97
I BOUGHT A COPY of the first edition of Kaputt in Italian, which made clear that the English translation followed the original text, where Malaparte offered a full account of the supposed visit to the Warsaw ghetto. Although I had come to learn that the words of Curzio Malaparte were not to be taken at face value, the account of the outing is worth recording. Malaparte records his departure from the Belvedere Palace, sitting in the first car with Frau Wächter and Governor-General Frank, followed by a second car occupied by Frau Frank and Max Schmeling, with other guests in two more cars. At the entrance to the “Forbidden City,” in front of a gate in the redbrick wall the Germans had built around the ghetto, the cars stopped and they all got out.
“See this wall?” said Frank to me. “Does it look to you like the terrible concrete wall bristling with machine guns that the British and American papers write about?” And he added, smiling, “The wretched Jews all have weak chests. At any rate this wall protects them against the wind”…
“And still,” said Frank laughing, “although leaving the ghetto is punishable by death, the Jews go in and out as they please.”
“Over the wall?”
“Oh, no,” replied Frank, “they go out through rat holes that they dig by night under the wall and that they cover up by day with a little earth and leaves. They crawl through those holes and go into the city to purchase food and clothing. The black market in the ghetto is carried on mainly through such holes. From time to time one of the rats is caught in a trap; they are children not over eight or nine years old. They risk their lives in a true sporting spirit, that is cricket too, nicht wahr?”
“They risk their lives?” I shouted.
“Basically,” replied Frank, “they risk nothing else.”
“And you call that cricket?”
“Certainly. Every game has its set of rules.”
“In Cracow,” said Frau Wächter, “my husband has built a wall of an Eastern design with elegant curves and graceful battlements. The Cracow Jews certainly have nothing to complain about. An elegant wall in the Jewish style.”
They all laughed as they stamped their feet on the frozen snow.
“Ruhe—Silence!” called a soldier who was kneeling concealed behind a mound of snow a few feet away from us with his rifle against his shoulder. Another soldier, kneeling behind him, peered over the shoulder of his companion who suddenly fired. The bullet hit the wall just at the edge of a hole. “Missed!” remarked the soldier gaily, slipping another cartridge into the barrel.
Frank walked over to the two soldiers and asked them what they were firing at.
“At a rat,” they replied laughing loudly.
“At a rat? Ach, so!” said Frank, kneeling and looking over the men’s shoulders.
We also came closer, and the ladies laughed and squealed lifting their skirt up to the knees as women do when they hear anything about mice.
“Where is it? Where is the rat?” asked Frau Brigitte Frank.
“It is in the trap,” said Frank laughing.
“Achtung! Look out!” said the soldier aiming. A black tuft of tangled hair popped out of the hole dug under the wall; then two hands appeared and rested on the snow.
It was a child.
Another shot and again the bullet missed its mark by a few inches.
The child’s head disappeared.
“Hand me the rifle,” said Frank in an impatient voice. “You don’t know how to handle it.” He grabbed the rifle out of the soldier’s hand and took aim. It snowed silently.
This was a ghetto visit as social occasion, accompanied by wives and friends and maybe children. I thought of Sasha Krawec, the young man who spent six months hidden in Elsie Tilney’s room in Vittel, one of Frank’s escaped rats. I asked Niklas about Malaparte’s account, the supposed visit to the Warsaw ghetto. Could Frank have taken a gun and aimed it at a Jew?
He confirmed that his mother did read Kaputt. “I have this memory of her on the sofa, very angry about Malaparte’s book. He wrote that my father had very long fingers; they were really long. Or was he writing about my mother’s fingers?”
“Your father’s fingers,” I said. Malaparte described Brigitte’s fingers as fat. Niklas nodded, then smiled his toothy smile. “My mother was agitated, moving around, really upset. ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘He never killed any Jews, not personally.’ This comforted her, a point in his favor; he didn’t kill anyone ‘personally.’ ”
“Personally”?
So the visit to the ghetto did take place?
“We all visited the ghettos,” Niklas said quietly, with shame. He remembered a visit, maybe to the Kraków ghetto, the one built by Wächter. “My brother Norman visited the Warsaw ghetto, my sister Sigrid visited the Kraków ghetto. I visited the Kraków ghetto with my mother.” Later he shared with me a copy of a home movie prepared for his father, with the title “Kraków.” Interspersed into the family scenes and images of Frank at work were a few moments in the ghetto. In one short scene, the camera lingers on a girl in a red dress.
Looking straight into the camera, she smiles, a beautiful long, hopeful smile that has remained with me. So did the red dress, an image picked up by the director Steven Spielberg in the film Schindler’s List. Same ghetto, same dress, fiction, fact. Could Spielberg have seen this film, which Niklas told me was not in the public domain, or was it just another coincidence?
I asked Niklas whether his father and Malaparte might have visited the Warsaw ghetto together.
“It could be,” Niklas said. “I don’t believe that he personally killed any Jews, and my mother certainly didn’t believe that. That is what made her so agitated, the book.”
Yet within the family a difference emerged on this important matter. Niklas’s older brother Norman, now dead, disagreed with the mother’s recollection.
“Norman visited the ghetto with Schamper,” Niklas added, referring to his father’s chauffeur. “He told me he could imagine that our father took a gun from a soldier.”