Not Me (19 page)

I hung up and closed my eyes. I don’t think I said a prayer, but I did wish to God this would all soon be over. The apartment was an incredible mess, but I found a way to slide the gym bag under the guest bed. Then I reached for another one of my father’s journals.

That would have to be penance enough.

The last survivors of Yad Mordechai could hold out no longer. That night, a small detachment of armored cars went down to wait for anyone who could escape through the Arab lines. Heshel Rosenheim had called on the radio to volunteer to go along, but they told him to stay put. He was no longer clear why he did anything. He only could not resist the impulse to volunteer. Yad Mordechai had held out four days. Tomorrow the Egyptians would march into the settlement, guns blazing, and find it abandoned. They would be flush with victory. They might take an hour to celebrate. Then they would rush on and take Ashdod. After that, they would find their way to Naor, or they might bypass it. But he knew they could not bypass it. It was not in their nature. They needed to destroy it. He understood why. The Nazis had often done the same thing where the Jews were concerned. No town was too small. No rag of a Jew unworthy of their undivided attention.

Around four in the morning, the report came in from the front. About a hundred survivors. Many wounded. Many of them women and small boys. The sky behind them lit their way, bright with the fires of what once had been their homes. Some came carrying stretchers. Some carted the wounded on their backs. Some did not make it the last kilometer. There were three stragglers, two women carrying a man on a stretcher. The waiting soldiers could make them out as dark figures moving erratically down the path. But then they heard a sentry call out in Arabic, and the footsteps stopped. Up on the hill, silhouetted against the fires of Yad Mordechai, they saw the three being led off under guard, and then they heard shots.

Heshel did not know why this news stabbed so painfully into his own heart, but Dovid, standing nearby, put his young hand on Heshel’s shoulder.

“It’s all right,” he said to Heshel. “At least they didn’t go like sheep.”

He nodded to Dovid, but what was he really thinking?

Later, he found himself alone, seated on a stool in the milking shed. He never did know much about livestock, but he liked the smell of the barn, the dark aroma of manure mixed with the bright grassy heather of hay and alfalfa, and he was somehow comforted by the snorting and mooing of the cows as they went about their business, doing nothing, thinking nothing, merely enduring, or perhaps even enjoying, their simple existence.

“They will never be seen again.” That is what the voice on the Haganah radio had said. In some ways these words were more terrible than the news of the fire bombings, the tank attacks, the victims blown up or shot down, the panic in the doctor’s pleas for help. Why was that? Why was it worse to be led a few feet to the side of the road and dispatched with a pistol against your forehead, than be torn to bits by shrapnel or ripped apart by Bren fire? Death is death. And yet not. Because they were not afraid of dying. Anyone could see that. But when they heard of these three, the two women carrying the wounded man, and how they were stopped, and how they were led aside, and how they were executed in a burst of gunfire (all three at once? the man in the stretcher first? or last? stoically? with tears? with cries for mercy?), there was such a silence in the room, such gasping, and off to the side, behind quivering hands, such tears flowing
—
and not just from the women’s eyes
—
that it stunned them all, including Heshel Rosenheim, as if their own loved ones had been murdered before their very eyes.

He sat there listening to the cows swat their tails and lick their noses. In a minute or two the milking would have to begin. He knew the schedule of the kibbutz better than anyone. He realized, of course, that it was a mistake not to evacuate the cows with the women and children. They would die here. During battle, no one would milk them, no one would feed them. And then they would get blown up or burnt to death. It’s just that no one had thought of it. When they come in this morning, they will all realize their mistake. They will wake up with a start at five in the morning and say, Oh my God! The cows!

He closed his eyes, the better to feel their living presence.

And that is when he remembered.

Heinrich Mueller arrived by train to Lublin on November 2,1943. He had been on leave for two weeks after vacating his post in Bergen-Belsen, and had traveled first to Berlin to visit his family, and then to Vienna, which he had never seen. He spent four days there, during which he ate great quantities of pastries, and had numerous sexual intercourses with prostitutes. He visited the Hofburg, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and Schloss Schoenbrunn, but mostly spent his time in the cafés and night clubs. He was not deprived of company, as there were always groups of cavorting SS men who invited him to join in. He even went dancing with a group of town girls who attached themselves to some young officers like himself, but out of a sense of honor he had not had sex with any of them, though without a doubt, he told himself later, he could have. There was one in particular who seemed to like him, and he thought about her all throughout the train ride to Lublin. He had gotten himself a first-class berth, but he could not sleep. He had written her name on his ticket, but he hadn’t had the courage to ask her address. He reproached himself all night long. Upon disembarking the train, he flagged down a car, threw his duffel in the back, and arrived at his post by midday. It was depressing, after the gaiety of Vienna and the beauty of the girls, the excellent food, the fine Austrian wine, the endless rounds of beer, to be shuffled into the commandant’s office by a dour-faced adjutant, to be shuffled out again after a quick salute and a few meaningless inquiries, and to be shown a desk with no window and a bunk in the officers’ quarters that was but a straw mattress on a steel frame, a few inches of private space that contained a miniature writing table, and, off to one side, a minuscule closet. It was a terrible, foul-smelling place; the air was dark even now at midday, whereas the sun had been shining only a moment ago in town. On top of that, his heart sank when he met his immediate superior, Wippern
—
a man with no imagination and plenty of ambition. One could never advance under such a person.

The very next day, Mueller was taken across the highway, to be shown the lay of the land, as Wippern put it.

“You’re in luck!” Wippern said. “Today is a big day! Big action today. Lots to see!”

As soon as he crossed the road, he could hear the loudspeakers blaring music, but beneath that, something else.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I’m saying!” snapped Wippern impatiently. “Big action today! Harvest Festival! That’s what we call it.”

As they walked toward the main field, the field that joined the two camps, he saw hordes of men and women stripped naked, their clothes thrown into piles, which others loaded onto carts. It was a pleasant day, not too cold at all, and the sun was shining brightly in spite of the gray cloud that hung over the camp. The music was incredibly loud, but as they walked farther, the mask of music grew thin, and he began to hear bursts of shooting and screaming. It was coming from an area behind several large buildings, one of which was clearly the ovens.

“I thought I heard convoys coming in last night,” Mueller remarked.

“Yes, some crackerjack units. Special orders from Berlin,” replied Wippern, rubbing his hands together against the damp morning air.

Mueller watched as groups of a hundred or so of these naked people were herded like cattle through a narrow causeway of barbed wire. They ran along, trying to cover themselves. The women put one arm in front of their breasts, the other between their legs. Why bother? thought Mueller.

“Rosamunda!” the loudspeaker sang. “Give me a kiss!”

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” said Wippern. “There will be a lot of paperwork tonight. A lot of head counting, a lot of shoes to deal with.”

He winked.

He pointed out the various fields and blocks, told him where the Soviets were held, where the Poles, where the Jews, where the women.

“We just got in a huge crop from the ghetto in Warsaw,” he said as a way of explaining what was going on. “Leftover from the riots, you know. Can’t have that type around, can we? Next thing you know there’ll be trouble here too!”

“How many?” asked Mueller, thinking ahead to how much work he had to do on his very first day.

“I don’t know. Ten thousand, maybe, from Warsaw. Plus all our useless Jews in Camp A.”

“It will be a long day,” Mueller sighed.

“Attitude is everything!” advised Wippern.

“I only meant
—
”

“Never mind,” Wippern said kindly. “I know what it’s like to come back from holiday.”

They walked until they reached the gas chambers and crematorium. The music had gone dimmer here, for which Mueller was grateful, but now the sound of automatic weapons, barked commands, and human screams filled the air.

“Let’s take a peek,” suggested Wippern.

Mueller went along beside him. Not far beyond the crematorium they had dug several huge trenches, four, perhaps five, meters deep. They lined up the naked Jews and commanded them to climb down into the trench. There they were ordered to lie down atop a row of dead bodies
—
those who had come only moments before. They did what they were told. Amazing, he thought to himself. They did not seem to him at that moment the arch villains who had almost destroyed Germany in their plots to rule the world
—
the puppet masters of Roosevelt and Churchill, who had started this war. Only we could have broken them! he thought. The operation was wonderfully orderly, yet their nakedness disturbed him, he did not know why. It was particularly hard to watch the women lie down on the row of corpses. It offended, somehow, his German sense of chivalry, to see their asses lined up that way, and, after the Sturmbannführer nodded and the guns went off, to witness their defecation, or worse, the way their bodies writhed under the pressure of the bullets in a mockery of coitus. He knew he must not close his eyes, but he felt himself grow faint, so he pulled out his handkerchief and made a show of blowing his nose. When he uncovered his face again, he saw a lieutenant briskly walking the perimeter of the trench, finishing off any left alive with a deft pistol shot to the head, although with some he did not seem to bother, since, Mueller assumed, the half-dead criminals would be buried or crushed in a matter of minutes anyway. Indeed, a second later another group of naked Jews was led to the trench, and they too lay down upon the row of bodies, and they too were put away in a red flood of gunfire.

Mueller looked around and noticed Weiss, the commandant, on a little rise a few meters away, seated in his camp chair next to which was set up a table upon which breakfast was being served. The table was covered with linen, and the attendant poured coffee from a silver urn. When they saw him, Wippern and Mueller rose to attention and saluted, but Weiss did not notice them, and after a while Wippern suggested they stop fooling around and get back to work.

And they did have a lot a of work, too! The special units left Lublin that evening, and Wippern and Mueller had to do the accounting. It was a tedious and laborious task, but when it was finally done, they could report to Berlin that the population of Majdanek had been reduced by 18,400 Jews. They had decided to round off for convenience.

That night, the Poles in Block 3 were heard celebrating. But Mueller was exhausted and oddly aroused. He knew it was the moral thing, the right thing, the necessary thing for the Reich, for all of mankind. But he could not stop the queasiness rising up in his throat. It cannot be right, he thought, to dispose of so many potential workers while they still might be useful to the state.

Thus, he was much relieved when Wippern assigned him to Camp B, the work camp. It was actually the harder job, which is no doubt why Wippern gave it to him, but now, at least, he might be spared the sight of so much waste.