Guided by attendants, Eli stumbled on his way to the witness box. He corrected himself quickly, shaking off the hand which would have supported him. He lifted his chin, throwing back the mane of white hair (not cut since his arrival in Israel). He wore a dark pinstriped suit, which Becky could not remember having seen. It had a waistcoat, and the thin gold chain of a pocket watch flashed as he mounted the steps. She wondered if others were struck by the incongruity of a blind man providing himself with a timepiece which he could not read. He had resurrected, though she did not realise this, a pre-war persona. He was dressed as he would have dressed to go to work in the Reichsbank. His collar was as stiff as Hjalmar Schacht’s used to be.
He would give his evidence, it was announced, in the form of a statement on which he could subsequently be cross-examined. Becky glanced at Saul Birnbaum to see if he would protest; but he kept his seat.
Eli began to speak. He spoke in German, apologising for the inadequacy of his Hebrew.
“But in any case,” he said, “I wish the accused to be able to understand what I say without the possibly distorting medium of simultaneous translation, though I would also pay tribute to the excellence of the translators’ work.
“You will forgive me if the first part of what I say, which is also the reason for the unorthodox approach – in which context allow me to add that I am grateful for the understanding which the defence lawyers have extended towards me – if this introduction takes the form of a personal memoir, an essay in autobiography. I may claim a certain right to this indulgence since it was on account of my action, my recognition of the man posing as a German-Argentinian engineer calling himself Rudolf Schmidt, as Kestner, that this trial has been made possible. You will come to understand what anguish that recognition cost me, and you will in this way understand the overriding importance of this trial.”
(But had there been anguish? Hadn’t there been, as her mother thought, a proud and steely joy in what he did?)
“I was born a German. I was also of course a Jew. We were three generations from the ghetto, perhaps four. I was born in 1904. We had travelled from Vienna to Frankfurt to Hamburg, where my grandfather was director of a bank and a steamship company. He was a great figure in the city. Our house might be called a mansion, and the drawing rooms were full of flowers that grew only in hothouses. When the Kaiser visited Hamburg and was given a dinner by the Chamber of Commerce, my grandfather was selected to second the address. He had, I believe, little admiration for that bombastic and inadequate figure, but an immense veneration for everything that he represented. His speech was widely admired; even twenty years later old men remembered it and spoke to me of the effect it had made on them.
“In 1914 my father was recalled to the colours. He served on the Western Front, and was awarded the Iron Cross. In 1917 he was gassed. His health never recovered.
“After the war he no longer went to the synagogue. I never asked him why. Religious practices dwindled in our household; my mother, a beauty, was more interested in fashion. We had preserved our fortune, by good management, but my father was embittered. Like many, he believed that Germany had been betrayed. I grew up aware of the enemy within, whom my poor father identified with the Bolsheviks, and even the Social Democrats. He admired Rathenau, later adhered to the German Conservative Party. Franz von Papen visited us. There was much talk of reconstruction and the need to stabilise the currency.
“I grew up deeply conscious of the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles. The clauses concerning reparations seemed monstrous; they were, I was told and I believed, a crime against the German people. Except that I actually understood economics and finance, my views on such matters did not differ greatly from Adolf Hitler’s.
“But, when the Nazi Party started to grow, we had no time for it. We despised Hitler and his gang as ignorant opportunists.”
He looked up and smiled, directing his blind eyes at the cage where Kestner sat, very straight, his mouth a little open and his tongue wetting his lower lip.
“I may say that I have never altered that opinion, at any time.
“We were, however, assured, by von Papen and others, that the Nazis were necessary; that they diverted support from the non-German or international parties, and because they were nationalists, of the most fervid sort, they could be employed by their betters in the service of the nation.
“This seems naive now, but I have observed often how the received wisdom of one generation seems simple folly to its successors.
“I grew up scorning conventional economics, hating the irresponsibility of those who had permitted the great inflation which condemned millions of Germans to degradation and poverty. But I must say that I knew nothing of this at first hand. Our family affairs were well arranged. The hothouse flowers were replaced before they wilted.
“So, ignorant of the passions and the hatreds surging and seething below the agreeable surface of my personal life, and below the less agreeable surface of national life, I was confident of my own abilities and of my place in the world. Only in one respect was I idealistic: I wanted to serve Germany. For I must stress, that with our familial attachment to Judaism so diluted, I identified myself absolutely and unquestioningly with Germany. Only a few of you listening to me now will be able to comprehend that patriotic intensity.
“Even now, I sigh when I recollect the sweetness of that lost bourgeois way of life.
“Hitler came to power. I was only a little disconcerted. My Conservative friends assured me that he would be given only so much rope. Besides, they said, if he offends, the Generals will deal with him. I had a great faith in the integrity and sagacity of the German Officer Corps.
“Besides, I was engrossed in a great work. Why, I might have asked myself, should the work cease? I had been chosen by Hjalmar Schacht, on the strength of personal recommendation and the effect made by my dissertation on the relations between the availability of credit and economic activity, to assist him in the financial and economic reconstruction of Germany. If I had paused to question the work we were doing, I should have stilled my conscience by arguing that as the Nazis were the product of a sickness caused by the slump, so they could be eradicated or at least emasculated by renewed prosperity.
“Later, in many conversations, as war approached, I justified my position by arguing that the best way to cheat the revolution was to lead it.
“Both arguments, I came to see, were sophisms. But I had to endure much before I arrived at that opinion.
“When did I begin to know that I was still a Jew, and was perceived as a Jew?”
He paused, sipped water, dabbed his temple with a white handkerchief. The question was not directed at the court. He seemed oblivious of his audience. At times his voice had dropped to a murmur, so that even Becky had to strain to catch his words.
“Was it one day in Berlin in, I think, 1934? The street was blocked. Yet another parade, I sighed, for there were already too many of them, and they bored me. Bored me. There were days when I was consumed with boredom. Only my work saved me, only my work seemed real. But these were middle-aged men, in civilian clothes, with an air of the utmost respectability. Each of them wore a medal or a row of medals pinned to the breast pocket. They carried banners proclaiming that the Kaiser had praised them.
“‘Who are they?’ a woman next to me said.
“‘Can’t you read?’ her companion replied. ‘Bloody Yids, pretending they were soldiers in the war.’
“‘But weren’t they?’ she said. ‘Look at all these medals.’
“‘Course they weren’t,’ he said. ‘Bought them for a song off soldiers down on their luck, put out of work by their fellow Yids, that’s how they got them.’
“I might have despaired at that moment of everything I was struggling to accomplish.
“‘So why are they marching?’ the woman said.
“‘Like to make a fuss, don’t they. Bloody Yids.’
“‘They are marching,’ another man said, ‘because Our Leader has just cancelled their war pensions.’
“I asked myself, if my father had still been alive, would he have been marching with them? Or would he have still pretended, like me, that we Jews had no need to worry?
“It must have been that day, or soon after, that I realised my Jewishness, for I got into conversation with the man who had supplied the information about the pensions. I can’t think how I didn’t know him already. He was Wilfrid Israel.”
The name meant nothing to Becky.
“You will all know him,” Eli said, “as the bravest and most selfless defender of … our … people. You will know how he negotiated ransoms and escapes, resettlements and funds. No single man did more to save European Jewry.
“We fell into conversation, a conversation that developed into argument, argument that continued in friendly and fruitful style right up to the moment of his final departure from Germany. Though morally and spiritually I recognised him as my superior, we had, intellectually, much in common. We both believed in an older Germany, enduring tenaciously, under the vile scum of the Nazi movement, a Germany which was open to reason and to what I can only call spiritual Enlightenment, the Germany indeed that was the heir of that great movement of the European spirit which we are accustomed to call by its German name, the Aufklärung, the Germany that inherited values from Goethe and Heine, Schiller, Brahms and, yes, Wagner too, whom the Nazis perverted for their own cause. It was Wilfrid who put me in touch with men like Adam von Trott and Bonhoeffer, and one who was to become my greatest friend, Albrecht von Pfühlnitz, all men who were to form the German resistance to Hitler, who were doomed to die at his hands, and with whom I am proud to have been associated. And who is to say that we did not triumph, for has not the Germany we dreamed of been reborn?
“It was Wilfrid too who said to me, often: ‘Never forget, Eli, that it is the German people, not only the Jews, who have been the first victims of the Nazi oppression…’”
“He urged me to emigrate. I refused. It is strange that he who believed in so much should have left Germany, while I who believed in nothing should have remained. I insisted on the all-powerful influence of fact, and yet saw only those facts I chose to see. At the Reichsbank I worked to produce figures which proved how rearmament was damaging the German economy, how it was impossible that Germany could again sustain a long war. I worked under the direction of Schacht, and when he was dismissed in January 1939, I should have known we had failed, that war was certain… Yet even after his dismissal my technical ability kept me safe. I was still, it seemed, needed.
“I was not myself dismissed for another eighteen months, and even then I remained at freedom for another year before I was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. I shall not speak of my experiences there. There are others more entitled to testify, and some of them have already done so in this court.
“I now turn to the prisoner, Kestner, and to my relations with him. These were never close. When I first became aware of him, as a political officer in the SS, he was a nonentity. His position was nothing in comparison with my own. I regarded him only as a squalid nuisance.
“I met him once only, before the war. Though I steered clear of involvement in matters of refugees, it so happened that one day in the early summer of 1939 I received a message from Wilfrid Israel, asking me to act as an intermediary on his behalf. He was arranging to buy freedom for a group of Jewish academics. The financial arrangements were complicated. He thought I would perhaps be the best person to handle them. To my shame, I resisted, I tried to avoid the dangerous honour. But Wilfrid was very persuasive, and in the end I consented.
“Following my instructions I drove east from Berlin. It was a beautiful day, and the cornfields were turning yellow. I regarded them with a sort of misery, for I knew that each day of ripening brought war closer. Hitler would move when the harvest had been gathered. And yet, though I was conscious of this, and the pain and despair those fields of ripening grain portended, I was also, I remember, curiously at peace with myself.
“I had not been told the name of the man I was to meet at a little inn in a remote Prussian village, which had been selected for some reason never explained to me. But I recognised him as Kestner, who had been pointed out to me as what he was by my friend Albrecht von Pfühlnitz in a Berlin restaurant. So I was surprised when he announced himself by some other name, which I now forget. It was stupid since he was wearing his uniform, and I would have had means of checking if I chose. He must have known that; perhaps the alias amused him. I got the impression that the business on which we were engaged amused him.
“There was something pathetic about him. I had not expected that this proud and brutal Nazi I had prepared myself to encounter should wear such an aura of pathos. I may say here, though it will shock many, that I had never been able to bring myself to dislike Hitler. I hated him of course, and loathed everything for which he stood. I feared his power over men’s minds. But I could not bring myself to dislike him. He always reminded me of a neglected dog, left outside in the rain and howling to be admitted. Kestner gave me the same feeling. He was a man who seemed to me injured by experience. Remove the uniform and he would be nothing.”
Becky could not stop herself from looking at Franz’s father, who, however, remained impassive, as if indeed what Eli had to say concerned some other person. He sat back detached from what was happening around him, and then, aware perhaps that so many eyes had turned to see how he reacted to this assessment, to this attempt to strip even pride from him, the left corner of his mouth drew itself into a narrow smile. Her eyes sought Franz, on whom her father’s words seemed to have a greater effect. He had crumpled. Until now it seemed to her he had supported himself by the reflection that whatever his father had been, he had also been someone who commanded respect. And yet, Eli wasn’t speaking the full truth: for the uniform had been removed, and the man was not nothing. That was the point she couldn’t grasp. How had he transformed himself, so that the man she had met in the Engineers’ Club had seemed in every way the equal of her father? And how indeed had he brought himself to undergo that meeting, remembering as he must of his previous encounter with Eli?
“He offered me wine. I accepted. Not only because it would have been poor tactics, perhaps even compromising my mission, to have declined, but also because refusal would have seemed to throw him back into that darkness from which it was clear he had with such difficulty struggled. But, in that judgement, I was both right and wrong. For he had indeed struggled to emerge from darkness, that was true, only to find himself not in the light of reason, but in a still denser night. And perhaps it was not darkness from which he had emerged, but only the shadows, a grey world where nothing connected, where there was loneliness and the scuttle of rats’ feet on crumbling walls.”
Eli had forgotten where he was. He was speaking not to the judge, nor to the court or the world’s press, but out of some secret world of sympathy, and the words stumbled forth as if each one was a new discovery even to himself. And now the man in the cage was listening. The ironic smile was dislodged. If she could see his eyes, would they reveal that he and his accuser were bound together in a private theatre of embarrassment, that each had recognised the other? She remembered that when he had urged Franz to try to arrange for him to see her father again, even here in Israel, he had insisted that “Czinner would understand.” It was too clear he did. He must have been so lonely in himself since.
“So I accepted the wine, and we talked, of banalities, pleasantly. I remember that, because I was astonished that this creature could engage in civilised nothings. I hadn’t expected it, my experience was limited. We talked of our families, as strangers will. We even exchanged confidences. I admitted I was in love with an English girl. ‘You should join her,’ he said. ‘I respect you, Dr Czinner, but for your own sake I must tell you that you will be foolish if you remain in Germany.’ We even laughed about that. He told me he was a Saxon. ‘They call us stupid Saxons,’ he said, ‘but we’re persistent. We’re like an old dog that has got hold of a mangy bone and won’t let it go.’”
The man in the cage nodded his head. The smile returned to the corner of his mouth.
“And then we proceeded to our business. It was arranged with a certain sympathy. And courtesy. He understood the complicated financial arrangements very well. When we parted, he said: ‘This is not the first time I have saved a Jew’s life. Let that be remembered in my favour when we have lost the war that is coming.’ ‘Do you really believe that?’ I said. ‘That war is coming? It’s inevitable, I should have thought.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘that Germany will lose it.’ I was astonished and repeated my question, even wondering if his remark was some sort of trick – our way of life had made us so suspicious. ‘But yes,’ he said, ‘you must have made the same assessment yourself.’ ‘Then why?’ ‘Why am I a Nazi? Why do I wear this uniform? My dear Dr Czinner,’ he said, ‘I used to be a miserable clerk. Later I sold cosmetics from door to door. You can have no conception in your solid world, how insubstantial mine was.’
“I did not think he meant me to understand that he was only an opportunist. I did not think that at all.
“That was our only meeting in Germany. He cheated me, by the way. The men whose release I thought I had negotiated were not released. The money I had arranged to be paid in advance was not returned. It was a squalid trick.
“Over the following years I heard much of Kestner. People spoke of him with awe as of something inhuman. Never with hatred, but always I think with a certain revulsion. He became a man of power, great power. I wonder if he ever believed in it. I have never met someone who seemed emptier.”
He sipped his glass of water.
“I have little more to say. A few months ago, in Argentina, where I have lived for many years, my only child, my daughter, announced that she was going to marry a German boy.”
Franz’s head turned. For the first time since the first day of the trial he met Becky’s eyes. They looked at each other, frozen in immobility.
“He seemed agreeable, or so my wife reported. We arranged to meet his father. I am, as you will realise, blind. In compensation my other senses may have developed an unusual acuity. I was aware very early in our meeting that I had heard this man’s voice before. It was not until he made that same remark about being a Saxon, which I have reported to the court, that I realised who he was. It was with difficulty that I held my peace. I told myself I could not be sure, it might be a coincidence, though I knew it was not, and I was sure. I telephoned the next day and lured him into repeating the remark. I had no doubt, I took the necessary steps to bring my positive identification of him as Kestner before the relevant authorities… The rest you know.
“I have only this to add. For a long time, all my life it seems, I have struggled to avoid … to avoid … commitment. I set myself up as a judge of right and wrong, even as a judge over Israel … I was guilty of the sin of pride, guilty a thousand times over. Not even what I endured in the camps dented my pride. Now, at the cost of much pain to myself and my family, I was given the chance to make atonement. Do not think I have not suffered in doing so. But I lay that suffering on the altar of Israel … Let justice be done.”
He sat down, wiped his eyes. There was a long moment of silence.
The judge rose, announced an adjournment. Dr Czinner’s examination would be postponed. He was interrupted. Eli pitched forward, his hands folded over his breast. Someone cried for a doctor. Kinsky rushed forward also. Becky stood up. She drew a cardigan about her.
“Get me out of here, Rachel. Please.”