Warsaw (13 page)

...Morbidly, masochistically, I have often wondered who my
victim was - A shopkeeper? Farmer? Mayor? Did he have any children? Did he have
a garden? Did he like football? After the war I gave him a name for some reason
- Joseph. Joseph was my age, although privation and worry had aged his
appearance. His shoes were split, his flannel trousers and shirt threadbare.
His hair was dusty brown, his skin dry, almost powdery. He had a large, long
head which was noteworthy for being out of proportion with the rest of his
diminished body. Joseph's coffin-shaped head only made his cheeks appear more
sunken, his face gaunt, his eyes bulbous.

So Joseph was shoved into my arms by a dutiful, sadistic
Sergeant Major. My first impression was that Joseph was retarded, or at the
very least gormless. But he was just in shock, disorientated, terrified. For a
few minutes I just stood there with him, with the rest of my battalion and its
charges. Some began to pray, or sob. Joseph began to rock slightly and then
tremble. He glanced around him, as if wishing to catch the eye of a friend or
loved one. He began to mutter something in Polish or Yiddish. I don't know if
it was a prayer. But most were silent, resigned - a few even tried to be
dignified in their resignation but their fates were all the same. A few would
scream or struggle, or fall down or faint - but anyone making too much of a
scene was made an example of and quickly shot by an officer or zealous
policeman.

I tried my best not to make eye contact with the man I was
about to murder but I couldn't help it. He had soft brown eyes. I can still see
Joseph's face now, his image sometimes seems like it's stapled to my eyelids.
He opened his mouth in a forced, pathetic smile. What teeth he had were yellow
or black. What was going through my head at that point? I was scared, of the
deed and the repercussions of not doing my duty. I kept looking around at my
mates to see what they were doing, if any would take the lead. Straightaway
some of them led their victims off to find a private clearing in the woods.

At first the shots which echoed throughout the forest were
few and far between. With each one however both Joseph and I flinched a little.
I do not know how long we walked for, more than most I imagine. I already felt
sick. Already the woodland began to smell of something unnatural. My hands
shook as I tried to fix my bayonet. Joseph looked on, all the time making a
face as if he were about to break into tears. The expression on my face could
not have been all that dissimilar I imagine. As far as we walked we could still
hear the shots ring out in the background; we also heard the occasional thud
afterwards, as the murdered victims slumped to the pinecone-filled ground.

Looking back now, I try to remember at what point I started
or stopped lying to myself, for surely I must have always known that I would be
put in such a position, that this was the master-plan of the regime? We were
like ostriches, putting our heads in the sand.

It was not until after the war that the question dawned upon
me - what was Joseph thinking throughout all this? I should have let him go
then. I could have fired into the air, let him escape. Such were the corpses
that day that littered the area - they were perhaps as numerous as any specimen
of flora or tree - that one missing would have gone unnoticed. Yes he would
have been executed sooner or later, but not by me. I know I was party to the
murder of thousands and thousands of Jews during my posting in the Warsaw
ghetto, even though I tried to stay detached from any direct duties rounding
them up or processing people at the train station - but it is Joseph who I am
haunted by most.

When the tip of the bayonet touched his neck the rifle
almost acted as a conduit and a similar chill which appeared to run down
Joseph's spine made my frame shudder also. I had to here remove the blade from
his skin. I then gripped the barrel of the gun in an attempt to forcefully
cessate the trembling in my wet hands. For a minute or so I tried to pluck up
the courage by scaring myself as to the trouble I'd be in if I didn't fire. I
repeated the phrase inside my head as if it were an Indian mantra, "Just shoot,
just shoot". In the next instance I told myself that I couldn't do it, I
was a human being. I wasn't capable of such an act. He was a human being. As
long as they didn't shoot me I would accept and deal with any punishment they
could give out, just as long as I didn't have to go through with it. I heard my
commanding officer making his way through the wood towards me. By now the shots
had become so frequent that one didn't notice them so much.

He uttered something just before I fired. It might have even
been "Shalom". I closed my eyes and turned my head as I shot, but my
mouth was open and some of the warm blood and brains which exploded back upon
me went into it. I vomited immediately after, throwing my smoking rifle against
the nearest tree...

I have often asked myself why did we - or I - do it? There
was a plurality of causes; none or all of the following can be applied.

It was war. War is a general transgression which spawns a
multitude of further individual transgressions. It re-sets the rules of environments,
social interaction. Violence begets violence. Some people say that we got to
Warsaw and Auschwitz quickly, but precedents and other barbarous acts had to be
committed beforehand: SA beatings, Kristallnacht, Dachau, the executions in the
Russian advance, the euthanasia programme. There was a gradual progression,
regression. We did not change overnight, but war does change the workings and
codes of a man.

Race hatred. For some Germans the enemy wasn't the Bolshevik
pointing a gun at him, or the British Tommy, but rather it was the Jew. We were
a tribe fighting for our survival. The survival of the fittest. God was dead.
Might was right. The Jew was different, an affront to German culture, blood. If
they were beneath humanity then moral norms did not have to apply to them.
Brutality was a functional necessity and even ruthlessness could be contorted
into a virtue, or badge of honour, in light of the importance of our
"mission".

Yet most of us in my battalion were too old or cynical to
belong to the true fanatical National Socialist generation. They tried to
indoctrinate us before our task ahead in Poland by giving talks such as,
"Maintaining the Purity of German Blood" and "A Goal of this
War: Europe Free of Jews", but for my part the "brainwashing"
propaganda only brought home to me that it was propaganda, that their ideology
was warped. The same went for a number of my comrades, though not all of them.

I cannot remember if it was a conscious or unconscious
factor but the feeling of not wanting to be considered a coward or set apart
from my unit also motivated my choices to some degree. I can remember returning
to the barracks that day - and on subsequent days - and seeing the non-shooters
ostracised by the shooters. Perhaps envy help stirred their resentment of them
- that they wished too to feel the relief of being a non-shooter - but men were
often bullied or taunted. I remember the scene when one of the objectors was
scornfully berated by a willing executioner, "You think that you are too good
to shoot? You're too weak." The desire to conform was a great motivator. I
did not wish to be seen as a trouble maker.

 
Can killing become
a matter of routine? It seems so. It was not just in my Police battalion but
also in the ghetto where I witnessed men wilfully trying to become
anaesthetised to it all. Necessity was the mother of invention perhaps, for if
they did not master their conscience then their conscience might have
overwhelmed them.

The reason that we did what we did during the war out of a
fear of not following certain orders has its place, but the reason is not an
all encompassing excuse - or panacea. Yes one was fearful of what the SS would
do if you relieved yourself from certain duties or did not display the
appropriate fervour towards the cause (or crusade, as a few of the thugs
romantically called it). But I was never party to, nor heard from anyone else,
of an instance in which someone from the battalion, or my platoon in the
ghetto, was punished by a higher authority for wishing to be relieved of his
duty.

It has been argued of late that the men involved in the acts
of genocide in Poland and elsewhere were systematically selected by the SS
because they possessed a particular psychological profile. If it was in the
soldier's make-up to have a violent nature - a deference towards authority, a
lack of introspection or autonomous intelligence, a need for order and values
etc - then can we not comfortably infer that there was a certain inevitability
in what happened at Josefow and Warsaw? Could one not determine the outcome
through the equation of their inherent natures and the environments they were
inserted into? What do you expect will happen if the cages to the wild animals
are left unlocked in the zoo? These arguments however do not sit comfortably
with me, to the point where I find them offensive. There were no sets of
psychological tests or profiling in my, or anyone else's, police battalion or
army unit. It might seem easy or comfortable for these new fangled historians,
psychologists and sociologists (and their readers) to argue that we are a
"type" of people, or products of certain conditioning. But you would
not be doing us justice if you did not condemn our actions or say that we had
just been brainwashed. We are all capable of violence, blind service towards
authority, ignorance and moral cowardice - that is the point. They say we did
what we did because we were inhuman (the same term the Nazis sometimes coined
to describe the Jews to dismiss and denigrate them) - but I say we committed such
acts because we were, in Nietzsche's phrase, "human, all too human."

...I was at Verdun. I had known terror, horror, the reality
of war. I manned the machine guns as the French ran towards us, scared,
sacrificial and hateful. Hate also burnt in my eyes and I clenched my teeth as
I gunned them down efficiently, mercilessly. Even before Josefow I had been a
companion to death. Indeed the fields of Verdun were even more gruesome and
visceral than anything that happened in the woods that day. In France the
entire landscape and corpses were charred to the point that the bloodied mud
and ashes, putrescent flesh, rusting helmets and machinery congealed into each
other like a giant scab. Maggots and the sun bleached bones. Rats fed upon
rotting rations, eating better than most of the men. But despite the bad
orders, waste of life and horrors of Verdun there was a sense of honour and
common decency between most of the men in the trenches. It was not genocide. We
were not godless. Most of us were able to wash the blood from our hands and
return to our lives after the war. We were still able to pray. But there should
be no absolution for what I witnessed and participated in at Josefow and in
Warsaw... But I believe that the guilt has made me a better man - not that that
could, or should, prove any consolation to Joseph and his family."

Oscar Hummel survived the war to return home to his wife.
True to his behaviour after the Great War he drank too much and could not
remain faithful. I do not know whether the decision was prompted by his wife's
inability to have children, but in 1947 Oscar and Mary Hummel adopted two
Jewish orphans. By the time Joshua and Rebecca came of age they were able to
take over the family's construction company that had flourished after the War.
Oscar and Mary retired to the Algarve. Mary died in February 1968, with Oscar
surviving his wife by just four months.

11.

A feverish energy inched itself into Jessica Rubenstein's
state of mind. She was not the same young woman at the beginning of the week as
she was at the close of it. She would not go gently into the night,
consolidate. When possible she reduced her hours at the hospital and, when
working, her thoughts were rarely directed towards her patients. They were all dead
or dying she judged. Such was the potency of this new determination to survive,
save her family, that Jessica even began to steal from the hospital to
supplement her rations. She needed her strength and wished to look as
attractive as she could again, which meant trying to put on some weight and
regain her figure.

Sometimes, in her free hours, the possessed girl could be
seen, as if sleep-walking, making her way towards one of the sections of wire
fencing on the edges of the ghetto. Her purpose, embracing a phantom-hope, was
to catch the eye and make contact with her would-be saviour. She had not seen
Thomas for what had seemed like an age. On one such occasion Jessica nearly got
shot, as soldiers amused themselves by firing into the ghetto at Jews who would
chance death by loitering or travelling down the street which faced out onto
one of their watchtowers. Jessica barely registered the bright bullet as it
hissed past her head however, focused as she was on trying to discern whether a
well built soldier smoking a cigarette, leaning against a truck, was Thomas or
not. It wasn't. Thomas didn't even smoke.

Not only did Jessica stress herself out - and idly day-dream
- whilst actively searching for her Corporal but so too her heart would
momentarily leap - and then sink - when there was an unexpected knock upon the
door. She would rush to answer it - filled with irrational promise - and then
descend into abruptness when dealing with the parasitic neighbour. She would be
irritable with them, or anybody else, just because they were not the gallant
soldier.

Sleep acquitted the hormonal girl not of her obsessions. She
dreamt of him. They were all running through the forest together, Thomas and
the family. It was night time, cold - Jessica she could hear panting and see
her breathing mist-up in front of her face. Ferocious, foaming Alsatians - held
on a leash by their blood-thirsty masters - pursued them. Shots rang out and
one by one her Papa, Halina and then Kolya fell, disappearing. Her tiny hand in
his strong, warm palm Jessica and Thomas sped on. Through the dark briary
woodland she saw the light sands and safety of a desert, where the Germans
would not follow - they'd evaporate. Her legs grew stone heavy though. Just as
the couple were about to escape the gothic forest Jessica felt a hot jolt, her
back arched and she fell to the floor. Thomas disappeared - his wrenching loss
as agonising as her physical pain. As if she were a spirit departing from her
body Jessica looked down on herself, her pretty cotton dress soaking up the
gushing blood from her wound. She did not want to die. Yet a part of her was
consoled, in that it was now finally all over. It was the last image to be
branded in her mind's eye as the sweat soaked girl woke with a jolt in this
world, her back still arched.

It was not just Oscar's friendly warning which prompted a
prickling sense of anxiety in Thomas in regards to seeing the Jewish girl
again. He was sanctioned to murder without cause, steal from and even rape the
woman, but he could not be seen to converse with her or her people. By the very
fact that it was absurd and vicious it must be true Thomas wryly reasoned, such
was the age. Sometimes his mood and contempt for the regime was so strong as to
provoke a determination in the soldier's heart to defy his orders. But what was
he to do? Show up at the nurse's hospital? Or knock on the family's door and
ask her mother if her daughter was free to take a walk? Thomas also used Maria
as an excuse not to get further involved with the girl. Perhaps it was a valid
one.

Yet Thomas still did his best to visit Adam when possible.
The Corporal was both curious and pleased to see the changeable student in a
lively and equable mood during his last meeting. There was playfulness in his
conversation and glimmer in his eyes that Thomas hadn't seen for a long time,
if at all. He frequently quoted snippets of poetry and was neither bellicose
nor fatalistic in regards to his future. It was as if the occupation wasn't
happening outside. All of Thomas’ questions as to why Adam seemed so positive
were answered by a knock at the door.

Adam opened the door to his second visitor that afternoon.
Thomas heard a woman's voice.

"I thought you might want these," Anna said
kindly, handing her friend and lover a couple of apples.

Anna to catch sight of Thomas - and vice versa.

"This is my friend, Thomas. Thomas, this is Anna."

Whatever shameful acts Duritz or his prostitute lover had
committed previously they here blushed and stole glances through downcast eyes
like never before. Either out of shame, fear or shyness Anna could not look the
German in the eye - who was paternally smiling to himself as if he were the
friar who had just married Romeo and Juliet. Thomas broke the silence. He rose
and respectfully bowed to the young lady.

"Nice to meet you."

Anna at first reciprocated the handsome Corporal's disarming
expression. She then checked herself for such forwardness and glanced at Duritz
in hope of receiving some direction as to what to say.

"It's okay, Thomas is a friend of mine. Would you like
to come in?"

The soft-featured woman was still hesitant at the door and
bashfully shook her head. Duritz thought how adorable she was, coy, childish,
sweet - and grinned to himself for he also knew Anna as the ardent lover,
spirited Jewess and intelligent woman.

"I have to go out. I'll see you tonight," she
swiftly expressed, submissively, all the time trying not to make any direct eye
contact with the German. Duritz smiled and then excused himself, hurrying down
the corridor to catch up with his companion. In the short interim whilst
waiting for Adam to return Thomas took the time to study a couple of pictures
done in coloured pencil and paints that had sprang up on the walls since his
last visit. The first was an accomplished (for an amateur) copy of Caspar
Friedrich's "The Wanderer Above A Sea Of Mists". The sky was moodier,
greyer than the original - and the figure atop of the mountain looked a little
clumsy - but in that the original could be recognised in the copy Thomas gave
the picture due credit. If the second picture on the wall opposite, erupting
with light like an arctic flower upon the colourless background, was a copy as
well, then Thomas was unfamiliar with the original. It was a simple landscape
of a stone-clad cottage planted in a sea of verdant greens and browns. A
valley. Pastoral. An industrious, happy couple tended to their garden and a
couple of pens of livestock. The cottage, sketched with natural technique and
detail, was old but homely. Its door was open and, though but a speck within
the picture, one could still discern a warm fire inside and its delicate plume
of smoke weaved its way up out the chimney. In parts the sky was as blue and
white as the imitation Friedrich should have been, but over half the landscape
was bathed in the amber glow of the Claudian sun which dominated the scene. Was
the sun rising or setting though?

"I was bored," Adam dryly remarked as he returned
and caught his friend studying his pictures, which he quietly rejoiced in
creating and was intensely proud of.

"I rather think you were inspired by something, or
someone. She's pretty - and good for you if that satisfied smile on your face
is anything to go by."

"I dare say she's good for you then also in turn, if
the amused smirk on your face is anything to go by. It's just finally nice to
talk to someone who can conjugate their Polish verbs properly. What do you
think of the pictures? The SS haven't taken away what little talent I've got as
well as everything else have they?"

"No. They're very good. I didn't know that you were
familiar with the works of Friedrich."

"Even I was an idealist once, which is probably why I
became such a scabrous cynic and realist. I once painted in oils a copy of his
"Winter Landscape with Church" for a college exhibition."

"Isn't that the work in which a cripple prays to a
crucifix and is healed?"

"Yes, with the Cathedral in the background. Neither the
painting nor Friedrich are well known in Poland however. Some of my more
Christian class mates attacked me for being sarcastic towards Christianity and
the miracles. Whilst my father was equally disgusted, but for different reasons
- with my having painted such a "goy" picture. He barely spoke to me
for a week after my mother dragged him along to the exhibition."

"What was your intention and interpretation of the
scene, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I don't know, it changed and changes. Sometimes I
can't help but be impressed and warmed by the idea of the power of faith and
compassion of God, but at other times I can't help but be scornful of the
sentimentality, propaganda and inadvertent sarcasm of the piece. I can remember
however being offended by one comment I overheard by one of the parents who
viewed the work. They didn't say it was a Christian painting - that I could
understand and appreciate - but rather they deemed it a gaudy Catholic work of
art. I didn't agree with them of course, but after that I couldn't look at the
picture without a feeling of dissatisfaction."

Thomas had wrestled with the idea before, but that afternoon
the German revealed something of his own history to Duritz. Perhaps it was
because of Duritz being in such a relaxed and confessional mood. Adam listened
avidly to the German's biography.

"I won't bore you with the reason or reasons, why I left
university but I did. Suffice to say though that almost immediately after the
fact, I drowned my life in drink. Half of my day was spent reading, or writing
some piece of hack journalism which would pay for the next bottle of vodka -
and the other half was spent drinking the bottle and sleeping it off. I became
a hermit, or rather the Underground Man. I'd had my fill of women by then. I
saw less and less of my friends, who grew hypocritical and mediocre in my
blinkered eyes... My intellect made me conceited. In the same way that some of
my countrymen started spouting about how they were the Master Race, I happily
satirised them whilst I sincerely, almost religiously, believed myself to be
superior to others. Perhaps the only thing that I was consumed and intoxicated
by more than the drink was Nietzsche. Like him I wanted to shout from the
rooftops of the world, ‘One day you will cry: I am alone! One day you will cry:
Everything is false!"

And I possessed a proud and defiant enough nature to believe
that I was happy with my lot. Yet all the while an oppressive feeling of
dejection, or nausea, pervaded my existence and rendered it empty at the same
time. And I couldn't, or didn't, change. More than from some sublime epiphany
though, I went back home to my village. My money ran out and my debts were
mounting to the extent that they made even a drunk sober up a little. In a
similar way to when my parents were half-heartedly proud of me for going to
University, they were duly half-heartedly disappointed in their estranged son
when they discovered that he had been expelled. They had high hopes perhaps, or
dollar signs in their eyes, when I went off to make my fortune in the big
city...

I was desperate and needed money to pay off my debts. So I
turned to my old Sunday-school teacher, who had recently become the Head
Teacher at the village school. His name was Josef Wirth. In a way he was my
original mentor. Ever since I could remember I looked up to the Iron Cross
winner; just as importantly though he had introduced me to Shakespeare and
Socrates... Josef was an unsung good man in a world that had forgotten, or
devalued, the qualities he embodied. He did not forgive me or grant me a second
chance because he was weak. He did so because he was strong. Believing himself
to have been given a second chance in his own life he generously gave others
the benefit of the doubt... I also went to Josef because he was one of the few
friends who I had left in my life who I deemed I could fall back on. He cashed
in his pension fund and paid off all the monies I owed to various creditors. In
return though I not only had to promise Josef that I would pay him back, but
that I would do so by securing the requisite qualifications and teaching in his
school for the next two years.

I lived in his house with his wife as a boarder. They both
helped me try to clean up my act. I still perhaps drank more than I should have
but I consciously drank beer rather than vodka. My belly swelled more than my
liver. On Josef's suggestion I started to read Kierkegaard instead of
Nietzsche. I still feel sometimes as if I am the child of those two fathers...
As there were no prostitutes in the village, or good women of ill repute, I
courted a nice German girl. Necessity became the mother of invention... It was
also around this time when I discovered that I enjoyed - and had a talent for -
teaching... Work fended off boredom. Work set me free so to speak it might even
be argued. I just didn't have the spare time to be depressed or feel stupidly
superior anymore... Believe it or not but one of the greatest days of my life
was when I coached the school's football team to victory in the regional
finals...

After the two years were up and I had paid off my debts I
realised that I was as content as I had ever been. I remained at the school,
bought a modest cottage and married Maria... I would have lived happily ever
after - if not for the rest of the world intruding. At first the Nazis and SA
descended upon the village, vomiting their poison out. I felt ashamed when I did
not speak up when they took over the tavern. The next night however a local man
did. The bastards laughed as they beat him to a pulp. His wife, rather than his
friends, rescued him from more serious injury. Then the Communists came,
promising to emancipate me from my quiet sense of contentment. As far as I was
concerned I couldn't abide either of them, they were like two sides of the same
worthless coin... In many ways I was happy in my ignorance of the rising
tensions and injustices that were occurring at the time. We were lucky also in
that the Depression did not affect our village as harshly as it did other
areas. I tried just to read the sports articles in the newspapers. But
eventually I couldn't help but be dragged down by what was happening, into the
concentric circles of some modern Hell. But what could I do? I felt but fear,
impotence and shame. Resignation, interspersed with instances of unvoiced
indignation was the order of the day. No, once I did do something. I drafted a
ten page letter to one of our efficiently ineffective liberal newspapers,
protesting about the illegality of the Nuremburg Laws. I also intended to
donate money to Jewish families who'd had their homes and livelihoods taken
away from them in engineered acts of barbarity. But I didn't actually go
through with it. My wife told me "not to cause any trouble" - we had
a baby to think about... The world turned upside down. The bullshit of the
local tavern, with its bigotry, half-truths and idle gossip somehow mutated.
Anti-Semitism, Fascism, Nazism, became political gospel. Right became wrong and
vice-versa. I remember hearing a story about how, just before Hitler came to
power; a group of SA foot-soldiers beat a man, a Communist, to death. There was
a trial and the men were sentenced to death. When Hitler came to power however
he pardoned the culprits, claiming that they were not cold-blooded killers but
brave soldiers fighting for the National Socialist cause. Politics turned into
thuggery, or worse - it became a form of religion. We were a new chosen people.
We had a new Bible in the form of Mien Kampf, augmented by Party propaganda and
the diatribes of Goebbels. And we bowed down to follow a new saviour, our
God-given Fuhrer. More than our deliver though Hitler was an avenging angel, vanquishing
the enemies and false idols of Judaism, Communism and homosexuality... A Jewish
colleague at the school was one day ordered to go back home and never return to
work by an odious bureaucrat, producing a government stamped piece of paper as
a reason. We did nothing. A year later the man disappeared altogether. We said
nothing... And what did I or anyone else do when an ambulance arrived and took
the retarded son of a neighbour of mine away? They told her that the boy had
been selected for an experimental cure. She wrote letter upon letter requesting
to visit her son in the clinic, which they said that he was staying in.
Eventually, after threatening to visit her son without permission, she received
a letter informing her that her child had contracted an infectious disease and
had died. Such was the contagious nature of the disease that, for the good of
the other patients in the hospital, they had to cremate the bodies of all the
victims, to prevent the risk of further infection...