B002FB6BZK EBOK (16 page)

His nights, he told me, were a constant tour of hell. I loathed his use of
the story of the distinguished poet in the context of the solution of the
Semitic problem. I also suffered quite a bit from the fact that I had to put
the rare and only copy of the Divine Comedy in a closet next to haberdashery, between suits and shirts. But authority as we know goes down while
responsibility goes up, and so I had the honor of obeying one whose words
disgusted me, and I had to listen to confused and meaningless speeches
about the descent of the Muslims, whom I wanted to lead in our war against
the British and the Russians, vis-a-vis Dante. The word Muslims rises here
in my mind in view of the fact that they started then, to my displeasure, to
call worn-out Jews Musulmen. Weiss claimed that the Muslims wouldn't
forgive the distinguished poet for putting Mohammed and his son Ali in hell while he hung their intestines at the entrance. As somebody who saw
pigs like Captain Roehm who lusted after men-in a moment of drunkenness, Weiss had the nerve to tell me that it was he who recruited the Fuhrer
into the party-hanged on hooks like butchered meat, I had to rise above
myself not to challenge that claim. I told him, But Salah-a-Din was put
along with "infidels" like Homer and Virgil in a corner of infidels who had
a great soul, and he said, Yes, yes, but Homer wasn't a Christian and I said,
And us? We're different Christians, we belong to the SS Reiterstandarten,
sifting the nobility from the filth, burning the dirt, our faith dear Weiss, as
Rosenberg put it, is pure chauvinism; Jesus's mother served as a temple
and with the support of an important priest, she bore a German soldier
with fair hair and blue eyes from the tribes of the Germans in the Roman
army who moved north from the Carpathians, and we became Gutglaubig:
people with pure German faith of Nordic origin and not talmudist Yids
filled with remorse and when we drive in our shining Horick and Maubach
cars, we present a powerful future and not some primitive and frustrated
Christianity, but Weiss didn't answer me. In his heart I know he detested
me, I could see his mousy eyes looking at me with distrust, he knew very
well that every word he said to me would be reported to Berlin, in his own
heart he feared our illustrious Wotan customs that bore us in sublime excitement to the pure German soil to ancient altars or to the light of torches
in a strong song of brotherhood. He was and still is a traditionalist, he commands death that smells Christian. My obedient nature often impelled me
to those clashes with Weiss despite the fact that I was almost anonymous
in our hierarchy while he-the miserable Christian-was called by his first
name by Goring and Goebbels, Dr. Frick, Ley, and Kerl who knew him
from the days when the Fuhrer was in prison. His SS card had three digits, two or three numbers behind the Reichsfuhrer. But I already said, my
obedience was my first nature and not some random careerist blindness.
We'd sniff each other all the time, each trying to discover his companion's
secrets, "his companion," from my point of view should be written in quotation marks. I wrote before that I had a special privilege of seeing him
sleeping at seven twenty in the morning and so I could also see the special
way he woke up. The servant on duty who was usually a Pole, with his always delicate and beautiful hands-Weiss knew how to select handsome
young men to serve him-would remove the blanket and stick a cigarette between his master's lips. And then he would carefully light the cigarette,
wait until his master started sucking the smoke a little and his eyes would
then express buds of waking. When he got out of bed he'd do it with a
concentrated and frozen and maybe even savage leap. On the way to the
warm bath, prepared for him in time, with the cigarette in his mouth, he'd
open his old book of Walter von der Poloida or the poem of Ludwig and
would read the book through its binding. He would immediately sink into
recitation and by the time he entered the bathroom, the water was lukewarm. After a year he was able to repeat word for word what he hadn't read
that morning. But to the same extent he was able to shout at me that he
didn't consider the attempt plausible to restore to the modern world of the
Third Reich the old-fashioned exalted aura of ancient German gods. Those
gods too, he told me once with typical sincerity-sent word for word to my
superiors in Berlin-impose infinite chains on man, impose too great a
burden on a pure organism that, more than it loves or is enslaved to the
gods, is enslaved to ritual. What we are trying to create, he said, is a ritual
and not a myth. And I of course was filled with honest, maybe even patriotic, grievance.

After one of Weiss's endless one-way arguments with me (I was silent
then with outstanding nobility) he showed me as a gesture of reconcilia
tion-he apparently detested the instructions sent from Berlin as a result
of my letters-a small wooden box and asked me with a jocularity steeped
in horrifying transparent malice, what I thought of that box, I looked, the
box opened to the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I felt the
box in my hands, felt my eyes fill with tears, I said to him: I haven't seen
such a marvelous creation in many years, and that was truly true.

He lit an Egyptian cigarette whose delicate smell blazed up in my nose,
drank wine from a bottle he used to keep in front of him. Those expensive
cigarettes he used to chain-smoke and would put them out on his hand. For
some reason he wouldn't crush the cigarettes in the many ashtrays heaped
up in his room. I looked at the box again, outside, through the windowpane
hazed with gray smoke. The landscape was gray, desolate, monotonous, and
gloomy. This was not the proper place to show a rare creation of art. I asked
Weiss if he had bought that box on one of his tours of duty in the East
where he had served many years earlier as an agent for oriental objets d'art,
something he'd do between his frequent appearances as an understudy opera singer in provincial towns whose names were known for not appearing on maps. He chuckled at me and said-something I of course understood immediately was not true-Mr. Beautiful People, those works are
created here!

Then he told me about some ludicrous Jew who could do magic with
wood. My friends in Berlin, he told me with a smile and a hint that didn't
escape me, compete, after knocking themselves out about certain letters
that come to them from here about ideological instability, institutional
instability. Kramer, brotherhood of the leaders, for who'll get a box, who'll
get a grandfather clock, who'll get an intricate frame smeared with endless
lacquers and the secret of their blend isn't understood by the most famous
experts.

And I'm there ... Perfection evokes in me a dreadful sense of quiet
bliss. I told him excitedly, without responding to his hints: Goethe said
that the greatest virtue a man can reach is amazement, and I, I feel now a
mastery and modesty of endless amazement, that's an enlightened and
special work of art, can that be done by a blind man?

Can a bloodthirsty Jew, a perverse mutation, create that work? Weiss
smiled and went on sipping the French wine and immediately, as an answer characteristic of him, with red eyes of drunkenness, started reciting
to me the Niebelungenlied shrouded in tragic fates.

I went outside, the gigantic courtyard was empty. I had to find the Jew.
I didn't ask Weiss, I knew he'd despise me too gracefully. I'm capable of
smelling them from afar. And he was indeed sitting in the small storeroom
under the guardroom that was never used, under a bare bulb hanging on an
electrical cord at a table heaped with tin boxes full of liquids, pieces of
wood, paste, planes, hammers, nails, and other objects scattered in imploring disorder. My look was apparently especially bold since he looked aside,
froze on the spot, and stayed like that. With my supple cane I signaled to
him to go outside. He obeyed immediately, blinked his malicious eyes, and
from far away in the gray air, smelling the approaching odor of a Yid, two
hundred purebred dogs started barking in their kennels.

He didn't look flaccid and faint like the other Jews but there was no
pride of a human being in him either. He wore tatters I wouldn't have
given to a pig. He maintained a distance of a meter and a half from me, as
if that measure was natural to him and not just a form of obedience. I told him to come close to me and he didn't. I saw his body stiffen; closeness to
us was forbidden and he knew that in his body, as a genetic code, but after
I raised my voice and waved my cane, he came close. I wanted to discover
his image. When he came close I whipped him, he bent over with a typical Jewish dexterity but didn't make a sound. The first blow struck him,
but his evasion of the second blow almost made me stumble. He straightened up and said a sentence to me that I shall never forget, he said to
me: My name's Ebenezer Schneerson, Herr SS Sturmbahnfuhrer, and
there is no acceptable reason for you to hit me, by day I'm the carpenter
of SS Obersturmbahnfuhrer Weiss, at night I'm your Jew! And then you
can hit me. I noticed the tone of the words. He knew how to emphasize
the fact that Weiss's rank was higher than mine but he also knew that I
had more power than Weiss. That Yid knew how to play Berlin against
our camp, and if somebody needed proof of the force of cunning, that was
a smashing example, and if my blood didn't go to my head that was because
of the strict education I had obtained in my youth when I was sent to the
homeland to complete my schooling, and because my father didn't spare
me a decent education worthy of the name. Think before you hit, my father told me, and hit them so that the blow will evoke respect, more than
strength, the memory of the blow is more important than anything. But
there's no denying that at the sound of Ebenezer's words I was stunned.
"My poor puppy ran away from here," I quoted in my mind a line from
some forgotten song, and at that time I also saw before my eyes my sisters,
Lotte, Sylvia, Kaete, and Eva, I saw my sweet mother in her new house in
the homeland, an exact copy of our house in Palestine, in my thoughts I
saw them listening to a sweet melody notes bursting from those beautiful
music boxes, I saw them putting in a handsome cabinet the pearl necklaces
and the beautiful objects I used to bring them now and then from organized tours in the liberated areas of France, Poland, Holland, and Belarus,
and I said: Stand, dog, and he stood, I ordered him to make me a box like
the one I had seen in Weiss's room but with a different tune, and he said,
With your generous permission, and after I didn't say anything else, the
dog waited a while and then without turning his face, as was customary, he
walked to his kennel, his back knew the way, he didn't stumble, he didn't
slip, but he walked backward as if he were born to walk backward. His eyes
fixed on me the whole time, weren't lowered. He was frightened, he was very frightened, but he also knew not to show that fear. What a silly demonstration of courage when all I had to do was hang him on the hook and
let his guts rot. His face was familiar to me, his name struck waves in my
mind for some reason.

I couldn't shut my eyes that night. A scene from the recesses of my youth
rose and bothered me and wasn't clear. I heard the sounds of the night, the
orders of the guards, I was restless, those eyes of his, I knew them, I got
dressed and went to the office to check what block he lived in. There were
about a thousand creatures there lying on bunks. None of them paid any
attention to me. What could hardly be called human beings were twined
into one another like leeches. In the light of my flashlight, some of them
were seen chomping breadcrumbs, their faces full of mad lust, hungry,
some were rubbing the breadcrumbs on the damp boards to moisten them,
others were picking lice out of their heads and swallowing them, others
were scraping the sweat off the wall with their tongues, the Latvian and
Ukrainian guards huddled around the small stove were amazed to see me.
The wooden boards groaned, people muttered in their sleep or in dying
that spared us the need to destroy some of them with our own hands every
night. He looked straight into my eyes, as if he were waiting for me. I ordered him to get up and he got up. His rags now looked as if they were
wrapping a scarecrow. I ordered him to stand on all fours and he obeyed.
I was so stunned by it that my grief and offense increased. I was mighty
and at the same time the deputy of a fool, a powerful and noble cog in a
dark machine of strict and necessary laws. To preserve my honor I had to
act as I demanded others act, the chain of orders I was part of created divinity, not vice versa, when I ordered him to recite the prayer Adon 0lam
sitting like a dog he told me he didn't know the prayer by heart, that infuriated me not because of what he said but because of the fact that when
I attended the Hebrew course in my training as an SS Reiterstandarten I
was almost the only one who knew anything about Judaism. And when we
were told that every Jew knew the prayer Adon 0lam by heart, I said there
were many Jews today who didn't know it. And they laughed at me. The
course was superficial and short, we could have succeeded much better
if our knowledge had been much better. When I asked my commander,
who was an ignoramus about Jewish matters, to read to the students, all
of them loyal commanders and good Nazis, the important pamphlet "The Catholic Faith against the Jews" by Isidor of Seville, and I claimed that
that was one of the most ancient German works even though it was written
in Roman, the commander said: We don't need to learn from the Catholics
who the Jews are! As if that was what I meant. He said, and I'll never forget this: An ancient pamphlet a hundred years old shouldn't interest us
when we have "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" by Rosenberg. I
said, Commander, this pamphlet is more than a thousand years old and it
explains to us how ancient and rooted our loathing is and even how justified it is, but instead of listening to me he became hostile to me and it
wasn't only because of my wound in the first battle I participated in that
I was transferred to the camp, but also because of the enmity of that
commander who later participated in the revolt of the generals. And I was
denied the bliss of serving the Fuhrer with the courage I knew was in me,
because of the miserable jealousy of a person who was later hanged on a
hook and died very slowly dripping blood and kicking.