The Human Pool (21 page)

STRASBOURG, TRANSYLVANIA, 1944

I MADE TWO MORE
excursions before the final crisis in Budapest, which showed how strangely the Nazis were redefining themselves, as men who could be reasoned with, while ostensible bystanders like Willi committed themselves to a deeper ambiguity. Both journeys remain memorable for their sense of isolation compared with the tangled politics they served, and their contrast to the centrifugal force building up in Budapest.

 

The Strasbourg train left Zurich with clockwork Swiss efficiency. After the border I travelled with three uniformed German officers, a mother and two whining children, and an imperious, well-dressed elderly woman with brandy in a jar which she offered to the soldiers. Life in wartime. The three officers smoked too much and looked demoralised beyond weariness. We were delayed a long time, waiting for a troop train to pass. Conversation remained confined to careful pleasantries, while I wondered if they knew about the cattle trucks. It was absurd. What master race?

There was an inspection of papers. Mine attracted curiosity, and afterwards the old woman asked where I was from. ‘He is a neutral,' she observed, so nobody was left in any doubt. What was more, one with a window seat. I offered round my chocolate. ‘
Ach, die Schokolade,
' said the tired young mother, with an air of ecstasy. She told me it was the children's holidays. I was surprised there still were such things.

The chocolate had been taken along on the advice of Betty Monroe, who had given me my papers and ticket. ‘You're getting around quite a bit these days,' she commented, and asked if I was enjoying myself. From her blithe tone she might have been talking about summer camp. Practical Betty: ‘You look like you could do with feeding up.' She told me to take lots of chocolate because the Germans were suffering from food shortages.

We had met at her house rather than downtown. There was a lawn party. I had been asked to use the back entrance. We did the transaction in the kitchen. It was the last time I visited the house until Beate.

Strasbourg smelled of summer, its ancient buildings a declaration of its immunity. French was heard as much as German, its influence most apparent in the bars. A man was painting a front door. This small domestic scene seemed all wrong. I was sure all the paint would have been requisitioned for the war effort. Several limousines—expensive prewar Mercedes—went by. Their destination became obvious. Outside the Hotel Maison Rouge a line of rich men's cars was parked watched over by their chauffeurs, men too old for active service. Important people hung around the lobby, mainly civilian businessmen. Standing out for being much younger than the rest was Karl-Heinz in a dark suit.

‘We meet again,' he said archly. I presumed he was why I was there. He ordered tea, giving the waitress some English Earl Grey he had brought with him; Karl-Heinz as usual was able to produce the impossible. He said, ‘Give me Strasbourg any day over Budapest.'

Karl-Heinz's papers give some insight into the real state of his mind that day. ‘Desperate days,' he writes. ‘We walk the high wire of treason. The Reichsführer's softening on the Jewish question is done with the Führer's knowledge. What the Führer does not know is that this is a blind for more urgent dealings which will leave the Fatherland with some honour, especially should the worst befall us in the form of those bloodthirsty rapists, the Ivans. Since July 20, I am informed that the Führer is both fearful and rabid, and the most frequent sound to be heard is the scuttle of rats leaving the sinking ship, apart from the fanatic core. Unfortunately, the policies of divide and rule fostered by both Führer and Reichsführer now have dangerous consequences. That jumped-up puppetmaster Eichmann has worked himself into a frenzy over the end to the deportations. Even after they had been officially stopped, he ordered Wisliceny to sneak in one more trainload. This had been turned back by the Hungarian government. Eichmann's response was to summon the Jewish Council for a huge dressing down: rat-a-tat gangsterlike screamings, spit flying. He has heard that the Führer shouts, too. He kept the council waiting the best part of a day while the SS carried out the job using its own men and lorries. He was still sniggering at his deception when I next saw him, and amused because the Hungarians were going to be reprimanded by the International Red Cross for breaking their word about the deportations.'

That day in Strasbourg, Karl-Heinz was saying very little, and I wondered if his coolness was to do with his falling out with Willi and my continued association with him. He told me, much later, that he and Dulles had met privately in Bern to discuss the events at the Maison Rouge, and he had overruled Dulles sending Willi to Strasbourg. When Karl-Heinz had insisted on me, Dulles said, ‘Don't you think the boy knows too much already?' Dulles tried to persuade him that I was unreliable and ‘an agent for the Jews', to which Karl-Heinz answered that his own pet Jewish agent was exactly what a man like him needed under the circumstances.

 

Karl-Heinz told me to lose myself and come back later. He would offer no explanation about what was going on. When I asked him what the matter was, all he would say was ‘too many cooks'.

A desultory, flat day with nothing to do, a day with no edge, left me restless and nervous. I tried and failed to sleep, tried and failed to read, failed even to make much of a walk round the park. Eventually I dined alone at the restaurant where I would eat with Willi Schmidt the next spring, and, nearly sixty years on, with Vaughan.

As I was walking back through a small square, I heard a sound familiar from Budapest: the thin pop of air defence guns and the growing drone of aero-engines. Passersby looked confused. The noise was new to them. Strasbourg was about to have an air raid. Dulles had told me I would at least be spared that because everyone agreed it was too pretty to bomb. He was wrong.

There were no signs to any shelters. I was in a small square. A gang of young boys dared each other to stay and watch. I hid in the deepest doorway I could find. The boys hopped up and down as the planes grew louder and squealed as the first bombs fell, as excited as if they were watching a fireworks show. The ground shook from the impact. The noise threatened to suck everything in. The boys staggered around like drunks, hands clapped to their ears. They didn't look so excited now. Above, the nervous tracery of searchlights patterned the reddening sky.

The last bomb left behind an image of the square shrouded in smoke and empty apart from the legs of one boy still running after his torso had been sliced off. A column of blood gushed from the trunk. A white dray bolted across the square in the other direction, hooves clattering on the cobbles.

I made my way back to the Maison Rouge, shocked but shaky with the exhilaration of survival. Shards of glass lay everywhere, like jewels in the moonlight. I remembered Bandi Grosz laughing as he pointed out how most of the bombs that had destroyed London had been made by the British themselves. The hotel lobby was very crowded. The immediate effect of the raid was wearing off, and everyone was jabbering as panic turned to anger. Like the Jews of Budapest, these people had thought they were exempt and were full of growing indignation that the town had been bombed—the British were barbarians. A woman had fainted and was being revived. I found Karl-Heinz in a state of silent rage. My head was still ringing. Two distinguished elderly men walked by looking inconvenienced. One wore a monocle, the other a Prussian moustache.

Karl-Heinz half-dragged me into a servants' corridor, pushed me against the wall, and, gripping my lapels, asked if I had told anyone about my trip to Strasbourg. Of course not, I said. He was sure his security had been penetrated. An enemy agent was thought to be in the hotel ready to receive a report of the conference.

‘What conference?' I asked. It took some convincing to persuade him I had no idea why I was there. ‘I didn't even know it was you I was supposed to be meeting.'

I think he explained not because he believed me—it had occurred to him that I was that enemy agent (‘I no longer know whom to trust')—but out of a sense of moral and physical exhaustion. That day a clandestine, and treasonable, meeting of German industrialists had taken place to implement the secret removal of their assets to safety via a pre-existing setup of carefully disguised foreign subsidiaries, many of them U.S. companies.

‘I dream that my life comes down to a choice between the Allied hangman's rope and Hitler's piano wire. I have seen the films of what they did to them,
pour encourager les autres,
and believe me, you would rather take any other way out, including full disembowelling,' he told me. ‘I have the only set of notes of the conference for you to pass on to Mr Davis.
That
is why you're in Strasbourg.'

Under the circumstances, Karl-Heinz thought it too risky to entrust my return to public transport, so we drove. The car came courtesy of one of the industrialist millionaires, with a driver. It was a huge Mercedes, not the sort of car anyone would stop without extremely good reason.

We sped across the Rhine plain while Karl-Heinz and I dozed in the back. He dropped me at the border. As we parted he said, ‘I have no idea when we will see each other again. I think my luck is close to running out. A final word of warning: Hitler wants Budapest's Jews. Tell that to your friends, but don't tell Willi Schmidt, and say to them it may be too late for me to do anything to help them.'

 

Immediately after my return to Budapest, Willi sent me off on a trip to acquire a stockpile of tuna in a warehouse in Transylvania. The tuna turned out to be two hundred eighty cans of sardines, four years past their eat-by date. The labelling was in French, and the tins had come from Dakar of all places, with various customs stamps still on the boxes.

Willi seemed scarely bothered when I told him that the trip had been a waste of time, and dangerous. The contact referred to by him had taken me to an industrial zone of a deserted small town where most of the buildings had been daubed with the Star of David. While there, we were ambushed by three young men with very old rifles. They had shot my guide out of hand up against the wall of the warehouse and taken me into the forest, where their leader, an older man with a pistol on each hip, accused me in crude German of being a black-market collaborator profiting from the Jewish clear-out. Apparently someone posing as a Red Cross agent had been doing a tidy business.

Only a chance mention of David's name saved my life. Word had reached them, even in the forest, that there was a man in Budapest organising resistance. These men were among the few survivors of the Jewish conscripts who had been sent to the Russian front to work in the labour battalions. All were gaunt and aged well beyond their years, weathered to a leathery brown. Two shorter and darker ones were Bosnian Muslims who had been recruited into the Hungarian army and had deserted. Their leader had been a dentist before the war, a circumcised Christian who had been consigned to a labour battalion. I thought of the Strasbourg big shots laundering their money, their immunity so rudely interrupted by the air raid, compared with the desperate, scavenging nature of this trip.

Willi had heard the same story about the bogus Red Cross agent, but only after he had sent me off to Transylvania. He insisted, ‘I had no idea.' But I wonder now if he had been taking an idle gamble on my life because the fancy took him.

‘They're saying this man was really a German agent who tricked deportees into thinking they would be safe,' he said. “Quite soon you will go east to help with the harvest,” is what he told them, and they went off in trucks marked “German worker-resettlers”. He travelled around showing them an educational film of a camp like the one where everyone was going, a neat community full of grinning children. Is that what you heard?'

‘Yes, except afterwards he went back to organise the redistribution of their possessions.'

‘I didn't know about that part,' said Willi with the casualness of a man telling the truth. ‘And I suppose you were told he was very tall?'

‘That's the point of the story,' I said.

Willi shrugged and laughed. ‘There's no crime in being tall.'

It was typical of him at that time that he appropriated the story, and, while denying it by claiming that the incident had been made up by Karl-Heinz to slander him, he nevertheless related it in a way that was tantamount to an admission. He even changed the punchline to ‘People are saying he looked just like me'.

BUDAPEST, 1944

*Karl-Heinz remarks elsewhere: ‘For years I wondered if Magda had not imagined this image of Eichmann at High Mass, but perhaps not. Writing about the Danube, Claude Magris has a note on him: “The technocrat of massacre loved meditation, inner absorption, the peace of the woods, maybe even prayer.”'

*Hoover notes: This enterprise would lead to an investigation of Dulles's (and my) activities, thwarted by Allen's flat denial of any irregularity when, in fact, we were using the film companies to launder Nazi money taken from the Bank of Hungary.