Mother Night (3 page)

“With whom?” I said. I hadn’t yet been to Warsaw, hadn’t yet met with brother Hoess.

“He’s running a little health resort for Jews in Poland,” said Goebbels. “We must be sure to ask him to save us some.”

Can the writing of this ghastly pageant be added to the list of my war crimes? No, thank God. It never
got much beyond having a working title, which was: “Last Full Measure.”

I am willing to admit, however, that I probably would have written it if there had been enough time, if my superiors had put enough pressure on me.

Actually, I am willing to admit almost anything.

About this pageant: it had one peculiar result. It brought the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln to the attention of Goebbels, and then to the attention of Hitler himself.

Goebbels asked me where I’d gotten the working title, so I made a translation for him of the entire Gettysburg Address.

He read it, his lips moving all the time. “You know,” he said to me, “this is a very fine piece of propaganda. We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.”

“It’s a very famous speech in my native land,” I said. “Every schoolchild has to learn it by heart.”

“Do you miss America?” he said.

“I miss the mountains, the rivers, the broad plains, the forests,” I said. “But I could never be happy with the Jews in charge of everything.”

“They will be taken care of in due time,” he said.

“I live for that day—my wife and I live for that day,” I said.

“How is your wife?” he said.

“Blooming, thank you,” I said.

“A beautiful woman,” he said. “I’ll tell her you said so,” I said. “It will please her immensely.”

“About the speech by Abraham Lincoln—” he
said.

“Sir—?” I said.

“There are phrases in here that might be used most impressively in dedications of German military cemeteries,” he said. “I haven’t been happy at all, frankly, with most of our funeral oratory. This seems to have the extra dimension I’ve been looking for. I’d like very much to send this to Hitler.”

“Whatever you say, sir,” I said.

“Lincoln wasn’t a Jew, was he?” he said.

“I’m sure not,” I said.

“It would be very embarrassing to me if he turned out to be one,” he said.

“I’ve never heard anyone suggest that he was,” I said.

“The name Abraham is very suspicious, to say the least,” said Goebbels.

“I’m sure his parents didn’t realize that it was a Jewish name,” I said. “They must have just liked the sound of it. They were simple frontier people. If they’d known the name was Jewish, I’m sure they would have called him something more American, like George or Stanley or Fred.”

Two weeks later, the Gettysburg Address came back from Hitler. There was a note from
der Fuehrer
himself stapled to the top of it. “Some parts of this,” he wrote, “almost made me weep. All northern peoples are one in their deep feelings for soldiers. It is perhaps our greatest bond.”

Strange—I never dream of Hitler or Goebbels or Hoess or Goering or any of the other nightmare people of the world war numbered “two.” I dream of women, instead.

I asked Bernard Mengel, the guard who watches over me while I sleep here in Jerusalem, if he had any clues as to what I dreamed about.

“Last night?” he said.

“Any night,” I said.

“Last night it was women,” he said. “Two names you said over and over.”

“What were they?” I said.

“Helga was one,” he said.

“My wife,” I said.

“The other was Resi,” he said.

“My wife’s younger sister,” I said. “Just their names—that’s all.”

“You said ‘Goodbye,’” he said.

“Goodbye,” I echoed. That certainly made sense, whether I dreamed or not. Helga and Resi were both gone forever.

“And you talked about New York,” said Mengel. “You mumbled, and then you said ‘New York,’ and then you mumbled some more.”

That made sense, too, as do most of the things I dream. I lived in New York for a long time before coming to Israel.

“New York City must be Heaven,” said Mengel.

“It might well be for you,” I said. “It was hell for me—or not Hell, something worse than Hell.”

“What could be worse than Hell?” he said.

“Purgatory,” I said.

A
BOUT THAT
purgatory of mine in New York City: I was in it for fifteen years.

I disappeared from Germany at the end of the Second World War. I reappeared, unrecognized, in Greenwich Village. There I rented a depressing attic apartment with rats squeaking and scrabbling in the walls. I continued to inhabit that attic until a month ago, when I was brought to Israel for trial.

There was one pleasant thing about my ratty attic: the back window of it overlooked a little private park, a little Eden formed by joined back yards. That park, that Eden, was walled off from the streets by houses on all sides.

It was big enough for children to play hide-and-seek in.

I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child’s cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was
the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, that those still hiding were to come out of hiding, that it was time to go home.

The cry was this: “Olly-olly-ox-in-free.”

And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful—

“Olly-olly-ox-in-free.”

I
,
H
OWARD
W. C
AMPBELL, JR
., was born in Schenectady, New York, on February 16, 1912. My father, who was raised in Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister, was an engineer in the Service Engineering Department of the General Electric Company.

The mission of the Service Engineering Department was to install, maintain and repair General Electric heavy equipment sold anywhere in the world. My father, whose assignments were at first only in the United States, was rarely home. And his job demanded such varied forms of technical cleverness of him that he had scant time and imagination left over for anything else. The man was the job and the job was the man.

The only nontechnical book I ever saw him look at was a picture history of the First World War. It was a big book, with pictures a foot high and a foot-and-a-half
wide. My father never seemed to tire of looking at the book, though he hadn’t been in the war.

He never told me what the book meant to him, and I never asked him. All he ever said to me about it was that it wasn’t for children, that I wasn’t to look at it.

So, of course, I looked at it every time I was left alone. There were pictures of men hung on barbed wire, mutilated women, bodies stacked like cord-wood—all the usual furniture of world wars.

My mother was the former Virginia Crocker, the daughter of a portrait photographer from Indianapolis. She was a housewife and an amateur cellist. She played cello with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra, and she once had dreams of my playing the cello, too.

I failed as a cellist because I, like my father, am tone-deaf.

I had no brothers and sisters, and my father was seldom home. So I was for many years the principal companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was drunk most of the time. I remember a time when she filled a saucer with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and table salt. She put the saucer on the kitchen table, turned out all the lights, and had me sit facing her across the table.

And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her.

“There—” she said, “that’s what we’ll look like when we’re dead.”

This queer demonstration not only scared me; it scared her, too. My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. From that moment on she hardly spoke to me—cut me dead, I’m sure, out of fear of doing or saying something even crazier.

All that happened in Schenectady, before I was ten.

In 1923, when I was eleven, my father was assigned to the General Electric Office in Berlin, Germany. From then on, my education, my friends, and my principal language were German.

I eventually became a playwright in the German language, and I took a German wife, the actress Helga Noth. Helga Noth was the elder of the two daughters of Werner Noth, the Chief of Police of Berlin.

My father and mother left Germany in 1939, when war came.

My wife and I stayed on.

I earned my keep until the war ended in 1945 as a writer and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the English-speaking world. I was the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

When the war was ending, I was high on the list of war
criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public.

I was captured by one Lieutenant Bernard B. O’Hare of the American Third Army near Hersfeld on April 12, 1945. I was on a motorcycle, unarmed. While entitled to a uniform, a blue and gold one, I was not wearing it. I was in mufti, in a blue serge suit and a moth-eaten coat with a fur collar.

As it happened, the Third Army had overrun Ohrdruf, the first Nazi death camp the Americans were to see, two days before. I was taken there, was forced to look at it all—the lime pits, the gallows, the whipping posts—at the gutted and scabby, bug-eyed, spavined dead in heaps.

The idea was to show me the consequences of what I had done.

The Ohrdruf gallows were capable of hanging six at a time. When I saw them, there was a dead camp guard at the end of each rope.

And it was expected that I would hang soon, too.

I expected it myself, and I took an interest in the peace of the six guards at the ends of their ropes.

They had died fast.

My photograph was taken while I looked up at the gallows. Lieutenant O’Hare was standing behind me, lean as a young wolf, as full of hatred as a rattlesnake.

The picture was on the cover of
Life
, and came close to winning a Pulitzer Prize.

I
DID NOT HANG
.

I committed high treason, crimes against humanity, and crimes against my own conscience, and I got away with them until now.

I got away with them because I was an American agent all through the war. My broadcasts carried coded information out of Germany.

The code was a matter of mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences. Persons I never saw gave me my instructions, told me in which sentences of a broadcast the mannerisms were to appear. I do not know to this day what information went out through me. From the simplicity of most of my instructions, I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus. Occasionally, as during the buildup for the Normandy invasion, my instructions were
more complicated, and my phrasing and diction sounded like the last stages of double pneumonia.

That was the extent of my usefulness to the Allied cause.

And that usefulness was what saved my neck.

I was provided with cover. I was never acknowledged as an American agent, but the treason case against me was sabotaged. I was freed on nonexistent technicalities about my citizenship, and I was helped to disappear.

I came to New York under an assumed name. I started a new life, in a manner of speaking, in my ratty attic overlooking the secret park.

I was left alone—so much alone that I was able to take back my own name, and almost nobody wondered if I was
the
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

I would occasionally find my name in a newspaper or magazine—never as an important person, but as one name in a long list of names of war criminals who had disappeared. There were rumors of me in Iran, Argentina, Ireland. … Israeli agents were said to be looking high and low for me.

Be that as it may, no agent ever knocked on my door. Nobody knocked on my door, even though the name on my mailbox was plain for anybody to see: Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

Until the very end of my purgatory in Greenwich Village, the closest I came to being detected in my infamy
was when I went to a Jewish doctor in the same building as my attic. I had an infected thumb.

The doctor’s name was Abraham Epstein. He lived with his mother on the second floor. They had just moved in.

When I gave him my name, it meant nothing to him, but it did mean something to his mother. Epstein was young, fresh out of medical school. His mother was old—heavy, slow, deeply lined, sadly, bitterly watchful.

“That is a very famous name,” she said. “You must know that.”

“Pardon me?” I said.

“You do not know about anybody else named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.?” she said.

“I suppose there are some others,” I said. “How old are you?” she said. I told her.

“Then you are old enough to remember the war,” she said.

“Forget the war,” her son said to her, affectionately but sharply. He was bandaging my thumb.

“And you never heard Howard W. Campbell, Jr., broadcasting from Berlin?” she said to me.

“I do remember now—yes,” I said. “I’d forgotten. That was a long time ago. I never listened to him, but I remember he was in the news. Those things fade.”

“They should fade,” said young Dr. Epstein.
“They belong to a period of insanity that should be forgotten as quickly as possible.”

“Auschwitz,” said his mother.

“Forget Auschwitz,” said Dr. Epstein.

“Do you know what Auschwitz was?” his mother asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“That was where I spent my young womanhood,” she said. “And that was where my son the doctor here spent his childhood.”

“I never think about it,” said Dr. Epstein abruptly. “There—that thumb should be all right in a couple of days. Keep it warm, keep it dry.” And he hustled me toward the door.