Galerie

by Steven Greenberg

  Having finished helping Weiszl, Garlic stepped forward at Vodka’s prompting and neatly punched her in the stomach.

  She doubled over, partially deflated, but continued to struggle.

  Garlic produced a pair of handcuffs, deftly twisted her arms behind her back, secured her wrists, and pushed her away from him.

  She fell to the floor, and there she remained.

  Weiszl straightened up and smoothed his combover, vainly attempting to regain his previous dignity. There was no finger tapping now. “You little kike whore,” he spat in a low voice that bristled with the hatred of a street fighter. “I should simply kill you now, as I wanted to when you first came to Prague. Hans only wanted me to scare you off, and he was furious when my colleagues got a bit overzealous in Terezin. In any case, before Hans become ‘incommunicado,’ shall we say, I made a promise on my honor and I am nothing if not an honorable man. Now, if you please will sit down here….” He indicated the wooden bench, directly under the upraised Torah in the central diorama.

  Vodka picked her up and roughly pushed her towards it.

  “I will tell you the story, as Hans wished,” Weiszl said. “Then we will be done with you.”

  Prague, June 1992

  SS-Oberscharfuhrer Josef Weiszl sat down next to Vanesa, who slumped uncomfortably on the hard wooden bench. Her arms ached from Vodka’s rough yank, the handcuffs were beginning to chafe her wrists, and her hands felt swollen and strangely, numbly detached. Trying to hide her pain, she sat up with difficulty, blew an itinerant strand of hair from her face, and stared at Weiszl with an undisguised loathing, as if the illusions he had so casually shattered had become daggers that she repeatedly stabbed into him one by one.

  Weiszl stared back at her, unabashed. He regarded her for several long minutes, pensively resuming his ritual. Tap up. Tap Down. Finally, as if just noticing her obvious discomfort, he motioned to Vodka to approach. “Andel, I believe that Dr. Neuman’s temper tantrum has passed. Has it not, Dr. Neuman? Very well. If Dr. Neuman promises to behave, you may remove the handcuffs, Andel. Thank you. After all, it’s not like she’ll be going anywhere, correct? There is only one door to Galerie, and it is locked and guarded at all times.”

  Vodka approached, groped her unabashedly as he removed the handcuffs, and then retreated.

  Weiszl again stood. “I think it would be more illustrative if we took a stroll. Will you join me, Dr. Neuman?”

  He waited expectantly for her to comply, and she did so, rubbing her wrists as she rose. He led her to the first display on their left, in which an attractive young woman in her twenties sat playing a cello in a flat that resembled Jonas’s. A look of intense concentration mixed with subdued triumph on her smooth and eerily realistic face, her brow furrowed as if she was successfully working through a particularly challenging cadenza. Her skirt was pushed back to expose shapely legs whose clearly defined calf muscles were taut from the effort of holding the cello. A view of Prague Castle, shrouded in grey rainclouds and real enough to make a viewer momentarily forget the sub-basement venue, was visible from the window behind her.

  “Rachel was our first,” Weiszl reminisced. “Of course, we had to keep her for almost a year, until your grandfather was finally persuaded that he had no choice but to use his skills to assist us. Hans shopped for her for several months in late 1942. He finally found her in Mauthausen—the camp, of course, not the village. Such a lovely specimen, don’t you think? So young, so liberated, so free-thinking—truly the quintessence of Prague Jewry. We got to know each other very well during that year. Very well indeed.” His voice trailed off, its lascivious innuendo unmistakable.

  Controlling her urge to throttle Weiszl, Vanesa looked carefully around the room and took in the minute details, although not yet sure what she was seeking. She noted the bronze plaques next to every display in the hall. This one contained the young woman’s full name, Rachel Glaser, her date and place of birth, education, profession, and a short backgrounder on Jews in the diorama’s setting, in this case pre-war Prague.

  Weiszl shook his head as if dispelling the memory. He looked at his watch fretfully, clucked his tongue in dismay, and continued. “Let us get on with this. Time is short and I have a long trip back to Bucharest tonight. Where were we? Oh yes. So, Hans first approached your grandfather in early 1942. Neuman was still living in Prague at that time. There was really no question as to which taxidermist would be most suitable. He was truly renowned in the taxidermy and naturalist community, his reputation sterling, his work beyond compare. It had to be him, but he was quite recalcitrant. It took several months on half rations in Theresienstadt to bring him around. Starving, not to mention watching your wife and child starve, can be a powerful motivator. But I think it was the transport of your grandmother’s family to the east—they ended up in Maly Trostenets, I believe—that really clinched the deal. This was my idea, of course. Hans had by that time entrusted such logistics to me, as he did throughout the project until the end of the war. In any case, when Neuman finally relented, we left his Jewess in Theresienstadt as insurance, but let him bring his boy back here to Prague. We brought them here, as they say, ‘off the books,’ so as not to leave a paper trail that might raise questions. Later, Hans even made sure that their names were included in the last transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Pity he didn’t manage to get his own included, but he of course did not then know he would need to. In any event, we brought them here in early 1943. A very cold winter, I recall.”

  They had moved on to the next display, the Iraqi carpet merchant—Moshe Mizrahi, the plaque declared. Weiszl continued his monologue, but Vanesa focused on the recessed door next to this display, and similar doors next to all the others. Did these lead just into the display cases, or was there a service corridor behind them, perhaps with an exit to the street?

  Weiszl continued, and she listened, divided between morbid fascination and an urgent drive for self-preservation.

  “This specimen was difficult to obtain. I myself oversaw the covert operation in Baghdad, which was not part of the Reich, as you know. We wanted a recent sample of Babylonian Jewry, and, you see, Hans insisted on absolute authenticity for all the displays. All the specimens you see here are real people, displayed in situ, as they actually lived. I visited Mizrahi’s store myself, and worked closely with your grandfather on the details of this tableau. The level of detail, I think you’ll agree, is outstanding.

  “However, in this display, unlike others, you’ll note that the subject is facing the side, and his face is partially obscured. This is because he was unfortunately disfigured in the collection and shipping process, which was not as delicately handled as it could have been. Your grandfather quickly learned that, unlike animals, whose pelts are quite resilient even several days after death, human skin is far more difficult to preserve. It turns out that human corpses make poor mounts, and signs of violence are difficult to eliminate in the mounting process. After Mizrahi, we decided it was imperative that future subjects be brought gently, willingly, and alive, back to Prague.”

  As they moved to the next display window, Vanesa surreptitiously tried the handle of the access door. Locked. Would the rest be similarly inaccessible? She needed a quick exit option, some way past Vodka and Garlic, who were closely shadowing her and Weiszl, carefully watching her for signs of renewed violence. She clenched and unclenched her hands, still feeling the stiffness brought on by the tight cuffs.

  Weiszl led her to the next window, and stopped. It was Moe, the American GI, posed against the backdrop of an Allied encampment, smoking a cigarette while leaning on an actual olive drab, white-starred Willys jeep. A Star of David pendant hung on the chain with his dog tags over the neck of his dirty white undershirt. Vanesa leaned forward and could just make out the “H” stamped into the corner of the tags, the US Army’s designation for Jewish soldiers at that time.

  “Mojzis Jehlicka. He called himself Moe, I believe, and came from some small town in the American Mi
dwest. We collected him from Berga, where they were keeping the Jewish POWs at that time. He came quite willingly when we offered him a warm place and food. After several months here, his physical condition had improved sufficiently to enable us to harvest and mount him. Perhaps you’ll be pleased to hear that your grandfather consistently and adamantly refused to take part in the harvesting, although he did provide us with the detailed conditions that needed to be upheld, in order to optimize the mounting process.”

  Weiszl now motioned to the remaining eleven windows. “The rest, most of which you’ll note include multiple specimens, were collected under the auspices of RSHA Referat IV-B47g. From late 1943, we became a recognized section in Eichmann’s sub-department IV-B4. Although we were a confidential section, as the ‘g’ for ‘geheim’ in our section nomenclature indicates, Eichmann was so taken with Hans’ vision that he ensured our provisioning and funding right up to the end.”

  Weiszl’s blatant bureaucratic pride reminded Vanesa in passing of their former boss’s testimony in his trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann, she had long suspected and now knew for sure, could not have been merely benignly evil, as thinkers like Hannah Arendt portrayed him. To actively further an agenda like Galerie demanded a special kind of evil—rabidity that, although perhaps concealable, incorporated no trace of “banality.”

  Weiszl continued enthusiastically. “With funding and administrative infrastructure, we were able to entice whole groups of Jews from the far reaches of the Reich to come to Prague of their own volition, healthy and intact. We even created fake travel papers for them from their origin to Istanbul—always through Prague, of course. We were, to some measure, self-funded. Once in Prague, our subjects would go through the Central Office’s standard procedure, signing away most of their remaining assets like any other emigrants, willingly surrendering their valuable property on the promise of safe passage out of the Reich. They would be held upstairs in this building, ‘awaiting transport.’ We had a special team that would discreetly harvest them one by one. Separating the children from the parents for harvesting was a bit messy, as we needed to avoid generating stress, which could damage the preservation process. We learned to overcome this, as you can see from the quality we achieved in tableaux like this one, our Moroccan wedding party.”

  Weiszl had led her to the next window, labeled “Azoulay Family Wedding,” and pointed out the subtle details with obvious pride: the inlay in the furniture, the authenticity of the costumes, the subtly joyful expressions on the bride and groom’s faces, and the mischievousness looks on those of the children.

  “Yes, yes, they are completely real, too,” Weiszl assured her.

  Vanesa, sickened but still hyper-alert for any hope of salvation, suddenly drew in a breath.

  Weiszl, interpreting her gasp as a sign of awe at his previous revelation about the children in the display, nodded as if to acknowledge the compliment, and turned to move on. He was clearly enjoying this.

  But Vanesa’s eyes were not on the children. They were locked on the air vent near her feet. Around one meter square, it contained the same intricate ironwork as the grill at the entrance to the building, with the Galerie symbol subtly incorporated into its pattern. “I came down to see him through the air duct, the one with the symbol in the grillwork,” her father had written in his story about Moe. He’d mentioned the grill in other stories, too. She quickly scanned the hall. This was the only opening of its type she could see.

  Unaware, Weiszl led her on to the next display, a winter shtetl street scene. The plaque read “The Jewish Shtetl of Krenau, Poland, 1943.” Weiszl began a droning explanation about the display that had clearly been delivered numerous times, how its subjects were actual residents of this former part of the town, how each was depicted in his or her natural occupation—the butcher behind his counter, the beggar on the stoop, the old lady pulling her shopping cart—all actual people, all preserved for eternity just as they had been.

  Vanesa nodded sagely, trying to add the right tinge of revulsion to her expression in an attempt to disguise the fact that her mind had grabbed the torch of hope and was sprinting off into the distance, trying hard not to look back.

  Perhaps in an attempt to protect his son from the “work” in Galerie, Jakub must have made the sub-basement off-limits to Michael. The air duct had to lead to the upper floors, if Michael had used it to surreptitiously access Galerie. Not “had to lead,” she cautioned herself, because her father’s actual physical situation almost fifty years ago was anyone’s guess. But “would likely lead” was good enough for her, given the circumstances. She doubted she’d find a better option, and Weiszl’s tour was already nearly half over.

  The duct would have been big enough for her father at age twelve, so she could probably fit through it. But what if its egress, wherever that was, had been sealed off over the course of the years? This would make sense, since the preservation of the covert museum for so many years must have necessitated absolute secrecy, and all physical traces between Galerie and the outside world would have had to be strictly eliminated. Could she gamble her life on the chance that it hadn’t? They would kill her if she didn’t get away, and she would only have one chance to do so. One chance, she thought, her eyes darting back to the shtetl display.

  We all get one chance to choose the right path, do we not? Did my grandfather thus choose? Do our choices define us, or we them? The questions poked through her fear like thorns in a cotton shirt, pricking her with increasing pain even as she attempted to shift away from them.

  Weiszl gently took her elbow and urged her to the next window, farther away from the duct. “Jakob Ehrlich Addressing a Session of the 14th World Zionist Conference, Vienna, August 1925,” the plaque read.

  This was the display she’d seen when the lights first came on. In it, grey-suited and mustachioed Zionist leaders listened raptly to the anti-Nazi Erlich against the backdrop of the Flag of Israel. Erlich, she recalled, had been a prominent Jewish leader known to have been murdered by the Gestapo for his outspoken anti-Nazi views in the period before the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938.

  As if anticipating her question, Weiszl nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, it was really him. Himmler had kept him all those years, and provided the family with an alternate body. When he heard from Eichmann of Hans’ plan, he made us a gift of him. Ironic, is it not?”

  She stared stony-faced at Weiszl, choosing not to dignify his sick self-satisfaction with a response, and using the silence to glance longingly back to the iron grill, two displays behind her. Weiszl again took her elbow, urging her forward, and when she hesitated, Vodka gave her a small shove from behind. The grill was getting farther and farther away. She needed to arrest the tour’s progress long enough to somehow distract the three men, get to the air duct, remove the cover—assuming that was even possible—and get inside, all before they grabbed her.

  “What about my father?” she blurted, grasping at the first idea that popped into her head. “Where was he, this whole time my grandfather was working on these… these… displays?”

  Weiszl looked at her with surprise, as if he’d forgotten she could actually speak, then answered brusquely. “He wasn’t allowed down here. There is only one way in here, and the door was locked, with guards at the top of the staircase day and night. He knew nothing of what went on here. I don’t really know where he was or what he did. Jakub took care of him, although Hans did develop a certain fondness for the boy. I still think Michael was part of the reason Hans stayed in Israel, instead of continuing on to Syria as he’d planned. Then you came along, and it was clear to me that Hans actually liked his life in Tel Aviv. You were the ‘new Jews,’ he once told me, nothing at all like the old ones, and quite empirically fascinating to him.”

  Weiszl turned to move forward, switching back to tour guide mode. “Now, let us continue to the next display. I think you’ll agree that here we truly reached new levels of realism….”

  He droned on as if on au
to-pilot, as if she was part of a group of… of… who? Who would come to this type of place for a tour? She forced herself to focus, and suddenly felt as if a light bulb had just lit up over her head. Weiszl doesn’t know about the stories! Uncle Tomas never told him. This is my key!

  “Yes, he did,” she said simply.

  Weiszl turned around with annoyance at her repeated interruption of his carefully polished monologue.

  She continued. “He did know, my father. In fact, he kept a diary, in which he recorded everything he knew. It’s safe in Tel Aviv with my lawyer. He has instructions to turn it over to the Simon Wiesenthal Center if I don’t return safely. I did the same with my research notes. I left a copy with a colleague of Marek’s in the Jewish Museum.”

  She paused for effect, letting the implication of her words sink in, and continued pensively. “I wonder if they’ll give you a show trial when they catch you, like Demanjuk. I mean, he was just a low-level guard, but you are a big fish, an Eichmann groupie who’s never been tried for this particular crime. Then again, they might just kill you when they find you, to save trouble.” She was dangerously twisting the knife, but she had nothing to lose.

  Weiszl looked momentarily flustered, wobbling against his cane as if there had been a sudden, highly localized earthquake under his feet, but he quickly regained his poise, waving her away as if she was a pesky fly. “You’re bluffing, and it’s pathetic. You have no leverage, Dr. Neuman. Don’t try to pretend that you do.”

  Vanesa’s historian brain kicked into hyper-analytical mode. Out of options, she had to play this out, so she shot back. “Very well. Then how did I find this place, Herr Weiszl? I mean, the physical location was fairly easy, but how did I know of Galerie in the first place? I may have lacked an exact understanding of your deplorable crimes here, but what was my first clue to its existence? Tomas—that is, Hans—didn’t tell you how I knew, did he? Just that I was coming. How did I know, if not from my father? Do you think Tomas, Hans Guenther himself, told me?”