Chapter 7

On May 21, 1945, thirty-six days after liberation and twelve days after the German unconditional surrender that finally put an end to the war, the British burned the three camps that had constituted the monstrosity known as Bergen-Belsen. The flamethrowers licked at the ugly wooden buildings a few moments and then they caught fire, flaming quickly into ash. The soldiers wielding the tubular torches expected some greater reaction from those watching—a cheer, perhaps, cries of delight, of vengeance, something, anything—but the inmates merely stood back and stared dully, still stunned by the enormity of their terrible experience, and by the deaths that continued to mount in the thirty-two casualty clearing stations established by the British. It had taken those thirty-six days for the three camps to be cleared and for the survivors to be housed in the former German Army quarters a mile away; over three hundred men, women, and children had continued to die each day during that period. Starvation had advanced too far for many; they could not tolerate food, and so they died. And typhus had continued to take its toll of the weakened inmates despite the best efforts of the dedicated British doctors, and so they died. And many had waited just for the day of liberation, and now they had nothing left to wait for. And so they died.

Morris Wolf was keeping a list.

Morris Wolf had come back from the hospital and the dead; he had located Brodsky and Grossman in the former German Army headquarters and had moved in with them, being greeted with great enthusiasm by Max Brodsky.

His list began when Hans Frank, the ex-governor general of Poland, appointed to that position by the leaders of the Third Reich, was picked up in a routine sweep that netted the 30th Infantry Division of the American Seventh Army several thousand prisoners at Berchtesgaden. That night Frank, the “Hangman of Poland,” brought attention to himself by attempting suicide; otherwise he might well have been released as most of the others were once the war ended a few days later. Wolf, scribbling the name and date at the head of a sheet of paper and posting it on the wall next to his cot, claimed that Hans Frank had been in Poland too long; he had begun to act like a Pole.

His list continued as the days passed: Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling, May 7; Hermann Goering, number two man in Nazi Germany, May 9; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, successor to Heydrich as head of the SD, the Security Service, May 15; Robert Lay, in charge of labor recruitment, May 16; Albert Rosenberg, the so-called theoritician of the Nazi Party, May 19 …

The prize, of course, especially to the inmates of the camps, was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Himmler had shaved off his mustache, adopted a black eye patch, and furnished himself with false papers in the name of one Heinrich Hitzinger, somehow imagining this would constitute a valid disguise. In the crowd of ex-prisoners of war, discharged soldiers, foreign workers, and refugees that pressed across the bridge spanning the Oste River at Meinstadt on May 21, only Himmler stopped at the control point to demonstrate his suspiciously new identity card; most of the others had no papers and simply crossed the bridge unimpeded. Himmler had also made the rather simplistic mistake of forging his new identity as a member of the Secret Military Police, apparently unaware that all members of that organization were being arrested. As Max Brodsky gleefully watched Wolf add the name to his list, he remarked loftily that Himmler had apparently been in Germany too long; he had begun acting like a German. It was, however, a short-lived joke; there was shocked silence the following day when it became known that Himmler had managed to commit suicide and thus escape what all had hoped would be a more fitting justice.

Wolf’s list went on: Julius Streicher, Jew-baiter and pornographer, publisher of the official Nazi newspaper, May 23; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister for the Third Reich, June 4; Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, June 5 …

The interrogation waiting room was stuffy; the small fan droning listlessly in one corner seemed only to shift the hot air from one part of the small room to another. Benjamin Grossman, patiently waiting his turn, wondered how much personal history he should invent. One could never be sure how much information these investigators might have unearthed in other camps, or how thoroughly they might correlate the information they gathered. He should have considered the possibility of being questioned in depth about his background during the investigation he knew all prisoners were undergoing, but he was still not fully recovered from his illness and he wasn’t thinking as clearly or as quickly as he once had. Not, he admitted to himself sourly, that he had been thinking so clearly when he undertook the identity of a Jew!

Still, there were no records; they had gone up in smoke when the train had been bombed at Celle. Besides, the others who had gone through the interrogation had assured him the investigators were not interested in the prisoners themselves; they were looking for witnesses, for facts, for statements, for hard evidence against those of the SS they intended to try for war crimes, and Benjamin Grossman knew what he was going to say in this regard.

He was very thin, finally beginning to walk a bit more erect, but still slouching slightly; and there were lines in his face that had not been there before and would never go away again. His hair was beginning to grow in again, and he was slowly getting accustomed to the strange face that stared at him curiously from the mirror each morning as he shaved. The new clothing issued by the British authorities, either from captured SS supplies or when necessary from their own QM stocks, felt stiff and uncomfortable in the summer heat, and for a moment Grossman wished he had worn his soft, ragged camp pajama uniform, or at least the blouse, but for the interview he felt it more appropriate to be better clad. And he really did appreciate the new shoes, even though they were heavy.

He heard his name called and rose slowly, shuffling into the next room, guided by a young corporal. He sat where the soldier indicated and stared wordlessly across the desk at the thin-lipped colonel who was returning his look with no expression at all on his slightly horse-like face. A small plaque on the desk identified his interviewer as a Colonel Manley-Jones. The colonel had a hairline mustache which he stroked constantly, sensuously, as he asked his questions. It almost looked like a form of masturbation, Grossman thought, and found himself wondering what happened when the mustache climaxed. The colonel looked down at a paper on his desk and looked up again.

“Benjamin Grossman?”

“Yes.” The colonel frowned and waited expectantly. Grossman finally understood. He added evenly, “Sir.”

“Yes,” the colonel said, and studied the paper, his thumbnail going back and forth rhythmically across the short hairs on his lip. “Your papers were destroyed in the bombing of a prisoner train in Celle last fall, I understand.” The colonel’s cold eyes stared across the desk; he managed to make it sound as if the prisoners were somehow at fault.

“Yes, sir.”

“We are familiar with the incident.” And bored with it, his tone seemed to imply. The colonel abandoned his mustache long enough to shuffle some papers; he located the one he wanted and went back to his mustache, no longer considering Grossman but studying this new document instead. “Do you have a family?” He spoke a stilted but correct German.

“No.” Enough of “sirs.” To hell with the bastard, Grossman thought. And let us hope we won’t have to start inventing relatives who died in other camps or in ghettos, because this colonel looks just prick enough to follow up and disprove anything we said. Still, if there wasn’t a Grossman in every camp in Europe, he’d be very surprised.

But Colonel Manley-Jones was not at all interested in either Benjamin Grossman or his family; it was a question on his list that had to be asked, but there was nothing in his instructions that specifically said he had to pay any attention to the answers. At first he had listened to all the tragic stories these people managed to invent, but in the end it became quite boring. Before he had come to the camp, the colonel had supposed a bit of sympathy for them might have been in order, but that sympathy had long since dissipated into an almost active dislike for them. Oh, he supposed some of them had suffered a bit in the camps; but when you came right down to it, they were also a pretty scruffy, unattractive bunch. Guarding them could hardly have been a pleasure, and almost certainly was bound to have led to occasional excesses. Any memory of the camp as the colonel had first seen it, with its skeletal inmates gripping the fence wire for support and silently staring at him with anguished eyes, or the piles of corpses covered with flies outside each barrack or lying about haphazardly where they had fallen and died, had faded once the camp itself had disappeared in smoke and flame. The bulldozers that had filled in the huge burial pits and covered them over had buried the colonel’s memory with the dead. Now the prisoners—for the colonel still thought of them as prisoners—were properly fed, probably better than they had ever been fed even before the war, and undoubtedly better clothed, as well. All the colonel wanted from this unprepossessing bunch was information he had been detailed to obtain for the coming war-crimes trials. And those trials were another thing—also undoubtedly an exaggeration, the colonel thought. It was true, he supposed, that there may have been a few sour apples among the accused captured Germans—after all, you can’t pick and choose your personnel in wartime—but many of them had also been officers in the regular army, the Wehrmacht, dammit! You couldn’t convince Colonel Manley-Jones that very many career officers in any army in the world—excepting the Russians, of course—would behave like that. He stared at Grossman, not pleased by what he saw, and got on with the distasteful job.

“Other than Bergen-Belsen, what camps were you in?”

“I was transferred here from Buchenwald—” Grossman waited to hear the colonel say there never had been a prisoner at Buchenwald named Benjamin Grossman, and then decided he was simply overtired. It was evident the colonel was asking his questions by rote.

“Was that the only other camp you were in?”

“No. I was in Maidanek.”

“Maidanek?” The colonel moved papers, bringing a new one to the top. “When you were at Maidanek, who was in charge?”

This was what Grossman had been waiting for.

“A Commandant Mittendorf,” he said evenly. “A vicious, miserable, perverted son of a bitch. When you catch the bastard—”

“The Russians have a full dossier on Mittendorf, I’m sure,” the colonel said, interrupting. “He’s their problem if they catch him. I’m only interested in war criminals now in the Allied areas. For example—” He consulted his papers. “There was a Colonel von Schraeder of the SS at Maidanek, who was transferred to Buchenwald. That makes him our problem. A Colonel Helmut von Schraeder. What can you tell me about him?”

Grossman picked his words carefully. “Von Schraeder was the assistant commandant at Maidanek, yes, and he was transferred to Buchenwald after I was. But he’s dead. He died at the camp there. At Buchenwald.”

“We’ve heard that as a rumor, but we want any further data we can get. We have a feeling,” the colonel said with what passed as humor for him, “that more SS died than there were bodies.”

“Von Schraeder died,” Grossman said with all the conviction he could marshal. “I know that for a positive fact. I should; I was the one who had to sew him into the burial sack and help cart him to the crematorium. He died of typhus in Ward Forty-six, and I watched him burn. With pleasure.” The conviction in his voice was not all acting; he had lived with the thought so long it had almost become truth to him.

“I see.” The colonel made a note, muttering under his breath. “Von Schraeder’s death confirmed by prisoner Benjamin Grossman.” He looked up. “How long were you at Maidanek? You’re sure you knew von Schraeder on sight?”

“I knew him! I was at Maidanek three years—”

For once the colonel was surprised. Maidanek might have been the problem of the Russians, and the question, like many of the others, may have been asked without conscious thought, but the answer still surprised him. He looked at Grossman almost with respect.

“How did you manage to survive so long? The stories we’ve been hearing about that camp—”

It was a question Grossman had given considerable thought to, and the answer came easily.

“I was strong when I first went into the camp,” he said quietly. “I know I don’t look it now, but I was strong. I could do work. They made me a Sonderkommando …” He managed to look ashamed at the admission, knowing it would be expected.

The colonel’s look of near respect changed instantly to one of deep disgust. They would soon be hanging officers, army officers, while these filth who cleaned out the gas chambers and fed the ovens would be pampered heroes! It was a strange world. The colonel changed the subject.

“And in Buchenwald?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What did you do in Buchenwald?”

“I thought I mentioned it. I was an orderly in Ward Forty-six, in the typhus section.”

“And what atrocities did you witness in Buchenwald?”

“There were atrocities in all the camps,” Grossman said slowly, “but I was in Buchenwald such a short time, and most of the time I was in the typhus section. But in Maidanek, this Commandant Mittendorf—”

The colonel had had enough of this particular inmate, who in any event would be of no use to him. He interrupted brusquely.

“I think that will be all, Grossman. You can leave.”

Grossman cleared his throat nervously. “Colonel—?”

The cold eyes came up, contemptuous. “I said, that’s all.”

“But, Colonel—don’t you issue passes from the camp? I mean, your office?”

“Why? You don’t need any pass. If you want to leave, just leave.” And good riddance, his tone seemed to add.

“I mean, passes to a different zone …”

“Why? Where do you want to go?”

“I thought the American Zone. Or the French Zone …”

Colonel Manley-Jones frowned. “Where are you from?”

“Originally, Hamburg.”

“That’s in this zone, the British Zone. You don’t require a pass.”

“I know, but Hamburg—” Grossman’s shrug indicated there wasn’t much left either of Hamburg or in Hamburg to entice a person.

The colonel’s voice became accusatory.

“You said you had no family. Why would you want to go to the American Zone? Or the French Zone? You have no one there.”

“I have no one anywhere,” Grossman said in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, “but none of us can stay here forever. It’s been two months since the camp was liberated, and a month since the war ended. There’s nothing for me in Hamburg. I thought from the American Zone or the French Zone I might eventually be able to get permission to enter Switzerland …”

“Switzerland?” The colonel made it sound as if the suggestion was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. “You say you have no family anywhere, so obviously you have no one in Switzerland. So how do you expect to get permission to immigrate there? Switzerland isn’t exactly waiting with open arms to be filled with”—with a diplomacy rare with him, the colonel bit back the word “trash” and substituted it with—“refugees.” He considered Grossman coldly. “Why, then, do you want to go there?”

Ben Grossman had always known this was a question that would have to be answered carefully. He realized he had not ingratiated himself with Manley-Jones, but he suspected no prisoner really could. He tried to sound as sincere as possible.

“Before the war I often visited Switzerland. I came to like it very much. There was a girl I met when I was in Lucerne, a very beautiful girl …” He tried to smile but the result was a rather ghastly grimace.

No muscle moved on the colonel’s narrow equine face, but inwardly he was outraged. Those Sonderkommando hands that still carried the stench and blood of the dead bodies that they handled, to be thought of touching the body of a beautiful girl, undoubtedly a gentile girl, which all the Jews seemed to prefer? Grossman misunderstood the colonel’s continuing silence for some form of understanding. He hurried on.

“Also, I’m an engineer, Colonel, a mechanical engineer by profession. I—I studied in Switzerland. I can easily get work there. I would never be a burden on the state.”

The colonel regarded him expressionlessly, and then shrugged.

“I can’t imagine where you got the idea such passes are in my department. All passes from the British Zone to any other zone are issued through the office of the military governor. The liaison between that office and this camp is provided by Major Wilson.”

He immediately bent over his papers, his thumbnail stroking his mustache almost fiercely. It was an obvious termination of the interview. Grossman stared at the bent head a moment, then slowly came to his feet and shuffled from the room. The colonel looked up to be sure the man had left, then reached for the telephone and asked the operator to connect him with Major Wilson’s office.

Switzerland, indeed! Not if Colonel Manley-Jones had anything to do with it! The Russian Zone, perhaps, but no pass to either the American or the French Zone, if he could help it. From there it would be only a step across the border, and the Yanks and the Frogs would probably close their eyes. They were too soft-hearted, that was their trouble. That Sonderkommando! It was a bloody wonder the Jew hadn’t demanded a chauffeur-driven limousine to carry him in luxury across the bloody border!

Max Brodsky and Morris Wolf were discussing God.

Time passed slowly in the camp and a discussion on any subject was a welcome relief from the boredom, becoming the principal mental exercise the inmates could indulge in. Besides, being Jews, Wolf and Brodsky were prepared to argue either side of any proposition with a passion that was almost the equivalent of honest conviction.

“How can anyone but a fool deny the existence of God?” Brodsky demanded. “Look around you. Where do trees come from? Or flowers? They say that man descended from the monkeys, but what about trees? Another question—where do you come from? Why do you have five fingers—”

“Ten.”

“—on each hand,” Brodsky said, determined not to be put off by Wolf’s so-called humor. “It isn’t something that happens occasionally; it happens every time a baby is born. Millions of times a year. Every time the same five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. Why do you think the sun rises in the east every morning? According to you, it’s all an accident, is that it? On a Tuesday you get up expecting light and that day the sun is just going down—”

“You overslept.”

“I’m serious! Everything that happens is following some great master plan. Nothing happens by accident. Look around you.”

Brodsky was sitting on his cot, picking the threads from the SS shoulder patch on a woolen shirt he had just “organized” from the captured stores. At his elbow a radio softly gave the news. Max’s thick fingers, once again approaching their former strength, held the tiny needle with infinite delicacy.

“All right, look around you!” Wolf countered, no longer humorous. “Take a good look! Go take a look at the burial mounds, go look at the electrified fence, take a look at the watchtowers and the momsers there with their machine guns! This is all part of your God’s master plan? All those dead people? The chosen people! That’s a laugh! Chosen to be killed. This is your God? The one who fried the people like that dumb Yashinko? On the fence?”

“He was shot. And he wasn’t a Jew.”

“So that makes him healthy again!” Wolf shook his head disbelievingly. “On a Tuesday the sun is going down instead of up, you don’t know whether to eat dinner or breakfast—that’s your argument for God? I’m impressed. The gas chambers, the ovens, the pits! Those are my arguments. And they outvote you six million to one!”

Brodsky shook his head stubbornly, his thick fingers continuing to pick delicately at the stitching of the patch.

“You don’t understand,” he said sadly. “You don’t want to understand. If there’s no God, what makes everything work? How do you explain the fact that every winter it gets cold and it snows, every summer it gets hot. Every year with no exceptions. Answer me that! Accidental? Never!”

“I have no idea,” Wolf admitted. “I admit I don’t understand, I only know this—leaves or trees or no leaves or trees, sun or no sun, snow or no snow, why does your all-powerful God permit a Hitler to kill millions and millions of people? Does your God think we’re overpopulated? What kind of a God lets things like that happen? You answer me that!”

Brodsky paused in his work, frowning.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, “but God has his reasons. We have to believe that …”

“You have to believe it,” Wolf said bitterly. “I don’t. Look at me. I’m a gargoyle. I could get a job swinging from that Notre Dame church in Paris. They could hire me to frighten children. Children? Adults! God needed another ugly man? And if he needed one so badly, he couldn’t make one from an SS? He needed me?”

“You don’t understand,” Brodsky said patiently, and then paused as Grossman came into the room. He smiled and gestured toward Wolf’s list on the wall. “They picked up Raeder today. The great Admiral of the Navy was simply sitting at home in the Russian sector of Berlin, can you imagine? Officially registered and completely undisturbed. It’s—” He noticed the expression on Grossman’s face for the first time. He reached over and switched off the radio. “What’s the matter?”

Grossman slumped onto his cot. “I didn’t handle it very well.” And thought, a few years ago I would have had that miserable colonel shoveling shit in the gas pens, carting the dead to the ovens, and happy to be alive to do it. Now I sat and apologized to the bastard! The time here at Belsen has done more to me than I would have supposed!

“Who did you have?”

“Some colonel. Manley-something.”

“Manley-Jones,” Wolf said and bobbed his small head. “I had him. He’s a prick. There has to be one in every outfit, I guess, including the British. Or maybe especially the British.”

Max had stopped his needlework. “So what happened?”

Grossman shrugged. “I should have stopped after I answered his questions and he told me to go. But I thought he was the one who handed out passes to a different zone.” He stared down at his new shoes. “Now the son of a bitch is undoubtedly getting in touch with some office and making damned sure I don’t go anywhere. Especially Switzerland.”

Brodsky snorted and went back to his blouse. “Switzerland, Switzerland! It’s all you talk about. You’d think you had a fortune in a numbered account there!”

“If I thought so,” Wolf said, “I’d get you into Switzerland if I had to carry you across the border. And don’t break our hearts about that girl you say you met there before the war,” he added. “You think she’s still waiting for Grossman to appear after six years?” He put a hand up to his scarred face, moved his fingers to touch the eyepatch over his empty socket. “For somebody handsome like me, maybe they’d wait—but for you?”

“Forget Switzerland,” Brodsky said definitely. “Come to Palestine with us, instead. We’ve got prettier girls.” My Deborah, for instance, he added to himself, and wondered if his Deborah would still be waiting after all the years. He had written to her immediately after liberation, and still had heard no word.

Grossman shook his head. It was an old argument. “If you two want to go to Palestine, go. Nobody’s stopping you.”

Wolf smiled. “Only the British.”

“That’s your problem. I’m going to Switzerland, and the British aren’t going to stop me. Certainly no British named Manley-Jones!”

Brodsky went back to his needlework, speaking over his shoulder.

“So at least come with us until you’re somewhere near the Swiss border. You can say good-bye there just as easy as here. We’ll be leaving here in a month or so—”

“A month or so?”

“That’s right.”

“When was all this decided?”

“Today, while you were at your interview. The Mossad man was here, you knew he was coming today. Davi Ben-Levi. You didn’t want to see him, remember?”

“I didn’t have anything to see him about.”

“Well,” Brodsky said, disregarding Grossman’s comment, “the Mossad are setting up places we can stay until we reach a port in Italy. They have to buy a ship, or ships.” He shrugged. “It all takes time.”

“And you’re going to stay here until they’re ready?”

“Why not?” Wolf said. “What’s wrong with here? All the comforts of home—” He gestured toward the radio. “Entertainment, good food, good company—”

“Well stay here a month or possibly more,” Brodsky said. “By that time you can put on your camp uniform, the striped shirt and cap, and walk across any zone without any pass at all. You’ll see. Besides,” he added quietly, “most of the men are in no condition to travel, as yet. You, for example.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me. Once I get to Switzerland—”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Wolf said, “except if you want to walk, you have to take off your shoes. They’re too heavy for you.” He shrugged. “I see you now, shuffling across the border, one mile an hour, with the border guards in hot pursuit. Sitting on turtles. That’s how fine you are.”

Grossman didn’t argue. Brodsky nodded.

“We’re also going to have to organize some warm clothes—”

“In July or August?”

“We’ll leave here in July or August, that’s true. But we won’t be taking the Rome Express, first-class, with meals,” Brodsky said dryly. “Sometimes well have to walk, sometimes maybe we can hitch a ride, or the Mossad can arrange transportation, but we can’t depend on it. Once we cross into Austria without proper papers we may have to hide out a lot, travel by night, hide by day. And once we cross the Italian border it will be worse. The British practically control Italy now, especially the north, and they don’t intend to let any Jews leave for Palestine if they can help it. So we don’t know when we’ll get to a port, or when a ship will be ready.” He pointed to the shirt he had stolen from supplies. “So we’ll need clothes, warm clothes.”

Grossman leaned back on his bed and thought about it. It was true he was still far from his full strength, but he was sure he was strong enough to cross a border. He didn’t intend to fight his way across; he meant to use his brain. Still, it was also true that at the moment he was sure Colonel Manley-Jones would do his best to see there would be no travel pass for him to any zone adjacent to the Swiss border; but in a month or so, it was highly possible that Manley-Jones would be out of here. The interrogation process was already nearing an end, with the war-crimes trials already announced by the Russians to begin in Berlin, and the trials in Nuremberg would follow soon after. Max was probably right that in a month or so passes would be a mere formality, and anyone in a camp-striped shirt would be able to go where he wanted without any problem.

He looked up.

“From here you plan to go directly to Italy? Or try?”

“No; from here we’ll be going to Munich, to an Allied refugee camp there in Felsdorf.”

“And how long will you stay there?”

Brodsky shrugged. “Until the Mossad tells us to leave.”

Grossman thought that over. It was true that there would be no harm in going as far as Felsdorf with Brodsky and the others. It was also true that it might be helpful to travel in the company of others. There was safety in numbers; some of the ex-prisoners who had left the camp and returned for a visit had said the world outside was a jungle. Gangs of discharged soldiers, ragged and hungry, often attacked anyone who looked as if he had anything worth taking. Besides, he actually was in no great hurry; since the camp’s liberation and his recovery from typhus, he had gone back to considering his old plan as being fully operational. He was no longer a suspected war criminal, and he would soon be in Switzerland; and that had been the original idea, hadn’t it? The time lost at Bergen-Belsen had been an unfortunate hiatus, a distressful detour, but now he was back on the track. He looked at Brodsky.

“How do you plan to get to Felsdorf?”

“Hike into Celle and get rides on trucks from there. Hitchhiking.”

“And from Felsdorf, how do you plan to go? Where do you intend to cross the Austrian border? Anywhere near Switzerland?”

Brodsky was busy folding the shirt into his knapsack. He slid the knapsack into the small locker beside his cot, locked the locker, and put away the key.

“That’s up to the Mossad,” he said. “They may take us down to Lindau on the Bodensee, then through Austria to the Italian border, then down to some port on the west coast, like La Spezia or Livorno. Or from Munich they may go down through Innsbruck and then over to some port on the Adriatic, like Chioggia.”

“Ask the British where they won’t have gunboats to follow us and sink us,” Wolf said dryly. “That’s probably where the Mossad will take us.”

Brodsky suddenly looked at Grossman, sensing that the question meant a surrender of sorts on the part of his friend.

“You mean you’ll go with us?”

“As far as Felsdorf,” Grossman said. He made it sound a concession.

Brodsky smiled inwardly. Long before Munich or Felsdorf he would have converted Benjamin Grossman to Zionism. Palestine needed people like Grossman: an engineer, a good friend. A survivor.

Switzerland, indeed!