Voices of the Dead

by Peter Leonard

  They were in Poland in 1945 when the Russians were coming from the east and the Americans from the west and it was a foregone conclusion Germany had lost the war. Hess and Rausch walked away from their battalion one night, stole a military vehicle and drove to Lodz.

  Hess had money, diamonds and gold he had taken from the Jews, acquiring a small fortune. He had purchased clothing and an automobile so they could make their way back to Germany. After the war Hess started a construction company to repair Germany’s war-torn cities, and had become rich. He had traveled extensively between Munich, Frankfurt and Dresden, often carrying large sums of money, and decided he needed a gun for protection.

  Rausch had said, “Do you remember the first one?”

  “Do you mean after the war?”

  “Yes. I was trying to think of the year.”

  “1947,” Hess said. “I was still following orders.”

  “Come on. I watched you. You enjoyed it.”

  “Is it wrong to enjoy your work?” Hess said.

  “I don’t think it had anything to do with work or taking orders,” Rausch said. “The Reich was over. You did this on your own. For yourself. Maybe you couldn’t stop.”

  It was true, of course, although he had never admitted it to anyone, surprised Rausch had been so observant. “We were rebuilding parts of Dresden, do you remember? The city had virtually been destroyed. We used to eat at a certain cafe, and I couldn’t help but notice Jews were returning to the city. There was one couple we saw regularly.”

  “The Jewess you couldn’t take your eyes off of,” Rausch said.

  “You do remember. One day she dined alone and left her gloves on the table. I picked them up and followed her home. She lived in a flat in an old building that had been hit by Allied bombs. Parts of it had been destroyed.”

  “Were you thinking about killing her?”

  “No, I was thinking about returning the gloves,” Hess said. “My good deed for the day.”

  “Is this the truth?”

  “Do you want me to tell you?”

  Rausch sat back.

  “Her flat was on the first floor.”

  “Was she married?”

  “I am getting to that.” Hess gave him a hard look. “I rang the bell and heard a dog barking. The woman, her name was Gail Kaplan, opened it a crack and I held up her gloves. She swung it open and a little dog, a dachshund, tried to get out. She said, ‘No‚ Karl.’ The dog barked, I squatted and pet it. ‘What a beautiful dog,’ I said. ‘I‚ too‚ have a dachshund.’”

  “You never had a dachshund,” Rausch said. “Did you?”

  Hess glanced at him, raised his eyebrows. “The dog snapped at me. ‘What is your dog’s name?’ the woman said. ‘Alfonso. We call him Fonzie.’”

  “Now I understand,” Rausch said.

  He was a little slow at times.

  “‘Oh, how adorable,’ the woman said.

  “I said to her, ‘Before I forget, here are your gloves.’

  “‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Frau Kaplan said. She bent down and picked up the dog and held it against her chest.

  “‘I wonder if I might trouble you for a glass of water,’ I said. She said, ‘Yes, of course, it’s the least I can do. You saw me at the cafe, yes? I know I have seen you before, reading your newspaper.’”

  “And then you knew?” Rausch said.

  “I thought it might happen. The urge was there. I had the Luger in the pocket of my sport jacket. The woman walked out of the room, carrying the dog. I looked around. There was a grand piano on the other side of the salon. I took off my overcoat and walked to the piano and started to play Mozart’s piano concerto number 27 in B flat major. The woman came back in smiling, carrying a glass of water, Karl the dachshund walking next to her like they were a couple. I stopped playing and said, ‘Forgive me. I see a piano I cannot resist.’

  “‘Please continue,’ she said. ‘I insist. I love Mozart, so does my husband.’

  “She handed me the glass of water. I took a drink and put it on a table next to the piano, and played for ten more minutes.

  “The woman said, ‘Bravo.’

  “I stood, picked up my overcoat, draped it over my arm and moved toward the couch. I could feel the weight of the Luger in my pocket. ‘Is your husband home?’ I said. ‘I was hoping to meet him.’

  “‘No,’ she said, ‘he is at work. He is an architect.’

  “‘Another time,’ I said. I picked up this small green pillow off the couch. She gave me a quizzical look. I drew the Luger and said, ‘Let’s go in the other room.’ Now the dachshund came toward me, barking. I glanced at the dog and back at the woman and she was gone. I went into the bedroom and there she was sitting on the bed with the phone in her hand.

  “‘Please,’ she said. ‘I am pregnant.’

  “I moved toward her and said, ‘It will be all right.’ I held the pillow in front of her face, trying to muffle the gunshot, and pulled the trigger. The pillow caught on fire and the dog went crazy.”

  “What happened to the dog?” Rausch said.

  “It was still barking when I walked out.”

  “How many others have there been?”

  9:15 in the morning, Harry got a phone call from a woman named Colette Rizik, saying she was a journalist.

  “I am writing an article for a magazine called Der Spiegel about the rise of the neo-Nazis in Germany.” She spoke with a British accent. “I understand you were attacked last night.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I have a contact with the police.”

  Harry agreed to meet her in the hotel restaurant in an hour. He took aspirin and iced his bruised rib. It felt better today. Showered, dressed and went down to the lobby. He was sitting at a table having coffee when a good-looking woman walked in. Every head in the room—men and women—turned and looked at her. Harry, assuming it was Colette, stood up, waved and she came over. He introduced himself, invited her to sit and she took the chair to his right.

  Colette Rizik was blonde, five eight, stunning. She showed him her Der Spiegel ID card. It looked official, not that Harry would’ve known if it were fake. The waitress stopped by with coffee, poured Colette a cup and refilled his. Heads were still turning, looking at her. She reached in her purse and took out a pad and a pen. She had nice hands, long thin fingers with red nails.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Herr Levin. As I mentioned I am writing an article for Der Spiegel, a magazine like your Time and Newsweek.

  Colette turned and took a newspaper out of her bag, unfolded it and showed Harry a short, one column article with a headline that said:

  Tourists Attacked at Munich Gaststätte

  Harry said, “What do you want to know?”

  “It is very unusual for Blackshirts to attack tourists,” Colette said.

  Harry listened, studying her. She wore a simple white blouse, collar folded over the lapels of a black blazer. He could see the swell of her breasts, the outline of her bra under the thin fabric.

  “They have an agenda, you see. People they target to terrorize and harass. Did you provoke them in any way?”

  “That’s what Detective Huber asked,” Harry said. “You think I picked a fight with six guys carrying ax handles?”

  “I didn’t mean that.” She took the top off her pen, and wrote something on the pad. “Did you say anything to them?”

  “Not a word,” Harry said. “They came in swinging.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “What friend?”

  “I was told there were two of you.”

  He watched Colette sip her coffee, red lipstick leaving a faint stain on the off-white china. She put her cup back on the saucer.

  “He was just there,” Harry said. “Sitting at the bar. We started talking, found out we were both from Detroit.”

  “We’re undergoing an internal crisis in Germany today. The Blackshirts are one of the subversive groups that have emerged. Most of their members are c
riminals, thugs and drunks without jobs or money. It reminds many Germans of a time we are still trying to forget.” She paused. “But please, Herr Levin, do not judge all Bavarians by the behavior of these fanatics. If you have time I would like to show you the good people of Munich. Are you free this evening?”

  “This is what I wanted to show you,” Martz said.

  Harry stared at the swastikas in black spray-paint on the wall of the synagogue.

  “The neo-Nazis who attacked you also did this. They are the new SS, the new stormtroopers,” Lisa said. “I feel like it’s starting all over again.”

  They had come from the cemetery where Harry’s grandfather was buried. Myron was a funny easy-going guy, always telling jokes like Harry’s uncle Sam. His grandfather’s gravestone had been spared, probably because it wasn’t particularly big or ostentatious, but random markers around it had been desecrated with black swastikas and the words Sieg Heil. Some of the headstones had been turned over or broken.

  “They won’t even let the dead rest in peace,” Martz said.

  Lisa drove them to her office in an old building on Brennerstrasse not far from Königsplatz. They walked up two flights of stairs, the old man breathing heavy when they got there. She opened the door and they went in.

  “Welcome to the ZOB,” Lisa said. “It’s named after a Polish resistance group during World War Two, the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa. ZOB. It’s a tribute to the parents of my partners killed by Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The English translation is Jewish Combat Organization, which seems appropriate since we’re still fighting the Nazis.”

  There was a row of beige file cabinets lined up across the wall and bookcases filled with binders, and dozens of black-and-white photos of Nazis on a bulletin board. There was a woman on the phone at her desk. She had blonde shoulder-length hair, late thirties, plain but attractive, more so when she smiled and waved. Put her hand over the phone and mouthed something to Lisa.

  “Irena, this is Harry, the boy I had a crush on when I was twelve. Harry, meet Irena Pronicheva.”

  Irena nodded and went back to her phone call.

  “What do you do here?” Harry said.

  “Keep track of neo-Nazi activities, and try to locate war criminals. Harry, there are still Nazi murderers among us, living normal lives.”

  They walked past Irena’s desk into another room.

  “This is my office,” Lisa said.

  There was a desk and a couch and two chairs. Harry went to the window and glanced down at the street below. Lisa turned on a lamp and sat behind her desk, opened a drawer and took out a stack of photographs.

  “Harry, I want you to see these.”

  Harry and Martz sat across from her, Lisa showing them shots of neo-Nazis, different angles, walking down a Munich street, carrying ax handles, broken store windows in the background.

  “Jewish shops on Maximilianstrasse,” Lisa said. “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?”

  “These could’ve been taken thirty years ago,” Harry said.

  “I know. That’s what’s so scary. And it’s going on all over the country.”

  She picked up a piece of paper and read. “A bomb attack wounded ten people leaving a synagogue in Stuttgart. A Jewish family was terrorized in Dresden. A prosperous Jewish couple, the Lachmanns, were murdered execution-style a few blocks from here last night.”

  She put the paper down, looked at Harry. “And you were attacked. Another average day in Deutschland.”

  Harry said, “How do you find war criminals?”

  “We have a list of Nazi Party members, those who weren’t condemned to death, or are still serving time. What’s astonishing, many SS kept their real names after the war and became lawyers, judges, teachers, policemen, and politicians. It’s unbelievable when you think about it. A lot of the Nazis that were prosecuted had their sentences commuted.” Lisa paused. “A few weeks ago, a Dachau survivor saw a former SS officer coming out of a restaurant on Leopoldstrasse. Her name is Joyce Cantor. She was visiting Munich for the first time in thirty years and ran into a Nazi who tried to kill her.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The SS officer in charge of a killing squad one day in the woods outside Dachau. Harry, didn’t the same thing happen to you?”

  “I remember him, but not his name or anything about him.”

  “Joyce called the Anti-Defamation League in New York, and they gave her our number. I spoke to her. She was supposed to come in and look at our archival photographs the next day. But when she went back to her hotel room there was a swastika painted on the wall. Sound familiar? She was scared to death and flew out that evening.”

  “Did she tell you what happened?”

  “I have our taped conversation right here.” Lisa pointed to the recorder on her desk. “She had been driven to the woods outside Dachau with a group from the women’s camp. It was late in the afternoon. A pit had been dug, and by the time she arrived it was full of Jews, dead and dying. She was told to jump in the pit, the guards shooting at her. But by then they were drunk, and missed her. When it was dark she crawled out and escaped.”

  Harry could picture the scene, remembered seeing someone running into the woods.

  Lisa took out a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white prints, placed them on the desk in front of Harry.

  “These are the photographs I was going to show her. Look at them. You will probably see some familiar faces.”

  The first one was a brown sepia tone shot of an SS officer, head and shoulders, the man wearing a peaked cap, eagle above the skull and crossbones, pale-gray uniform with a high collar and epaulets, arrogance evident in his thin-lipped grin.

  “Martin Weiss,” Martz said. “Arrived the 3rd of January 1942. Took over for Alex Piorkowski who was eventually kicked out of the Nazi Party.”

  “I remember Weiss,” Harry said. “He shot a man in the yard after roll call because his shirt wasn’t buttoned all the way.”

  “We don’t have to worry about him any more,” Martz said. “He was sentenced at Nuremberg and hanged.”

  “The question is, who did Joyce Cantor recognize?” Lisa said. “Forty-one other men at Dachau were tried with Weiss after the war. That seemed like a logical place to begin. All were found guilty of war crimes. Thirty-five were sentenced to death, the remaining six to various terms of imprisonment. Max Lengfelder, Sebastian Schmidt and Peter Betz—do you remember any of them?—received life sentences.”

  Harry glanced at their photographs, but no one looked familiar.

  “The final three, Hugo Lausterer, Albin Gretsch and Johann Schoepp, were given ten-year sentences. So any one of them could have been on Leopoldstrasse, coming out of the restaurant that day.”

  He looked at their photos. “Familiar faces,” Harry said. “But not the one we’re looking for.”

  Martz handed him another photograph. “You remember Egon Zill?”

  “I do,” Harry said. “He’d have guards tie a prisoner’s hands and feet together and make them crawl, squealing like a pig. Food was thrown into the pigsty and the Jew would have to fight the pigs for it.”

  “This is Himmler,” Martz said. “Remember the day he came, April 11, 1941.”

  “We weren’t taken there till November,” Harry said.

  “The SS were nervous, making the prisoners clean up the yard, the barracks, burning bodies in the morgue or burying them. Word was Reichsführer Himmler had a weak stomach.” Martz took a breath. “We were in the yard, standing at attention after roll call. Himmler came out to inspect us. I remember his eyes, dark and small, close together. He looked like some kind of rodent.”

  “Here are a few more,” Lisa said, sliding the pile over the desktop to him.

  Harry shuffled through the pictures and shook his head. “I don’t see him. Now what?”

  The beer garden was crowded when Harry got there at 6:15. He had walked through the Augustinerkeller, and it was like going back in time, the beer hall much the same as he remembe
red it: dark wood, heavy pine tables, timber-frame ceiling, and animal heads on the walls.

  He went out back and saw Colette sitting at a long table under the linden trees. She was with a group of locals decked out in Tracht clothing, home-sewn Tyrolean outfits that made them look like friendly mountain people, smiling ruddy-faced men and women who drank goat milk and lived humble honest lives.

  They were talking, drinking beer, listening to the oompah band, its members wearing lederhosen, having fun. It was a scene from his past when everything was good, before all the craziness.

  Harry watched Colette for a couple minutes, Colette the quintessential fräulein singing, hoisting her mug, enjoying herself. She looked over, saw him and waved. He walked to the table, sat next to her and met the people she was with. This was the custom, you found a space at a table and mixed with whoever was there. The waitress, a sturdy blonde with huge bazooms, came by and he ordered a beer. The band started up again and the Bavarians were singing and swaying in their seats, really getting into it.

  “Ein prosit, ein prosit der Gemütlichkeit,” Colette sang, smiling at him. “Come on, Harry, try it.”

  “I only sing in the shower,” Harry said.

  “Here, everyone sings.”

  “I better not.”

  “Then you have to dance with me.”

  Before Harry could object, Colette stood up next to him, took hold of his hands, pulled him up and hooked an arm around his, moving for the dance floor. He held her right hand and she put her left on his shoulder. He put his other hand on her hip and brought it up and felt the firm tautness of her waist. He twirled her a couple times, Colette really into it, laughing and grinning at him. When the song ended they went back to the table. Harry sang “Ein prosit,” loosening up a little, trying to put Hess out of his mind for a while. But he wanted to get out of the beer garden. He’d had enough of this Bavarian schmaltz, the oompah band and the cheeky German camaraderie.

  They went inside and had dinner: sauerbraten and roast potatoes.