A Death in Vienna (12 page)

“I know this man,” Gabriel said, eyes on the photo.

“How?”

Gabriel ignored the question. “I need to borrow this,” he said. Then, without waiting for Rivlin’s answer, he slipped out the door and was gone.

I
N THE OLD
days he would have taken the fast road north through Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin. Now, even a man with the survival skills of Gabriel would be foolhardy to attempt such a run without an armored car and battle escort. So he took the long way round, down the western slope of the Judean Mountains toward Tel Aviv, up the Coastal Plain to Hadera, then northeast, through the Mount Carmel ridge, to El Megiddo: Armageddon.

The valley opened before him, stretching from the Samarian hills in the south to the slopes of the Galilee in the north, a green-brown patchwork of row crops, orchards, and forestlands planted by the earliest Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine. He headed toward Nazareth, then east, to a small farming town on the edge of the Balfour Forest called Ramat David.

It took him a few minutes to find the address. The bungalow that had been built for the Allons had been torn down and replaced by a California-style sandstone rambler with a satellite dish on the roof and an American-made minivan in the front drive. As Gabriel looked on, a soldier stepped from the front door and walked briskly across the front lawn. Gabriel’s memory flashed. He saw his father, making the same journey on a warm evening in June, and though he had not realized it then, it would be the last time Gabriel would ever see him alive.

He looked at the house next door. It was the house where Tziona had lived. The plastic toys littering the front lawn indicated that Tziona, unmarried and childless, did not live there anymore. Still, Israel was nothing if not an extended, quarrelsome family, and Gabriel was confident the new occupants could at least point him in the right direction.

He rang the bell. The plump young woman who spoke Russian-accented Hebrew did not disappoint him. Tziona was living up in Safed. The Russian woman had a forwarding address.

J
EWS HAD BEEN
living in the center of Safed since the days of antiquity. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Ottoman Turks allowed many more Jews to settle there, and the city flourished as a center of Jewish mysticism, scholarship, and art. During the war of independence, Safed was on the verge of falling to superior Arab forces when the besieged community was reinforced by a platoon of Palmach fighters, who stole into the city after making a daring night crossing from their garrison on Mount Canaan. The leader of the Palmach unit negotiated an agreement with Safed’s powerful rabbis to work over Passover to reinforce the city’s fortifications. His name was Ari Shamron.

Tziona’s apartment was in the Artists’ Quarter, at the top of a flight of cobblestone steps. She was an enormous woman, draped in a white caftan, with wild gray hair and so many bracelets that she clanged and clattered when she threw her arms around Gabriel’s neck. She drew him inside, into a space that was both a living room and potter’s studio, and sat him down on the stone terrace to watch the sunset over the Galilee. The air smelled of burning lavender oil.

A plate of bread and hummus appeared, along with olives and a bottle of Golan wine. Gabriel relaxed instantly. Tziona Levin was the closest thing to a sibling he had. She had cared for him when his mother was working or was too sick from depression to get out of bed. Some nights he would climb out his window and steal next door into Tziona’s bed. She would caress and hold him in a way his mother never could. When his father was killed in the June war, it was Tziona who wiped away his tears.

The rhythmic, hypnotic sound of
Ma’ariv
prayers floated up from a nearby synagogue. Tziona added more lavender oil to the lamp. She talked of the
matsav
: the situation. Of the fighting in the Territories and the terror in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Of friends lost to the
sha-heed
and friends who had given up trying to find work in Israel and had moved to America instead.

Gabriel drank his wine and watched the fiery sun sink into the Galilee. He was listening to Tziona, but his thoughts were of his mother. It had been nearly twenty years since her death, and in the intervening time, he had found himself thinking of her less and less. Her face, as a young woman, was lost to him, stripped of pigment and abraded, like a canvas faded by time and exposure to corrosive elements. Only her death mask could he conjure. After the tortures of cancer, her emaciated features had settled into an expression of serenity, like a woman posing for a portrait. She seemed to welcome death. It had finally given her deliverance from the torments raging inside her memory.

Had she loved him? Yes, he thought now, but she had surrounded herself with walls and battlements that he could never scale. She was prone to melancholia and violent mood swings. She did not sleep well at night. She could not show pleasure on festive occasions and could not partake of rich food and drink. She wore a bandage always on her left arm, over the faded numbers tattooed into her skin. She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame.

Gabriel had taken up painting to be closer to her. She soon resented this as an unwarranted intrusion on her private world; then, when his talents matured and began to challenge hers, she begrudged his obvious gifts. Gabriel pushed her to new heights. Her pain, so visible in life, found expression in her work. Gabriel grew obsessed with the nightmarish imagery that flowed from her memory onto her canvases. He began to search for the source.

In school he had learned of a place called Birkenau. He asked her about the bandage she wore habitually on her left arm, about the long-sleeved blouses she wore, even in the furnacelike heat of the Jezreel Valley. He asked what had happened to her during the war, what had happened to his grandparents. She refused at first, but finally, under his steady onslaught of questions, she relented. Her account was hurried and reluctant; Gabriel, even in youth, was able to detect the note of evasion and more than a trace of guilt. Yes, she had been in Birkenau. Her parents had been murdered there on the day they arrived. She had worked. She had survived. That was all. Gabriel, hungry for more details about his mother’s experience, began to concoct all manner of scenarios to account for her survival. He too began to feel ashamed and guilty. Her affliction, like a hereditary disorder, was thus passed on to the next generation.

The matter was never discussed again. It was as if a steel door had swung shut, as if the Holocaust had never happened. She fell into a prolonged depression and was bedridden for many days. When finally she emerged, she retreated to her studio and began to paint. She worked relentlessly, day and night. Once Gabriel peered through the half-open door and found her sprawled on the floor, her hands stained by paint, trembling before a canvas. That canvas was the reason he had come to Safed to see Tziona.

The sun was gone. It had grown cold on the terrace. Tziona drew a shawl around her shoulders and asked Gabriel if he ever intended to come home. Gabriel mumbled something about needing to work, like Tziona’s friends who had moved to America.

“And who are you working for these days?”

He didn’t rise to the challenge. “I restore Old Master paintings. I need to be where the paintings are. In Venice.”

“Venice,”
she said derisively. “Venice is a museum.” She raised her wineglass toward the Galilee. “This is real life.
This
is art. Enough of this restoration. You should be devoting all your time and energy to your own work.”

“There’s no such thing as my own work. That went out of me a long time ago. I’m one of the best art restorers in the world. That’s good enough for me.”

Tziona threw up her hands. Her bracelets clattered like wind chimes. “It’s a lie. You’re a lie. You’re an artist, Gabriel. Come to Safed and find your art. Find
yourself.
”

Her prodding was making him uncomfortable. He might have told her there was now a woman involved, but that would have opened a whole new front that Gabriel was anxious to avoid. Instead, he allowed a silence to fall between them, which was filled by the consoling sound of
Ma’ariv.

“What are you doing in Safed?” she finally asked. “I know you didn’t come all the way up here for a lecture from your
Doda
Tziona.”

He asked whether Tziona still had his mother’s paintings and sketches.

“Of course, Gabriel. I’ve been keeping them all these years, waiting for you to come and claim them.”

“I’m not ready to take them off your hands yet. I just need to see them.”

She held a candle to his face. “You’re hiding something from me, Gabriel. I’m the only person in the world who can tell when you’re keeping secrets. It was always that way, especially when you were a boy.”

Gabriel poured himself another glass of wine and told Tziona about Vienna.

S
HE PULLED OPEN
the door of the storeroom and yanked down on the drawstring of the overhead light. The closet was filled floor to ceiling with canvases and sketches. Gabriel began leafing through the work. He’d forgotten how gifted his mother was. He could see the influence of Beckmann, Picasso, Egon Schiele, and of course her father, Viktor Frankel. There were even variations on themes Gabriel had been exploring in his own work at the time. His mother had expanded on them, or, in some cases, utterly demolished them. She had been breathtakingly talented.

Tziona pushed him aside and came out with a stack of canvases and two large envelopes filled with sketches. Gabriel crouched on the stone floor and examined the works while Tziona looked on over his shoulder.

There were images of the camps. Children crowded into bunks. Women slaving over machinery in the factories. Bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting to be hurled into the fire. A family huddled together while the gas gathered round them.

The final canvas depicted a solitary figure, an SS man dressed head to toe in black. It was the painting he had seen that day in his mother’s studio. While the other works were dark and abstract, here she strove for realism and revelation. Gabriel found himself marveling at her impeccable draftsmanship and brushwork before his eyes finally settled on the face of the subject. It belonged to Erich Radek.

T
ZIONA MADE
a
bed for Gabriel on the living room couch and told him the midrash of the broken vessel.

“Before God created the world, there was only God. When God decided to create the world, God pulled back in order to create a space for the world. It was in that space that the universe was formed. But now, in that space, there was no God. God created Divine Sparks, light, to be placed back into God’s creation. When God created light, and placed light inside of Creation, special containers were prepared to hold it. But there was an accident. A cosmic accident. The containers broke. The universe became filled with sparks of God’s divine light and shards of broken containers.”

“It’s a lovely story,” Gabriel said, helping Tziona tuck the ends of a sheet beneath the couch cushions. “But what does it have to do with my mother?”

“The midrash teaches us that until the sparks of God’s light are gathered together, the task of creation will not be complete. As Jews, this is our solemn duty. We call it
Tikkun Olam
: Repair of the World.”

“I can restore many things, Tziona, but I’m afraid the world is too broad a canvas, with far too much damage.”

“So start small.”

“How?”

“Gather your mother’s sparks, Gabriel. And punish the man who broke her vessel.”

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Gabriel slipped out of Tziona’s apartment without waking her and crept down the cobblestone steps in the shadowless gray light of dawn with the portrait of Radek beneath his arm. An Orthodox Jew, on his way to morning prayer, thought him a madman and shook his fist in anger. Gabriel loaded the painting into the trunk of the car and headed out of Safed. A bloodred sunrise broke over the ridge. Below, on the valley floor, the Sea of Galilee turned to fire.

He stopped in Afula for breakfast and left a message on Moshe Rivlin’s voice mail, warning him that he was coming back to Yad Vashem. It was late morning by the time he arrived. Rivlin was waiting for him. Gabriel showed him the canvas.

“Who painted it?”

“My mother.”

“What was her name?”

“Irene Allon, but her German name was Frankel.”

“Where was she?”

“The women’s camp at Birkenau, from January 1943 until the end.”

“The death march?”

Gabriel nodded. Rivlin seized Gabriel by the arm and said, “Come with me.”

R
IVLIN PLACED
G
ABRIEL
at a table in the main reading room of the archives and sat down before a computer terminal. He entered the words “Irene Allon” into the database and drummed his stubby fingers impatiently on the keyboard while waiting for a response. A few seconds later, he scribbled five numbers onto a piece of scratch paper and without a word to Gabriel disappeared through a doorway leading to the storerooms of the archives. Twenty minutes later, he returned and placed a document on the table. Behind a clear plastic cover were the words Y
AD
V
ASHEM
A
RCHIVES
in both Hebrew and English, along with a file number: 03/812. Gabriel carefully lifted the plastic cover and turned to the first page. The heading made him feel suddenly cold: T
HE
T
ESTIMONY OF
I
RENE
A
LLON
, D
ELIVERED
M
ARCH
19, 1957. Rivlin placed a hand on his shoulder and slipped out of the room. Gabriel hesitated a moment, then looked down and began to read.

I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead. I will not tell you all the unspeakable cruelty we endured at the hands of the so-called master race, nor will I tell you the things that some of us did in order to survive just one more day. Only those who lived through it will ever understand what it was truly like, and I will not humiliate the dead one last time. I will only tell you the things that I did, and the things that were done to me. I spent two years in Auschwitz-Birkenau, two years to the very day, almost precisely two years to the hour. My name is Irene Allon. I used to be called Irene Frankel. This is what I witnessed in January 1945, on the death march from Birkenau.

To understand the misery of the death march, you must first know something of what came before. You’ve heard the story from others. Mine is not so different. Like all the others, we came by train. Ours set out from Berlin in the middle of the night. They told us we were going to the east, to work. We believed them. They told us it would be a proper carriage with seats. They assured us we would be given food and water. We believed them. My father, the painter Viktor Frankel, had packed a sketchpad and some pencils. He had been fired from his teaching position and his work had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. Most of his paintings had been seized and burned. He hoped the Nazis would allow him to resume his work in the east.

Of course, it was not a proper carriage with seats, and there was no food or water. I do not remember precisely how long the journey lasted. I lost count of how many times the sun rose and set, how many times we traveled in and out of the darkness. There was no toilet, only one bucket—one bucket for sixty of us. You can imagine the conditions we endured. You can imagine the unbearable smell. You can imagine the things some of us resorted to when our thirst pushed us over the edge of insanity. On the second day, an old woman standing next to me died. I closed her eyes and prayed for her. I watched my mother, Sarah Frankel, and waited for her to die, too. Nearly half our car was dead by the time the train finally screeched to a stop. Some prayed. Some actually thanked God the journey was finally over.

For ten years we had lived under Hitler’s thumb. We had suffered the Nuremberg Laws. We had lived the nightmare of Kristallnacht. We had watched our synagogues burn. Even so, I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me when the bolts slid back and the doors were finally thrown open. I saw a towering, tapered redbrick chimney, belching thick smoke. Below the chimney was a building, aglow with a raging, leaping flame. There was a terrible smell on the air. We could not identify it. It lingers in my nostrils to this day. There was a sign over the rail platform. Auschwitz. I knew then that I had arrived in hell.

“Juden, raus, raus!”
An SS man cracks a whip across my thigh. “Get out of the car,
Juden
.” I jump onto the snow-covered platform. My legs, weak from many days of standing, buckle beneath me. The SS man cracks his whip again, this time across my shoulders. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before. I get to my feet. Somehow, I manage not to cry out. I try to help my mother down from the car. The SS man pushes me away. My father jumps onto the platform and collapses. My mother too. Like me, they are whipped to their feet.

Men in striped pajamas clamber onto the train and start tossing out our luggage. I think, Who are these crazy people trying to steal the meager possessions they had permitted us to bring? They look like men from an insane asylum, shaved heads, sunken faces, rotten teeth. My father turns to an SS officer and says, “Look there, those people are taking our things. Stop them!” The SS officer calmly replies that our luggage is not being stolen, just removed for sorting. It would be sent along, once we’d been assigned housing. My father thanks the SS man.

With clubs and whips they separate us, men from women, and instruct us to form neat rows of five. I did not know it then, but I will spend much of the next two years standing or marching in neat rows of five. I am able to maneuver myself next to my mother. I try to hold her hand. An SS man brings his club down on my arm, severing my grasp. I hear music. Somewhere, a chamber orchestra is playing Schubert.

At the head of the line is a table and a few SS officers. One in particular stands out. He has black hair and skin the color of alabaster. He wears a pleasant smile on his handsome face. His uniform is neatly pressed, his riding boots shine in the bright lights of the rail platform. Kid gloves cover his hands, spotless and white. He is whistling “The Blue Danube Waltz.” To this day, I cannot bear to hear it. Later, I will learn his name. His name is Mengele, the chief doctor of Auschwitz. It is Mengele who decides who is capable of work and who will go immediately to the gas. Right and left, life and death.

My father steps forward. Mengele, whistling, glances at him, then says pleasantly, “To the left, please.”

“I was assured I would be going to a family camp,” my father says. “Will my wife be coming with me?”

“Is that what you wish?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Which one is your wife?”

My father points to my mother. Mengele says, “You there, get out of line and join your husband on the left. Hurry, please, we haven’t got all night.”

I watch my parents walk away to the left, following the others. Old people and small children, that’s who goes to the left. Young and healthy are being sent to the right. I step forward to face the beautiful man in his spotless uniform. He looks me up and down, seems pleased, and wordlessly points to the right.

“But my parents went to the left.”

The Devil smiles. There is a gap between his two front teeth. “You’ll be with them soon enough, but trust me, for now, it’s better you go to the right.”

He seems so kind, so pleasant. I believe him. I go to the right. I look over my shoulder for my parents, but they have been swallowed by the mass of filthy, exhausted humanity trudging quietly toward the gas in neat rows of five.

I cannot possibly tell you everything that took place during the next two years. Some of it I cannot remember. Some of it I have chosen to forget. There was a merciless rhythm to Birkenau, a monotonous cruelty that ran on a tight and efficient schedule. Death was constant, yet even death became monotonous.

We are shorn, not just our heads, but everywhere, our arms, our legs, even our pubic hair. They don’t seem to care that the shears are cutting our skin. They don’t seem to hear our screams. We are assigned a number and tattooed on our left arm, just below the elbow. I cease to be Irene Frankel. Now I am a tool of the Reich known as 29395. They spray us with disinfectant, they give us prison clothing made from heavy rough wool. Mine smells of sweat and blood. I try not to breathe too deeply. Our “shoes” are wooden blocks with leather straps. We cannot walk in them. Who could? We are given a metal bowl and are ordered to carry it at all times. Should we misplace our bowl, we are told we will be shot immediately. We believe them.

We are taken to a barracks not fit for animals. The women who await us are something less than human. They are starving, their stares are vacant, their movements slow and listless. I wonder how long it will be before I look like them. One of these half-humans points me toward an empty bunk. Five girls crowd onto a wooden shelf with only a bit of bug-infested straw for bedding. We introduce ourselves. Two are sisters, Roza and Regina. The others are called Lene and Rachel. We are all German. We have all lost our parents on the selection ramp. We form a new family that night. We hold each other and pray. None of us sleeps.

We are awakened at four o’clock the next morning. I will wake at four o’clock every morning for the next two years, except on those nights when they order a special nighttime roll call and make us stand at attention in the freezing yard for hours on end. We are divided into kommandos and sent out to work. Most days, we march out into the surrounding countryside to shovel and sift sand for construction or to work in the camp agricultural projects. Some days we build roads or move stone from place to place. Not a single day passes that I am not beaten: a blow with a club, a whip across my back, a kick in the ribs. The offense can be dropping a stone or resting too long on the handle of my shovel. The two winters are bitterly cold. They give us no extra clothing to protect us from the weather, even when we are working outside. The summers are miserably hot. We all contract malaria. The mosquitoes do not discriminate between German masters and Jewish slaves. Even Mengele comes down with malaria.

They do not give us enough food to survive, only enough so that we would starve slowly and still be of service to the Reich. I lose my period, then I lose my breasts. Before long, I too look like one of the half-humans I’d seen that first day in Birkenau. For breakfast, it’s gray water they call “tea.” For lunch, rancid soup, which we eat in the place where we are working. Sometimes, there might be a small morsel of meat. Some of the girls refuse to eat it because it is not kosher. I do not abide by the dietary laws while I am at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no God in the death camps, and I hate God for abandoning us to our fate. If there is meat in my bowl, I eat it. For supper, we are given bread. It is mostly sawdust. We learn to eat half the bread at night and save the rest for the morning so that we have something in our stomachs before we march to the fields to work. If you collapse at work, they beat you. If you cannot get up, they toss you onto the back of a flatbed and carry you to the gas.

This is our life in the women’s camp of Birkenau. We wake. We remove the dead from their bunks, the lucky ones who perish peacefully in their sleep. We drink our gray tea. We go to roll call. We march out to work in neat rows of five. We eat our lunch. We are beaten. We come back to camp. We go to roll call. We eat our bread, we sleep and wait for it all to begin again. They make us work on Shabbat. On Sundays, their holy day, there is no work. Every third Sunday, they shave us. Everything runs on a schedule. Everything except the selections.

We learn to anticipate them. Like animals, our survival senses are highly tuned. The camp population is the most reliable warning sign. When the camp is too full, there will be a selection. There is never a warning. After roll call, we are ordered to line up on the Lagerstrasse to await our turn before Mengele and his selection team, to await our chance to prove we are still capable of work, still worthy of life.

The selections take an entire day. They give us no food and nothing to drink. Some never make it to the table where Mengele plays god. They are “selected” by the SS sadists long before. A brute named Taube enjoys making us do “exercises” while we wait so we will be strong for the selectors. He forces us to do pushups, then orders us to put our faces in the mud and stay there. Taube has a special punishment for any girl who moves. He steps on her head with all his weight and crushes her skull.

Finally, we stand before our judge. He looks us up and down, takes note of our number. Open your mouth, Jew. Lift your arms. We try to look after our health in this cesspool, but it is impossible. A sore throat can mean a trip to the gas. Salves and ointments are too precious to waste on Jews, so a cut on the hand can mean the gas the next time Mengele is culling the population.

If we pass visual inspection, our judge has one final test. He points toward a ditch and says, “Jump, Jew.” I stand before the ditch and gather my last reserves of strength. Land on the other side and I will live, at least until the next selection. Fall in, and I will be tossed onto the back of a flatbed and driven to the gas. The first time I go through this madness, I think: I am a German-Jewish girl from Berlin from a good family. My father was a renowned painter. Why am I jumping this trench? After that, I think of nothing but reaching the other side and landing on my feet.

Roza is the first of our new family to be selected. She has the misfortune of being very sick with malaria at the time of a big selection, and there is no way to conceal it from Mengele’s expert eyes. Regina begs the Devil to take her too, so that her sister will not have to die alone in the gas. Mengele smiles, revealing his gapped teeth. “You’ll go soon enough, but you can work a little longer first. Go to the right.” For the only time in my life, I am glad not to have a sister.

Regina stops eating. She doesn’t seem to notice when they beat her at work. She has crossed over the line. She is already dead. At the next big selection, she waits patiently on the endless line. She endures Taube’s “exercises” and keeps her face in the mud so he will not crush her skull. When finally she reaches the selection table, she flies at Mengele and tries to stab him through the eye with the handle of her spoon. An SS man shoots her in the stomach.

Mengele is clearly frightened. “Don’t waste any gas on her! Throw her into the fire alive! Up the chimney with her!”

They toss Regina into a wheelbarrow. We watch her go and pray she dies before she reaches the crematorium.

In the autumn of 1944, we begin hearing the Russian guns. In September, the camp’s air raid sirens sound for the first time. Three weeks later they sound again, and the camp’s antiaircraft guns fire their first shots. That same day, the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV revolt. They attack their SS guards with pickaxes and hammers and manage to set fire to their barracks and the crematoria before being machine-gunned. A week later, bombs fall into the camp itself. Our masters show signs of stress. They no longer look so invincible. Sometimes they even look a little frightened. This gives us a certain pleasure and a modicum of hope. The gassings stop. They still kill us, but they have to do it themselves. Selected prisoners are shot in the gas chambers or near Crematorium V. Soon they begin dismantling the crematoria. Our hope of survival increases.

The situation deteriorates throughout that autumn and winter. Food is in short supply. Each day, many women collapse and die of starvation and exhaustion. Typhus takes a terrible toll. In December, Allied bombs fall on the I.G. Farben synthetic fuel and rubber plant. A few days later, the Allies strike again, but this time several bombs fall on an SS sickbay barracks inside Birkenau. Five SS are killed. The guards grow more irritable, more unpredictable. I avoid them. I try to make myself invisible.