Gratitude (30 page)

“Is everything all right?” Wallenberg asked, as he handed the folded table to Dr. Felix and hoisted up his briefcase and chair.

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Felix said. The two joined the others to retrace their steps up the same street they had just come down. In a moment, they came upon the dead man, Laszlo Zene, and several of the Jews now felt free to sob. The gentleman lay peacefully, his arms out and inviting. Bunched beside him lay a familiar cape.

Paul bent to retrieve the garment, and the camera tumbled out. He folded the Hasselblad back in the cape and took it with him under his arm.

As they resumed their walk, Dr. Felix spoke in German. He said he had one question.

“Yes, anything,” Wallenberg answered.

“I’m wondering, sir,” said Felix, “because I haven’t been able to go for a while, if my Swedish pass entitles me to admission at the opera.”

Wallenberg paused, turned to look down at the pavement and the fallen man and the train yard beyond. He glanced at Paul, sighed, then continued walking.

PAUL WAS INCONSOLABLE
. He paced for an hour in Wallenberg’s office, then sat staring out the window, chewing on his pencil. Wallenberg came in with some more espresso. He put his hand on Paul’s shoulder and told him, “We’ll do what we can to get him back. He’s a Swedish national.”

Paul acknowledged the hand with his own. “We haven’t figured out how that part of the operation goes, have we? We can prevent some from going, but we can’t get them back. Except—”

“No, Paul,” Wallenberg said. “You’re not going with the car again. I can’t afford to lose you. Or the car.”

“It worked once.”

“Yes, once and once only. We can figure something out. I have been lobbying.”

“I know,” Paul said. He patted the comforting hand. “It’s just difficult continually taking the tally: I lost my mother before the war, then my father—I know you never even
met
your father, Raoul—then my brother, Istvan, in Szeged. I have no idea what became of him. I have aunts and uncles and cousins in Miskolc and Debrecen who appear to have vanished. Even that friend of Istvan’s, the poet, Miklos Radnoti, has disappeared. Now my future brother-in-law—what a good young man he was.”

“
Is
.”

“Is. Of course,
is
. We’ll have to get his film developed. My sister knows where his place is, where the other films are hidden.”

“Good,” Wallenberg said. “And I have news for you.”

Paul turned to look at the Swede.

“Adolf Eichmann has agreed to see us. He wants to talk—bargain, maybe.”

“When?” Paul stood.

“First thing in the morning. Stay with me, we’ll talk strategy and go together in the morning, only the two of us—that’s the deal.”

Paul bit down on the end of his pencil, tapped it against his forehead, and then snapped it in two. Wallenberg watched him. “Steady now,” he said. “We have to do this right.”

“Shouldn’t I go tell my sister tonight what happened?”

“She’ll sleep better if you don’t.”

“I want to take a pistol.”

“They’ll confiscate it and shoot you with it.”

Twenty-Two

Budapest – October 10, 1944

EICHMANN WAS HEADQUARTERED
in a grand white house surrounded by iron railings behind the Octagon, off Andrassy Street. Wallenberg and Paul took the Alfa Romeo and made an impression as they glided along the wide avenues of Budapest. When they came to the house, it was guarded on all sides.

Paul and the Swede disembarked and special guards came at them from both sides while two more created a barrier with their crossed rifles in front of the visitors. The men were frisked. Then the two rifles were uncrossed.

“You are?” an officer asked in German.

“Swedish diplomats, both of us.” Paul offered their papers.

The soldiers lowered their rifles altogether, and the officer trotted to the front door, tapped lightly and was admitted. Wallenberg and Paul waited with the other guard. The two stood facing the house, admiring its white gabled porch, the generous bay windows admitting the autumn sun. On how many occasions had this gracious house received friends and relatives? How often had it been a place of celebration, retreat, music, love and laughter?

SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann, the special commander of the region, greeted Wallenberg and Paul with a surprisingly limp handshake. Paul loomed over the German. Eichmann looked the two of them over, especially Paul. The unlikely Jew was tall, had sharp, fierce eyes and an impressive head of red hair; he was bedecked in a light wool suit and his camel hair cape, like someone come to call on the lady of the house. The visitors could hear a phonograph from the parlour, playing Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. How lovely. On whose gramophone? Paul wondered. Whose record?

“Nice house,” Paul said in German. “Yours?”

“Yes,” Eichmann said. He clasped his hands together. “It was abandoned.”

Paul could feel the Swede’s eyes on him.

The three were standing in the bright hall before a sweeping blond oak staircase leading upstairs. Two guards stood before them at the foot of the stairs and another two behind them at the door.

The Beethoven was beautiful. Paul’s stomach rose to his throat.

“I have a proposition for you, gentlemen,” Eichmann said, and led the way into the drawing room. The men followed and each took a seat in a peach-coloured chair. It was too summery a room for the time of year. Eichmann sat facing them, and two guards stood behind the visitors.

“There are wealthy Jew industrialists, like Manfred Weiss. Do you gentlemen know him?” Wallenberg turned to Paul, and Paul shrugged. Eichmann said, “I need his holdings transferred to me. I had underestimated how strong some of these men are. We need the steel, the munitions. For the war effort.”

“You mean like Baron Louis de Rothschild, the Vienna Rothschilds,” Wallenberg said, “who signed over their steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works in exchange for their freedom? Is that the sort of conversation you want to have?”

“Precisely.”

Eichmann was a surprisingly unimposing man when he sat. He had thinning hair, like Wallenberg’s, and small bones to go with a small voice.

“Why are you asking us?” Paul asked. “What makes you think we have any sort of power over such people?”

Eichmann paused. At first Paul thought he might be listening to the Beethoven. The symphony’s country carnival celebrations were being played out.

“You Swedes are the people everyone listens to now. You have attractive powers of persuasion. We want the holdings of a number of people, and we’re prepared to trade safe passage for their families to Switzerland. I’ve already spoken to Carl Lutz about the arrangements.”

“What about the other deportees?” Paul asked. Wallenberg glanced at his companion. “What happens to them?”

“No one is being deported, merely relocated.”

“Call it what you will.”

“Well, you gentlemen, I take it, seem to show up at some of our relocation launches, and you skilfully sniff out Swedes among the Jews.”

Paul noticed a large, dark rectangle on the wall where a painting must have hung. The wall looked strange, undressed.

The German lieutenant colonel looked toward the parlour where Beethoven’s soft sun was coming out after the celebrations. The birds of the countryside outside Bonn were twittering sweetly.

“Maybe some of the people you describe are actually Swedish,” Wallenberg said. “We’ll have to check. There are some very powerful Swedes who have invested here in Budapest.”

The commander rubbed his chin. He looked into the parlour again. Beethoven’s fragrant countryside was ablaze with colour now. “You are students of contemporary history, Mr. Wallenberg? Mr….?”

“Beck.”

The German ran his soft hand over his chin again in exaggerated contemplation. “My good Beck. Good Swedish name, Beck.”

Paul nodded his appreciation. He didn’t dare look at Wallenberg; he didn’t want to read the anxiety in his face. Paul thought he could hear his own heart beating.

One of the guards took a step toward his commander. He stood beside Paul now. But Eichmann lifted a pale hand, and the guard stepped back obediently. “I asked you, gentlemen, about your awareness of contemporary history.”

“Yes, we are quite aware,” Wallenberg said. “Paul studied at Cambridge, and I studied at the—”

“University of Michigan,” Eichmann said for him. “Yes, I know.”

Paul’s thoughts fell on Zsuzsi in Philadelphia. She seemed planets away, galaxies. Paul remembered the photograph of Rozsi, Istvan and him, dressed as the Three Musketeers. How would he tell Rozsi what had happened? What words could he use? He found himself flying out of this room, every which way his mind would propel him.

The commander stared at both men, looked each straight in the eye, but then looked away, stood and turned his back on them altogether. “You will lose this war,” Paul wanted to tell him, “and you’ll lose the whole century with it, maybe more.”

What would the weasel say then? Was he the one who’d ordered Paul’s father to be executed? Would the weasel say, “I was merely following orders. I’m a good soldier.”

“Is that all you are,” Paul would answer, “a good soldier, neutral on all matters—Jews, Gypsies, communists—a good soldier awaiting a promotion?”

“Yes.”

“And it doesn’t matter what your boss asks?”

“Not at all.”

“Would you kill Germans the same way, if asked—grandmothers only, if asked—all pet dogs?”

“Yes, the content of the order doesn’t matter. I have my superiors.”

“I don’t think they’re all the same to you.”

“Think what you want.”

“I think you like German grandmothers better than Jews. I think you like dogs better.”

“I do like dogs.”

“You’ll lose this war,” Paul would say.

“Yes, Swede, possibly,” Eichmann might reply. “But we won’t lose in the way you have in mind. We’ll lose the war in a way even we could not have foreseen. I am and have always been an ordinary man with ordinary ambitions, like the Jews. But the Jews have always been victims. It’s a great racket. And no one else comes close to the Jews for playing it up. For two millennia, maybe longer, the Jews have been victims. Did you know that, Swede?”

“Are we on some sort of philosophical cliff here, German, our claws hooked into each other’s necks?”

“Do you know what we’ll do, Swede? We’ll turn each and every Jew into a martyr. We have nailed them to a cross as big as Europe, and the hammering has been loud enough to attract the attention of the whole galaxy. The Jews have always been despised; you might know that. Maybe you have even felt a touch of hatred yourself. Even when people
like
Jews, or appear to, they despise them. The Jews of my home town of Cologne despised themselves—what do you think of that? They wanted always to be German. They begged to be German. And for a time we let them.”

Might Paul ask, “Is it possible for us to have an idea between us that is not profane?”

“Let me try,” the little German with thinning hair would say. “We were only doing the world a favour. But it will backfire worse than any punishment ever inflicted upon the Jews. Jews have always been inventive. Now they will become the world’s greatest inventors. They’ll become our best scientists, our best poets, our best composers—oh, how they’ll sing like the lark soaring above a flaming countryside, unable to land.” Here Eichmann would spin like a dancer, as he himself sang out the words to accompany the music coming from the other room. “We will lose this war if a mere dozen Jews survive, because we will turn them into warriors, Jews seeking justice, Jews on a mission. Oh, may the God of the Jews save us all from the furors we unleash today.”

“So what are you, then, Mr. Eichmann? Are you merely the sounder of the sirens? Are you the one who points to the fire but can’t put it out? No, you are more than that. You’re the one wearing the uniform, so it is you who are on a mission. And you are possessed by your mission, ready in a second to blame your bosses. You’ll lose in yet another way—do you know that, commander—lieutenant colonel, is it?—not quite colonel? You’ll lose because you are a soothsayer, and that is the worst curse. You’ll lose because you’re sharp enough to foretell your own downfall, yet not courageous enough to subvert it while you still can.”

Beethoven’s tremulous countryside flowed into the room where the men were meeting.

“Is it courage you’re describing, Swede, or is it determination? Or better, is it cunning?”

“It’s courage.”

“The sanctimony has already begun.”

Beethoven’s storm clouds gathered.

WALLENBERG SAID
, “If I can persuade Manfred Weiss and some others to sign over their factories, what then? Would you stop the transports?”

“I am under orders,” Eichmann said. “But I can stop the
surprise
transports. You can know when each one is occurring.”

“So there will be no surprises?” Paul asked.

“Please, gentlemen, I am a soldier who receives direction from Berlin. I am not Berlin myself.”

Paul looked to see if there was a blunt object nearby. The Beethoven was finished. Wallenberg took Paul’s upper arm sharply, painfully, into his clutch. The man was as instinctive as he was brave.

IN THE BACK OF THE CAR
, Wallenberg told Paul, “I felt your intensity in there. I know you didn’t say anything, and yet I’m surprised we made it out alive. I shouldn’t have taken you with me. I can’t take you along everywhere.”

Paul threw his cape back off his shoulders. “Of course I was intense. Do you know who that was?”

“I know who it was, but you’re making him into much more than he is. He’s a man of a single note. When birds sing and sing again, they’re not driving home a point. They’re singing. Eichmann is that bird. Even Beethoven in the background doesn’t give him an additional dimension.”

“Maybe birds are saying something to one another,” Paul said, “not singing for
our
benefit.”

“Maybe they are, but their message is simple: danger, food, rain. Not,
Why are you over in that other tree?
Not,
Why do you insist on ignoring me?
If we psychoanalyze the Reich, we’ll get nowhere. We’ll kill ourselves with despair, or stand in the line of fire. If we concentrate on figuring out how to save lives and then
save
them, we’ll beat them. Sometimes.
Occasionally
.”

Paul threw himself back against the seat. “Yes. Occasionally.”

“Look,” Wallenberg said. He turned to face Paul. “I’m a simple man. I’m like Eichmann, but with different values.”

Paul looked at the Swede. “You are much more complex than you know.”

“Not today. Today we have a job to do. Tomorrow, if we survive, we’ll reflect.”

“Tomorrow,” Paul said. “Yes.”