Chapter 1

The Institute and Library for Cultural Research was financed by Jews, manned and operated by Jews, but was open to any scholar of any religion interested in researching the holocaust. The institute was located in the Burgunder Strasse, in a row of three-story buildings that had once been private homes, and Herzl, ringing the doorbell and looking about him as he waited, had to admit that since his arrival in Munich the German people with whom he had come in contact had been extremely polite to him in every way. At the Riem Airport he had been ushered through customs without the slightest problem; the taxi driver had been informative, pointing out the various interesting sights on the way to the hotel; the room clerk at the Haus Bavaria in the Gollierstrasse had been both polite and helpful, having a room cleaned for him so he could check in before the normal hour. But Herzl still felt very strange. Accustomed to being surrounded by Jews, it was strange to be in a country where they were conspicuous by their absence. In a way he would have preferred to have been treated badly, so as to permit him to exercise his prejudices; then he smiled. If you are going to do proper research, he told himself sternly but with a smile, try not to make your mind up about things until you know something about them. Although he doubted his research on the subject of Zion Films’ project—or his innate feeling of strangeness to be in Germany—would alter his opinion very much.

The door was opened at last; a short, stocky gray-haired woman stood there looking at him with the suspicion reserved for door-to-door salesmen or other interlopers.

“Yes?”

“I’m—” He suddenly remembered and brought out his letter of introduction, handing it over.

She put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that appeared magically in her hand—for a moment it looked as if they had been secreted in the beehive of her towering bun of hair—and studied it carefully. At last she nodded.

“Ah, yes. Mr. Grossman. We had a letter saying you would be coming.” She ushered him into the hall, gave him back his letter, and pointed. “Up the stairs to the second floor, the door right before you. Miss Kleiman will be happy to help you.”

“Thank you.” He nodded and mounted the steps, pleased to be started on his mission at last. It was the first step in a process that would eventually result in a finished documentary on the screen, and he was involved. It was a good feeling. He took a breath and opened the door before him.

The room was large, running the length of the building, and was lined with bookshelves to the high ceiling, leaving almost no room for the narrow table set in the center. In one comer, half hidden behind file cabinets, was a small desk covered with magazines, books, and newspaper clippings; a girl Herzl judged to be his own age, or slightly less, was sitting there, studying a manuscript. She looked up as he closed the door behind him.

“Yes?”

Herzl patiently handed over his letter of introduction, wondering how many more guardians of the gate he would have to pass before he could get his hands on some of the books that seemed to bulge the walls of the room. The girl nodded, indicating a chair; Herzl sat down. She handed him back his letter of introduction.

“You come here to research the holocaust.” It was a statement, not a question.

“In a way; and then again, not in a way—” Herzl was about to try and put it as accurately as possible, when the girl interrupted him, speaking in English.

“You are speaking English?”

For a moment Herzl wondered if his German was so bad as not to be understandable; then he understood. “You mean, do I speak English? Yes. Why?”

“We speak, then, English. I am forced to improve. You are saying?”

“I said, in a way it is about the holocaust, but in a larger sense it is not. You see, Zion Films does documentaries. We’re planning one now on the so-called monsters of the concentration camps. We are not—I want you to be clear on that—we are not planning a film about the camps and their horrors. That’s been done many times. What we are planning is a film covering people like Koch and his wife, and Dr. Mengele, and Eichmann, and von Schraeder, and Kramer, and Sergeant Moll, who was at Auschwitz what von Schraeder was at Maidanek—people like that. In the film we want to study their motives, to try and understand what brought them to the point where they could perform the hideous acts they did, without being bothered by them in the least. We want to select some of these people and trace their background, see where they came from, what type home they were raised in, what influence their environment had on them, or their schooling, or their religious upbringing, or their jobs if they had any before they went into the SS. In short, we want to see what made them what they ended up being. They certainly weren’t born monsters.”

“I am wondering.” Miss Kleiman looked around the room, her face sober. “Here in the institute is one of the few libraries in the world dedicated to just the one subject—the holocaust. In London is another, the Wiener. When you are living with these books and the films and photographs we are having downstairs, then you are wondering.” Herzl was intrigued by her constant use of the present tense. She went on. “Are you reading the testimony of the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg?”

“Am I reading it? Oh, you mean have I read it.” Herzl shook his head. “I’ve read most of it, but that’s not what we want. We don’t want the testimony of people who were in the concentration camps. They are too prejudiced.”

Miss Kleiman drew in her breath with a hiss. “Prejudiced?”

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Herzl said patiently. “What I mean is that the survivors of the camps cannot picture these men as human beings. But they once were human beings, who changed. We want to know why; that’s the whole purpose of the film. My father was in three camps, and many of our close friends, as well. I didn’t even ask him or them about this. That isn’t what we’re looking for. We don’t want this to be an emotional film. We want this to be—well, a sort of study in psychology. Or psychiatry, possibly.”

Miss Kleiman was looking at him strangely.

“Not to be an emotional film. Well, possibly you are being able to do it …” She came to her feet; Herzl noted that she was tall and extremely well built. Get your mind back on your job, he told himself sternly, and brought his eyes to her face, which merely confirmed his previous estimate that it was very pretty. “All right,” Miss Kleiman said. “I am showing you the files and how they work. You are filling out a separate slip for every books and I am getting them for you. The films and the photographs collections are downstairs in the cellar. Incidentally, how many languages you are speaking?”

“English, German, and Hebrew.”

“It should be enough.”

Well, Herzl thought, I should certainly hope so! “How many do you speak?”

“Eight. Much of the holocaust books are in Polish and Russian, some in Lithuanian. But you are speaking enough languages, I think.”

“Thank you,” Herzl said, slightly deflated. “By the way—what’s your first name?”

She looked at him evenly; her eyes, he noted, were hazel, with little flecks of gold in them. “Miriam. Why?”

Herzl felt his face getting red. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant to say at all; it just came out. What I meant to say was, is it possible to see the film clips first?”

“You are interested in only the people. It will be taking a while for Rolf Steiner—he exhibits—exhibits is correct?—the film. I am calling him. In the meantime, you might wish to start.”

“Yes,” Herzl said, and went to work, picking titles from the files, filling in slips, watching Miss Miriam Kleiman’s lovely legs as she mounted the movable ladders to get him his choices, then digging into the books, pulling out a small fact here, another there.

Adolf Eichmann—starting alphabetically—originally on file as having been born in Sarona, German Templar Colony, in Palestine, later found to have actually been born in Linz, Austria (the birthplace of Adolf Hitler), of deeply religious parents—Presbyterian—whose father was once the guest speaker of honor at the synagogue in Linz. He was actually christened Karl, not Adolf; the Adolf seems to have been adopted later in life, probably due to influence of Hitler’s name. He was oddly fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to his native German. (Where did he learn those languages, and why? Investigate …) He was raised with Jews as a child, was always friendly with Jews, and had no record of any trouble with Jews at school or elsewhere, nor any record of any rejection by any Jewish girl or woman that might have changed him. He—

“Mr. Grossman?”

He looked up and smiled. “Herzl.”

“Herzl, then. Rolf Steiner says he has enough films for today.”

“Oh? Good!” He came to his feet, surprised at how long he had been at the books, extracting the information bit by bit. “Where?”

“In the cellar—the basement. Two stories downstairs.”

“Will you be joining me?” Alone in a darkened projection room, one arm draped casually across the back of her chair—

“No, no! Here I must do work.”

Herzl felt a tiny stab of disappointment, but put it aside with the knowledge that once the films were over, he could come back and have Miss Kleiman all to himself—if the library wasn’t crowded when he got back. But it seemed unlikely; that morning he had been the only one there. An introduction was required, and only serious scholars and researchers took advantage of it, and he hoped that no serious scholar or researcher, other than himself, needed information that day.

He didn’t realize he was staring at her until he saw her cheeks begin to redden; then she said rather pointedly, “Rolf Steiner will be waiting for you.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. Well,” Herzl said bravely, “I’ll see you as soon as I can.” And he walked out of the room, wondering if Rolf Steiner was handsome, and if a man could work at the same place as a beautiful girl like Miriam Kleiman and not be attracted to her, and if that attraction was mutual.

He need not have worried. Rolf Steiner was a short, pudgy man of seventy years of age, with a red face, a fringe of white hair standing away from his bald head in the manner of Ben Gurion, and with what seemed like a permanent smile on his face. He was a happy little gnome who spent his working days in the basement with his miles and miles of film. He lived just for his films and spent hours upon hours sorting through them, trying to organize them better, cross-filing their contents, or spending hours repairing the sprocket holes on films that went back to the earliest days of the Nazi Party and which had been shown until they were nearly worn out. He loved nothing better than to show his films, and now he seated Herzl in the small projection room, chattering as he went about threading the first master reel into the projector.

“Don’t exactly know what you want, Mr. Grossman—”

“Herzl.”

“Herzl, Miriam wasn’t too precise, but we have plenty of film, oh, yes, oh, yes, miles and miles on the camps and some of it shows the people who ran them, if you see anything on anyone you’d like in greater detail we may have special film on them, not much on some quite a bit on others, rather decent cross-filing system if I say so myself—” He completed his work and reached for the light switch. “… say so myself …” he said again rather vaguely, and then the lights went out.

The films began to flicker and Herzl brought his thoughts from Miriam Kleiman to the scenes being unfolded before him. Behind him he could hear the heavy excited breathing of Rolf Steiner, enjoying the film he had seen hundreds of times before as if it were his first viewing. The films were mostly copies of official German SS film, and the scenes for the various camps were remarkably similar; each camp site seemed to have been selected to oppress the prisoners as much with the bleakness of the terrain as with the cruelty of the punishment and the discomfort of the facilities. Hangings were quite common; the first made Herzl slightly ill, but after a while the horror of seeing men stare into the lens of the camera with dulled eyes and then silently, unstrugglingly drop to their death began to lose its effect. It was too terrible to contemplate, too gruesome to credit as having actually happened. There was an almost disbelief to see recorded on the film the seemingly endless lines of naked women, children, and men lined up to be shot at the edge of a burial pit without the slightest attempt to flee; each succeeding one lessened the impact of the next. It had to be a scene from some badly acted, poorly directed film, Herzl thought, and swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat.

Behind him Steiner kept up a running comment.

“Auschwitz … that was taken in Poland in the Krepiecki Forest … Russian film … had to make all new sprocket holes, awful job … this was at Mauthausen, terrible place, killed them by pushing them into a quarry … Ravensbrook, that was just for women … Auschwitz, again … only camp that tattooed the inmates, don’t know why, they didn’t usually live long enough … Maidanek just put a card around the neck and used the number over and over …”

A British official film was being shown; it indicated SS Captain Josef Kramer surrendering the Bergen-Belsen camp to a British officer. Kramer stood at attention, his staff lined up behind him, all in order. Steiner laughed.

“Didn’t even know he had done any wrong! Surrendered as if he were an honorable prisoner of war! Hung him, finally. I’ve some film of his trial at Leuenburg—British court—if you want to see it later …”

“Possibly.”

The film rolled on, Steiner maintaining a running commentary.

“This is an old reel, don’t know how it got mixed in.” He sounded really put out by a mistake in his department. “Anschluss, in Austria. March 1938. Might as well run it, just as fast as trying to jump it …” The film rolled on, cars passed the camera, each with a driver sitting stiffly in his place and with a smiling officer beside him. On each side of the road people cheered and threw streamers. The faces rolled on; Herzl stifled a yawn and glanced at his watch. Six-thirty. At the end of this reel he would call it a day. He brought his eyes up and suddenly stared.

“Wait! Hold it!”

Steiner stopped the projector; the figure on the screen froze, the crowd stopped its activity, hands in the air, mouths open. Steiner was looking at him awaiting instruction.

“Can you run it in reverse?”

“Of course. Tell me when to stop.”

The projector was reversed; cars went into reverse, comically; people on the street dropped their arms and walked backward; streamers shot back into little rolls in people’s hands.

“There! That car, that man. Stop!” The projector was instantly stopped. Herzl frowned at the smiling face on the screen. It was so familiar! How could he fail to remember a face that well known? “Mr. Steiner, who is that, do you know?”

Steiner knew every inch of his film by heart. “Von Schraeder, the colonel in charge of the extermination at Maidanek,” he said at once, and added proudly, “We identified almost every officer in the entire parade.”

“He looks familiar …”

Steiner shrugged doubtfully. “He died of typhus before the end of the war.”

“I know. Well, let’s go on, shall we?”

“Right,” Steiner said, and pressed the proper switch, while Herzl pondered the nagging sensation of having seen that face before.

It was seven o’clock when Herzl slowly mounted the steps from the basement projection room, rubbing the back of his neck wearily. How Rolf Steiner could sit and watch films for hour after hour was beyond him; in any event the fun was going to be in making them, not in watching them. He reached the first floor and glanced up hopefully toward the second floor, but he was really not too surprised to see the door to the library there closed and only darkness visible through the small frosted-glass window in the door. So he would not get to see Miss Miriam Kleiman anymore that day. A pity; it would have been nice to take her out to dinner and get to know her better. Eight languages; his mother would be impressed. And his father would be impressed with the rest of her. He smiled broadly at the thought. Ah, well, there was always tomorrow.…

He heard Steiner climbing the stairs breathlessly behind him.

“Everyone’s gone many hours, I’ll let you out,” he said in his chattering way, and extracted a huge bunch of keys from his pocket. “I must respool the film, take out the Anschluss film, don’t know how it got in in the first place, don’t usually make mistakes, oh, no, mind must have been on something else, getting old, oh, yes!” He looked up at Herzl, his head tilted bird-wise, blinking with his tiny eyes. “Will you want to see more film in the morning, anyone special, I might get it ready still tonight …?”

“I’ll let you know in the morning,” Herzl said. “You should get some rest tonight. And thank you, Mr. Steiner. Good night.”

He walked out into the evening, hearing the door being locked behind him, wondering if Miriam Kleiman had a friend she saw regularly. He also could not help but wonder in the back of his mind who that face in that parade in Vienna in 1938 reminded him of.

The answer to his first question as to Miriam Kleiman and the possibility of her having a steady friend could not readily be ascertained, although it was not possible to think she would not have. But the answer to his second query came that very evening as he was washing his face before going down to a lonely dinner in the hotel dining room. It made him crow with disbelieving laughter.

The face he had seen in the Vienna parade had been his own!