Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  “After the singing, children,” Marta said. “You know the rules—singing, cleaning up the table, cleaning the kitchen, then presents. Rewards only after duty.”

  “Just like the army,” Kurt added. “Your father did his duties at the front, and now he is rewarded with a long vacation.”

  “Quite correct,” I said. “Just as Mama got this present—this beautiful piano—for being so brave while I was away.”

  Kurt, who has always had an eye for design and quality, ran his hand over the burnished mahogany surface of the Bechstein. “It’s magnificent. They say the tone of these Bechsteins improves with age.”

  Marta played a few chords, reveling in the sounds. “I was stunned when the movers came with it. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

  Peter blurted out, “And it didn’t cost a penny!”

  “Really?” asked Kurt.

  “It was sitting, unplayed, in that clinic on Groningstrasse, in an upstairs room,” I explained. “The physician who runs the place, Dr. Heinzen, knows of my interest in music, and so he offered it to me.”

  “Offered?” Kurt looked puzzled.

  “In the interest of party unity. I was helpful in arranging for the good doctor to take the clinic over.”

  Marta frowned. “I think it could use a tuning.”

  “Oh,” Kurt joked. “Tuning a piano is no problem. Getting one is.”

  My uncle seemed to have some fixation on the piano and kept asking questions about it. He is quite naive about the process by which the party rewards good workers, high-ranking officers. Peter suddenly blurted out—he must have overheard a conversation between me and Marta—that the piano once belonged to the Jewish doctor who lived over the clinic.

  Kurt was about to ask another question, when Marta clapped her hands and said, “Intermission! Time to open presents!”

  The children flew to the Christmas tree and began to tear their boxes apart, ripping paper, strewing ribbons on the floor. There was a pair of live white mice for Peter, in a huge wooden cage, something he had asked for, since he was very much interested in biology. Laura got some special gifts I had found in Russia—a Ukrainian rag doll, and one of those clever “Petrushka” dolls, a series of wooden figures each smaller than the one before, so they stack into a single form. They were both delighted.

  For Marta, I purchased a magnificent silk robe edged with lace, from the special purchasing agent for the SS, who handles such things.

  “Oh, Erik, it is so beautiful,” she said. She put it over her shoulders. It is the palest blue, almost as pale as her eyes. “Where did you ever get it? No shop in Berlin has anything like this!”

  I kissed her cheek. “You won’t believe this, but they do this kind of elegant work in the camps.”

  “The camps?” she asked.

  “Yes. The detention centers. It’s a kind of therapy for offenders. Many of them are expert craftsmen, and it’s a shame to let their skills go to waste.”

  Peter was playing with his mice. He had one in each hand. “I’ll name them Siegfried and Wotan,” he said.

  “You’d better not,” I said. “One’s a female, the pet-store owner assured me. You’d better count on a Brunhilde.”

  “Boy and girl?” Peter asked. “And they’ll have babies?”

  “That’s right,” Marta said. “And you’d better keep your mouse family nice and clean, and inside the cage.”

  Laura wailed. “My dolls can’t have babies! It’s not fair!”

  I patted Laura’s silken hair. “Peter is a man, and older than you, Laura, and mother and I want him to learn about these things.”

  “That’s right, darling,” Marta said. “The miracle of life. The goodness in all living things. We must respect it, even in a mouse, for they are God’s creatures.”

  Kurt stoked his pipe, and through a haze of smoke looked at all of us, from some distance. An aging bachelor, he was somewhat out of it. “What a lovely concept, Marta,” Kurt said. “The miracle of life. What a beautiful thing to teach children.”

  “Babies,” Peter said. “I can’t wait.” He shoved a mouse at Laura’s face, taunting her. “If they’re sick, I might give you one. Or I might kill the sick ones.”

  “Mama, make him stop!” Laura wailed.

  Peter chased her around the room, and I had to intervene, grabbing my son’s arm, cautioning him to be more gentle—and generous—with his sister.

  Marta said, “The children are so tired, Erik. Why don’t we sing Silent Night, and they can go to bed, and then you and I and Kurt can listen to midnight mass on the radio.”

  I turned to Kurt. “Uncle, you see how being married to an efficient administrator has made Marta equally efficient?”

  “It may be the other way around, Erik,” he said. “Some of Marta’s efficiency has rubbed off on you.”

  Again we gathered around the piano. We began to sing, but after a few bars, Marta stopped.

  “That’s odd,” she said. “It’s making a funny sound on the lowest notes. As if the hammers or strings are broken. Something is muffling the tone.”

  Kurt and I raised the huge mahogany cover to its highest position. My uncle peered into the inner workings of the piano, and fetched something out—what appeared to be pieces of cardboard.

  “Photographs,” Kurt said. He dusted them off. There were three photos, all framed in the kind of heavy cardboard used by professional photographers.

  “Oh! Pictures!” Peter cried. “Let’s see!”

  “They were blocking the strings,” Marta said. “Throw them out.”

  Kurt and I looked at the old photographs.

  “Who are they, Papa?” Laura asked.

  “Stupid,” said Peter. “The people who used to own the piano.”

  I studied the photographs a moment. One was of Dr. Josef Weiss and a woman who must have been his wife, an attractive slender woman, smiling. They were dressed as if at a summer’s outing. There was a lake, possibly the ocean, in the background. There was also a photo of a young couple, obviously a wedding picture—a slender young man bearing a resemblance to the doctor, and a blond woman with a rather Aryan face. The third photo, smaller, and not at all professional-looking, was of a twelve-year-old girl in braids, with her arm around a rather rugged-looking boy of about sixteen. The boy wore a soccer shirt and seemed well-muscled.

  “Yes, that looks like Dr. Weiss,” I said.

  “And his family,” Kurt said.

  “I’m scared. It’s like ghosts in the piano.” Laura looked at the photos, stuck her tongue out at them. “Ghosts!”

  “Where are they all now, Erik?” asked Kurt.

  “Oh, Weiss was deported years ago,” I said. “Not a bad sort of fellow, and a rather good doctor. But he was here illegally, a Pole, and he was breaking the law.”

  “And the rest of his family?” my uncle asked.

  “Not the faintest idea. They left Berlin years ago.”

  Marta struck a loud chord. “We did not finish Silent Night,” she said. Then she asked for the photographs.

  I thought for a moment she wanted to look at them also. But she gave them to Peter and said, “Burn them, Peter. In the fireplace, with the wrappings from the packages.”

  Rudi Weiss’ Story

  That winter my mother became ill. There was nothing specifically wrong with her, I learned from Eva and other survivors, but she weakened, as did many in the ghetto, from the poor diet and the lack of medication.

  According to my informants, my parents remained as devoted to each other as ever. My mother complained very little, but more and more, she had to forego her teaching—the music and literature lessons she gave, gratis, to the ghetto children.

  One day, while a meeting of some key members of the council was taking place in the apartment adjoining my parents’ room, Eva heard my father taking my mother’s pulse, listening to her heart with a stethoscope. He was, as with all his patients, gentle, considerate, hopeful.

  “What do you hear in my old heart?” she
asked.

  “Mozart,” Papa said.

  And she laughed. “Full of your old tricks, the same old jokes.”

  “We old general practitioners have a limited repertory. I still draw pictures of rabbits on my prescription pad to distract a child about to get an injection.”

  They talked about her going back to the school. If she failed to come, many of the children ran off—to beg, to steal, to smuggle.

  The talk of the schoolchildren reminded them of us—of me, of Karl, of Anna. My mother kept photographs of us tacked over her bed. Sometimes my father thought it was not a good idea for her to be constantly reminded of her lost family.

  “Oh, but they give me hope, Josef,” she would say.

  And he would play the game with her. He argued that anyone who was “useful” survived. “I’m a doctor, so I manage. Karl is an artist, they’ll use him. And Rudi …”

  “Rudi will make his way, Josef. I have faith in him.”

  Eva interrupted them to say that Uncle Moses had just sneaked back into the ghetto with a man from Vilna who had important information.

  At that moment, my mother was talking to my father about some money that she had sewn into her old coat from Berlin. It was a kind of emergency fund, for God knows what purpose. But my mother had decided—knowing of the terrible condition in the children’s ward at the hospital—that my father should use the money to purchase food for the sick youngsters.

  He nodded his agreement. With shears, she began to cut the lining of the coat.

  “Someone wanting to sneak into our ghetto?” my father asked Eva.

  “A courier named Kovel. With important information for us.”

  “Ah. A high-level conference.” He kissed my mother and followed Eva Lubin into the next room.

  Kovel was a starved-looking bearded man with haunted eyes. But he had a precise manner, and as he sat, hunched over, rubbing his eyes and sipping hot tea, he told the group his story.

  “Don’t believe anything the Germans tell you about work camps or special ghettoes,” Kovel said.

  “Oh, of course we take whatever they tell us with a grain of salt.” It was Dr. Kohn, the eternal conciliator, who spoke.

  Kovel looked up. His shadowed eyes took in all in the crowded cold room. “They mean to murder every Jew in Europe.”

  “Impossible,” said Kohn.

  “You must mean reprisals on a large scale,” my father said. Sensible man that he was, even he could not believe the truth.

  “Not reprisals,” Kovel said. “Annihilation. It is their intention to kill every Jew. Why can none of you understand what I am saying?”

  Eva recalls the silence. Zalman, Anelevitz and she—working people, humble people—seemed to have a better grasp of events than the educated, the professionals. Anelevitz had been trying to tell them of their fate for some months.

  Kovel went on. “There were once eighty thousand Jews in the Vilna ghetto. There are today less than twenty thousand.”

  My Uncle Moses was the first to react. “Sixty thousand … ?”

  “Shot by the SS.”

  Dr. Kohn threw his hands up. “Utter nonsense. No one, not even the Germans, can march sixty thousand people out and shoot them. The logistics, the arrangements … impossible …”

  “I’m not sure I can believe it either,” my father said.

  Anelevitz sat down next to the man from Vilna and asked, “How was it done, Kovel?”

  “First the SS rounded up all Jews for work and forced them to dig ditches about twenty miles from the city. Then the Lithuanian police threw a cordon around the ghetto. No one could get out or get in. If you tried to fight back, you were shot. They forced everyone out with clubs and whips. They have a technique. The Jews are forced to undress, wait, are marched into the ditches in groups and shot, either with single shots in the neck, or massed fire from machine guns. There are no exceptions. When there are delays, the Jewish Council is forced to draw up lists. Then they are shot themselves.”

  Dr. Kohn wet his lips. “Ah … Vilna … perhaps an exception, a special case, you know …”

  “No,” Kovel said. “Ghetto after ghetto is being wiped out. Riga. Kovno. Lodz.”

  My father shook his head. “I know they are cruel and they hate us. But the German army … the old sense of honor … they must object.”

  Kovel laughed bitterly. “Object? They look the other way, or they help the bloody SS.”

  More silence.

  Kovel told of more massacres—Dvinsk, Rowno, ghettoes the length and breadth of Poland and Russia.

  “Open your eyes,” he said. “Warsaw has the biggest concentration of Jews in Europe. Your time will come.”

  “We are close to half a million,” Dr. Kohn said. “They won’t be able to dig enough ditches, find enough ammunition.”

  Uncle Moses interrupted him. “They’ll find a way.”

  Anelevitz looked at Kovel. “Tell us what we must do.”

  Kovel took a rumpled sheet from his jacket. “Start with this. Send it out as a warning to everyone here. Read it for all to hear.”

  Eva Lubin took it, and in her girlish voice read the Vilna proclamation. “‘Let us not go to our deaths like lambs to the slaughter. Young Jews, I appeal to you, do not believe those who wish to do you harm. It is Hitler’s plan to annihilate the Jews. We are the first. It is true we are weak and alone, but the only answer worth giving to the enemy is resistance. Brothers, rather die fighting than to live by the grace of the slaughterer. Let us defend ourselves to the death. Vilna, in the ghetto, January 1, 1942.’”

  No one spoke for a while. Then Dr. Kohn asked, “But what good can it do? You say they’ll be killed anyway.”

  “They?” Uncle Moses asked. “We, Kohn, we.”

  “Bare hands against tanks and artillery?” Kohn asked.

  Kovel turned to Anelevitz. “Do you have any guns?”

  “None yet. But we’re teaching the Zionist youth to obey orders, to work with broomsticks pretending they’re guns, to organize on military lines.”

  “We’ll be soldiers first, then get guns,” Eva said.

  “That sounds like Jews,” Uncle Moses said. “Not a gun among us, but soldiers.”

  Dr. Kohn was shaking his head. “The Germans can be bribed. I know it. The Warsaw ghetto is valuable to them. They know the war is finished. The Americans are in the war. They’re losing Africa. The Russians will hold Moscow—”

  “And we will all be dead while all that is happening,” Kovel said.

  “They need our factories, our workrooms,” Kohn went on. “Uniforms, leather goods. We Jews are skilled craftsmen.”

  Kovel got up. “I cannot seem to make you understand that the murder of Jews is central to their plan. They care less about losing territory here and there, an invasion, a two-front war, than they do about killing Jews. That is their primary aim.”

  “Oh, rubbish,” Kohn said. “Even Hitler is not that insane.”

  The argument went on for a while. Kohn was outvoted. My father and my uncle took their stand with the resistance.

  My mother had been eavesdropping from the small adjoining room. At the conclusion of the discussion, she entered, ladylike and elegant in her old robe, apologizing for her undone hair, and gave my father the money that had been sewn into her coat.

  “Ah,” my father said. “For the children …”

  “No, Josef. To buy guns.”

  In January, 1942, Muller finally lived up to his word. He had Karl transferred to the artist’s studio at Buchenwald, a favored place to work, since it was indoors, warm, and the artists were a rather privileged group.

  What kept them privileged was the vanity of the SS who enjoyed having their portraits painted, and even more, having their alleged family trees—intricate genealogical diagrams—created in glowing colors.

  In the studio Karl had made the friendship of a small frail artist from Karlsruhe named Otto Felsher. Felsher had been a successful portraitist on the outside, and hence was so
mething of a favorite of the guards, although he, like Karl, had been beaten and starved before they decided to make use of his skills.

  The truth was, although they were now better treated, Karl and Felsher detested the work assigned to them.

  “And how is the Muller family tree coming, Weiss?” Felsher would ask.

  “Lies on top of lies. What whores they make of us.”

  “It’s how we survive.”

  Karl looked at the intricate, multi-colored family tree he was designing for Muller. “The bastard has me painting in Charlemagne and Frederick the Great.”

  Felsher laughed. “They’re jealous because we go back to Abraham.”

  “So we do. For all the good it seems to have done us.”

  Sergeant Muller came by daily to look at the work in progress. “Beautiful, Weiss, beautiful. Don’t forget the two Crusaders.”

  “Here they are,” my brother said.

  Muller beamed. “Weiss, you and I may get to be friends when this is over. Who knows? With America in the war, I may need a Jew to say nice things about me.”

  “Don’t count on me, Muller.”

  The SS man took a letter from inside his tunic. “After all I’ve done for you? Your wife was here yesterday. The monthly letter from the fair Inga.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Of course you do, Weiss.”

  “You made her pay the usual price, didn’t you?”

  Muller shrugged. “It came postage due. She had to pay, yes. She can afford it.”

  “Get away from me. I don’t want to hear from her again. Tell her—no more letters, none from her, or from me.”

  Muller shoved the letter at him, jamming it into the pocket of his striped prison suit. “She won’t be coming here any more, so it doesn’t matter. You’re being transferred. You and Felsher. We’ve had a request for a couple of high-class artists.”

  “Transferred?”

  “Oh, you have reputations. The Buchenwald studio is famous. They want you, and some others of our skilled workers, at a new camp in Czechoslovakia. Theresienstadt. The Paradise Ghetto. Reserved for the most deserving Jews. A vacation resort.”

  Muller winked, sighed, as if an old friendship were ending. “I shall miss playing mailman for you, Weiss. But I think I will have to arrange more frequent leaves to Berlin.”