His brother Ernst — in spite of his fleeing to a neighboring country he ended up where he had to end up.
Richard Kahn of Richard Kahn, Inc., qualified real estate agent, plumber on the run, lastly number 547811, and his wife, Else. (While Herr Kahn survived the death of his sons, Dani and Benjamin, by several months, Frau Kahn was struck off the camp lists shortly thereafter.)
The opera singer Werner Kurzig — he died a natural death in a small guesthouse in Switzerland.
Seven hundred sixty-six men, women, and children of Transport Number 17 from Drancy — they arrived at four in the morning and at 5:50 A.M. were skillfully eliminated.
Professor Dr. Justus Bernstein, chief editor of a cultural magazine — he had seen the synagogues burn — his wife, and their daughter, Cilly.
Karl Schneider, former owner of the former O.B. department store.
Max, Felice, and Leo Lewinter. Adieu.
Thirty-five of the forty male residents of the fishing village.
Herr Bernhard and a further twenty men, seized in the operation that was to contribute to the stamping out of homosexuality in Germany.
All the men, women, and children of the transport from Wilna — before evening fell they had all been shot in front of the ditch. It had been done hurriedly because there were not any searchlights.
The married couple the Recktenwalds. They refused to respond to the “German greeting,” came to Dachau, and then, as Herr and Frau Recktenwald were closely connected to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sent to the East.
The young Pole Peter Baslewicz. Do widzenia.
The communist Karl Kowalsky. Saluti
little Löwy, his father, his mother, and his sister.
Stupid Anna.
Karl Streng is scolding a whore who will not keep her room clean.
The whore listens passively, staring down at her shoes that arrived with a transport from Greece, already disinfected, and thinks, the old eunuch.
Corporal Zink was sitting with Vogt at the dinner table. After seeing the transport from Wilna being shot to death he had taken sick leave and had now come back to the front, strengthened and with fresh courage after two weeks with Berti in the barn.
“All interventions must be well calculated,” said Vogt, well known for his opinions, “and we have to strike quickly. A special operation has to be prepared and well thought through. The Jews are a crafty race.”
“Yes,” replied the accountant, whom everybody just called Accountant because his name sounded so Slavic, and looked over to Zink’s plate. He was buttering two slices of bread thickly with butter. “Our boys will certainly master that.”
The waitress Berti has let the milk boil over and gets a slap in the face, for these days nothing must be burnt. She takes it without a fight. She wants to marry the proprietor’s son, the darling Zink, and will not be so easily shaken off. On his next home leave she will try to get pregnant by him.
Marianne Brackmann threw up. She was pregnant. After it was ascertained in the interests of the healthy body of the Volk that Marianne was suitable for marriage — Father Brackmann may be a friend of the Jews and a music lover but that is not, thank God, despoiling — she has married at last. She has also received a loan for her marital status, because now she is a future wife, and a housewife should not work.
Everyone is happy about it. Marianne, who was not partial to her work as a secretary. Father, and Mother Brackmann. And even Erna was happy, although Ecki did not want to marry her and she had every reason to be jealous, since she did not possess anything, and Marianne possessed so much.
The local group leader, Dieter Walter, has also married again. This time a nice girl, however, a brown sister who is already in the kitchen as he sleeps.
His divorced wife, Vicki, went down a slippery path after the story with the compact. She had an affair with the Jew Blumenfeld and with a Frenchman. Now she is sitting on a wooden bunk in a camp, scratching her head. Her romances have made her guilty.
Detective Mehring has his day off and throws the stick with an impatient movement for the dog to bring back. He did not get the raise in salary and is annoyed. From now on he will not work quite so conscientiously.
Frau Liselotte Schneider, formerly Oppenheimer, is scolding her maid, Fatima, whom she suspects of theft. Her two sons are sitting sweating on the verandah playing scat.
The social democrat Neumann was hanged. He was caught at the same time as Ulrich Tilling, but unlike Tilling was polished off right away.
The publisher Siegfried Scholem has emigrated to Palestine and is unsuccessfully trying his hand at a translation of Cabal and Love.
Herr Neunzlinger is sitting in the front room. He has just arrived and is terribly tired but wants to eat something before going to bed. Mommy is already standing proudly at the oven in her pearl necklace. Home leave, home leave, she cried from the stairs because nothing better came to her with the surge of feelings, and thus woke up little Nette and Thomas, who raced to their father with joy because he had most certainly brought something nice for them from the east.
His brother-in-law, the farrier Heinz Schröder, is drinking a glass of French tap water. He is in the Wehrmacht now. After the shop of his employer Alfred Blumenfeld was smashed up, he could not find another job. So it was very good timing with his call-up.
The secretary Marianne Flinker is getting out of the bus. Oswald has disappeared, along with the inventory, without a trace. Marianne is furious. She cannot help thinking of him in the night, though.
Dr. Johann Marburg is sleeping. The ring, his unlucky mascot, is lying on the bedside table next to him. He does not have a shift today, nor does he have to select at the infirmary.
His colleague Delmotte is snoring. He does not have the earlier shift either.
The camp prefect Tadeusz Lebowic steals a slice of bread. He is about to get orders to strike through Vera’s number, among others, with a ruler. He swallows the bread on the way to the hospital building. The KZ guard is well-disposed today and looks the other way.
Bettina Feigenbaum is standing up straight. She, too, is a scribe today. Although a Jew, she speaks such a beautiful high German that the doctor likes her and has her keep the lists of the dead. She is crying now, standing up straight, and crying. How is her daughter Andrea getting along?
And Dr. Johann Paul Kremer is writing, after extracting muscle tissue, spleen, and liver: “Today fixated freshest material from the human liver, spleen, and pancreas.”
For everyone was doing something that day on which the world crawled into the furthest-off hole of the dirty milky pathway, because God was playing hide-and-seek with Mars, Jupiter, Luna, and Earth. And God found Mars, Jupiter, and Luna, but not little Earth, who had run so far away. She held in her breath in joyful excitement and waited to be discovered, while God forgot all about her and played war with Mars. Forgot about her and did not see what was being done to his chosen people, to the people of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Sara, who received a visitation from God when Abraham was one hundred, and bore him laughter.
Epilogue
AFTER HER PARENTS HAD BEEN TAKEN AWAY, Erika went back to the apartment immediately and packed the suitcases. There was no time to be lost. Going through the papers eventually they would realize that they had left one family member behind and would return. But she would not wait for them. She would not serve the child up to them on a silver platter. If they wanted the child, they would have to come looking for her.
They drove out to her brothers’ in the country. Where else could they go? At first he did not want to take them in. He was up to his neck in trouble as it was without them. They wanted to draft him even though he was the only man on the farm.
They called her Käthe. It took a few days for the child to realize she had to change her name. She did not know the danger she was in and that they would all be in if she had been called by her real name. They stayed there for six years, although the agreement had been they would leave the farm again in a few weeks’
time. Six years of fear. Above all at night.
After the war, Erika started making inquiries. Max’s, Felice’s, and Leo’s whereabouts were unknown. Through the Red Cross she learned that the unknown residence of the Lewinter family at the end had been Buchenwald, and that Herr Lewinter had by a year outlived his wife and son, who were murdered immediately.
She waited until Lea had come of age before telling her.
They moved to Zurich. The Jewish World Association paid for Lea’s education after some hesitation, for she, Erika, was not Jewish.
She had battled for custody of the girl. It was not easy. She was German, there were doubts. But finally victory was hers. She adopted Lea when she was fourteen, two years after her Bat Mitzvah.
She invested the reparation sum — Lea’s father, before his fall from grace due to his descent, had been a respected sociologist — in a Swiss bank for her. More than anything she wanted to spit in the face of the official who had at that point calculated how much Lea would be paid monthly, how much the skin of a Jew was worth. She did not do it, did not once complain, for she felt she should not deprive the child of the little capital she was entitled to.
In 1957, Lea married an American Jew, who was in Zurich on business, and moved back with him to New York. On Lea’s and her husband’s insistence, Erika went with them. They moved into an apartment, just a block away from the Fried-manns’ house, and she fulfilled an old dream of hers. She learned stenography.
Lea’s children do not speak any German. Samuel, thirty-three today, has become a sociologist like his grandfather. He teaches at the university and has a three-year-old son.
Roberta, two years younger, works at a bank. Last year she went traveling in Europe again with the boyfriend she will be marrying next year, to Italy and Switzerland, where they went skiing. She has yet to set foot on German soil.
For a long time Lea could not speak about the war years, not even to Erika. About five years ago, at a seminar, she met Ernst Fuchs, a man who like her had lost all his family. With his help she learned how to come to terms with her past.
She realized as an almost sixty-year-old woman that she had still not forgiven her parents for leaving her behind and that her life had been determined by her fear of being left alone again. She understood that she felt guilty because she was the only one to survive, and that it was not her fault that she was alive.
Lea often thinks of her family, of her father and her mother, who remains in her memory a young woman — much younger than she herself today — because she was shot when she was twenty-eight.
From her parents’ home she still had her parents’ wedding photo and a silver cigarette case engraved with her father’s initials, which Erika had packed as it was on the chest of drawers in the hallway.
Lea gave it to her son on his eighteenth birthday, since she thought it would be important to him to possess something from his family — as a sort of proof.
He lost the case after a week.
To begin with Lea was depressed, but then she felt a kind of inexplicable and liberating lightness spreading through her, as if after all the stormy years at sea she had finally thrown the ballast over the side of the tossing boat, to save herself from drowning.
The Inventory: A Novel Page 28
