Europe Central (79 page)

(Well, but after all, Berthe was her sister.)

His three children, pale and dispirited, ate their soup in silence. Friedl said: Now you must tell us where you’ve been, Kurt.

Minsk. Did you get my letter?

Not yet, she said steadily

Is it pretty bombed up? asked his father.

I’m afraid so. There’s not much good to say about that place.

Well, after all, it was under Jewish domination for so long. Have all the Jews fled, or are they still causing trouble?

They’ve been evacuated, he said bitterly. This is excellent soup.

His son Christian said: Vati, I’ve heard there’s a lot to eat in Prague. You go to Prague, don’t you?

Yes.

Did you bring us anything from Prague?

Let your father eat, said Elfriede. Can’t you see how tired he is?

Vati, someday will you take us there?

After the war, he replied with his head in his hands.

How many castles do they have? And what colors are on their flag? I’m doing a project about flags for school.

Their flag is the swastika now, of course. What on earth have your teachers been telling you?

He didn’t bring home good marks this time, Elfriede announced harshly, and Gerstein knew that he, the absent man, was failing all of them. Charity begins at home, runs the proverb, and he was spending his charity far, far away, on a race whose extinction no one would even remember!
Leave the dead to bury the dead,
as Scripture says. For a moment he imagined bringing his family to Prague on a holiday, or taking Christian at least, so that the boy could see the ornate towers, the curving stone balconies flying our long crimson buntings whose swastikas make us all proud; it wasn’t Germany, but those devils who—

Vati, next time you go to Prague will you please bring us something really good to eat?

Christian, said Elfriede, but not as sharply as she might have, you know better than to speak to your father that way! Say you’re sorry!

Sorry, Vati. Vati, what do they have to eat in Prague?

He wanted to please them. He said: Well, sometimes there’s roast duck.

With red cabbage?

That will be enough, said Ludwig Gerstein. Try not to be angry at him, Kurt.

I’m not angry, father. Why is it so dark in here?

It’s not dark. The fire’s very bright.

No, it’s those blackout curtains. What a ridiculous regulation! The Allies have devices with which they can pinpoint their targets in the dark . . .

Don’t be a defeatist, Kurt!

Nobody said anything until the soup was gone, and then Christian asked in a low shy voice: Vati, may I please see your cap?

Smiling with relief, Gerstein took it off and passed it across the table. He remembered seeing soldiers as a small boy, and longing to be one.

I like that death’s head! laughed the child.

Silly! You’ve seen it before!

Please, Mama, let me look at it just a little bit more!

Let him, Ludwig Gerstein decreed. It won’t do the lad any harm.

Vati, when I grow up can I be in the
like you?

Surely, said Gerstein, trying not to burst into tears.

19

In 11.42, they closed Belzec, having liquidated half a million Jewish-Polish bandits. They burned the bodies, shot the work-Jews and burned them, too, demolished the installations, and interred their final report in a folder stamped with the invocation
Then they motored back to Lemberg to celebrate in one of the restaurants for
Germans only.No
Poles Admitted.
Truth to tell, Belzec had never been any more than a fifty-mile practice march, so to speak; the real campaign must be waged at Auschwitz, whose public name is Camp A. Good blond
-Oberstrumführer Kurt Gerstein was in on it from the first; with his colleagues he sang “Erika, We Love You,” a melody very popular with our Panzer troops at Stalingrad; and this Gerstein had a beautiful voice; he was said to have been a Christian youth leader once, so doubtless he’d led many a choir in his time. Come to think of it, he resembled a choirmaster with his strangely delicate eyes and fine lips like a girl’s, his face almost as fair as the twin lightning-bolts like pallid gashes in the darkness of his right collar-tab; he cut a very dashing silver-and-black appearance; the way he carried himself, with his head thrown back, seemed confident at first, but then the backflung head began to strike any thoughtful observer (fortunately for him, in this world there are few of those) as the sort of stance which might be taken by, say, a Polish hostage standing before the firing squad; in our experience it is rather surprising how frequently such racial chaff actually tries to be brave; well, brave or not, they know the bullet will enter the forehead—if they’re lucky—so while the eyes gaze at us levelly, and sometimes the mouth can even
smile
(no matter that the smile lacks three teeth), the head creeps backward, unknown to itself, striving in its primitive way to gain another inch of distance from fate.

With his fine comrades he marched down Krakow’s streets, all of them singing “Erika, We Love You” in perfect time, accompanied by the pleasing clink of their steel boots on the cobblestones, and at that moment only he of all of them remembered the pits full of dead Jews stinking and brownish-yellow like the earth which rains back down upon the snow after another mortar explodes at Stalingrad. Siegfried the bankrupt tavernkeeper’s son was out of cigarettes (he’d just completed two weeks’ “sharp arrest” for smoking in the motor pool); Kurt Gerstein gave him a whole pack of them. Albrecht the former assistant cashier wanted to send his mother some gold bars which he’d providentially found; Kurt Gerstein telephoned Captain Wirth, and it was arranged. Handsome Heini and Karl, who’d first met in prison back in ’32, were sulky because instead of having more fun with P-girls, they must now deliver some documents all the way to the Central Office for the Jewish Problem in Bohemia and Moravia; dear blond Kurt Gerstein offered to make the journey himself.

He was trying to read the newspaper, whose front page presented Ribbentrop jutting out his chin in imitation of the statues in his renovated Foreign Office; that meant that there was no news at all, no good news at any rate. He wanted to finish the article about Ribbentrop, but they wouldn’t let him. They were his children. Heini, who’d grown newly enthusiastic about our national literature, kept hounding him about
Tristan,
which to save time the boy was reading in a modern German version. He’d finally gotten as far as the verse where Tristan the Amorous sets out to help Dwarf Tristan regain a mistress raped away into a foeman’s castle. They slay the evil knight, along with his six brothers; that part’s all right, but Dwarf Tristan dies in the process, and Tristan the Amorous gets wounded in the groin with a poisoned spear. Only Isolde can save Tristan, and she won’t arrive in time. Handsome Heini wanted to know the significance of the poisoned spear. Why did it have to be in the loins? What was all that about? Perhaps, wondered Handsome Heini aloud in an innocent tone, Kurt Gerstein could explain something about knights who’d been wounded in the loins.—Instead, Kurt Gerstein led them in “Three Riders Rode Out to the Gate,” after which they decided that Kurt Gerstein was really very nice; they got drunk and embraced him, the way our truehearted soldiers do. They drew their revolvers and clattered them down on the café table, laughing at everybody’s terror. Then they swore blood brotherhood with each other, sweet blond Kurt Gerstein included: they all pricked their fingers with their
daggers and mixed their blood with his!

In our medieval romances, brother battles brother because identity’s hid behind each closed visor. But these young men all wore the same armor as he; their honor was their loyalty. He pretended to be their brother, and they didn’t see his face. As long as it was dark he couldn’t see their faces; he prayed that Captain Wirth wouldn’t turn on the light. And he wished that he knew how to play cards, because that would have made them happy. They murdered innocently, because they’d been told to murder and because they were stupid. How could Christ Himself blame their bloody hands? They invited him to drink beers with them and watch leg shows at the Wintergarten as soon as the war was over. They asked him which film actress he preferred, In-grid Lutze or seventeen-year-old Lisca Malbrum, and he smiled and said there was a certain Berthe whom he never stopped thinking about; when they asked who she was, he sang one more round of “Erika, We Love You.” He led them in
Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.
They thought he must have lost those three teeth in a street fight; they knew he’d been with the Brownshirts, just like the legendary Barricade Otto. And that made them love him all the more.

Now, across the tanned skull of a shaveheaded Pole, he spied an
-man slipping his arm around a U-blonde as they passed down the angling twisting street to get swallowed by a bar’s awning. He laughed, his eyelid twitching, and muttered:
Geheim!

Finally he got away from them. (As Friedl kept telling him, your fanatical convictions are making you unhappy, Kurt.) He was very sorry, but now he must answer the call of duty. They thought him a sanctimonious ass; he never knew how to have fun.

In the town of O
wi
cim he met Captain Wirth, who was drinking beer from a dead family’s soup tureen which was a conch shell inset in herringbone-patterned silver; and Captain Wirth told him, “between you and me,” how the new crematoria, built with truly Germanic perfection by Topf und Söhne, were nearly doubling their rated capacity of four thousand five hundred and seventy-six corpses (Captain Wirth had memorized this figure), at which Gerstein (already calculating: eight hundred a day makes twenty-nine thousand two hundred a year, excluding the occasional open pyres of two thousand a day, which makes . . . ) laughed and shouted: Serves those Jews right!—then his eyelid twitched, which did not make Captain Wirth suspicious in the least because our huntsmen do develop mannerisms indicative of the stress of the heroic work.—Remember to keep this close to your chest! sniggered Captain Wirth. After all, even the Russians seal their radio equipment before a secret offensive . . .