Beach Music (87 page)

“The monster, Krüger, begins showing signs of intense nervousness as the fall weather grows colder. Some days he does not leave the house. On others, he is tempestuous and brutal and everywhere at once. A Jewish family is discovered to have hidden gold and diamonds beneath a stone of a Christian church and Krüger beats the entire family to death with a statue of St. Joseph he commandeered from the church. One of his victims is a two-year-old girl. The Jewish fire brigade is ordered to always have burial pits already dug for at least five hundred other bodies.

“On one of his more manic days, Krüger comes to the factory where I am sewing coats. Every Jewish tailor who sees Krüger walk into the workplace almost has an instant heart attack. He has come to represent the Angel of Death himself in the ghetto. The administration of horror was taking a toll on even Krüger’s face. His flesh is caving in on itself, as though he is rotting from the inside out. With his finger, he motions for me to come with him. What can I do? I am his slave and, of course, I follow him.

“In the back of the jeep he puts me. He spits on my Star of David as though to remind me what he thinks of all Jews. It is almost comical to me—for I should need any reminding? He drives me through the streets of Kironittska and stops outside of an orphanage that is filled with small children. It is the month a huge shipment of Hungarian Jews arrives in the ghetto, which does not want them and has no use for them. The Jews of Kironittska treat the Hungarian Jews abominably except for a few notable exceptions. Always, among humans, it is the notable exceptions that make God’s creation of mankind seem like a good idea. But at the orphanage this day, the very idea of mankind is turned on its head.

“In trucks they have loaded over one hundred children, the smallest ones, the most helpless. Twelve of them are not even Jewish. Four have committed the crime of being Polish. Eight are guilty of
being Ukrainian. There are many infants. Some are crying. Most are too weak to cry. Krüger’s jeep leads a small caravan out of town. I must tell you that I am fearing for my own life more than for anything on this trip. Not once can I remember thinking of any of these poor children. For one hour we drive until we get to the high country, the mountains barely visible from Kironittska on a clear day. We come to a bridge overlooking a gorge with a raging river three hundred feet below. It is such a height as not to be believed. The soldiers begin with the toddlers. Taking them by the feet, they put each child into a burlap bag. Most children cry, others struggle, some are already half-dead and protest not at all. Krüger takes out a beautiful hunting rifle that he tells me he used to hunt stag and wild hogs in Bavaria. It has carvings on the stock.

“On the drive to the bridge, the German soldiers have gotten drunk on brandy. One by one, they pick up these packages of unwanted children and throw them over the bridge into the river far below. The bridge seems to come apart with the special terror of children. The ones who are not packaged go into a panic. Some cry out for their mothers. None really know what is happening and that is the only humane thing about this indescribable scene. Krüger loads his rifle and takes aim. He takes shots at about every third child or infant as it is tossed off the bridge. He is a marksman famed even in the SS. He attempts to spin each bundle he fires at. One baby he spins three times before it hits the river and the German soldiers cheer Krüger for his accuracy. He has one run of hitting fifteen children in a row, before missing a baby he does not fire at until it almost hits the river. Before long, he grows impatient with the game and carefully replaces his rifle in its case. He yells at the soldiers to hurry up their work and they begin throwing the last twenty or thirty children into the gorge without even bothering to package them up. I see five naked babies plunging toward their deaths at varying heights above the gorge. Those babies are flying and innocent and doomed. Soon the work is finished and we drive back to the city. Krüger never directs a single word toward me. And I know that if I speak, he will put a bullet through my brain.

“That night he asks that I play something beautiful for him, something that will ease the great agony that comes with his command.
I play the Concerto Number 21 of Mozart because it has a kind of secret beauty. In the middle of my playing, he begins to weep and I understand he is drunk again. He begins to talk but he does not talk about those slaughtered children. He talks of duty, stern duty. To be a good soldier, he must carry out each and every order of the Führer with all the ferocity he can muster. It would be easy for him to be soft, because as a civilian he is known for his softness and kindness and good cheer. Everyone tells him he spoils his children, especially his daughter, Bridget. He is a banker in his other life and his only problem is he wants to lend everyone money. It hurts him to say no even to the drunkards and the wastrels. For an hour he tells me in a monotone voice what a softie he is, how he loves to pick basketfuls of wild flowers for his Bridget, how he loves to play goalie against his two sons, and always makes sure he allows them to score before they return home for dinner. I play Mozart and I try to mind my own business. He weeps and drinks, weeps and drinks. Then he passes out and I tiptoe out of his house and walk back through the ghetto on the night that Krüger has ordered over a hundred orphans thrown to their deaths from a bridge in the Ukraine. If there is a God, Jack, those orphans are to have met Krüger on a bridge overlooking hell. God should then turn his back, as he did on his chosen people in the years I describe, and not turn around no matter how piteous the screams of Krüger become, no matter how long they last, and I pray it is eternity.

“Every day, I pass more and more starving people. Their legs swell up and change colors. They move oddly as though they are under water and you begin to recognize those people who will be dead in just a few days. They have an aura and a stench and you learn to avoid them by walking far around them. Because I am a member of the Judenrat, a tailor at the factory, and the piano player of Krüger my family is well fed, considering. We live in filth and squalor, but we are as well fed as any Jews in the ghetto. For this I am grateful and my beautiful Sonia and my children are all alive.

“Then a Jew named Sklar, young, fiery, athletic, meets a Nazi who has come to arrest his mother and father with a jar of hydrochloric acid. This Sklar hurls the acid into the face of the Nazi beast, who screams as the acid burns out his eyeballs and half his face. This
Sklar is killed immediately by other Germans and his parents are both shot in the head. Krüger orders that the body be publicly hanged and set on fire. But the blood lust of Krüger is not satisfied with such tame retribution. The Nazi without eyes or half a face is sent to his home in Düsseldorf and Krüger calls the Judenrat together for a night meeting in which he demands three hundred Jews to be hanged on the lampposts of Kironittska in reprisal for the attack on a soldier of the Reich. The Judenrat puts out a call for volunteers, but it is a rare man who volunteers for his own execution.

“The members of the Judenrat nearly go mad with anguish. Then the very old men are snatched up for the gallows and the reasoning is that they have tasted enough of life. Then the hospital is raided and the very sick are driven out of their beds. The insane are grabbed and we tell ourselves we are doing them a favor since they don’t know the difference between life or death. Krüger is a black God whom we must obey as we select our fellow Jews for the slaughter. When we come up short with numbers, Krüger screams that he will hang every member of the Judenrat along with our families if we do not provide him with these souls. Then, to our great luck, we think then and suffer later, a shipment of Hungarian Jews arrives at the station. From lampposts, from rafters, from newly constructed gallows, three hundred Jews are sacrificed for one blind Nazi. Krüger lets them hang there until their bodies begin to decompose.

“On the night he lynchs those Jews, Krüger has me play Wagner for him. Wagner, the anti-Semite. But Krüger is a stupid man and his musical wishes this night do not reflect any sense of irony on his part. Again, he gets drunk and begins to mutter, ‘You do not know the cost. You do not know the cost.’ I play the piano as though I do not hear him. I play Wagner as this night three hundred Jewish men cross the Red Sea into the Promised Land. Three hundred men, men who have kept the covenant with their creator, swing in the cold winds that come down from the frozen mountains around Kironittska. I know the cost, Herr Krüger, I know the exact cost, because you make me help select each one of them.

“Judenrat. I can barely speak this name out loud. The shame I
feel when I speak this word causes such despair that I have trouble breathing after I say it. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the head of the Judenrat kills himself. This is the only proper response, I think. But it requires a courage I walked into this war without. What will Sonia and my sons do if I slit my wrists or eat rat poison. I know four families who took rat poison all together. So they could die on their own terms. I wait until the Nazi beast grows hungry and looks around to feed. Who would think that the Nazi beast would one day turn toward pretty Sonia?

“Single-mindedly, I make up my mind that my wife and children will survive and the whole rest of the world be damned. Yet one day they close down the factory for suspected sabotage of a machine, but it is nothing and they send us all home with threats and no extra food ration for that day. I come to the crowded apartment where my family is housed among many families, including new arrivals from Hungary. My children are there being taken care of by an old Jewish farm woman from the country. I ask about my wife as I take the baby and my two older sons come to my lap and search my pockets for food. It is difficult to utter the sounds of my sons’ names. When Sonia returns she is surprised to see me. Then very ashamed. I ask her where she has been, for it is dangerous for any attractive woman to be walking the streets with the Ukrainian police and the German soldiers always on patrol. She puts a finger to my lips, looks down at the floor, and says, ‘Please do not ask, my husband.’

“That same night, the city sleeping, the snoring of strangers, a blanket separating us from the others, I reach over to bring my wife to me. I want to take comfort in her body. I wish to forget everything as I make love to her. She kisses me as always, then tells me that we can never make love ever again, that she has shamed me and shamed our families and that she can never be held by me again. She cries very hard in the darkness and asks my forgiveness. Over a month ago the monster, Krüger, comes to her and orders her to come to his house because he has decided that she will make a suitable whore. He goes to great lengths to tell her that he does not believe in the laws of racial purity espoused by the Nazis, but pays lip service to them for the sake of his career. Before him, she
trembles and begs him not to make her do this. But because this Krüger is king of this portion of hell, he laughs at her and tells her he will be happy to shoot her husband and children down in the streets, then bring her to live in his house as a servant. Then he quits his explanation, his moment of seduction begins to bore him, and he rapes her on the couch near the piano. Each day he requires her to report to his house. Sonia begs Krüger not to let me know about her degradation. In his kindness, Krüger agrees to this. Each time it is a rape, dear husband, good Sonia says to me. Then she explains that she cannot love me because Krüger has given her syphilis. Sweet Sonia. Her suffering and shame that night in my arms are almost too much for either of us to bear. But toward morning we pledge our love to each other anew. They can take everything away from us, but our love for each other is forever.

“You think you have heard and imagined the worst that can happen to the ghetto Jews. Then something else happens so horrible that you shut down completely. You pray that you can imagine nothing. Your prayers are answered. You learn that evil is bottomless. The despair I feel in my stomach is like a paralysis.

“As I tell you this, Jack, I worry now about how I am telling it. Does he think I am exaggerating, I ask myself? Am I leaving out important details that would convince him of the authenticity of these events? Should I hide details that seem too lurid or unbelievable? Do I sound sincere enough? What do you think, Jack? Say something. Your eyes. I have always hated your eyes. Krüger eyes. The eyes of Germany. Ha! The eyes of my son-in-law.

“Typhoid comes. Then cholera. As it begins to grow colder the end of the ghetto comes nearer. Things are not going well for the German army on the Russian front. Mother Russia is beginning to eat the armies of its invaders as it always does. The looks on German faces begin to change.

“The dead begin to be put out on the streets like morning garbage.

“Krüger begins to talk to me as though we were old friends. He has a need to talk, so he chooses me. He does not like for me to answer out loud, so I nod as my fingers move along the keyboard. I learn to look sympathetic to his plight, to the agony of his command.
He tells me something interesting. The monster, Krüger, tells me that I will never understand what it is like to have an entire city under my control. He knows that the city is ruled by pure terror, but he has learned that terror has its limits. I am playing Dvo?ák as he is telling me this. He spills his cognac as he contemplates this dilemma. Every life in Kironittska is there for the taking. He, Krüger, can order everyone killed. In Gestapo Headquarters, men and women are tortured to death frequently. He knows about nails under the fingernails and the pain it causes. Every place on the body can be used for torture. Scissors can be forced up nostrils, down eardrums, up anuses. Scrotums can be removed brutally. Every orifice can be turned into a tunnel of what he calls ‘exquisite pain.’ Every tongue can be made to talk, then ripped out. He realizes that human suffering no longer touches him at all. He can order ten thousand people killed and will think more about killing a fly with the heel of his boot. His daughter has come down with pneumonia and his son is making bad grades in school. He tells me he wishes his wife were a better cook. He had once played goalie on an elementary school soccer team. It will not be long now, he says, but he does not explain. Tonight, he would like to hear Mozart, instead of Beethoven. The idiot does not know I was playing Dvo?ák.