21

Reichsautobahn 7, Direction Northwest, Germany

October 16, 1938

1:21 a.m.

Trying to ignore his left index finger, Josef listened to the steady hum of the truck’s heavy tires on the smooth pavement beneath his feet. He wished the noise would lull him to sleep, but it didn’t, asking instead the continual question, “Where are they taking us?” The engine rumbled in reply but gave no answer as the bloody end of Josef’s finger seared in pain once more.

How could one finger hurt so damn much?

The pain seemed to have layers to it. The sharp, cutting sensation of the nail having been ripped away now lay above a secondary pulsing that felt deeper than the thickness of the finger. Rhythmical, like the relentless ticking of a clock, it told him that the ointment, smeared on hastily before the finger was bandaged, was already losing the battle with infection.

If this is only one finger then what the hell must Gunter be feeling?

Josef looked down at the shadow of his friend stretched out on the floor of the truck. Even in the dark he could see the white of the bandages that entirely covered both of his mutilated hands and hear the occasional moans that accompanied his constant drift in and out of consciousness. Reaching out to him with his still-intact right hand, Josef felt once again the hot fever on Gunter’s clammy forehead. He wondered if he was dying.

The thought frightened Josef. He and Kurt, his hands untouched by the gestapo but his damaged knee having suffered particular attention throughout their interrogations, had already done what little they could to try and aid their broken friend. They had given him sips from the water bottles the guards provided. They had made him as comfortable as possible, propping up and covering him with the three old blankets that awaited them in the back of the otherwise empty truck. They had wiped his brow. But their best efforts had made no impression on his suffering.

It appeared to Josef to be more than just the torn and ripped fingers. He suspected that Gunter had sustained some unseen internal injury in one of the earlier beatings. The gestapo had known from the start that Gunter was the ringleader. They’d singled him out, dedicating the most time to him, hoping to extract what they were so desperate to find out. Josef didn’t know if Gunter even knew the true identity of the people in Munich who were behind the smuggling operation, but, looking at those bandaged hands, in the end he must have told his torturers everything. No one could resist the gestapo, not even Gunter.

Again Josef wondered where they were being taken. They were back in the hands of the SS now and the only conclusion he could come to was a desperate one; they were being taken somewhere to be shot. It couldn’t be for more torture. The gestapo were masters at that and had already extracted every detail. No, the SS would simply want to silence the three of them. They had been there on that hill, they knew what the SS had done to those nine Jews, including women and children—Josef himself had complained about it during their interrogation. In the darkness of the truck, Josef saw it all again, hearing once more the shots and the explosion that had killed them. With every murderous echo that night, a bit more of his old, carefree life had been wrung from him. By the time they had reached the valley road, Josef knew that he was no longer young, no longer a free person who lived without consequences. Ever since, the memory of those sounds had denied him the right to even hope for his own survival.

Why couldn’t the SS just have arrested us?

Is this really what happens now?

Gunter began to moan, then screamed once, horribly, before falling silent again. The cry made Josef recall his own screams when the gestapo had set to work on his hand only for that tall, blond SS-obersturmführer to suddenly barge into the room, waving a fistful of official-looking documents and demanding they immediately release him.

At first, his interrogators had refused to unbuckle the heavy leather straps that bound Josef’s wrists to the deliberately spoon-shaped wooden arms of the chair. On the left one, in a pool of red blood that spewed from the end of his finger, the rough pliers, his fingernail still within its teeth, was set down alongside his trapped hand. With a taste of bile in his mouth, eyes stinging with dirty tears of pain, Josef had flicked the pliers onto the floor, only to receive a punch in the side of the head from one of his torturers.

The SS officer responded by instantly pulling his Luger from its holster and shouting, “Do not touch this man again, any of you. These documents show that your most senior officer, the reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, orders that you release him into my custody immediately. Do so now, or I will shoot you myself!” The man had jabbed the pistol toward the face of the nearest gestapo officer and passed the documents to another. Within seconds, Josef was out of the room. His finger hastily covered, he was put into the awaiting lorry, Kurt and Gunter already inside. They had left immediately.

Another cry from Gunter made Josef, once again, tell the two SS guards seated between them and the rear of the truck that he needed their help and, once again, they said and did nothing. A terse “you should save your breath” had been their single response for the entire journey. There was nothing Josef Becker could do but sit in silence as his friend failed, waiting for arrival at what he was sure would be his final destination.

Their first stop after the arrest had been their own regimental barracks in Garmisch. For a number of days a visiting officer from the SS, accompanied by officers from his own regiment, had individually questioned them. The interviews were thorough yet formal, almost civilized in their adherence to military protocols.

Josef hadn’t told them much because he didn’t know much.

Yes, he was a qualified Heeresbergsführer, an official mountain guide of the army.

Occasionally they did guide people over the mountains and bring contraband back.

Yes, they did get paid to do it, always in cash when they handed over the goods at the end of the return journey.

He sent most of the money to his mother and two sisters who lived in Elmau.

Yes, he had also bought a new BMW motorcycle with some of it. He used it to get back to his home village to visit his family.

They were a close family, had been since his father was killed in the Great War.

Yes, he used the motorcycle to go climbing as well.

Yes, he did like to climb. He had climbed many routes.

Everything: rock, ice, snow, whatever necessary to reach the top.

Germany and Austria. Switzerland also when he got some leave.

No, not always alone, but often.

No, he didn’t know who organized their smuggling runs. He had never met them, never even been told about them. He was only a guide. It was what he did before the army; it was what he did in the army; it was what he would do after the army.

No, he didn’t understand that there would be no “after the army” now.

No, he wasn’t a communist.

No, he didn’t love Jews. They were people. He was a guide. He had guided a lot of people in the mountains.

The interviews went on and on. Josef saw no reason to be devious. The only thing he knew for sure was that he climbed, he soldiered, he worked with Gunter and Kurt on whatever mountain work came up. His captors knew it also, so why deny it?

On the fourth day, Josef had been taken from his cell back to the interview room once more. As he walked there, he wondered what use it would be to ask the same questions all over again. However, this time when he stepped into the room he was confronted with the back of the commanding officer of the 1st Gebirgs Division.

Generalmajor Ludwig Ganzler was looking out of the frosted window and up at the sheer, spiky rock faces of the Wetterstein Mountains that towered over the barracks. Ganzler’s adjutant was already sitting to the side of the questioning table, a leather file of papers open in front of him. The generalmajor turned to contemplate Josef as he entered. He was smoking a meerschaum pipe with an ivory bowl carved in the shape of a ravenous wolf’s head. The room was clouded with the smoke of the pipe’s aromatic tobacco. It irritated Josef’s eyes as he stood to attention and saluted, yet its smell was faintly comforting. His father’s pipes still hung on the wall of his mother’s house.

Ganzler gestured Josef to a chair. As he also sat at the table, Ganzler placed the pipe down in front of him on a silver dish that his adjutant must have brought into the room for that precise purpose. The wolf’s smoke dwindled and then stopped. It was the first time that Josef had ever been so near to his commanding officer. He was a long-faced man, grey-haired. He spoke like a gentleman. Josef had taken many like him hunting in the hills but never the generalmajor. At his neck, behind the Iron Cross First Class, hung a distinctive enameled blue star, the “Pour le Mérite.” In the regiment they said that the generalmajor had won his Blue Max, the highest decoration of German valor, as a young lieutenant on the Italian front in 1917, the week before another young officer by the name of Erwin Rommel had done the same, and that they had become lifelong friends as a result.

The two medals trembled a little as Ganzler began to speak. “You know that I watched you make that solo climb up the Waxenstein?”

Josef nodded.

The officer glanced at Josef’s right hand.

“I don’t see the regimental ring I sent to you in recognition of your feat. Did the SS take it?”

“Yes,” Josef replied, recalling the moment before they were placed in the cells, when they had torn the identification tag from his neck, taking his ring with it.

“A pity. Whatever trouble you may be in now, Gefreiter Becker, you earned that ring that day. Do you know I followed every move you made through a telescope I had brought to my office? It was a beautiful thing to see, a perfect demonstration of bold, fluid climbing. I wondered how you could do it, so alone up there, without ropes or pitons. You were hugely exposed. One slip. Imagine.”

Ganzler stopped, waiting for Josef to say something.

“I never think about it, Herr Generalmajor. I just concentrate on climbing.”

“So you do, to very great effect. Watching you that day made me proud of our regiment. I thought to myself it is not only the SS who can conquer the great alpine north faces, but we, the Gebirgsjäger, the true troops of the mountains, can also climb like spiders. With men like you, I said to myself, it is true; Germany can be truly great once again.

“Your officers tell me, and I believe them, that you are the finest climber in the entire division, one of the very best in all Bavaria. I wondered if I might watch you fall that day, but I didn’t, and I was glad of it.” He paused and then said slowly as he stared at Josef, “It goes against the grain of any decent commanding officer to watch helplessly as good men die.”

Josef hung his head a little to escape Ganzler’s piercing look.

“You should know, Gefreiter Becker, that I have tried to keep this as a military matter—a regimental matter, in fact. I and others like me believe that we should be able to deal with our own. However, I fear that this may no longer be possible in your case. The gestapo and the kripo are fighting between themselves to have you three delivered to Munich. You must understand that there are other agendas at work in this country now that go far beyond simple soldiering. They make matters such as this much more complicated than they once might have been.”

The generalmajor waited to let what he was saying sink in before he spoke again.

“The reason that I have called you here is to ask you one last time, as one soldier to another, if there is anything that you can tell me that might make it possible for me to keep you in Garmisch, to give you a life behind bars here rather than a wasteful death in Munich.

“War is coming, sooner or later, Gefreiter Becker. When it does, a man like you would not stay in any jail of mine but would be free to serve his country, to take his chance alongside the rest of my soldiers. I think that you earned that right as I watched you climb.

“Tell me, Becker, who organized the smuggling? Was it Obergefreiter Schirnhoffer? Who in Munich was behind it? Give me something, a name, anything that I can put on the record to permit me to keep you here.”

Josef wanted to say something, but he only knew one name and Ilsa was dead. In silence, he found himself looking directly at the officer’s Blue Max medal. It was a thing of beauty, delicate and fine, chivalrous when compared to the blunt, black Iron Cross that hung to the front of it. It spoke to Josef of a time when innocent children weren’t shot like rats.

“The only thing that I can put on the record, Herr Generalmajor, is that the SS soldiers who captured us murdered the nine Jews that we were transporting over the hills,” Josef said, looking at the generalmajor.

Ganzler stared back into Josef’s eyes for a second. “And I think they will murder you too, Gefreiter Josef Becker. I have given you a last chance, and now, whether I like it or not, I must accept that I am watching you fall. You just haven’t hit the ground yet.”

He stood up, saluted, and, with a final glance at Josef, took up his pipe and left.

Within an hour, the three of them were being moved to Munich in two black Mercedes cars. Through the rear windows, the snowy Bavarian mountains had silently watched them go. Two hours later they arrived at Gestapo Headquarters in the center of Munich, immediately leaving the surface world of night and day for a small cell in a basement.

Down there, Josef understood immediately that his life was now the possession of others, to do what they would with it. Almost immediately, new interrogations began, interrogations that became beatings, and beatings that became torture, always Gunter first. When Gunter was thrown back into the cell that last time, his fingers bleeding, and they pulled Josef out, he already knew what they were going to do to his precious hands.

The arrival of the SS officer may have stopped it after the agony of just one finger but it couldn’t have been for compassionate reasons. There was no compassion in the SS. It had to be because they wanted the prisoners for themselves. They were going to be silenced.

The monotonous sound of the truck’s engine suddenly changed, the sound jerking Josef back to the moment as he felt the vehicle turn off the long highway it had been following. The engine started to rise and fall, the lorry slowly working its way along what felt like narrower, windier roads. A deeper chill cut into the truck, an invisible mist moistening his clothes and bringing with it a smell of damp, earthy farmland. It made Josef wonder if they were going to have to dig their own graves.

The truck slowed even more, changing down to its lowest gear, protesting as it climbed slowly up a rippling gradient before finally stopping. One of the SS guards immediately pushed a sacking hood over Josef’s head and pulled him toward the back of the truck where unseen hands roughly pulled him down onto his feet. Through the bottom of the hood Josef caught a glimpse of damp, rounded cobblestones, shiny yellow with reflected light.

Standing there, Josef could feel his heart pulsating in his chest, beating like a massive drum. He tried to calm it by thinking of the mountains but instead could only recall the face of little Ilsa in that godforsaken chapel above the Paznaun and the sound of the rifle bolts from outside.

He waited to hear that sound again.