Judenstaat (22 page)

“Why would I?” Judit asked. The response couldn't help but feel dismissive, as though she didn't want the room itself. In fact, she didn't. It wasn't a room where someone worked; it was a showplace. Kornfeld took the statement in that spirit. He walked right past Judit and closed the door.

“Fine,” he said. “You get to decide what you want now. You get to decide what we all want. But maybe we're not buying what you're selling. We'll see.”

“What are you talking about?” Judit asked. Her tone was mild; the pity she felt was real. Kornfeld, with his boxes of audiotape, with his little bald head and his suit-coat and cufflinks, he had been on his way out for years. But was that her fault?

“I'm talking about this,” Kornfeld said. He pulled an enormous handsome volume from where it rested on his shelf and flipped it open. “This garbage. These Nazis. They're the new heroes?”

It was a photograph of a haggard man, dressed like a hunter. He was posed on a black and yellow sandstone cliff, shielding his eyes from the sun with the flat of his hand. Below: white type on black, a caption:

We stored weapons in the caves and attacked the Reds by night. The Soviet troop trains heading to Dresden all passed our camp, across the Elbe, in the Bastei cliffs near Rathen. Our proudest moment was the fire of '54. With nothing but an old grenade and a pint of kerosene, we forced a whole battalion to retreat.

“Fascists,” Kornfeld said, “sabotaging the work of liberation. I don't care what name they want to call it. It was liberation. The Soviet Union gave us our lives back. They liberated Auschwitz. They liberated Treblinka. They pushed those bastards out and gave us a country. The people I talk to, they know it's liberation.”

“Oscar,” Judit began, but he didn't let her say more.

“I don't even know why you bothered coming in here. What do you have to prove to somebody like me? When the book comes out, when the film comes out, though, there'll be hell to pay. People do remember, Judit. And not all of them are dead.”

He was right. She shouldn't have bothered to come in here. What did she want? Some kind of blessing from that petty little man? Sure, it would make a lot of people angry: brutal descriptions of Soviet rapes and murders of Jews and Saxons both, interviews with partisans and their fight against the occupation. She also knew that she was telling the truth. Maybe Oscar Kornfeld couldn't see it, but his children would. Then she realized that she didn't know if Kornfeld had children.

“Well,” Kornfeld said, “of course you're on board with this.” He gave a bitter laugh. “After all, you married one of them.”

 

3

Rough cut: Fortieth Anniversary Project. Working title: “Survival and Resistance” 28/02/88

[A Displaced Persons camp in Schmilka, 1946. The sky flat white, and hard lines of prefabricated barracks cut across the frame. Out of those huts, young men with bowls and cups for morning coffee. A banner by the coffee urn: “
WE ARE HERE
!” The frame freezes on a man with light hair and a hard jaw. The image dissolves into interview: a man of sixty, same jaw, lank, white hair. Caption identifies: “Samuel Fieffer, Survivor of Treblinka.”]

We were duped. [Fieffer shakes his head and runs a hand across his face.] We were told we bought this country with our martyrs' blood.

[More emblematic footage, young men in black and white montage, scrambling for those pairs of boots and dumping out those famous notes. Those notes are scattered in the dirt, and then a wind rises and blows them in the air through a gate where Soviet troops stand guard. Two soldiers lean against a jeep. One of them pulls on a cigarette and laughs.]

How were we supposed to know that we were still in prison, that we'd be in prison for another forty years? Nobody just hands you a country.

[Footage of Stalin, circa 1950, walking across a parade ground, doffing his cap and turning to speak to someone on his right.]

What did he have in mind? Nothing's in writing. But there were some of us, even then, who'd heard things from the ones who'd seen what Stalin thought of Jews firsthand. Watch out, they said. That yellow star of yours, it's flying over the biggest concentration camp in Europe.

[Camera focuses on the iconic shot of Stripes and Star rippling in black and white. The images melt into washed- out color, and the camera pans back to a Judenstaat choir in their striped prison uniforms and red bandannas. Caption: “May 14th, ‘Liberation' Day 1949.” Eisler's national anthem blares, distorted by its punishing volume.]

Let us plant, let us build

Learn and create like never before

And trusting in our strength

A free generation is on the rise.

[A parade that same year, men and women in camp uniforms below banners marked: “Auschwitz,” “Treblinka,” “Dachau,” “Belsen,” carrying spades across their shoulders through the rubble of Dresden, followed by dignitaries in open cars. Suddenly, they are obscured by a deep shadow as a Soviet fighter plane passes overhead. Cut to interview: a lean, bald man with a ravaged face. Caption: “Lev Margolis, Applicant, Judenstaat Officer Corps.” There is something wrong with his mouth, so that although he speaks German, subtitles are necessary.]

We were told we would be the new officer corps. My comrades and I traveled to Moscow in 1950. You can imagine.

[Footage of jaunty men in leather jackets, heading towards an airplane. A propeller spins.]

I was twenty-three. I'd fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I was so proud of myself and of our country. My whole life led me here. How could we know where we were really going?

[Mountain peaks, gray sand, round pits, and sound of wind. Caption: “Kolyma Mines, 1951.” Miners working under heavy guard.]

Now there were twenty of us, maybe, who made it through that first winter. I never even knew that Stalin died, just that some of the prisoners were pardoned, but not us. Us, they kept. We were buried alive. They took all of the fight out of me.”

[Old film stock: five young men facing the camera, spades in their hands. One rolls up his sleeve to show the tattoo of a number, then another and another number is revealed. The camera pans in so close that the numbers dissolve into the flesh.]

We could tell you things, you people in Judenstaat. We could tell you things your bones already know. Terror is terror.

[Rolling right over those words, a keening, and some cries in German. Stock-footage montage: army trucks with red stars, rolling down roads made more specific by a flash of the remains of Leipzig's Saint Thomas Church rising from the smoke. Fire in a field of barley. An open road with tank-treads through the mud and rain. A caption: “1946.” Cut to photographs, a black and white portrait of a frail girl with black braids, sitting on a bench with a kitten. Cut to interview: tight close-up of a middle-aged woman, dark hair, tender-looking eyes. She is not identified.]

I was on my way to school right here, when they found me—three of them. I told my father I'd fallen into a ditch and he scolded me and told me I needed to be careful. But my mother, she knew. She didn't say a word. After all, they were our liberators. [Pause.] It hurts me to come back here.

[Camera pulls back to reveal a second woman, an older, white-haired Saxon in a housedress. They are both standing in a barren field. She speaks.]

It hurts me too.

[A caption appears: “German and Jewish survivors of Soviet sexual assault.”]

Our house was here. [The Saxon points to a stone foundation broken by weeds.] They took it over and moved us into the barn, my grandmother, mother, father, older sisters. They took her so often, and also my mother and my grandmother. The shame of it broke my father. Nobody talks about it.

[Grainy film stock, pastoral scene, an empty road, high grass. The two women talk together, the older woman limping slightly. She gestures towards a rock.]

I left the baby on that stone. And then we burned the barn and took what we could carry into Brandenburg. Can I tell you what it means to come back to this place?

[Montage: silent figures standing in the street as Soviets tape signs to the door of a tavern, the door of a blacksmith's shop, silent figures watching the demolition of a church, passing by with bowed heads, a cloud, unnaturally low, over the ruins of Dresden. A voice in English begins, with simultaneous translation.]

The Soviets had a plan.

[Interview: elegant old man sitting in a deck chair by what appears to be a bay; yachts float some distance off. Caption: “Lewis Richmond, U.S. Ambassador to Judenstaat, 1949. Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Amherst.”]

Their interest in Judenstaat was clear. In those years after the war, it would make all the sense in the world for this country to be—on paper—nonaligned, to be a so-called neutral zone the Soviet Union could exploit economically and politically. The analogy with Hong Kong and mainland China is quite instructive. But Judenstaat could serve as something even more pragmatic. Its actions would be legitimized by suffering, acting in its own name, but always in the interests of the Warsaw Pact. Of course, all of that fell apart by '53.

[More footage of expropriation, though now it is Jewish shops with signs in Yiddish. Soviet soldiers wrap a chain around the double-doors of a Dresden department store. Cut to a long prison train with Cyrillic lettering on its side, passing the Chemnitz station.]

It wasn't just a matter of an anti-Semitic lunatic like Stalin. The problem goes far deeper. The fascists pursued policies that ultimately led to their destruction. The communists did the same. That your country has survived forty years and has—essentially—transcended its own history, that it has managed to overcome the terror and reached real stability and maturity, that is a true miracle. But of course, it was a country founded on resistance.

[Footage of schoolchildren wearing white blouses and red bandannas, circa 1960. They sing
The Song of the Ghetto Partisans
, in Yiddish. Subtitles are provided.]

Not with lead this song was written, but with blood.

It wasn't warbled in the forest like a bird,

but a people trapped between collapsing walls

With weapons held in hand—they made this song!

[Though the children still sing on-screen, the audio swells and shifts to German, a loud male voice, not tuneful.]

Never say that we have reached the final road

Though the lead-gray clouds conceal blue skies above

That hour that we've longed for now draws near.

Our steps proclaim like drumbeats:
WE ARE HERE
!

Our greatest stronghold was in those standstone cliffs, those bunkers outside Rathen that they flushed us out of back in '55. For years, we managed to sabotage the rail-lines between Prague and Dresden at least a few times a month.

[The speaker is revealed, a wizened man with cropped, rust-colored hair and bronze skin. Caption: “Arno Durmersheimer, Anti-Soviet Partisan.”]

They killed my brother one night. He was standing right next to me. Red sniper got him. And Fieffer buried him.

[Black and white photograph of Fieffer, half-torn, but easy to identify. Durmersheimer holds it.]

He fought beside me. There were hundreds of us, Jews, Saxons, all together. Those Jews had seen firsthand what those butchers had done to their own brothers. [Voice breaks.] There was real friendship in those days. For me, they remain the most precious of my life.

[Camera pulls back, and a man obscured by shadow stumbles across short grass. Durmersheimer turns, and we hear his throat catch as he takes a step forward and cries out:]

My brother!

[It is Fieffer. The two men fall into each other's arms and weep.]

DURMERSHEIMER
: That I would live to see this day.

FIEFFER
: We have survived them! We have survived them!

[Voice rolls over this exchange, a voice with rich, warm intonation, though rough around the bass, implying age. It is a familiar voice.]

You begin with nothing.

[Footage of the Displaced Persons camp in Schmilka, those young men reaching for pairs of boots lined up on benches.]

From there germinates a need, to have a home. On any terms.

[Abrupt cut to a hospital room where an old man sits on the edge of a bed. He wears a gown unbuttoned just enough to show springing white tufts of hair, and his withered face looks like a balloon with half of the air pressed out. His eyes are vibrant, though, and he is the source of the voice that comes out of the concave throat, a voice that unmistakably identifies the man himself.]

After forty years, you ask me, would I do it all again? That is like asking a man if he regrets having a son. The son has a life of his own, and maybe—who knows—redeems the father.

[Now a characteristic gesture, tracing a circle with his hands and then the bridge below his chin. His eyes roll up as though to follow a thought across the room.]

Forgive the religious language. Sometimes you need to reach for that. As you well know.

 

4

“
HOW
can that be?” Judit asked Bondi. “How can Stein still be alive?”

“He's surrounded by the most sophisticated medical team on earth,” Bondi said. “Why wouldn't he be alive?”

“It doesn't seem physically possible,” Judit said. She had just received the latest reel by courier, and had at once called Bondi. “I can't do this. I can't fabricate.”

“Of course you can't. Neither can we,” Bondi said. “Too much is at stake.”

They were in their room above the dairy restaurant, both sitting on the daybed. It was midafternoon. Judit had been prepared to resign, but the physical proximity of Bondi and his clear sincerity made her feel seasick. “It could be an actor,” she said, although she knew very well it was no actor. Then, “It could be an illusion. It could be an old image someone manipulated. I've seen Gluck do that a thousand times.” Then, “It could be a ghost.”