A Perfect Madness (41 page)

“
We should not be talking
of fighting and dying, when there are many cards yet to be played,”
Erich said, trying to sound as dramatic as he could. Doing so
always impressed Franz, because the role of evil always requires a
lot of acting, and Franz was the master thespian in playing
it.

Surprised by Erich’s sudden theatrical
flair, Franz crossed his arms for a second studying him, then
leaned back, roaring with laughter, causing many in the room to
look at him.

“
You are right, there is
more to come, and then we will face the Russians and die with great
honor as we should. We must have more beer and talk of the days to
come and what they will bring.”

So Erich and the man he detested more
than his own self drank away the last hours of a long night until
neither could stand, nor cared that he couldn’t. Erich had never
been this drunk before, and found little enjoyment in it,
especially when a swirling nausea blurred his eyes, seizing his
mind and twisting his stomach into a thousand tiny knots before
heaving into his throat and mouth all that he had eaten for the
day. The vile vomit spewed forth from his mouth like one might
expect to happen from a holy exorcism, covering Franz, who was fast
asleep in his own world with its own evil spirit. In the morning,
Erich could remember little of the night except that he had
showered Franz with vomit and felt good in doing so.

They had been together over two years
at Auschwitz, and he hated Franz every second of those days. To
him, Franz came into this world corrupted; there was no other way
to explain it. No one could grow into all the evil that possessed
him. The problem was, as Erich saw it, the kind of diseased
corruption that owned Franz was contagious in some strange way. How
else could he explain his own corruption? He had been pure until
the day he met Franz. His life and dreams with Julia at the time
were locked in another beautiful world, clean and full of hope.
Franz never had to choose between good and evil like he did to stay
alive. That’s the best way to explain all the terrible things that
had happened. But the moments, he knew, were near now when all this
would be over, everything he had done here and at Görden would pass
into history. And the thought gladdened his heart and gave him
hope.

On the second night after his drunken
binge with Franz, the news came to Erich that Franz had been
arrested by the Gestapo, then summarily tried and executed. Stunned
beyond belief, Erich was afraid to ask why. He had sat and drank
with him the night before when he had loudly berated the weakness
of the Wehrmacht soldiers, a moment of treason. No reason for
Franz’s sudden downfall and death would ever be known, except
through the passing whispered rumors in the camp. In the early
hours of the morning, he had awakened at the table, still quite
drunk and covered with Erich’s vomit. Staggering into the club’s
kitchen to clean himself, he encountered a young Jewish girl of
fifteen, quite small and emaciated, whose duties were those of a
kitchen maid. Ordering her to strip off his filthy uniform and
underclothes and clean them, he became aroused by her presence.
Knocking her to the floor, he bared her body, too, and repeatedly
beat and raped her until he was spent. When the morning shift
arrived, they found him asleep, lying naked across the nude
battered body of the small girl, who was semi-conscious and
whimpering like a beaten dog. Without moving either one, the
kitchen staff summoned the camp police who quickly marched a naked
and still groggy Franz to headquarters for questioning. No excuse
was there for him to plead. Being a favorite within the Health
Ministry was of little help. With the war lost, those who had been
important, or perceived themselves so, were scattering like straws
blowing in the wind, hoping no one would find where they would come
to rest.

Ending up in the hands of the Gestapo,
Franz was executed not because he had beaten and raped a young
girl, but because he had sexual intercourse with a Jew, an
unpardonable crime. Only treason to the Führer and desertion of
duty were higher crimes. The young girl did not escape either,
though she was innocent. Taken to one of the open ditches, she was
thrown in while still alive and burned with the other bodies
already smoldering there.

For Erich, Franz’s ignominious ending,
if it were true, was another sign that God was changing sides. All
would be over, the terrible things he was a part of, when Auschwitz
closed in a few weeks. Then he could begin to nourish again the
humanity that had long stayed crouched deep within him, cowering in
fear. As a doctor, he would not have to stay behind when the camp
was evacuated but would go with the thousands of prisoners to be
moved deeper into Germany away from the advancing Russian army. He
would leave one day, when they drew near to Dresden, by simply
walking away. That was his plan.

No one, if they listened long enough,
could fail to hear the distant rumbling sounds coming from the
east. There were too many to miss, as the crisp cold days of
January carried the faint booming of a thousand mortars and cannons
echoing through the woods and across the wide expanse east of the
camp. A phrase would soon begin that would be repeated again and
again until they were actually there: “They are coming, the
Russians,” spread through the camp. Coming not as liberators, but
to defeat the hated Germans, they would bring their own particular
version of hell with them, which like the Nazi’s was the stuff of
fiction, being too unimaginable to be true. No female body was too
young, or too old, to escape being penetrated by the conquering
soldiers, who had been set loose on the towns like wild animals
chasing down prey. Freeing Auschwitz’s prisoners meant little to
them, unless they were Russians. Saving what few Jews remained in
the camp after the Germans evacuated it would be an added burden
they didn’t want.

As the thunder of the big guns grew
louder, worry among the prisoners grew, too. Their task had become
as one, to demonstrate to Erich and the other doctors they would be
able to endure the long march ahead of them the day the camp was to
be evacuated. No other choice was open for them to live. They would
either march or be shot, or be left to die in their rotting skins
for the Russians to find them.

The day before Erich was to leave
Auschwitz, along with over sixty thousand prisoners, he noticed
among a sickly group of Jews who would be left behind what seemed
to be a familiar face. As the day progressed, the man’s face
haunted him, and in the late afternoon he went to find him. But the
man, called Abram, hid from Erich when he saw him approaching the
barracks where he slept. In time, Erich quit the search, but the
man’s face, especially his eyes, would not go away, following him
wherever he went. He had never seen the man before, which was
understandable to Erich, considering the thousands of prisoners
that had come to Auschwitz during the past two years. It did seem
strange to him though, that this one face he appeared to know but
didn’t was squeezing his mind for an answer from the past that
wasn’t there.

It was the worst of January’s winter
days when Erich boarded the army truck that would take him and
others of the medical staff away from Auschwitz. A cold wind mixed
with sleet blew through the camp, making it impossible to stay
warm. Those that were left behind would be shot where they were
found or left to freeze to death in the unheated barracks. When the
Russians would arrive nine days later, large mounds of rotting
bodies would be there to greet their eyes. For Erich, though, there
was little he cared to remember as the camp faded from view and
into a history that was yet to be written. Only the mysterious face
that came before him filled his mind, crowding out all other
thoughts, had he tried or cared to think of what had happened
behind the closing gates. It was as if he had never been there
before. Auschwitz, and the man’s face when it came to him, was of
another time and place. Hours later, when they were far into
Germany, he would rest and sleep and know that Dresden was near and
he would be home soon.

***

TWENTY-EIGHT

Julia, Carpathian Mountains, Slovakia,
1944

F
inding Django’s
Romani road leading to the Carpathians took longer than expected.
Hidden beneath tall grass and brush, little of the old road could
be seen. Only where the ground was weathered bare by the seasons,
or where families of rocks lay piled together as markers, could the
tracks of gypsy carts be seen. The old road seemed to begin in the
middle of nowhere, and end in the same way, too, deep in the cuts
between the last of the rising hills before they curled up against
the great mountains.

Julia had never seen the Carpathians,
having never traveled much distance east of the Vltava River, and
when they loomed before her she was taken by their odd shapes.
Unlike the great Alps with their jagged peaks reaching to where
heaven begins, they were more forested and rounded, with thousands
of hidden folds looking in places much like a human brain. But she
loved all mountains, big and small. There was something holy about
them and the sounds the wind would make blowing up and down and
around them. No sound was ever the same, like when it blew across
open fields or through the narrow streets of Prague. It was easy to
see why God first chose a mountain to look down from to tell us
what was right and wrong.

But to the north, the tall mountains
held more than God. Hidden among the tens of villages sprinkled
throughout the deep valleys of the mountains were small numbers of
Slovak partisans who maintained contact with the Czech resistance
and British intelligence. So it was there Julia and Eva and Django
would go to live and fight for two years, only to run once more to
stay alive.

One day, when spring came early in
1944, two men came to Julia’s band of partisans camped high in the
mountains around the small village of Banska Bystrica and told them
of Auschwitz and its horrors. Never before had the Czechs and
Slovaks there heard such tales of evil as these two Jewish men
offered. Both had managed a miraculous escape from the death camp,
and would spend their days ahead like prophets of old, spreading
the terrible stories to all who would listen. When Julia first
heard them she cried unashamedly, knowing they spoke of her father
and mother’s fate as well. When she asked about her family, neither
men knew of them, only that a small handful of those that came from
Prague had escaped the ovens thus far. The words of the two men,
though, added a new dimension to Eva’s own silent hate of the
Nazis, and in the coming months she became someone unknown to
Julia, even to Django, fighting with the ferocity of a wounded
beast, daring things no one else would do. The Slovaks grew to love
her even though she was a Jew.

One August morning, after the summer
winds had warmed the mountains, the partisans descended on Banska
Bystrica, bringing with them Julia and Eva and Django. A
long-planned national uprising against the Germans and Slovak
puppet government had begun its ill-fated journey to disaster.
Though Julia and Eva knew of the plan, little had come to them from
intelligence of what their role should be. By the time the cards
were turned face up for everyone to see, a quickening demise of the
ill-planned uprising was taking place before them. With their
fighting group quickly encircled by six German divisions, Eva and
Django talked together away from Julia of the end to come and of
their hope of killing ten soldiers before their own eyes became
fixed in the stare of the dead, too.

Thinking of her own death was not
Julia’s way. It was only the silence that came with the loss of
something precious that she had tried to understand. It was the
only reason she had for believing a human soul existed. We go
before God as a shadow, her father had told her when she was a
child, and it is there we are given the light promised Moses and
Abraham. But his words made little sense to her, because it is the
light of living that dims and grows dark when death is around. She
had seen it flicker for a while, and then go out like a candle in
the wind when her grandpapa died. How to keep this candle burning a
little longer was all that Julia could think of doing in the
moments before her, not of dying and killing. Thousands of
partisans and rebel Slovak forces were preparing to retreat to the
high mountains ahead of the advancing German troops; and Julia and
Eva and Django would go with them, but then turn south, retracing
the trail that first brought them here two years back.

Walking over to where Eva and Django
were sitting eating bits of hard bread and cheese, Julia knelt down
to tell them of what tomorrow would bring. Her words were
interrupted when the first salvo of heavy German mortars crashed
down upon the encampment without warning, shattering and tossing
bodies in the air with every explosion. She realized the time was
now, in the night’s darkness, to go back into the mountains once
more, not tomorrow. Screaming loudly at Eva and Django to grab what
they could carry of food and water and follow her, Julia started
for the narrow winding road leading deep into the first of the long
valleys stretched out beneath the tallest of the mountains. The
road was filling rapidly with others who knew that night was their
only hope to escape the relentless shelling. Safety would not come
in numbers, Julia knew, and would draw the guns once they were
seen. Before she could move away from the road towards a row of
low-lying hills silhouetted like moving phantoms across the night
sky by the rising moon, the mortars came again, covering the road
with flying shrapnel from every direction. So many fell that the
earth itself trembled in fear.