The Savior (14 page)

There was a small station near the river's edge, and he noticed a train approaching from the city. He made his way to the platform just as the train pulled in. Before he had time to think about it, he jumped aboard and sank into a seat with tremendous relief.

Only in the warmth of the carriage did he realize he'd been shivering. When the conductor came, he asked him how far the train would go, thinking it was just a suburban line. Cologne, the man replied; Gottfried laughed in surprise and bought a ticket. It occurred to him that he hadn't checked out of the hotel and some of his things were still there. That made him laugh again, until he noticed the few passengers scattered throughout the car looking at him. He pursed his lips and leaned his forehead against the window, watching the river and its fringe of bare-branched trees glide by as the train picked up speed.

 

Every day, he expected a telephone call, a letter, a reproach of some kind. But silence turned out to be more of a reproach than he could have imagined.

He thought she would try to reach him, maybe through a mutual friend, at least to make sure that nothing had happened to him. But she must have found out from his hotel that he had wired from Cologne that afternoon, settling his account and asking them to send on the things he'd left in his room.

For the first few weeks he couldn't practice, could barely bring himself to read a newspaper. The news was all bad, anyway. He had the feeling that events were rushing forward, and resourceful people adapted to them as best they could, while he hung back and did nothing.

There were so many times that he thought of picking up a telephone and calling her! So many times he almost did it, but held back at the last moment. What if her father were the one who answered the call? No, he didn't want to hear that mellifluous voice and those hard-edged words anymore. He began a dozen letters to her, but could find no way to explain what he had done. How could he explain it to her when he couldn't explain it to himself?

As the months passed, the only solace he could find, the only refuge from hating himself, was to imagine her safely en route to Palestine. He was relieved that she had left behind the hurt, the disappointment, the danger, and hoped she no longer reproached herself for the foolish choice she'd made to fall in love with a man like him. He could see her facing east, her lithe body leaning against the railing at the prow of the ship, her eyes scanning the horizon for some sign of a coastline, of a promised land that had not yet come into view.

Music was never the same for him after that. He did eventually find the courage to practice again; he hired an accompanist and played other pieces—he couldn't bear to rehearse any of the repertoire he'd worked on with Marietta. Those recitals and house concerts went passably well in the spring. But there was some fluidity lacking in his phrasing, some warmth gone, as if on that walk along the Main something had frozen in him forever.

S
he glanced over her shoulder, then looked back at him shyly and came into the room. He closed the door, sat her down on his bed and offered her some of the coffee he'd been drinking. It must have been a luxury for her; she accepted it gratefully, and looked at him over the brim of the cup as she downed its contents. It was freezing outside, and she was shivering. He wrapped a blanket around her.

The hot liquid soon brought a hint of color to her cheeks. The skin was drawn tightly over the bones of her face, but there was something appealing about her. She must have been beautiful at one time. Her blue eyes were striking despite the shadows beneath them. Her lips, chapped and bitten, could have been voluptuous. Her hair—cropped short, of course—was reddish-brown. Auburn curls would have softened the angular severity of her features.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Grete.”

“Was it you who asked me to stay yesterday?”

She nodded, then spoke haltingly. “I wanted to apologize for this afternoon.”

“It was my playing that led up to it. I should apologize to all of you for the way those guards…the way they rescued me. Were any of you badly hurt?”

She shook her head. “A lot of bruises, but nothing really serious. They must have been holding back.”

If that was holding back, he thought—but said nothing.

“You must be wondering why I'm here.” She looked down at the coffee cup cradled in her hands. “I…I had to talk to someone.”

A few seconds went by; she seemed to need some encouragement. “I want to hear what you have to tell me,” he said.

Grete put down the cup and faced the opposite wall as she spoke, sometimes half-turning to catch his eye. “Last night I couldn't sleep. The music you played kept running through my head. It reminded me of before…of life outside. And then I noticed there were no footsteps.”

“Footsteps?”

“The guards pass near our barracks once every twenty minutes, like clockwork. I know because my bunk is closest to the door. At least two hours went by. I'd never dreamt I would miss that pacing, but when it wasn't there, all of a sudden the silence scared me. I thought it might be a trap, so I stayed in bed and finally fell asleep.

“Tonight there were still no guards around. I lay awake again for a couple of hours, but then I didn't see the point of waiting any longer, so I pulled the door open a few inches.”

“Excuse me, Grete. I don't understand. They don't…lock you in at night?”

“The door is kept unlocked so we can use the latrine if we have to. The Kommandant made a point of that in one of his speeches to us about the special treatment we were getting. Besides, they're all obsessed with cleanliness. We're in a different area from the other Häftlinge, from where we used to be, and we don't have to work as hard. For the past few weeks they've been treating us…
well,
for some reason. Until this afternoon, which was an emergency. They're not going to change their approach tonight, I said to myself. What good would that do them? And if I'm wrong, what am I risking? If they shoot me, how many years of my life will I lose? How many
days
?”

She laughed bitterly and looked at him as if he would know the answer to that question.

“It doesn't make any sense to try to figure them out. I'm sure of only one thing: they never do anything by chance. Those guards were removed. So I'm probably doing what they want, but I don't care—as long as it doesn't endanger you.”

“I don't think I'm in any danger,” he said. Then he remembered that just before the war started, it was considered dangerous even to be seen with a Jew. After a while it was no longer an issue: the Jews had disappeared.

She studied his face for a few moments, as if to make sure she could absolutely trust him. “Sometimes a few of us talk about what we might do if we ever get out of here, but that's foolish. It can make you sick to think too much about the future when you know you'll probably never have one.”

She bit her lower lip.

“Now and then we exchange a few words about what it takes to stay alive from one day to the next, but we can't talk about what it
feels
like to be here. They've taken away our language—I mean the language of the heart. And even if we could respond to things the way we used to, what would we say? There are no words to describe this. I can't explain it to you. You've been here only a few days, you haven't seen much yet, you couldn't possibly understand.”

He wanted to say something, wanted to show her that he could understand, or at least sympathize. But the haunted look in her eyes convinced him there was nothing he could say.

“We can't say how we feel. Maybe, if any of us survive—maybe later. But to tell someone even a small part of what's happened, to tell one's own story…You see, I don't know most of the other prisoners too well, not even the ones in the group that's getting special treatment. People you meet here you don't usually know for very long. And the people you knew before, like your family: either you don't know what's become of them, because you've been separated, or else…you do know.”

She turned away from him; a vein was standing out on the side of her neck.

“I can't tell anyone here what I've seen. It would be a useless repetition of their story, of what
they've
seen; it would be self-indulgent, a way of asking for sympathy. There's no place for sympathy here. Only an outsider, who understands maybe one-millionth of it, could feel an emotion like sympathy. And most of the outsiders who come here wear uniforms, they're the same as the guards, they feel nothing. But you're not like them—I know you're not.”

He squeezed her hand.

“You know, before all this started, I wanted to become a writer.” A hint of a smile flitted across her face. “It was just a young girl's fantasy, a dream of being famous someday. By the time I was fifteen, I'd filled three notebooks with poems and stories. They were realistic stories about everyday life, but they always seemed…so made-up to me. And now that whole period seems so remote, like a dream, like someone else's life. Now I've
lived
a story too horrible to be invented. Until today I never thought I'd find the words to describe what I've seen, or anyone to listen.”

“Tell me now. Please.”

It took her a few more seconds to summon the energy, or the courage, to begin. He knew it would be difficult for her to speak of these things, and for him to listen. But it was necessary for both of them.

“I come from Heidelberg. My father was a lawyer, and he taught at the university until 1933. He was able to continue with his law practice for about a year after he was dismissed from his teaching post. It took until the spring of '36 for my parents to realize that we absolutely had to get out of Germany. There could be no more waiting around and hoping for things to get better. But by then it was too late to get visas for all of us to enter the United States or England. We were put on waiting lists. After months of waiting we were turned down, and we couldn't even fill out applications for any of the other countries. They all had quotas for Jews.

“Then came that terrible night when they burned down the synagogues and smashed our shopwindows. Soon Germany's borders were closed to us. About six months after the war started, we went into hiding—my parents, my sister and I—in a Gentile friend's attic. For two years that man and his family risked their lives to feed us and keep us from going crazy with fear and boredom. You know, two years is a long time to be shut up in an attic, even with three people you love. It was hard to keep those walls from closing in on us. But every time we got on each other's nerves, we found a way to become cheerful and optimistic afterward. And we never had the courage to admit how forced that optimism felt.

“One day our friend and his wife and son disappeared. We didn't know if they left because they wanted to or if they were taken away for some political reason—surely not us, since we would have been taken at the same time. There was enough food left in our tiny kitchen to last a few days. Imagine the panic we felt at the idea of the food running out. But we were spared that agony, because the SS came for us on the third day.

“There was a door that had always been kept shut, except when our friends brought us food—the hidden door at the bottom of the stairway that led to our attic. I'll never forget the knocking on that door when they found us. We looked at each other without saying a word. I saw in my parents' and sister's eyes that they had always known this moment would come. All the hopes we had talked about, all the dreams of a peaceful life together after the war—all were false, a pack of beautiful lies we'd been telling each other. The pounding on that door was the truth tearing down the walls between us.

“I looked at my father's face as they started to kick through the door, as it cracked and began to give way. He hadn't acted soon enough to get us out of the country: I think the guilt he felt for that made him irritable most of the time. But when the door caved in and we heard those boots pounding their way up the stairs, his face looked strangely peaceful. It was over now, out of his hands. And as he looked at me, I felt such love for him.

“They dragged us downstairs and out to the street. Two vans were waiting. My sister was forced into one; the rest of us were shoved in the other. My sister, my poor, dear sister Nora: she had to face the beginning of the torture alone.”

Grete swallowed audibly. “I've never seen or heard anything about Nora since that night. That was over two years ago. I…I doubt she's alive. But the idea of her sitting in that van alone, suddenly torn away from her family—poor little Nora, who was never so strong—that idea tortures me more than thinking she's dead. You know why? Because I can't imagine her alive anymore, can't picture her dealing with life in a place like this, with the hunger and fear and a hundred humiliations every day.”

She paused, then suddenly turned to face him. “I'd rather have her be dead,” she said fiercely. “She'd be better off. It would have to happen sooner or later, anyway. Why not sooner, when there's nothing to live for?”

Gottfried took her hand again, since he could think of nothing to say. After a few seconds she calmed down enough to continue her story.

“They took us to a detention camp not far away. The camp didn't have the proper ‘facilities,' as they called them. Later I found out what that meant—no ‘showers' or crematoria.”

“Showers?”

“Yes.” She withdrew her hand from his. “Didn't you know?” The nuance of irony in her voice made him uncomfortable. “That's their pet name for the gas chamber, their favorite method. You know the biggest building in this camp, the one with the chimneys?”

He wanted to get up and pull open the window.

“That's where they kill prisoners and dispose of the bodies after they've been gassed.” Her tone of voice had become almost matter-of-fact. “Gas isn't used in warfare anymore. It's not fit for human beings; there are more dignified ways for them to die. But for us Jews it's all right. For the last two days, though, the furnaces have been shut down. No one knows why, but I'm sure of one thing. It's not out of the kindness of their hearts. There must be something wrong with the mechanism—maybe they're waiting for the engineers to come. Another thing I'm sure of: the chimneys may be quiet, but that doesn't mean the selections have stopped.”

“Selections…”

“That's when they choose who's going to be killed.”

How many…how many per day? The furnaces: overstuffed, clogged—yes, that was a much more likely explanation for shutting them than the Kommandant's “esteem for the arts.”

“We had to wait at the transit camp until there was enough room for us to be sent here. Meanwhile they made us work twelve-hour shifts in a factory nearby. We ate something that passed for soup and a piece of stale bread twice a day, and at night we were all crowded into one large barracks with hundreds of bunks. Because the camp was much too small for all of us, the SS didn't even bother to separate the men and women. They kept saying we were there only temporarily. But I knew that wherever our final destination was, things could only get worse.

“I watched my father a lot during the days we spent in that camp. He had that same peaceful look more and more, which meant he wasn't responding to anything that was happening around us. One day they shot a prisoner right in our room, for some minor offense. I don't remember what it was, if it was anything at all. Maybe the guards were just having fun. The man fell a few feet away from my father, who sat on his bunk with no reaction, at least none that I could see. Afterward he never mentioned the shooting; it was as if it hadn't happened. His eyes were far away and he hardly talked anymore. What he did say didn't sound like him, didn't make much sense.

“And then I woke up one morning to my mother's screaming. She was shaking me, her nails were digging into my shoulders. I looked across at my father's bunk, but even before I looked,
I knew.
I couldn't see his face because the blanket was twisted, bunched up over his chest and head. One arm was hanging from the bunk with a slash in the wrist. A razor lay on the floor in a red puddle.