The Final Reckoning (14 page)

‘Perhaps Julian never opened the box.’ Tom didn't like taking over like this. But the Garrick tie had convinced him: a man like Henry Goldman would speak to a fellow white, male lawyer more openly than with a non-male, non-lawyer. For men of Goldman's ilk, that would be like communicating with another species. The fact that Rebecca was Jewish, while he, Tom, was not, did not seem to make any difference. The tie suggested Goldman was not that kind of Jew.

Goldman sat down at the table and gave them both a straight look in the eye. ‘It's difficult for me to talk about this without letting my own views show, and I am sure what you are both in need of is an uncoloured account. For which reason, perhaps it is best if I pass on – without too much commentary on my part – the arguments advanced by my father.’

‘Actually, a few facts at this stage would be an enormous help,’ Tom said, adopting the excessive politeness he affected whenever speaking with the English establishment.

‘Very well.’ Goldman leaned forward. ‘As you now know, Rebecca's father was involved in the—’ he searched for the right word, ‘—
removal
of certain men associated with the events of the Second World War.’

Tom could see Rebecca's leg oscillating up and down in a constant vibration.

‘Well, I have to tell you. He did not do this work alone. He was part of an organization. We would call them Holocaust survivors now, though no one used that word at the time. They were men, and a few women, who had seen unspeakable horrors. Unspeakable.’ Goldman gave a little shake of his head. ‘At the start, in the final weeks of the war and immediately afterwards, there were no more than fifty of them, with maybe two hundred more offering help on the outside. Almost all had been involved in the resistance in some way.’

An image floated into Tom's head of the young Gershon Matzkin, posing as Vitatis Olekas, hopping on and off trains as he criss-crossed occupied Europe, cheating death and desperately trying to warn others so that they might live.
Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.

'They were ghetto fighters, my father included. And I suppose this effort evolved quite naturally out of that. They had been trying to kill Nazis before and they were killing Nazis now. Churchill and Roosevelt had declared the war over, but “it wasn't their war to finish”. That's what my father used to say. Hitler had declared war on the Jews long before he declared war on Britain or America or Russia. The Jews had their own score to settle.

‘But there was more to it than that. More to what we—’ he meant Tom and him, fellow lawyers, ‘—would speak of as
motive.
To understand that, you have to start from first principles.’

Tom didn't even have to look over at Rebecca to know she was squirming in her seat. He felt it too. Goldman had no appreciation of the urgency of their situation. They hadn't told him about last night's break-in for fear it would make him clam up. He hadn't become the emeritus senior partner of Roderick Jones, with a corner office view of Docklands, by wading balls deep into trouble. They would have to be patient.

‘You have to remember that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was impossible.’ Goldman raised his palm in protest, anticipating an objection. 'I know, I know. There
was
resistance. My father and your father, Rebecca, were part of it. Nevertheless, the logical starting point is that Jewish resistance was impossible. You have to understand that to understand anything.

‘As you know, Nazi control was absolute. Even the slightest act of defiance would be punished by swift and lethal retaliation. Dare to raise a hand to a Nazi and they would kill you, your family and your whole community, without compunction. For one of them, they would kill a thousand of you. But that's not the main thing.’

Rebecca was now drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair.

'The Jews lacked the essential requirements of any plausible resistance. They had no arms, no tradition of fighting. They had no army, no barracks, no arsenals. The Poles and the French had been sovereign nations, with their own armies;
there were resources – arms dumps and so forth, even in the middle of the countryside – they could call on when under occupation. The Jews had none of that.

‘Above all, they had no friends. No one would help them at all. I'm sure you know the stories, the lengths the Jews had to go to, the bribes they had to pay, to get the Poles or Lithuanians or Ukrainians to sell them so much as a single pistol. And if they ever got out, ever escaped the Nazis, woe betide them if they ran into the rest of the resistance. The Poles or Lithuanians or anyone else for that matter hated the Jews so much, they were only too glad to finish off anybody the Nazis had been foolish enough to let slip away. As my late father, who loved English idiom, used to say, “We went from the fire into the frying pan”.’

Tom could feel Rebecca shuffling, desperate for Goldman to get to the point. ‘Could I—’

The raised palm again. ‘You'll soon see where this is leading.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Add to this the fact that the Nazis did not exactly advertise their plans. They hid behind euphemisms: “resettlement in the east”, and so on. And of course the Jews swallowed it up. “Never underestimate a man's inability to imagine his own destruction.” Those were the words of a member of this group. A rabbi, as it happens. Oh yes, there was a rabbi. A poet too. A couple of journalists. Farmers, merchants, doctors. They were a very mixed bunch. Anyway, this rabbi used to speak of Hitler's bus.’
He leaned forward, his eyes bright. 'You know about Hitler's bus, yes? That he was planning to exterminate every single Jew, except twelve? These twelve would be saved, as specimens. Human exhibits. They were to travel the world in a specially equipped bus, a mobile display of “the extinct Jewish people”. That was Hitler's plan. And you know what this rabbi would say? “Every Jew in Europe believed he would be one of the twelve who would make it onto that bus”.

'This is the context in which your father, Rebecca, and mine acted. They believed that the Jews, for all the reasons I have mentioned, had accepted their fate too passively. A few individuals had fought back, but the damage they had inflicted amounted to mere pinpricks. They were just children, the leaders of the resistance. Even the most senior commanders were in their very early twenties. There was so little they could do. You know the phrase, “Like sheep to the slaughter”? That was coined by the poet of the group. He said the Jews had walked into the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter.

‘It was this that those three hundred men could not stand, that Jewish life had been extinguished so cheaply, without punishment. They wanted to teach the world a different lesson: that to kill a Jew came at a price. That such a crime would be avenged. And so they looked back into history and found an ancient vow:
Dam Israel Nokeam.
“The blood of Israel will take vengeance”. They
took the first letter of each Hebrew word of that slogan to form another word, DIN
.
A word in itself, it means “judgement” and that became the name of this group. Your father and my father, they were both in it. And I believe, Rebecca, that your father was its very last member.’

Tom was thinking hard about everything he had seen: the passports, the press clippings, the evidence in New York. Had there been any pointer to this word, DIN; some clue he had missed?

‘In the beginning, it was quite straightforward. By the middle of 1945, the Allies ruled Berlin and DIN could operate relatively freely. They cultivated informants in the British and American bureaucracies, especially in the prosecutors' offices, finding men who for their own reasons were only too happy to leak information on Nazis who had melted back into civilian life. One way or another, DIN acquired a target list. Then they used all the old techniques of the ghetto resistance to acquire the uniforms and IDs they needed. My father was good at this work: he would follow a military policeman and knock him out cold, taking great care to steal everything he had: wristwatch, wallet, belt. The soldier would come to a few hours later, stark naked, unaware that the only things his attacker had really wanted were his uniform and military ID. But I believe the female members of DIN were especially adept in this task – though they didn't use force to part the MPs from their uniforms.’

Goldman allowed himself a smile at this, but it passed quickly. The earlier ebullience and pomposity had gone now; his face appeared to be in shadow, a shade entirely of its own making. The more of the story he told, the greater the weight it seemed to press on him.

'Posing as military police made the job easy; they could walk right up to a target and “arrest” him, just like that, bold as brass. Or they could do a “snatch”, an abduction. They could do all this because DIN were wearing the uniforms of the Allied authorities – and the Allies were the masters now.

'Then they would act like a court, reading out the charge sheet, listing the prisoner's crimes. Only then would they announce themselves:
“We act in the name of the Jews and we have come to administer justice.”

‘Afterwards, they would go to some lengths to hide the body. That way the investigation into the victim's disappearance took longer, giving DIN time either to get away or to strike again. Ideally, the death, once discovered, was recorded as a suicide.’

Tom thought back to the sheaf of cuttings he had seen in the cardboard box that afternoon: most of the deaths reported there were either car accidents or suicides.

Goldman continued. 'This approach had the obvious advantage of ensuring that no other ex-Nazis would know there was a group actively pursuing them; they would not raise their guard. But, you have to realize, the way DIN saw things,
that was also a
disadvantage.
They
wanted
the Nazis to know the Jews were out for revenge. They wanted the Nazis to fear the Jews.

‘I must stress that they went only after those who had a hand in the Final Solution. SS men who had staffed the extermination camps, those who had served in the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen
.
You know about those, Mr Byrne?’

Tom nodded, remembering the story in the notebook, the same story recounted in countless history books: the pits, the shooting, the pile of bodies, still writhing even in death.

‘I see that I have avoided speaking of the actual
executions
themselves, as my father would have called them. I should correct that.’ Goldman sighed. 'My father hinted at all kinds of exotic methods. A punishment fit for the crime was one approach: a Nazi who had been involved with the gas chambers might be locked in his garage, properly sealed, with his car engine left running. Carbon monoxide was a poor substitute for Zyklon B, but at least the point was made. I heard about another method, also involving the garage. The target would be forced to stand on the roof of his car, while a noose, suspended from the ceiling, would be placed around his neck. Then a DIN member would drive the car away, leaving the target swinging.

‘Still, I'm not sure I believe these accounts. My best guess is that DIN preferred to kill with their bare hands – strangulation – or maybe a knife.’

‘Mr Goldman,’ Rebecca cut in. ‘What we saw today was nothing to do with this wartime period. The actions my father took were much later, in the fifties and sixties.’

Henry Goldman fell back in his chair, the air escaping from him like a punctured tyre. ‘I'm sorry. I've talked too long.’

‘No, not at all, I only—’

‘You see, I knew, of course, that this day would come, that one day I'd have to tell this story. But that does not prepare one for it.’ He gave a forced smile, an expression not of pleasure but of containment, of holding back a great floodtide of emotion. ‘I have not shared it with my wife or my sons. I have carried it, as it were, for many, many years. I don't know how else to tell it, except as I heard it.’

Tom decided to act as diplomat. ‘There's no problem with the way you're telling it, Mr Goldman. You take your time.’

Goldman nodded his silent thanks, cleared his throat and went on. ‘The killings I have described were known as “the first hunting season”. They arose out of the strong belief that there would be no other kind of justice. The Allies had promised it of course, fine speeches about bringing every last Nazi killer to book. But even before the war was over, those promises were fading. Soon there was the suggestion that only those in charge of the Third Reich would face prosecution. Which is how we came to have the great show at
Nuremberg, in which a grand total of twenty-four men were brought to account. Twenty-four!’

There was something strange about Goldman's narrative, and suddenly Tom realized that he was witnessing an act of ventriloquism. He was channelling the arguments, even the voice, of his long-dead father. He told the story the way it had been told to him. It had been preserved, as if on a reel of quarter-inch magnetic tape, inside his head for nearly fifty years.

‘DIN were repelled by the spectacle of the Nuremberg trial, the pretence that only two dozen men were responsible for this massive, international crime. They had seen with their own eyes the men who had whipped Jews to death for sport, who had herded them onto trains and shot them into pits, the men who had shoved them into gas chambers and then shovelled their bodies into crematoria – they had seen all this, and they knew it was not the work of
twenty-four
men. It was the work of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions!’

There was no interrupting Goldman now, the words poured out of him in a hot torrent.

‘As the crimes began to be revealed, as people saw the newsreel footage of those mountains of naked bodies, people in the West demanded better. The Russians were executing Nazis by the thousands; people here and in America expected something similar. The Allies felt they had to do something. By the end of 1946, they had jailed
nearly half a million Germans, holding them before trial on charges of direct participation in mass murder. There were another three and a half million listed for “significant criminal complicity”. Think of that number:
three and a half million.
But the United Nations War Crimes Commission drew up another list, made up of all those liable for automatic arrest as former members of the Nazi Party: in the American occupation zone alone the total was more than thirteen million people.’