in the ghetto, get the Jews to do the work, the registering of their own people, and work out arrangements to accept hundreds of thousands more Jews.

  He grunted his agreement, and invited me to ride around the ghetto in his staff car.

  The Warsaw ghetto is a depressing, filthy place, evidence that the Jews are incapable of keeping their own house in order. The streets are rubble-strewn, littered with garbage. To my astonishment, I even saw two corpses, lying in the gutter, unattended. Beggars, or homeless wanderers, Frank explained. Perhaps the feebleminded. The Jews, allegedly famous for their close family ties, their charitable interest in their own poor, are falling apart as a community, he said disgustedly.

  And yet, I am forced to admit that a curious vitality survives in the gloomy surroundings. Peddlers hawk wares from pushcarts. Draymen drive wagons through the cobbled streets. Old men enter synagogues, deep in conversation, their hands waving. Women push baby carriages. Stores, while dingy and ill-stocked, seem to be doing business. Against my better judgment, I have to conclude there is a life force in these people. Perhaps it is why they are so dangerous.

  “The damned fools go on as if nothing’s happening,” Frank sneered. “They’ll learn.”

  Then a curious incident occurred.

  As the staff car turned a corner, impeded for a moment by a wagonload of lumber, I saw a tallish man in a dark suit and a battered black Homburg cross the street in front of us. He carried what looked like a physician’s satchel.

  For a moment I thought it was Dr. Weiss, the man who had treated my family, and later taken care of Marta. I last saw him but two years ago, when he came to plead for his son.

  The man did not notice me. He was accompanied by another man, more humbly clothed, and they were conversing animatedly. They entered a building with a sign on it reading Judenrat—the Jewish Council of Warsaw—and I lost sight of them.

  An amazing coincidence—if the man actually was Dr. Weiss. Of course, I have no business with him any more. He means nothing to me. He is part of the past. A rather decent man, as I recall, but a naive one, with a stubborn wife who refused to get out of Germany when she could have.

  I asked Frank if he knew the man with the satchel.

  He shrugged. “I don’t keep track of every kike in Warsaw. He looks like one of the council members in that fancy hat. Damned lazy bunch. They’d better get organized, or we’ll have a few shootings to move them along. Dorf, I’ve shot more than my share of council members in the small towns, when they drag their heels. That’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it? No old concepts of justice. Just the noose and the gun, right?”

  I didn’t answer. For a while I could not shake the image of the tall man. Probably it was not Dr. Weiss. And if it was, what does that matter to me? He does not seem to be suffering unduly.

  Rudi Weiss’ Story

  A handful of Jews survived the horror of Warsaw. Some live here in Israel, and in fact, a woman who lives near Kibbutz Agam, Eva Lubin, knew my father and my Uncle Moses. She was a resistance fighter, participated in meetings of the council, before it lost all credibility with the Jews and was replaced by the fighting units. Eva told me a great deal of what happened.

  A man named Dr. Menahem Kohn was the council leader. He was, according to Eva, a conciliator, a man who would do precisely what the Nazis told him.

  My father, after his defiant argument with the German doctor over the use of toxic drugs to treat typhus—remedies that killed the ill in awful pain—had something of the reputation of a resister. Nothing, at that time, could have been farther from the truth. He remained a cautious man, interested in maintaining some level of medical service, despite terrible crowding, lack of sanitation, shortages of food, heat and medicines. People succumbed daily in the hospital and around it. He and his brother Moses and the nurses watched helplessly. The children were the worst—dozens of them crammed onto lice-ridden wards, huddled, fearful, their eyes growing large, their bodies gaunt, forever crying for food.

  That particular day, Eva remembers, there was a great deal of discussion about smuggling, which Dr. Kohn and most of the other elders regarded as a high crime.

  A man named Zalman, a plain workman, representing the Jewish trade unions, had begun the discussion by commenting about the wall. “Eleven miles of it,” he said. “To keep us in, and the Poles out. It’s a prison, that’s all.”

  My father agreed. “Warsaw will be the supreme ghetto of all time, I am afraid. It will get worse.”

  There was some argument about the work on the wall, Kohn insisting that Zalman’s workers deliver more labor, more manpower.

  Zalman tugged at his cap. “Not so easy, doctor. A lot of them know once that wall goes up, we’re locked in. No trade, no jobs outside.”

  Kohn leveled a finger at him. “My friend, in Reszow, a Jewish council exactly like this one failed to deliver the workers quota of men. The council members were hanged publicly. We must cooperate with the Germans. We have no choice. We are what we have always been—victims.”

  “I can’t tell that to my union brothers,” Zalman said.

  “You had better,” Dr. Kohn said.

  My father and my uncle were silent for a while. A ponderous gloom descended over the meeting of the Judenrat.

  “We must stop moaning and groaning about this ghetto concept,” Dr. Kohn continued. “At least it is something we understand, something we have lived with for centuries. We will be allowed our schools, our hospitals, our communal associations. The SS commandant himself has promised me. You see, gentlemen, they need us—skilled labor, trade, the Polish economy.”

  Again silence.

  Then my fathe
r asked, “For how long will they need us?”

  “I beg your pardon, Dr. Weiss?”

  “Dr. Kohn, I ask how long will they need us? How long will several million poor Jews mean anything to them? In the long run we may prove a burden. Then …”

  Dr. Kohn shook his head. “We have no choice but to cooperate in every way possible. Provide work details. Clean up the city. Keep the factories running.”

  Moses interrupted. “I hear these work details are not quite what they sound like. Men are beaten to death, shot, for mild infractions.”

  Zalman nodded. “It’s true. I’ve been on some of them. We aren’t treated like workmen, but like slaves.”

  “But we have absolutely no choice but to obey orders,” Dr. Kohn said solemnly. “We cannot resist. We must not resist. There will be no smuggling, no black-market operations, no attempts at sabotage. We can only pray for things to get better.”

  Eva Lubin, who was at the meeting, remembers my Uncle Moses whispering to my father, “From his mouth and to God’s ears.”

  In October, three months after Anna was sent to the mental hospital at Hadamar, my mother received a form letter from the hospital. It was brief, and it was signed by a “Director of Services.”

  A strange letter. It was headed “Charitable Foundation for Mental Care, Hadamar, Germany.”

  It stated that Anna Weiss, aged eighteen, had died of “pneumonia and complications.” No date was given. They had taken the liberty of cremating her body to prevent the spread of infection. At some later date, Mrs. Weiss would be informed of the location of her daughter’s grave.

  Mama became hysterical. She wept for days. She was inconsolable. Anna had been the family baby, the brightest of us, the child with the greatest love of life. It was inconceivable to my mother that she could die this way—with no loved one near her, with her mind shattered, her hopes destroyed. She had been able to bear Karl’s imprisonment—after all, he was alive. Even my vanishing had been understandable. But Anna’s death was like a knife wound in her side that would never stop bleeding.

  “It is my fault,” she wept to Inga. “I asked that she be sent away.”

  “No, Mama,” Inga said. “We felt it best for her … she could not live a normal life.”

  The women blamed themselves. From the Helms family, next door, there were clucks of sympathy, but no more. Inga heard them muttering that Anna had brought it on herself—running into the streets on New Year’s Eve.

  In the weeks following Anna’s death, my mother often seemed to be on the verge of losing her sanity. But whenever her hysteria would be at its worse, and Inga would grow concerned about her, that strength she held in reserve would surface, and she would force herself to maintain her balance by recalling Anna, Karl, me, my father.

  “We will be together again,” she would say. “I know it. We will remember Anna. When Karl and Rudi have children, they will name a child for her. Inga, do you remember what a tease she was? How she used to play with Rudi? The games they invented?”

  “I remember. We won’t forget our Anna.”

  I did not learn of precisely how my sister died until several years later, when Inga unearthed the evidence.

  Anna was one of 50,000 victims—Jew and Gentile—of the Nazi “euthanasia” program.

  It was not a sanitarium she had been taken to at Hadamar, but one of the first gassing installations, a model for the structures later used to kill millions of Jews.

  There were twelve of these places like Hadamar, and the state made the decision as to who should enter the gas chambers—without consulting the families of the doomed.

  In this manner, cripples, the feebleminded, the retarded, paralytics, and so on were driven to these murder mills, stripped, dressed in paper wrappers, and gassed to death with the exhaust from huge internal-combustion engines.

  These early gassings began sometime in 1938 and continued for a few years. A great deal of secrecy surrounded them, but word seeped out. In a sense, they were rehearsals for what was to become the pattern for the extermination of the Jews, and many others, a few years later.

  In my research, I learned that when comfirmation of the killing of these “useless” people reached the Vatican, strong protests were made to Berlin. Protestant churchmen also raised their voices. Idiots, Mongoloids, cretins, the crippled, were also children of God, the clergymen insisted. And so the “euthanasia” program was quietly phased out. But the plans were never set aside.

  When the Jews were gassed by the millions there were no protests from the honorable clergy. Not a word. Except from a few brave men. One might count them on the fingers of one hand.

  I find now that I must write about these matters as blandly and coldly as possible. Perhaps to keep myself from a lifetime of weeping over the murder of my beloved sister.

  Erik Dorf’s Diary

  Berlin

  November 1940

  An anonymous caller informed my office yesterday, November 15, that a certain priest is delivering sermons aimed at subverting our racial policies.

  The man’s name is Bernard Lichtenberg, and he is provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. He is a plain, gray-haired fellow, in his middle sixties. I know little about his background, but what has impelled him to this rash course, I cannot imagine. The vast majority of churches, Catholic and Protestant, have either supported us or have been discreetly neutral.

  Accordingly, I attended an evening service at St. Hedwig’s. (I am not a Catholic, nor have I been a practicing Christian of any kind since my childhood. My parents were Lutheran, but my father had small use for organized religions.)

  The church was less than a third filled. Perhaps word had gotten around about Lichtenberg’s anti-state commentaries. Indeed, as his sermon progressed, following the mass, at least a half-dozen people got up and left.

  The elderly priest was treading on dangerous ground. I have nothing personal against the man, but anyone undermining our policies has to be stopped. Those are the orders from the top.

  “Let us pray in silence,” Father Lichtenberg said, “for the children of Abraham.”

  It was at this point that four or five people left. Others, quite obviously, held their heads up, and did not pray at all.

  “Outside,” the priest went on, “the synagogue is burning, and that, too, is a house of God. In many of your homes, an inflammatory newspaper is circulated, warning Germans that if they exhibit false sentimentality to Jews, they commit treason. This church and this priest will pray for the Jews, for they suffer.”

  More people got up and left.

  “Do not let yourself be led astray by such unchristian thoughts, but act according to the clear command of Christ: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

  I waited until the service had ended, and then walked down the nave and into the sacristy. I was in civilian dress, feeling it a bit inappropriate to come to the mass in uniform. (Although many of our men are good Catholics or devout Protestants, and attend services in uniform all the time.)

  Father Lichtenberg was having his vestments removed by an aged sacristan. I approached him and showed him my identity card and badge.

  “Captain Erik Dorf,” he read. “How can I help you, my son?”

  “I listened to your sermon with much interest.”

  “And did you learn anything from it?”

  “I learned that you are a kind-hearted man, but you are gravely misinformed.”

  He looked at me with tired, sensitive eyes. I wished that I did not have to confront him. “I know what is happening to the Jews. And so do you, Captain.”

  Rather than argue with him, I walked around the sacristy table, weighing my words. “Father, Pope Pius some years ago concluded a concordat with the Führer. The Vatican has said many times that it regards Germany as Christian Europe’s last bastion against Bolshevism.”

  “That does not justify the torture and murder of innocents, Captain.”

  “No one is being tortured. I know of no murder of inno
cents.”

  “I have seen the Jews beaten and defiled in the streets. I have seen them sent off to prison for no reason—”

  “They are enemies of the Reich. We are engaged in a war, Father.”

  “Against armies? Or against defenseless Jews?”

  “I must appeal to you to be more temperate in your remarks, Father. Other churchmen have found no problem in reconciling their faith with us. In Bremen, last week, a new church was dedicated in the Führer’s name.”

  He would not be sidetracked. “I have heard stories from our soldiers returned from Poland,” the priest said. “They go beyond the mere transportation of so-called alien races.”

  “Confessions from battle-weary young men? You must take those stories lightly.”

  “But as a priest I must listen, and give absolution. I will follow my conscience in these matters.”

  He was a stubborn old fellow, decent enough, but blind to our aims, our goals. I bowed politely and told him not to let his conscience get him in trouble.

  He thanked me and turned away. Then I heard him say to the sacristan, “Such an intelligent and charming young man. Our gift to the new age.”

  I caught the sarcasm in his voice, and I made a mental note to put him under surveillance.

  Rudi Weiss’ Story

  Eventually my mother was arrested and sent to Warsaw.

  I think she was almost glad to have the ax fall. Although she might have remained some months longer in Karl’s old studio, she was deteriorating under the loss of Anna, the absence of her sons and her husband. Perhaps she was “denounced” by someone in the Helms family. Inga swears her parents said nothing, although they made no secret of their hatred of my mother.

  In any case, she was arrested in a general sweep of that quarter of the city, put on a freezing cattle car with hundreds of other Berlin Jews, most of them women and children, and sent to Warsaw.

  My father was working in the children’s ward of the Jewish Hospital when he learned that a Berta Weiss, claiming to be his wife, had arrived at the Umschlagplatz, near the main rail station in the ghetto.