The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  Slyomovits cut him off. “I don’t like to be called a survivor,” he said. “I’m not proud of that. I’d rather be a victor.”

  But that had proved impossible once he’d gotten on the train. Anyone who still asks why people walked like lambs to their deaths in Auschwitz clearly hasn’t read any one of the extant accounts of the logistics, how death in the gas chambers started in those boxcars. Because once on, once locked inside, deprived of food and water, unhinged by this, there was no chance of resistance when those doors were finally opened on the dead and the still-living. And the prisoners in Auschwitz knew this, which was why they collaborated on Vrba’s death-defying escape, which against all odds succeeded—only to be sabotaged by the very ones to whom it was entrusted.

  “Four hundred and thirty-seven thousand and four hundred and two”—Slyomovits knew the exact numbers, precisely how many unsuspecting Czechs and Hungarians were shipped out in the months after Vrba’s warning had been given to the community leaders.

  Was it possible? Consie gathered up her things and walked outside. It was still lovely, with the sun getting lower, cutting flat across the diagonal pathways where the carefree boys and girls in sandals strolled to and fro. There were bikes lying about, unlocked—free bikes, she realized, for the lucky students. Did they even know how lucky?

  Though if they knew, would they be quite so lucky? She too had had her American time in that bliss, unawares.

  It would take an hour at least for the roads to clear a bit. In the meantime, what was she supposed to do? Stroll around with the golden horde here? Her nice suit was rumpled. She felt old. Less chic in gray than lay nun.

  There was a small outdoor not-quite-café. More like an airport stand. What do you get in these places? A few kids were sitting at the little tables, loners all, eating yogurt and cups-o’-noodles. Ramen. She knew that from her own children. She got a tea and sat under a tree.

  Could she use the library? The regular library likely required an ID, but no one had stopped her from walking into the Doheny. She gulped the rest of the tea and went back inside, and immediately found a free computer that someone had left online, password and all.

  Fine. She had a fact for which she’d lost the source: “Each individual was worth precisely $745 to the German government, counting his or her bones, hair, and teeth, and deducting the costs of food, transport, and poison gas.” Even figuring low, at about 1.5 million at Auschwitz alone, you could see how the death camps fell into place, from the banker’s point of view.

  She’d been careless with the source, though, and what she should have done with this dead time was type in “Auschwitz” and then slog through the data till she found it again. But what she typed instead was “Kastner,” which led to another “Closing time,” and another dazed “What?”

  “We close at ten.”

  Ten? She looked up. When had it gotten dark?

  “The Leavey is open, though.”

  “No, that’s fine, sorry, uh, thanks”—she staggered to her feet.

  She had to hand it to Kastner. He’d gotten her kicked out twice in one day. She walked outside into the darkness—there was the fountain, and still some of the kids, and all those bikes, left out. Her Ohio upbringing balked at this, but after all, there was no need to put things away out here. It wouldn’t rain for months.

  Kastner—bloody Kastner. Her research had confirmed what Slyomovits had said, made it worse. Kastner had had what you might call a special relationship with Adolf Eichmann, the high SS officer who’d come to Budapest to ensure that what even the Nazis saw by then as their final act was all that it could be.

  What they didn’t want there was, as they put it, “a second Warsaw.” Resistance in Budapest would slow them down, now perhaps critically. Time was running out, but the death camps were primed. If things went smoothly, the Nazis could still rid the world of at least half a million men, women, and children, Eichmann figured, before the Russians came over the mountains and shut them down.

  To this end, the Nazis plastered the walls with the usual posters—YOU WILL BE RELOCATED TO A FAMILY CAMP, YOU WILL BE SENT TO PICK GRAPES IN TOKAY—replete with the usual lies. And then they called in Kastner, the community leader, to grease the wheels.

  Eichmann had liked Kastner from the start, he told Life magazine in an interview in the 1960s, liked his style. “This Dr. Kastner was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. . . . While we talked he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve, he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.”

  It didn’t take them long to reach an understanding: Kastner would help Eichmann “keep the people from resisting deportation and even keep order in the collection camps if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred emigrate.

  “It was a good bargain,” Eichmann felt. “You can have the others,” Kastner had told him, “but let me have this group here.”

  Eichmann admired this, Kastner’s willingness to sacrifice half a million people to his own ends. “As a matter of fact, there was a strong similarity between attitudes in the SS and Kastner’s,” he concluded, “and because he rendered us a great service, I let his groups escape.” These would be the founders of a new country, “biologically valuable blood,” Eichmann said Kastner called them, “human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work.”

  Eichmann could relate. “As I told Kastner: ‘We, too, are idealists and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.’ ”

  The two men shook hands, and thus it was that Kastner and his list were boarding their passenger train to Switzerland while Slyomovits and Hermann were allowing themselves to be shoved into boxcars to Auschwitz, under the logical if false assumption that they were being tapped for their labor, and that this was the best way to keep their wives and children alive.

  Kastner—she could picture him smoking with Eichmann. The studied cool, the thrill of this pas de deux with the devil. Hermann had probably had a silver cigarette case, too, though his would have been long gone by that time. Stolen or bartered right off, traded for nothing, a loaf of bread, an invalid permit, maybe even in Budapest itself, and it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that it had found its way to Kastner. After all, theirs was a small world, and the market for luxury goods would have been yet smaller, since the SS and the Gestapo presumably would have arrived already supplied with silver cigarette cases. They’d have had them for years, since the “happy days” of the early war, all that beautiful loot in Vienna or Berlin.

  Had them so long they would have come to think of them as their own, think that they’d been born with silver cigarette cases, those Nazi prestidigitators, but who would have gotten Hermann’s? One of the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross boys? But they were thugs—she couldn’t see them affecting a cigarette case. And Kastner had money, though how or whose remains a mystery. Plus, he was still permitted to stroll about like anyone else: Eichmann had exempted him from wearing the yellow star. Free from this, he could still enjoy an elegant public smoke.

  She could see it—Kastner with Hermann’s cigarette case. Anyway, with someone’s. Kastner had not been born to silver. His father had a small shop, which he’d neglected. Kastner’s mother had struggled to support the family. She wondered if Kastner had taken his cigarette case on the train, but why not? You could smoke on a passenger train to Switzerland in those days. Kastner would have smoked very comfortably, in the dining car as he supped. “One after another, just like an SS man.”

  And then perhaps, just as Hermann and his wife, both of them shocked by the violence and half-crazed with thirst and hunger, were being shoved out of their boxcar and getting their first dose of Auschwitz on that Stygian platform, the guards, the stripes, the dogs, the separation from each other, the longing looks that would turn out to be the last ones in this world; maybe even at that very moment, in one of those sy
nchronisms that happen from time to time, Kastner too was stepping from the train he’d bought with their lives, at a nice clean Swiss station, Hermann’s cigarette case tucked in his tweed.

  Or linen, for it was summer by then. Nor was it possible to continue this exercise, because Hermann disappears at that point. But Kastner’s life, au contraire, is part of the public record. He lived out the war the way people did in Switzerland; and afterwards, he, along with his wife and daughter, and all of his family and friends, took their places among the elite in their new world, the new State of Israel.

  He lost his bids for elective office there, but received an appointment, as spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That was in 1952. His colleagues in government seemed to have put the Budapest of May ’44 behind them. “Let the dead bury the dead,” as people in that part of the world had been saying for almost two thousand years.

  But every party needs a pooper, or maybe it was just that Malchiel Gruenwald was having trouble with transition. His entire family had been shipped from Hungary to Auschwitz and gassed while Kastner was smoking with the Nazis. Only Gruenwald had made it through, and now he lived in Tel Aviv, alone, except for the mimeograph machine in the back room of his little café. Which he used one day to publish a three-page pamphlet, which he handed out for free.

  “I have waited a long time,” it read, “to expose this careerist whom I consider, because of his collaboration with the Nazis, an indirect murderer of my dear people.”

  And collaboration wasn’t the only charge. Gruenwald went on to accuse Kastner of using the money of those sent to Ausch­witz, “millions for which no accounting is given,” to pay to save “his relatives, and hundreds of his friends . . . people with connections, [making] a fortune in the process.” But as for the rest of the people—“these, Kastner left in the valley of the shadow of death.”

  The pamphlet burned through the city, and calls went out for Kastner’s head. The Labor government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kastner’s behalf, which turned the thing from brush fire to conflagration.

  The trial dragged on for two years, as every Hungarian not on Kastner’s train stepped forward with their own “J’accuse.” Even the mother of Resistance martyr Hannah Senesh made the long trip out to charge Kastner with complicity in her daughter’s death. When Senesh was arrested at the Hungarian border, her mother had begged him to intervene, since he was known to have influence with her captors and even access to her prison. “But he did nothing,” she sobbed on the witness stand, and meanwhile, her daughter was tortured for months, and finally shot by the Nazis in November of 1944.

  The crowd was horrified, the headlines black, and the judges ruled against Kastner, for Gruenwald. Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil,” they concluded. Kastner resigned from his government position and withdrew from public life. He compared himself to Dreyfus, and lived with a loneliness “blacker than night, darker than hell,” he told reporters.

  The Labor government managed to get the verdict reversed on appeal, but even those judges conceded that Kastner had in fact served the Nazis, “expediting the work of exterminating the masses.” And by then, the damage was done. Labor fell over the affair, and Kastner was shot on his doorstep on March 3, 1957. He died twelve days later.

  “Good,” she blurted out loud, even in the library.

  But was it good? It turned out that his killers weren’t avenging Hungarians, but rather connected to the far-right terrorist Stern Gang, who then formed the new government. The one who’d pulled the trigger had once worked as a paid informer for Israeli intelligence. So instead of vengeance, was it a silencing? And why had the secret service wanted Kastner dead?

  SHE WALKED SLOWLY toward the parking structure. She had no recollection of where she’d left her car. Maybe she’d never find it, maybe the car was gone, or covered with the dust of decades. She suddenly understood what the historian Raul Hilberg had been after. He was quoted extensively in the French film Shoah, and had seemed half-mad, poring over all those minuscule train schedules, as if to pinpoint the evil. But now it seemed to her that he was right. Death here was in the details.

  One man facilitating, working with the Nazis for whatever reasons—they all had their reasons. The German engineer “following orders,” Kastner serving his vision of a new land—and there it was. The trains arriving, the trains pulling out, people showing up peaceably for deportations, all the little bits coming together and then you had it, the working death camps.

  Kastner was one of the best of them, but there were plenty more, all the mini-collaborationists. Hitler couldn’t have done it without them.

  As for her, she felt like Bluebeard’s bride, who’d opened one room too many and now couldn’t get the blood off the key. She’d come here this morning looking for good news, Hermann’s escape, but what she’d found instead was the precise mechanism of his probable death.

  There was her car—she ran.

  “Everything okay?” A guard came to the rail. There behind him, bright in the night sky, was a gigantic Felix the Cat, terrifying, horrible. It’s just an ad, she told herself, a billboard, but even as a child, she’d felt there was something about him. Something bad.

  “Yeah, fine,” she said to the guard, fumbling for the key, the lock, pushing the button, pulling the door, pushing again. It opened. She fell in, then took off, down around the infernal circles, into the weird, deserted streets. No wait at the lights now, no one on the freeway. It took the classic LA twenty minutes, or must have, because suddenly she was home. Where was the ocean? How had she missed it?

  She got out and looked up at the sky. There was the moon, rising late, it was waning. “Weak,” as they say in Brazil. “Cold,” as one of the French Resistance women wrote, about Ausch­witz. Cruel, it had seemed to them, as it shone down upon them, night after deadly night, and did nothing.

  19

  SHE SAT UP THAT NIGHT reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. What was there to be afraid of now? The story had burned into her mind, into her soul.

  And she’d come to love Hannah Arendt, loved her clarity, her tough, direct gaze, loved the way she smoked, and the way she talked, the way she wrote. But as she read her analysis of evil, she got the feeling that Arendt had gotten that wrong.

  Not about everything. She nails the “elation” of easy confession—young Germans in the sixties confessing to guilt without any indignation, or the Protestant churches admitting to a lack of “mercy,” when what is really lacking was and is justice. An accounting, say, from the princes of commerce, most of whom profited from slave labor. Bayer, Siemens, IG Farben, Krupp, Mercedes, Volkswagen, who built their factories right next to the death camps and signed contracts with the SS, who would provide a specified supply of guards, dogs, and whips, along with steady replacements for prisoners who would, it was understood, be worked to death.

  Hannah Arendt is good at this, but then, watching the little man Eichmann in his glass booth for months on end, she concluded that evil was banal.

  But what was banal was the man, not the evil. Eichmann was like someone who’d woken up from a dream. Banal, perhaps, as he sat there, captive, in Jerusalem, blinking, in isolation, facing the full turn of the tables, human, all too human, and completely alone.

  But when the Nazis were in full swing and Eichmann was in full step, figuring out, day and night, how to stuff their ovens with ever more live people—where was the banality there? It was, rather, the wild beast incarnate, the blinding blue-white light, the mouth of the wolf. “Amidst a Nightmare of Crime,” was what one of the SK prisoners called it, who left notes buried for after his own predetermined death.

  It was only afterwards, when the trains stopped and the ovens went cold, in that stunned silence that followed, then there came that glance around—Did I? Did you? What happened? And who can we blame?

  And that’s when the banality came in—the attempts at flight, the lies, the excuses, the long, talkative explanations. “I didn’t,” “I was only,” and the
rest of it, all of it banal in the extreme. Boring, predictable—excuses we all know from kindergarten, when we might have used them ourselves.

  And even the retribution turned out to be banal—since it was so useless, so disproportionate, a grain of sand in that vast sea of crime. Yes, Eichmann was hanged, but he was only hanged, and hanged only once. For it to work at all, he would have had to be hanged a million and a half times.

  Or at least hanged Nazi-style—a little bit, so their victims felt it, and then stopping for a moment, and doing it again. Or hanging them not quite high enough, so it took a very long time—and was that banal?

  Was it banal to transport people for days with no water, having calculated the precise effects of extreme thirst on the human being’s capacity for resistance? Banal to strip them bare and then push them, men and women with their own small children whom they loved, into a room without enough poison gas to even kill them quickly? Where death would come in such a way as to cause them to tear their own flesh? Bring blood from the eyes and ears?

  Banal to force other prisoners to then pry the bodies apart, the bodies of people they’d seen alive a few minutes before, sometimes people they knew, sometimes even people they loved, and cut their hair if it was lovely and pull out the gold in their teeth, which went to the Central Bank in Berlin? And how banal was even the Central Bank then, and how banal those gold teeth in its coffers? How banal were all those jewels flooding the Swiss markets, or the baby clothes handed out for free in Berlin?

  Nothing about it seemed banal to her. She even knew some of the faces, from the SS man’s photos, one last look at the Hungarians coming off the trains. Nice people, mostly old-fashioned looking, some with head scarves, most with good coats, and lots of children, very nice children, in coats and hats, sitting with their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers, each one “a world,” as one of the prisoners who worked in the ovens managed to write, “and in twenty minutes, that whole world will be transformed into ashes. No trace of them will remain.”