Every Man Dies Alone (71 page)

And now Pinscher has got his teeth into Anna Quangel.

“No!” cries Anna Quangel, and raises her hands imploringly. “Don’t say that! I never did anything like that!”

“You never did that?” yaps Pinscher. “So what do you call it when you put up the so-called fiancée of your son overnight not once, but on numerous occasions? Do we take it you took your son to bed with you on those occasions? Eh? Or where did Trudel sleep? You know she’s dead now, don’t you? Otherwise that harlot, that whore who helped your husband commit his crimes, would be here in the dock with you!”

The mention of Trudel, though, gives Frau Quangel fresh courage. She says, not to the prosecutor, but to the court at large: “Yes, thanks be to God that Trudel is dead, that she isn’t alive to witness this degenerate…”

“Watch your language, accused, I warn you!”

“She was a lovely, decent girl…”

“Who aborted her five-month-old baby, because she didn’t want to give the government any soldiers!”

“She didn’t abort it at all, she was miserable after it died!”

“She admitted it herself!”

“I don’t believe you.”

The prosecutor screams, “Do you think we care what you do or don’t believe! I warn you to change your tone, accused, otherwise you will experience something extremely unpleasant! Frau Hergesell’s statement was taken by Inspector Laub. A Gestapo inspector does not tell lies!”

Pinscher glowered menacingly round the courtroom. “Now I ask you again to tell me, accused: Did your son have relations with the girl or not?”

“I’m not a snoop. That’s not what a mother does.”

“But you had a duty to care! If you tolerated your son’s immoral behavior within your four walls, you were making yourself guilty of procuring; that’s what the law says.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. What I do know is that there was a war, and there was a chance my son would die. In our circles that’s the way it works: if a couple are engaged or as good as engaged, and there’s a war, then we might turn a blind eye.”

“Aha, so you admit it, accused! You knew about the immoral relations, and you tolerated them! And then you call it turning a blind eye. The law calls it procuring for immoral purposes, and a mother who tolerates such a thing deserves our condemnation!”

“Oh, does she? Then I should like to know,” says Anna Quangel quite fearlessly, and with a steady voice, “what the law has to say about the goings-on at the
Bubi-drück-tnich-verein?”
^*

General laughter…

“And what the SA get up to with their girls…” The laughter dies.

“And the SS—we hear the SS violates Jewish women before shooting them…”

Deathly silence…

And then pandemonium breaks loose. People start yelling. Some of the spectators clamber into the dock to assault the accused.

Otto Quangel has jumped to his feet, ready to run to the aid of his wife.

His guard and his missing suspenders hinder him. The judge stands and motions wildly for silence. The assistant judges talk among themselves. The prosecutor Pinscher is yapping away, but no one can hear a word.

Finally, Anna Quangel is dragged out of the court, the noise abates, and the judges withdraw to consult. Five minutes later, they return.

“The accused Anna Quangel is excluded from participation in the trial against her. She will remain shackled from now on, and under solitary confinement until further notice. A regimen of bread and water, and only every other day.”

The trial continues.

*
Irreverent popular nickname for the ‘Bund deutscher Mädel’ (BDM). The “Baby, Do Me” Club would be an approximation.

Chapter 63

THE TRIAL: THE WITNESS ULRICH HEFFKE

The witness Ulrich Heffke, technician and hunchbacked brother of Anna Quangel, had been through some hard months. The industrious Inspector Laub had arrested him along with his wife immediately after the Quangels, for no very good reason, other than that they were related to the Quangels.

From that moment on, Ulrich Heffke had lived in fear. This gentle man with his simple nature, who all his life had avoided strife, had been arrested by the sadistic Laub, had been tortured, yelled at, and beaten. He had been starved and humiliated. In short, he had been tortured by all the rules of the art.

Finally, something had swung in his hunchback’s mind. He had listened fearfully for what his tormentors wanted to hear from him and then given them the most incriminating statements—insanely incriminating, as was immediately demonstrated to him.

And then the tortures had begun all over again, in the hope that the hunchback might spill the beans on some further crime. Inspector Laub followed the watchword of the times: Everyone is guilty. You just need to probe for long enough, and you’ll find something.

Laub simply refused to believe that he had stumbled upon a German citizen, not a member of the Party, who never listened to enemy radio, or indulged in defeatist whisperings, or fiddled his rations.
Laub accused Heffke directly of having delivered postcards around Nollendorfplatz for his brother-in-law.

So Heffke confessed—and three days later, Laub was able to prove to him that he, Ulrich Heffke, could not possibly have delivered any postcards.

Now Inspector Laub was accusing Heffke of having sold industrial secrets at the optics factory where he was employed. Heffke confessed, and after a week of painstaking questioning, Laub was able to establish that there were no secrets to betray at the factory; no one even knew what weapon the parts they made there were destined for.

Heffke paid dearly for each false confession he made, but that only intimidated him more. He admitted anything, merely to be left alone. To avoid further questioning, he signed whatever was put in front of him. He would have signed his own death warrant. He was a quivering jelly, a bundle of fear ready to start trembling at the first word he heard.

Inspector Laub was unprincipled enough to have the poor man remanded along with the Quangels, even though there was no evidence of any involvement on Heffke’s part in the Quangels’ “crimes.” Better err on the safe side, and let the examining magistrate see if he couldn’t get anything incriminating out of Heffke. Ulrich Heffke took advantage of the slightly more generous accommodation in remand by promptly hanging himself. He was found in the nick of time, cut down, and returned to a life that had become completely unbearable to him.

From that moment on, the little hunchback was forced to live under much more onerous conditions: the light in his cell was left on all night, a special sentry peered in at him through a peephole every few minutes, his hands were manacled, and he was taken for questioning almost every day. Though the examining magistrate was unable to find anything incriminating against Heffke, he remained firmly convinced that the hunchback was covering a crime of some sort, why else would he have tried to kill himself? That wasn’t the way an innocent person behaved! The positively imbecilic way that Heffke agreed with every charge against him put the examining magistrate to the trouble of adopting the most wearisome procedures and strategies, all of which only revealed that Heffke hadn’t done anything.

So it happened that, barely a week before the beginning of the trial, Ulrich Heffke was released from remand. He went back to his tall, dark, tired wife, who had been released before him. She received
him in silence. Heffke was too disturbed to be able to work; he would kneel for hours in a corner of his room, singing hymns in his light, pleasing falsetto. He barely spoke, and cried a great deal at night. They had money put by, so the woman did nothing to spur the man to go back to work.

Three days after his release Ulrich Heffke received a further summons, to appear as a trial witness. His enfeebled brain could not make the distinction between witness and accused. His trepidation increased by the hour, he ate almost nothing, and his bouts of singing grew ever longer. He was tormented by the fear that his only recently suspended sufferings would recommence.

On the eve of the trial he hanged himself again, and this time it was his wife who saved his life. As soon as he was able to breathe, she gave him a sound thrashing. She didn’t think much of his new hobby. The next day she took him under her arm and delivered him to the servant of the court at the door of the witnesses’ room, with the words, “You’d better keep an eye him! He’s gone crazy!”

As the witnesses’ waiting room was already fairly full—for the most part with colleagues of Quangel’s, the directors of the factory, and the two women and the senior clerk who had seen him drop his postcards—as there were already quite a number of witnesses present when Anna Heffke gave her warning, not only the servant of the court but also the whole body of witnesses eagerly kept an eye on the little hunchback. Some tried to while away the tedious wait with teasing him, but it didn’t really catch on: he was too patently terrified, and most of them were too kindhearted to torment him too much.

The hunchback got through the questioning by Judge Freisler fairly well, in spite of being so terrified, simply because he spoke so softly and was shaking so hard that the highest judge in the land scorned to question such a scaredy-cat for very long. Then the hunchback returned to the witness box, hoping that that was it for him.

But by then he had been forced to witness Pinscher’s attack on his sister. He had had to listen to the scurrilous questions that were put to Anna, and his heart waxed indignant. He had wanted to step forward, to speak for his dearly loved sister, to bear witness that she had always led an honest and respectable life—but his fear had forced him down, made him lie low in silence.

So now, almost beside himself with a mixture of fear and cowardice and sudden surges of bravery, he followed the course of the trial up to the moment when Anna Quangel attacked the BDM,
the SA, and the SS. He witnessed the ensuing riot, and he himself with his ridiculous little figure created a bit of a riot by climbing up on the bench for a better view. He saw two guards drag Anna from the court.

He was still standing on the bench when the judge finally restored order. His neighbors had forgotten him; they were huddled together, whispering.

Then the eye of Prosecutor Pinscher fell on Ulrich Heffke, and he looked at him with astonishment, and called, “Hey, you there…! You’re the brother of the accused, aren’t you? What’s your name again?”

“Heffke, Ulrich Heffke!” supplied the prosecutor’s assistant.

“Witness Heffke, that was your sister! I call upon you now to tell the court about Anna Quangel’s previous life! What can you tell us about it?”

And Ulrich Heffke opened his mouth—he was still standing up on the bench—and for the first time his eyes looked out without dread. He opened his mouth, and in his pleasing falsetto he sang:

“Adieu to you, you wicked world
Whose evil doings I abhor
I yearn to be in heaven above
Which God reserves for those he loves!”

Everyone was so startled that they let him sing. A few enjoyed the plain manner of the singing, and moved their heads foolishly from side to side with the tune. One of the assistant judges gaped. Some of the law students gripped the rails hard and watched intensely. The grizzled, anxious defense attorney picked his nose abstractedly. Otto Quangel turned his sharp features toward his brother-in-law, and for the first time he could feel his cool heart beating a little for the poor chap. What punishment would they have in store for him?

“Hide my soul in Thy wounded side
Keep it there from grievous plight.
I will come to Thy celestial home,
For e’er to dwell in Thy bosom.”

While he sang the second verse, the court once again became a little unruly. The judge was distracted by a whispered consultation with the prosecutor, who passed a note to the guard.

But the little hunchback didn’t pay any regard to any of this. His gaze was directed toward the ceiling of the courtroom. Then, in ecstatically transfigured tones, he called out, “I’m coming!”

He spread his arms, pushed off from the bench, and flew…

And he fell clumsily among the witnesses sitting in front of him, who quickly got out of the way, and he rolled among the benches…

“Get that man out of here!” the judge barked to the once again unruly court. “He needs medical attention!”

Ulrich Heffke was escorted from the court.

“Plainly a family of criminals and madmen,” the judge declared. “They will all be exterminated.”

And he darted a threatening look in the direction of Otto Quangel, who, holding his pants up with his hands, was still looking at the door through which his little brother-in-law had disappeared.

The hunchback Ulrich Heffke was indeed duly exterminated. Physically and mentally he was found to be unfit for life, and after a brief spell in an asylum, was given an injection that saw to it that he really did bid adieu to this wicked world.

Chapter 64