“Bastards,” someone nearby said. “The Luftwaffe will pay them back for this.”
Katja shuddered. A year before it had seemed the Western allies were all defeated, and now they were dropping bombs on Berlin. She wished the bombers would be stopped, shot down if necessary, but she wanted the Nazis to be defeated. The contradiction was enough to drive her mad.
*
The all-clear sounded and the dinner guests returned to their places. The hotel was untouched and so the insular world of Nazi festivities could continue, at least for a while. If there was damage to the homes and workplaces of any of the diners, they would find out soon enough.
The dinner eaten and the drop apparently successful, Frederica called an end to the evening. “Please thank the Reichsminister and his client for me for a lovely dinner,” Dietrich said, taking her hand.
Frederica returned the warm clasp. “I shall be sure to mention that it was spent in part on a soldier of the Wehrmacht. That will please him, I’m sure,” she replied diplomatically.
Katja leaned in for a casual kiss of departure, longing to stay inside the fragrant embrace. But she dutifully drew away and followed her husband to the Grünewald Strassenbahn.
The entire line had stopped during the air raid, allowing the passengers to seek cover, but by the time Katja and Dietrich reached the platform, the cars were running again. When they passed two buildings, a residence and an office building, where bombs had struck, Katja could see that firemen were already on the scene and ambulances were carrying away the dead and injured. The smoky air seeped into the Strassenbahn and people covered their noses with handkerchiefs. Some refused to look at the ruins; it was too sharp a reminder that they might be next.
“She’s quite nice, your friend Frederica,” Dietrich said, slurring his words slightly. Where did you meet her?”
“She was part of the film team, in Nuremberg. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yes. You’re right. I remember the supper now. They were a nice lot, clever, all of them. I like it that my wife has clever friends. Do you see the others too?”
“Not the cameramen. Most of them are on the front now, I think. Frau Riefenstahl is lord knows where, trying to make her movie.”
“What about the one who took the picture? Rudi something? The one who sat in the middle?”
Katja hesitated. Should she lie? Was she going to have to lie about everything to him? “He’s in Sachsenhausen.”
“Good grief. What for?” He seemed genuinely shocked.
“Paragraph 175,” Katja said as neutrally as possible.
“A warmer?! You know, I sort of suspected that. The fellow he brought with him, I bet he was too. They seemed very chummy. Of course, it’s too bad when you find out someone you know is a pervert, but I’m glad the Nazis are cleaning that stuff up. If they can’t cure it, they should just get rid of it.”
Katja cringed. Another rift had opened between them. Dietrich’s view was so far from hers, they had no common ground on which to even discuss it. She put it to the back of her mind, along with the question of how she was going to tell him she loved a woman.
When they were finally in the house in Grünewald in their own room, he had just enough clarity of mind to undress and hang up his uniform. His inebriation was not enough to discourage sex, though it did render the act brief, to Katja’s relief. Then he lay on his side and took her in his arms.
“Liebchen, I’m sorry to tell you I’ll be away longer this time. Many months, probably.”
“Mmmm?”
“We’re going farther eastward into Russia. The Führer’s ready to attack Moscow, and that could end the war quickly. But it has to be a big effort, and they can’t be sending soldiers home every couple of months.”
She slid toward him to avoid sleeping on the wet spot.
“But when it’s over, we’ll go back to Nuremberg and buy the house near my parents that we’ve always talked about, I promise.” His voice was blurred by drowsiness and in a minute he was asleep.
He hadn’t seemed to notice that she never replied.
Chapter Twenty-two
November 1941
Rudi Lamm was camp-hardened now. At roll call, he had learned how to stand with his eyes cast down, huddled under his camp jacket, and to call out his number smartly and mechanically right after the man before. He knew that when a specific skill was requested—carpentry, shoemaking, horticulture—he should say he had it, even if he didn’t, because it usually meant a softer job. He had learned to stand two-thirds of the way down the line waiting for soup, since the first men got only broth, and the last men sometimes got short portions. He had learned to pack newspaper inside his jacket for added warmth at night but to remove it before roll call because it was forbidden.
But most of all, he had learned the value of sex. It must have been his soft gray eyes, his long girlish lashes, his curved lips, because with shorn head and thin wiry torso, certainly nothing else recommended him.
It was in the fourth week of his assignment to the clay pit, when the sadistic Kapo was replaced. The new man was almost as brutal, but had sidled up to Rudi and hinted he wanted some nice boy’s mouth on him in the morning, and Rudi agreed immediately. Every day for the next five months Rudi had reported to the Kapo’s quarters, a tiny room at the end of the prisoners’ barrack. And every morning, after taking the Kapo’s fat organ in his mouth, he earned himself an extra ration and a work assignment that would not kill him. After each grotesque act, he thought of Peter and the chasm of difference between the playful, loving sex they’d always had together and his whoring for survival. What else would he do to stay alive?
Word seemed to spread discreetly, of who serviced whom. And so, depending on the rotation of Kapos for his barracks or for the work details, Rudi alternated between being an ordinary brutalized prisoner during the lean months and a kept boy during the good ones. Each time he thought the starvation and labor and abuse would kill him, someone would discover him, and at the cost of nightly sexual debasement, sometimes brutal and sometimes not, he would gradually regain his strength. The irony never escaped him that the “crime” for which he was imprisoned was the only thing keeping him alive.
But his last protector had just been transferred to another camp, and now he stood shivering in the morning dampness, just another pink triangle. At the end of the numerical roll call, each block of men received an assignment. All the assigned detachments fast-marched off the parade ground, leaving some hundred men.
To his astonishment, the camp senior stepped aside and the camp commandant came to the fore. What did it mean? Without moving his head, he glanced sideways, trying to determine what made the remaining men different from those who had been assigned. He could make out no difference, except that none were Jews.
“Men,” the commandant began, and Rudi was once again astonished. It was the first time they had been called that rather than “scum” or “assfuckers,” so he felt a surge of hope.
“Look around you, men. You’re all Germans, citizens of the Reich. You now have a chance to prove your loyalty to the Fatherland and to leave the camp. You can be rehabilitated in a special regiment, the SS Sonderregiment under the command of Sturmbannführer Dirlewanger. This is your opportunity to serve Germany rather than rot here as an enemy of the Volk.”
At his signal, two prisoners carried a small table and chair to a spot just behind the commandant and one of the SS guards sat down with a large registry.
“If you sign here today, you can write one postcard to your family explaining your decision to serve in the military for Germany. Then you’ll be released for training. Once you’ve signed, you can’t change your mind.”
Rudi wasn’t sure. It could also be a trap. The camp was so overcrowded, the authorities were always rounding up men for “special” labor detachments that never returned. Rumors then circulated immediately that they had simply been killed, or worked to death in mines or other places invisible to the outside world. Would he
be exchanging a slow death sentence for a quick one?
Most of the men stepped forward and signed up, but Rudi remained in place. After some half an hour of reshuffling of men, the volunteers were lined up and marched toward another yard for further instruction.
The Commandant addressed the forty or so men who remained. “No patriotic spirit, eh? Well, then you can work for the Reich in Flossenbürg. Let’s see how you like cutting granite for the Führer’s monuments.”
*
Standing at the edge of the granite quarry Rudi felt a rush of vertigo and took a step back. He had not expected anything so deep. One entire side descended at a 45-degree angle halfway to the bottom, where it broke off into a sheer vertical wall. Scattered within the pit were blocks of various sizes, and men scrabbled over them like vermin. Guards ringed the edges of the quarry, but there was no need for barbed wire, since it would have taken a man five minutes of hard climbing to get to the top of the pit, during which time he would have been shot ten times over.
Talking was not allowed, but men grunting over their labor caused a constant low buzz punctuated by the tapping of hammers on chisels and chisels on stone.
Rudi was assigned to a crew to load freshly cut blocks onto rollers and haul them with ropes up a single narrow ramp to the surface. He worked silently for two hours, trying to gauge which of the Kapos were the most dangerous. He needn’t have troubled himself. His team had just loaded a new block onto the rollers, when an SS man snatched a cap from one of the prisoners. Laughing, he threw it high and it landed midway up the ramp.
“Prisoners are not allowed to remove their caps,” the guard said, slamming his truncheon down across the prisoner’s shoulders.
Recovering from the blow, the prisoner looked back and forth between the guard and his hat and began to shake. Walking up the ramp counted as an escape attempt, punishable by death. “I…I can’t, sir,” he whimpered.
“I told you to put on your cap,” the guard repeated, striking him again, this time across the face. With a sob of resignation, the prisoner crept up the ramp, as slowly as he could, prolonging life with each second of delay. Then, reaching his hat, he stopped but didn’t even bother to put it on his head. He just knelt down, crying, until the rifle shot struck him in the back and he toppled sideways.
Two other prisoners were assigned to drag away the body, and Rudi shut the image out of his mind. He threaded the heavy towing rope between the rollers and around the block and waited for the signal to begin hauling it to the top. Then he worked hammering for the next four hours until he could no longer hear anything but a ringing in his ears. His hands were raw and covered with abrasions from lifting the stone blocks, and he coughed constantly from the stone powder.
Lunch was soup, and half an hour later, he was on his knees hammering again, until he felt a hand sweep across his head, knocking off his cap.
He glanced up to see the same guard, grinning down at him. “Prisoners are not allowed to remove their caps,” he said.
Rudi’s jaw went slack. A death sentence had just been pronounced on him. He was going to die here, in this granite quarry, and no one would ever know. He didn’t even have a god to pray to. It was simply the end.
He looked into the eyes of the guard and saw only sadism and derision, nothing else. He struggled to his feet, feeling both the thudding dread in his chest and the need to urinate. He took a step up the ramp toward his execution.
“Stop shitting around, Volker. Isn’t one enough today?” A higher-ranking SS man confronted the tormentor. “Get the hell away from the prisoner and let him do his work,” the SS man said. Then to Rudi, “Go get your cap. No one will shoot.”
Rudi fetched it, scrambled back to his place, and knelt down to continue hammering blindly, aware only that he had soiled his prison pants.
At the end of the day, he approached the block senior. “If it’s possible, could you inform the commandant that I want to join the Sonderregiment?”
Chapter Twenty-three
December 1941
The bright sunlight and the summer-like warmth of the day should have cheered Katja, but it didn’t, for the first sight she saw when she stepped off the Strassenbahn was a truck carting away a Jewish family with three huge suitcases. Where were they being taken? The radio announcements said it was simply resettlement in the East, but rumors suggested it was to internment camps.
Katja shook off helplessness and despair, reminding herself that she carried good news. She entered the zoo just before closing time, then hurried immediately to the Lion House. She caught sight of Peter at the end of the corridor emerging from one of the lion cages. With a head toss of sudden cheerfulness, he shut the cage door behind him and motioned her into the storage room with him.
“I’m in the middle of feeding, but no one’s around to check on me, so we can visit awhile. Here, sit down.” He drew up one of the supply crates.
“I have something for you from Rudi.” She handed him the one-line postcard from Sachsenhausen and leaned against him to read it again with him. “I’m being treated well and will be released soon to serve the Fatherland on the Eastern Front.”
Peter laid the card against his heart. “Oh, Rudi. Finally some proof you’re alive.” He kissed Katja on her hair. “And thank God he wrote you instead of his father.”
“He must have known the only way to reach you was through me. He doesn’t know where you are, but he knows I’d try to reach you.”
Peter reread the card and frowned. “What does he mean ‘serve the Fatherland’? They’re drafting him into the Wehrmacht? Is it a punitive regiment?”
“I asked Frederica, since the propaganda ministry is up on all those things, of course. She said it’s a new SS regiment that started as a small group of poachers released to be trained as snipers and anti-partisan troops because they were so good with rifles. By the end of 1940 the SS realized they had a large source of untapped manpower and began to admit concentration-camp prisoners under the command of someone named Dirlewanger. That’s all she knew about it.”
Peter slumped against the wall, the postcard still in his hand. “At least he’s out and has a chance. I hate hiding like this, like some maiden waiting to be rescued. It makes me crazy that I can’t actually do anything to fight the Nazis.”
Katja could think of nothing more to say. The darkening sky in the high window of the storage room drew her attention. “I’m sorry, I can’t stay much longer. I have to get to the hospital for the night shift.”
He took off his spectacles and rubbed his face, as if to bring life back into it. “That’s all right. I’ve got only one more animal to feed. Come on, on the way out I’ll show you how I do it.”
He led her back into the corridor and pulled out a ring of keys. “This box up here controls both doors, this one right here, and the partition door to the outside cage.
“Look, the tiger’s asleep. I won’t have to bother with luring him outside. I’ll just slip his bowl into the cage directly.”
He turned the key in the slot and Katja heard the sound of gears.
“Are you sure it’s—” A low, growling rhuuuuu rose quickly to the piercing uiiiiiiii of the air-raid siren. The tiger sprang to his feet.
Peter spun around. “Damn! That’s the second time we’ve been raided in the middle of feeding time,” he shouted over the earsplitting whine. He reached up with one arm and gave the cage key a half turn. “Come on, the basement will do for a shelter. Let me run get a flashlight first. The fuse blew yesterday.”
Peter rushed into the storage room and she waited, hoping for the usual three-minute time lag between siren and bombardment.
The shrieking of the siren prevented her from hearing the creak of the cage door behind her, and only when it clanged open against the wall did she turn around.
The Sumatran tiger stood panting, halfway into the corridor. He swung his massive head toward her, his jaw open, and his ribs swelled with each breath like the pulse of a vast, primordial will.
Katja stared, held captive by its empty eyes, and sensed its savagery, implacable and absolute. The tiger rumbled low in its throat and slowly dropped to a crouch, preparing to leap. Something flew past her screaming, and by the time she realized it was Peter waving his flashlight, the bewildered tiger had darted back into his cage. Peter threw himself against the cage door, holding it with his chest while he turned the key in the lockbox overhead, then collapsed panting.
At that moment, a bomb detonated somewhere near the zoo, its concussion deafening. Peter sprang to life again, seized her hand, and pulled her along the corridor through the door of the building. Off to the side of the entryway was a door that he yanked open, and they stumbled down the stairs as a third bomb hit, sending dust into the stairwell.
Peter pulled the door shut and they both dropped onto a bench. For several minutes, no one spoke and Peter directed the beam of light at the floor in front of them.
“Dear God. How could I have done that?” He laid his head in his hands. “You were almost killed, and it would have been my fault. I was so stupid.”
Katja exhaled slowly through pursed lips. “I never saw anyone move so fast. You weren’t afraid? I was paralyzed.”
“I didn’t think about it. I was just so furious.”
“At what?
“At myself, at the war, at the whole thing. I mean tigers on one side and bombs on the other, and meanwhile, I just hide here, month after month, useless to Rudi and to you.”
“Don’t agonize over it. It’s over, we’re both safe now, and you have other things to worry about.” She squeezed his hand. “There will be a time for courage, I’m sure. From all of us.”
Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright Page 14
