by John Gardner
“Okay. Right, Loddermann met me when I got back to New York. I gave him observations. Same old stuff. People I’d seen, places I’d been. Bomber squadrons, weapons; okay, I gave some stuff about landing craft they were testing at one place. But nothing significant.”
“Name, rank and serial number, Lou, right?”
“You got it.” Count of ten. “Herb, can we eat now? Please. I get hungry.”
Herbie looked at his watch. “Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun,” he said.
In the bedroom, Pucky was taking off the headphones and changing the tape. Kruger had gone over the room again and regarded it as safe from Art’s listeners.
“I’m pushing him fast.” He gave her the big grin, the one for the cameras. “We don’t need much detail, only what he learned about how to operate. Experience which he brought with him to the Russians. This afternoon, I probably push him harder. Maybe we even get to the Russian involvement, I don’ know.”
Pucky nodded, gave him a peck on the cheek and said she would get them lunch. “Tuna fish salad do you?”
“Why you got to say ‘fish,’ Puck? If it’s tuna it’s fish, right?”
“Right.”
He took her arm, holding her back from the door, looking at her with not a little lust. “Tonight …” he began.
“Oh, goody …”
“No, tonight we got some work to do with the computer, Puck. Tonight I want us to do some hacking. I got numbers. So we find a little more about who is really who. If Lou Passau is Saul Isaak or Abraham Joseph Packensteiner.”
As they reached the door, the Maestro was calling for Kruger to put on some music for him. “I don’t hear music for hours on end, Herb.”
“What you want? You looked through the collection we bought?”
“Anything. Give me anything. You choose.”
Herbie put on Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet. “Star-crossed lovers,” he said cryptically, and old Louis Passau’s eyes filled with genuine tears.
We are getting near to the riddle of La Tempesta, Herbie thought. He went into the kitchen to help Pucky with the tomatoes, muttering under his breath—
“Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.”
“That’s not Romeo and Juliet!” Pucky smiled.
“No. But it’s Shakespeare, baby.” Once more the big smile. Then, “The isle is full of noises, Pucky. All we have to do is listen to the music.”
(12)
“OKAY, LOU. THESE PEOPLE—Flora, Irene, Loddermann. You never saw them again when it was all over?”
“Only that one brush with Flora.”
“And you never ran into the two guys who first set you up—Bukholtz and Haaven?”
“Never.”
“They ever give you any clue how they got the raw intelligence back to Germany?”
Lunch had been a quiet business, the music still weaving a spell around the apartment. Serge Prokofiev’s ballet had a way of concentrating the mind: throbbing, luxurious melodies, clashing harmonies. Dramatic. Passau seemed locked into the sounds. Living in a different world. Herbie thought that maybe he had retreated to happier days. When he started to question again, he went in tough and hard: the master cracking the whip. “So tell me, Lou, what did you know of their methods?”
“I didn’t ask. Didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.” Passau shut his mouth like a trap.
“And all the time, they kept their side of the bargain?”
He nodded.
“An answer, please, Lou. Nods don’t count.”
“Yes, you know. You fucking know what the bastards did.”
“I figured it out. It’s not in your biographies, Lou. But you don’t have to be a genius to know what happened.”
“Okay. Yes. Yes, and yes. I received letters. Regularly. Sometimes handed to me by the girls. Sometimes to my office, in the regular mail.”
“The regular mail? You remember the postmarks?”
“All over. All over the country—New Hampshire, Arizona, California. Who cares? They came and they were good.”
“How good?”
“Good enough.”
“Details, Lou. I know it hurts, but details I want.”
“The letters were, at the beginning, reassuring. They were under some kind of restraint, they said, but it was comfortable. They were not ill-treated. The food was sufficient. This was a word they always used—‘sufficient.’”
“They were together?”
Passau nodded again. Paused. Nodded a second time, then whispered, “Yes.” At last, Herbie saw that the Maestro was genuinely in difficulty; unfeigned emotion, sorrow was written across his face, and moved deep in his eyes. His breathing was heavy, as though he had some kind of constriction.
“You okay, Lou?” He leaned forward, one hand on the old man’s shoulder.
Passau nodded. “Give me a minute. There are two memories in my life which still have the power to hurt me. Nothing else.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and he was still having difficulty with his breathing.
Herbie thought, “Don’t die on me, Lou. There’s something in your life which still has a bearing on the present, and I’ve got to know. Don’t die on me, Lou.” For a moment he had one of those terrible fugues, where he was uncertain whether he had said his thoughts aloud or not. Passau’s eyes were closed and, for a second, Herb wondered if he should shout for help.
Then the spell broke. The old man opened his eyes, taking a huge gulp of air, as though by some necromancy life had returned. “I’m okay, Herb. Fine. Just a little faint. We finish for today, please?”
Herbie shook his head. “Sorry, Lou. Face it head-on. You’ll only have to tell this once.” It was a lie, he knew, but what do you do?
Passau’s head drooped onto his chest for a count of ten, then he raised it again and gave a tiny nod. He looked like a man near death, so Kruger waited another minute. Very slowly the color came back. “What was the question?” Louis Passau asked.
“Your cousins: were they together?”
“Yes. All of them. David, his wife and three children. Rachel had married a man called Krevitch. She had two little girls—well, they were not so little by then. Rebecca was also married. Joseph Fine was her husband. Worked precious metals in Passau. I have a gold pendant on a chain. Sometimes wear it. Made by him. They had one child. A son. Yes, twelve members of my family. All together. Well treated. Food sufficient.”
“You ever find if this was true?”
The nod once more, then the single affirmative. A lag between nod and word, as though it took time for his brain to signal to his voice. Another thirty seconds. “Yes, later we knew they were together. It was some old castle, or big house. A mile or two from Celle, Lower Saxony, northern Germany. There were several families there. Not all Jewish. The place was a short distance from where they finally built the camp: Bergen-Belsen.”
“You didn’t find this out until later?”
“Their movements were traced when it was all over. But the letters kept coming. Definitely written by my cousins. I don’t think they were forced to write good things, not until matters became irrevocable.”
“And when was that, Lou?”
“I guess early in forty-four. January 1944.”
“What happened?”
“A letter. Bright. Happy. From Rachel. She and Rebecca had told me, in almost every letter, that they were allowed to practice regularly.” He stopped, as though that explained everything.
“Practice?”
“The violin. They were both good.” He gave a little toss of the head. “Not concert standard, of course.”
“Of course not, Lou.” Quietly, but appalled inside. Nobody in Passau’s family was allowed to be concert standard except the Maestro.
“They told me what they were playing. How they practiced every day.”
“And?”
“In January 1944 the letter from Rachel was to tell me that she, with her family, and Rebecca with hers, were being moved. They were
to play in an orchestra, she said. She was happy, delighted. The only thing that made her sad was that David would stay behind. She told me openly, in this letter, that they were going to be in an orchestra, in a place called Auschwitz, and I nearly went mad.
“Jewish people in America knew about Auschwitz by then. We all knew about the death camps. Auschwitz was on everyone’s lips. We had pleaded with the authorities. Asked them to selectively bomb the place—the gas chambers, the crematoria, the wire. It was only later that I learned about the orchestra of Auschwitz. You know about that, Herb? The musicians of Auschwitz?”
“A little.” In fact he knew quite a lot. A group of musicians in the terrible camp had been banded together under the protection of one of the senior female officers, a woman called Maria Mandel—Lagerführerin Mandel. She was the female SS officer in charge of the so-called Orchestra Block at Auschwitz. Beautiful, slender, golden-haired. A fanatical Nazi. Some said that she had once taken a Jewish lover, so spent the rest of her life atoning for it. So she was a woman who obeyed orders, fought to keep her orchestra together, showed sympathy on one hand and ruthless, near bizarre, sadism on the other.
One story had touched Herbie, and stayed with him since he first heard of the woman and the orchestra of Auschwitz. One day, during what they all knew as the Selektion, when families were separated; when husbands, wives and children were put into different groups—some destined for immediate death, others sent to labor which would eventually kill them—a beautiful child detached himself from his mother and toddled, arms outstretched towards Mandel. She had picked him up and taken him away. For a time the child was always with her, well-dressed in a sailor suit or other nice clothes, always blue, taken from the piles left by children on their way to the gas chambers.
Those who had seen Mandel and the child, recorded how she played with him—Mummy and Baby games—how she gave him chocolate, and how, in the end, she took him, herself, to the gas chambers.
This was the woman who decided the fate of the individuals in the orchestra: the orchestra which played to soothe the troubled minds of those arriving at the death camp; the orchestra which gave special concerts for prisoners and staff; the orchestra—the last thing so many heard as they were marched towards the showers: those terrible chambers of death, where lethal Zyclon-B gas, not water, gushed from the sprays.
Herbie pulled himself from his own small knowledge of the musicians of Auschwitz. “They were in the orchestra, Lou? That dreadful orchestra?” This time he did not press for an audible “Yes.”
Then, he asked, “Didn’t many of those people survive?”
Once more, the long and trembling sigh. “I talked to some of them in later years. Some of the Auschwitz musicians. Yes, many survived. Not Rachel and Rebecca, though. Not their families. When the final panic began, at the end of forty-four, they returned, with the other survivors, to Bergen-Belsen. But they did not live to see the British troops overtake the camp.”
Passau suddenly doubled back on his narrative. “1944,” he began. “A happy and sad year. In May, almost exactly a month to the day before the Allied invasion of Hitler’s Europe, Veronica, at long last, gave birth to a little girl. She had already lost two children: one when she was three months’ pregnant, the other at five months.
“We had almost given up any idea of having children. She went through so much pain and suffering. Then, almost a miracle: a perfect little girl.”
May Cosima Passau, born May 6, 1944. The apple of her father’s eye. She had been at the Passau 90th Birthday Concert.
Herbie gently drew him back to the matters uppermost in his mind. This was the greatest emotion he had yet seen in the old man. “January, the letter from Rachel, which so upset you; May, the birth of your daughter; June, the invasion—Operation Overlord. What then, Lou? What further intelligence did you give to the girls?”
“Little. Meetings were set up. They came with lists of questions, trying to grab stuff from my memory. Things learned when I had been in England.”
“You answer any of those?”
Passau shook his head. “Made some up. I couldn’t remember anything. Not really. They said I should try because Hitler had the wonder weapons. The invasion would fail.”
“You had other letters? From David, Rebecca and Rachel?”
“When I heard they were being sent to Auschwitz, I knew it was the end. Since forty-three they had been moved from the castle into the new camp at Bergen-Belsen. You know about that—about that camp?”
“Yes. I know all about Bergen-Belsen, Lou.” It was like asking a doctor if he knew about death. In the days following the collapse of the Third Reich, the Americans—mainly the OSS—had recruited the young Herbie Kruger. At that time he was stick-thin and gangling. He also hated the Nazis and all they stood for. The Americans decided to use Herbie as a ferret. They would put him into the camps set up for DPs—Displaced Persons—and his job was to ferret out the many confirmed Nazis who had sought sanctuary in the DP camps.
The Americans were not overly scrupulous about the jurisdiction held over DP camps. By then—the early summer of 1945—Bergen-Belsen had become the largest of many camps being converted by the Allies. It was under British command, with the Royal Army Medical Corps trying to nurse the survivors—and the many others who ended up in that part of Germany—back to health. Herbie Kruger’s first assignment was to be insinuated into Bergen-Belsen by the Americans, without British knowledge. They told him that their security could be maintained if they did not have to go through the American authorities. They could hoodwink the British, and then come out smelling like roses by bagging Nazis from under the noses of the Brits. So much for Allied cooperation.
Herbie had mixed with, talked to, helped and comforted many of the inmates who had been on the death marches, or had suffered in other camps. He felt he knew the history of Bergen-Belsen by heart, for when you had seen the place you knew all about it. He talked to the walking half-clothed skeletons who were, unbelievably, human beings, left destitute of hope, health and dignity. To him, it was the whirlpool of the Holocaust. After all these years he still suffered the occasional nightmare about the place where no birds sang and the sights were not meant for human eyes. All this cascaded through his mind as he said, “Yes. I know all about Bergen-Belsen, Lou.” This, and more: the history of the place, as he heard it in 1945—
Originally it had been a prisoner-of-war camp, but in 1943 things had changed. It became an Aufenthaltslager—a detention camp: a place where they held people supposedly designated for exchange for German nationals in Allied countries. As he remembered it, there were five satellite camps: one atrocious place for prisoners brought in to do the building; another was a “special camp” for those Jews who had papers showing that they had been accepted by other countries. Many groups passed through the Sonderlager, the special camp. Several thousand of these wretched people simply paused there, on their way to Auschwitz and the gas chambers.
There were also the “neutral camp,” the “star camp” and the “Hungarian camp.” In the neutral camp conditions were better, less cruel. Herbie thought that would be where Passau’s cousins had been kept.
In 1944 everything changed again. Bergen-Belsen became the place that marked the end of the Death Marches from other concentration and death camps. For thousands it was the beginning and the end of horror. The crematoria belched out their pungent smoke, but there were no gas chambers. People in Bergen-Belsen, in the final days of the Third Reich, died from brutality, lack of food, typhus, phenol injections into the heart. There was also a firing range.
When the British Army arrived, in mid-April 1945, corpses were strewn everywhere, and the awful walking bones shuffled about in a daze. The British went into shock. They had not expected to discover such a place, and in the first five days a further fourteen thousand people died. In the weeks following, another fourteen thousand died of malnutrition and disease.
“Yes. I know all about Bergen-Belsen, Lou.” In the seconds
it took to say the words, Herbie Kruger recalled all this, and his own days there in late June 1945. The bodies had gone, the ragged camp pajamas had been replaced, but the air was still sweet with death, and the walking corpses still shuffled about, refusing to move outside the perimeter.
With a sudden jolt, Herbie remembered sitting at the door of one of the huts, talking to an old man, who was probably under thirty years of age. His bones protruded from parchment, translucent, tight skin, and his eyes were sunk, like deep gouges into his face.
“Were you here last week?” he asked of young Kruger, in a reedy voice.
“No. I only just arrived.”
“Last week there was a concert. A big orchestra came. They had a choir also. They played and it was wonderful. The most wonderful thing of my life.” The man staggered to his feet and tried to caper around, trying to relive this moment of joy, until he collapsed with stomach cramps and was taken away by two medical orderlies.
Herbie’s mind grasped at the dreadful coincidence, for he was a believer in coincidences. A bolt of shock went through him. He had missed seeing Louis Passau, with his orchestra and chorus, by a week. Now, he sat with the old man reliving personal truths about that terrible place where the rows of huts, and the very earth gave off a sense of brutality and mindless, cruel, unnecessary death. Kruger knew he had probably stood near the graves of Passau’s cousins. He also knew that he had netted four SS officers at Bergen-Belsen in the last days of June 1945.
“Yes. I know all about Bergen-Belsen, Lou.”
Passau grunted. “David and all his family perished in the typhoid epidemic. Rebecca’s husband and son died in Auschwitz. In the ‘showers.’ Rachel’s man, Kevitch, and her three little girls were separated from her during the journey back. She was crazy with grief. I had all this from one of the musicians of Auschwitz. Rachel and Rebecca died back in Bergen-Belsen. Most of the orchestra was saved, but Rebecca was clubbed to death by a Polish kapo—the Nazis appointed some of the more brutalized prisoners as kapos, but you know that.”
“I know it, Lou. And Rachel … ?”
