The Sonderberg Case (16 page)

Werner looks at me for a long time before adding in a lower voice: “It was he who had changed his name. And you’ll understand why: Hans Dunkelman was my paternal grandfather. His name was Sonderberg.”

Though I didn’t know why, this confession moves me. Perhaps because it makes me think of my own grandfather.

“Okay,” I say. “So you didn’t kill your ‘uncle.’ But,
knowing he was your grandfather, would you have killed him more deliberately?” I ask sarcastically.

“Perhaps,” he says, looking at me fixedly.

“What? You’re joking …”

Should I point out that the joke is in bad taste? He doesn’t let me finish my sentence.

“We quarreled. Violently. In his room, as soon as we arrived at the hotel. And again on the third day, when we went for our walk in the mountains.”

I understand that a serious event must have taken place. Now it’s my turn to lean toward him.

“You quarreled. Fine. That happens to everyone. There are people who spend their lives bickering. With their fathers, their mothers, their spouses, and their in-laws. But what was your quarrel about?”

I look at Anna who turns toward her husband and encourages him to answer. I ask them if I may take notes. They have no objections.

“About hatred,” Werner replies. “Our quarrel revolved around hatred. A bitter, fierce hatred, kept alive by death, entirely turned toward death: How could it be overcome? For it has to be overcome if men want to continue living in a world to which they are still condemned. That’s the conclusion I’d come to on that day: I wanted to hate, wanted to hate hatred so I could triumph over it. I had to, but everything within me refused to succumb to its call.”

He starts to tell the story he should have told at the
trial—not so he could have proved his innocence, but to have given truth a chance to be victorious.

When Werner went to the bathroom, Anna lowered her voice and said to me, “So you can fully understand what you’re about to hear, it’s important for you to know that he lost his father a short time before the trial.”

“From disease?”

“From cancer. Grief and everything that goes with it.”

She cut herself short as soon as her husband joined us again.

So here is what had happened in the tall, dark mountains of the Adirondacks.

The two men had gone there not for a vacation but in order to have a heart-to-heart talk. About the past. “Things” from long ago. Protagonists from a story that will shame humanity until the end of time. There was something unreal and timeless about their confrontation. In their one-to-one encounter, the two men represented the two faces of the worst species, the one called the human species.

Yes, Hans had been a member of the Nazi Party. Worse: he had been an SS officer. Worse still: he had been a member of the
Einsatzgruppen
, the special commandos whose task was the annihilation of every last Jew in occupied Europe. He had changed his name because he was on every list of persons wanted for crimes against humanity.

“Don’t ask me how it happened or why,” he said to Werner. “I know why, though you’ll never know. I mean, you’ll never understand. A defeated Germany, on her knees, pitiful. And me, too. Young but withered, scorned, poor, and famished. Humiliated and miserable.”

Hans described the First World War with disgust, “lost because of the Jews and their Communist allies.” The enemy within. The famous stab in the back. The disastrous Versailles Treaty. The smallest new state became more important, wealthier, more respected than Germany. The Weimar Republic: Hans called it the laughingstock of nations, cowardly, pernicious, open to all perversions, to all concessions, rushing headlong into bankruptcy. You had to fill a suitcase with banknotes just to buy a pair of shoes or a piece of bread. People sold entire buildings to foreigners so they could get by from day to day. In respectable families, fathers avoided their children’s gaze. Everyone felt their country was now the dregs of the civilized world.

Then Hitler entered the stage. He alone knew how to say the words that the people wanted to hear. Hans became impassioned: “By naming the guilty—the Jews, the Communists, the Democrats, the Freemasons, in other words, the others—he freed us from our guilt, our weakness, our defeat, our shame.” Pompous slogans? Certainly. Hysterical shouts? Yes, absolutely. Threats? Yes again. Moving words, grandiose appeals to the national honor and unshakable patriotism? Yes, a thousand times, yes. “Cause trembling instead of trembling”: being a penniless young man, Hans
had to believe in this slogan in order to believe in the future. So the Third Reich became a religion and Adolf Hitler its prophet if not its god.

“Can you imagine yourself in my place, at that time?” Hans asked. “For us, this was a matter of learning to walk tall again, head held high, singing of the glory of death of whom we were the proud and faithful allies.”

“How do you expect me to respond?” Werner said. “In the course of my studies I learned one word I’ll never let go of: ‘Why?’ If I had been in your position, I think, I hope, that at each stage I would have wondered: Why? Why the threats? Why the repression? Why the prisons? Why the camps? Why the massacres? But I wasn’t in your position.”

“No, you weren’t.”

The weather was beautiful amidst the trees in the mountains. A gentle, light wind caressed them. A golden sun played with the docile earth. In the distance, in the valley, you could make out a town and the gray and red tiled roofs of the houses. A rural ambience, too peaceful and benign for the blows and wounds the two men were inflicting on each other.

“I suppose you’re only at the beginning,” said Werner. “Do you want to continue?”

“The pride of putting on the black uniform of Heinrich Himmler for the first time. Of being accepted and feared. Of fulfilling special missions for the Führer, so admired and so loved: a spiral or escalation, the orders and actions progressed in boldness, brutality, and cruelty. The Night of the
Long Knives. The books thrown in the flames.
Kristallnacht:
ah, the looting of Jewish shops; the synagogues set on fire; the old Viennese men forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes; others running away like frightened animals; the beauty of these spectacles swelled the young breasts of the followers.”

“And the idea that your victims had harmed no one, that they were innocent—this didn’t disturb you?” Werner asked.

“They were Jewish, hence guilty.”

“Guilty of what?”

“Of being born Jewish.”

“Therefore?”

“Therefore they had to be punished, eliminated, pitilessly—all of them.”

“And it never occurred to you that they were human beings like you and me?”

“Not like you and me. They were Jewish, not human. In fact,” Hans added, “it was a sight to see them, terrified and cowardly, as they were chased out of their houses, or in the camps, in Dachau and later in Auschwitz, emptied of life, emaciated, like walking corpses. Not just the Jews, but their accomplices, too, their political allies, their business associates or accomplices in God, their sympathizers, pathetic humanists of all stripes. Up until then, they had wealth, enviable positions, titles, important jobs: we took off our hats to them; we almost went down on our knees to greet them. With our treatment, they started crawling on the
ground like animals to pick up a piece of stale bread or a cigarette butt. Not the slightest trace of dignity, or pride, or even anger. They didn’t belong to the same species as me.”

“And what if I told you that even then, even over there, those you assaulted, those you humiliated were still as human as you? Though pitiful, these men and women had preserved their humanity by weeping, while you lost the very last speck of yours? Can you understand that?”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand. You weren’t in my position.”

“I never would have agreed to be in it.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Hans let out a kind of momentary laugh. Werner found no hint of bitterness in it. Then the old man asked, “Between owning the whip and being subjected to its lashes, you would have chosen the lashes?”

“I hope so.”

“In that case, I think this conversation is useless. You’ll never understand.”

“Understanding implies an equality of standards. I refuse that.”

They looked at each other with harsh severity. With the same violence? Was one the exact reflection of the other? How can the impact of gazes be measured? Anna was becoming increasingly pale. She was in agony hearing about this conversation between the grandfather and his grandson. She was speechless.

“Keep going, get to the end of what you wanted to tell me,” Werner said.

“What else do you want to know?”

“You mentioned Dachau and Auschwitz.”

“I was there. Dachau first. Compared to what came later, not too terrible. I obeyed orders. Humiliate the prisoners; weaken their resistance; take away all their willpower. Kill their humanity, their hope. That was the main objective. They had been brought there to strengthen and glorify the Nazi ideal. While showing respect for German law and those who administered it. The prisoners had to understand this intangible truth and permanent reality: they were tools in our hands; when they became useless, they were thrown away.”

“But you were a tool, too, a malleable tool in the hands of your superiors. Their excesses, their bloodthirstiness, their mind-numbing blindness didn’t disturb you?”

“It’s not the same.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know. Let’s say that at the time, it didn’t occur to me. Actually I didn’t think about anything. My leaders thought for me. My duty was to obey. To serve a cause that I knew was sacred. Eternal. It justified all undertakings. Even what you call our monstrous crimes.”

“Yes, that’s what I call them.”

“You believe that I, your grandfather, was and still am a monster?”

“A human monster, or inhuman, it makes no difference.
And the fact that I’m your grandson is unbearable to me and makes me boil with indignation; there’s a part of me that refuses to accept it.”

Suddenly wounded, Hans’s face took on a cold, distant expression.

“So that’s it. You reject me. Though you haven’t heard it all yet.”

“I’m ready.”

“So listen closely,” said Hans. “Kamenetz-Podolsk and the Hungarian Jews, Kiev and the Ukrainian Jews. Vilnius and the Lithuanian Jews. Barbed wire as far as the eye can see. Huge communal graves. I saw. Shattered heads. Infants pummeled, scorned, trampled, used as targets. I saw. The undressing sessions. The stupor of women pushed into the gas chambers. Silent old men with stony shattered faces. I saw. What did I feel? Nothing. I felt nothing. The gun I held, I was that gun.”

He became ironic, cruel. “You, darling little grandson, you would have gone mad. With rage? With pain, no doubt. Whereas I felt nothing. I was Death. You’re Death’s grandson.”

He broke off and his cold gaze penetrated Werner’s, seeking to hurt him. “What you’ve just heard is merely the beginning. You have nothing to say to your grandfather about this?”

“One more question: You never felt any remorse?”

“Never.”

“Regret?”

“Yes. Even today I still regret having lost the war. We could have and should have won it. But history never stops. The final victory will be ours.”

“You killed. You assassinated. You massacred. And your only hope is that this horror recurs. You changed the world into a huge spectacle of ugliness, sadness, desolation, ash, and now you tell me this taught you nothing. That the future will resemble the past. And yet I’m still your grandson.”

“Do you want me to stop talking?”

“No. Continue.”

“Say: ‘Continue, Grandfather.’ ”

“No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“It’s time someone had the courage to say no to you.”

“You’re not the first person. Your father said no to me. Shortly before his death.”

“I’m proud to be his son.”

Hans frowned.

“In spite of what I told you, you won’t recognize any extenuating circumstances in my case?”

“No, none. Even if you felt remorse I’d be against you.”

“In that case, you asked for it. Should I go on?”

“Go on.”

“Treblinka and its columns of smoke. Birkenau and its ovens. The gas chambers. The whistle of the night trains arriving directly at ‘the ramp of the Jews.’ Promoted officer, I supervised the selections, the gassings, the shootings. Day after day, night after night, hour after hour, impervious to
the tears, lamentations, despair of the victims, death was dealt ruthlessly, efficiently, with talent and dedication. It was simple and implacable: in this cursed place, the condemned had come to die and I had come to kill. At no time was I seized with remorse or pity. I saw everything, I retained everything. I thought it was necessary. That it was just.”

Motionless, horrified, Werner cried out angrily, “And you want me to be proud of being related to you?”

“Whether you like it or not, you are. By blood.”

“Well, blood can lie. In our case, it lies. You and I, we don’t belong to the same human family.”

“There again, whether you like it or not, we’re related; we’re relatives.”

“Then I’ll bear this kinship like a burden. Worse—like a curse.”

Hans sniggered once again. “You’re like your father.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“Isn’t he the link between us?”

“Of him I’m proud. Whereas you make me sick.”

Werner was overcome with a rush of loathing; he let it sweep over him, but his gaze didn’t detach itself from Hans’s.

“Will you ever come to understand what you did to me and to my generation? Hitler and you, you kept proclaiming it was for the future of Germany’s children that you were at war with the rest of the world; for us that you were destroying entire cities; for us that you erased our right to
pride, honor, and hope for centuries to come. Before his suicide, Hitler, in his will, expressed his wish to punish the German people by turning Germany into a mountain of rubble. But what you did is worse: you took revenge on us, your descendants. Because of you, all of you, though we were born long after your atrocities, we feel guilty. Because of you, my joy will never be unmitigated. Because of you, the child I see in his mother’s arms makes me think of the children you sent to their deaths. Because of you, I’m banned from the pure and powerful happiness to which all men should have access. According to a Jewish saying, life is a wheel that never stops turning. Look at your life: what you did to the Jews is what you are living through now. You wanted to isolate them, you’re isolated; you wanted to hunt them down, you’re hunted; you made it impossible for them to live without anxiety, now you’ll never live without anxiety. And you’ll share the fate of your master. For the Jews of occupied Europe, the continent narrowed to the size of a country; the country narrowed to a city; the city to a street; the street to a house; the house to a room; the room to a basement; the basement to a freight car; and the freight car to a concrete, sealed shelter ensuring the effectiveness of the gas. And their lives ended in flames. Isn’t that what also happened to your Führer? His gigantic Nazi empire began to shrink: the continent was reduced to a country; the country to a city; the city to a street; the street to a bunker—and he, too, was consumed by flames.”