Kolchak's Gold (30 page)

“The lines of battle had veered away to the south, and there were no heavy movements of Germans through the area; the rear echelons and reinforcements had gone past to the south, on their road eastward to the fighting. For a few days it appeared there was room for hope that the Germans had forgotten their existence in the little valley.

“Finally, of course, some sort of minor official of the German Occupation arrived in the village in the sidecar of a motorcycle, and that was that.”

“It was in September that this Heinz Krausser came on the scene. The
shtetl
was only one of several on his list.

“He arrived in one of those open armored cars and he was carrying a Schmeisser machine pistol in one hand. His headquarters platoon was with him—fifty or sixty men. They went through the village tacking up posters on the walls, ordering all Jews to present themselves at eight o'clock the next morning in a field at the edge of town, for what was called “registration and resettlement.” At the bottom in very large letters it said
Bei Fluchtversuch Wird Geschossen'
—anyone who tries to escape will be shot. I have seen these posters in other villages.

“The SS went through people's houses, looting them. They did everything except rape. They didn't wish to be contaminated by contact with Jewish women. Zalmanson told me there were no rapes reported in the
shtetl.
These SS were often expert rapists. Many of them were only sixteen years old.

“Krausser was a different sort, much older than his troops. At his home in Bavaria, I was told by one of the sergeants, Krausser kept a Rumanian slave in the kitchen and a young Jew was chained outside the house like a watchdog.

“Zalmanson described him to me—he had a shaven head and one of those inhumanly monotonous German voices. He would walk strutting around the village square, slapping the Schmeisser into his open palm. He had a crude sort of humor—very cynical, a sort of dull sarcasm. The sergeant told me one of Krausser's favorite remarks—‘Our little war is going better. Much better than next year.' He was referring to the fact that there wouldn't be so many Jews to kill next year. Otherwise the story would not ring true. I think he was a fatalist, but not a defeatist, and anyway at this time it still looked as if the Nazis were winning the war, didn't it?

“The village was not fooled by the resettlement announcement. Too many refugees had told them what happened to villages where the Jews lined up for ‘registration.' In the afternoon there was a meeting out at the poultry farm—the Nazi SS had not come that far yet. Zalmanson was there, and my brother.

“It was too late to flee, yet there was no other choice. They did not know what to do. The SS were already setting up Spandaus on tripods along the edge of the field where the people were ordered to assemble in the morning. A truckload of shovels had arrived.

“They must have been chilled by the hopelessness. You know the kind of paralyzing fear which prevents flight?

“Zalmanson said my brother withdrew to meditate privately. When Zalmanson came upon him, Maxim was retching into his handkerchief.

“Dear God we can never forgive them! Never in a thousand years!

“Zalmanson told me he saw Maxim's face drawn with pain. But Zalmanson had no way of understanding the dilemma my brother faced. The community was scheduled for annihilation—this is what Zalmanson knew, and he attributed Maxim's agony solely to this. I never told Zalmanson the truth, but the events themselves can only be explained by the assumptions I must make.”

“Maxim had a giant's gentleness. He had made himself over into a man of faith, a man of peace. Through that blind indifference of fate he found himself, as I did, a forgotten survivor of that terrible Civil War in Siberia.

“Whatever material loyalty he owned, he felt he owed to the Jewish people of his homeland—those whom we had betrayed by denying them. Obviously he was no more a Communist than I am, even though he had elected—almost as a sort of penance—to remain in Russia. He had no allegiance to the Moscow regime.

“We carried in our heads the secret of that heavy royal treasure, buried in the Sayan heights. Neither of us had ever revealed the secret.

“Why? Well that is easiest to explain by asking another question: to whom could we have revealed it? The Red government? Hardly. Some other government? What for?

“I had thought of discussing it with my fellow Mossad people but it seemed pointless. Granted we needed money, we were chronically without it in Palestine. But you cannot simply go into Siberia and remove five hundred tons of deep-buried gold. Or so I assumed. And also of course we had no way to know whether the gold had already been removed from its hiding place. In fact I rather took it for granted that it had. I assumed the Bolsheviks had got it, in the end. Evidently Maxim did not make the same assumption; at least he acted as if he had not.

“So we kept the secret because there was no one to whom we could usefully reveal it.

“But then Krausser came to the
shtetl.”

“I have pieced these things together. Many of them are guesses but I shall relate them as if I know them to be fact; the outcome we know.

“At first Krausser refused to listen to my brother's pleas for a hearing. He had heard Jewish pleading before, he was not interested. But Maxim did get the ear of an amused junior officer, a Waffen SS
Hauptmann.

“Maxim implored this
Hauptmann
to persuade Krausser to spare the village. In return for the lives of the Jews, my brother offered to tell the Nazis where to find the gold we had buried for the Admiral.

“I have said my brother acted as if he assumed the gold was still where we had hidden it. Perhaps he did not believe that any more than I did; perhaps he only wanted to make the Germans believe it.

“Now I am on uncertain ground. I cannot describe the sequence of events, only the possibilities.

“It is likely, to me, that this
Hauptmann
was unimpressed by my brother's wild story. But perhaps he repeated it at the evening mess, and perhaps his fellow young Hitlerites agreed that there was probably nothing to it—a desperate lie by a cowardly Jew trying to save his skin—but
if
there were any truth at all in Maxim's story, it was possible they would find themselves in serious trouble for failure to report it.

“A hypothesis. A report goes to the
Oberst
—Krausser. Krausser feels there is probably nothing to it, but it cannot hurt to listen to the Jew—the story sounds entertaining.

“I know from Zalmanson that my brother was granted an audience with Krausser that night. I do not know what was said; one can guess.

“My brother is earnest, compelling. Perhaps he begins by demanding the lives of all surviving Russian Jews in return for leading the Germans to the gold. Krausser replies caustically that even if this fantasy has truth in it, the gold is hidden a thousand miles beyond German lines in the deep heart of the Soviet Union. What good is this to the Third Reich?

“But Maxim is adamant—persuasive. Krausser hears him out. Finally Krausser probes: an offer. If what Maxim says proves to be true, the villagers will indeed be spared. His promise, on his word as a German officer.

“Not the villagers, Maxim insists. Consider the value of this hoard. Billions of Reichsmarks. Billions. All the Jews who are still alive must be spared.

“The village, Krausser says. Only the village. Gold is not that important. Important but not that important.

“Now Maxim sees that there is no hope of gaining a wider reprieve. The
shtetl
, only the
shtetl.
Yet Maxim knows about German honor. He insists that he be given a guarantee of safety for the villagers from a higher, more responsible official than Krausser. He picks a name out of the air, a name he has heard—General von Bock's name because von Bock is known, even to his enemies, to be an honorable old-fashioned soldier.

“A guarantee in writing, personally signed by von Bock. Only then will he reveal the location of the gold.

“Now it goes through Krausser's mind that he could torture this Jew and make him talk. But he is impressed by Maxim. Maxim is a very big man, powerful. His eyes are calm and level. He has lived with torture half his life—the torture from within. He will not break easily. It would take a long time and the results are never guaranteed: men under torture have willed themselves to die. In any case it would take time and these SS do not have a great deal of time. The Nazis are always in a hurry. There are other villages: Jews to kill.

“My brother gains a temporary reprieve. In the morning the villagers queue up for registration. The twelve hundred and seven men, women and children are stripped of their valuables and ordered to wear Star of David armbands at all times—and then they are released to go home.

“Krausser allows an appropriate interval to pass and then in due course a written guarantee over General von Bock's signature is presented to my brother by Herr Krausser. Two or three army command orders, bearing von Bock's signature, are shown to my brother so that he may be sure the signature is genuine.

“Krausser speaks with feigned anger, talking very fast, insisting that my brother realize that the reprieve remains only temporary until it is ascertained whether his story is true. Until that time the
shtetl
remains in jeopardy, and only if the gold is found will the Jews be spared. In the meantime the village must consider itself collectively under arrest and subject to the strictures of Nazi martial law.

“Actually what has transpired in the interval, one must assume, is a series of communications between Krausser and General von Geyr, between Krausser and other officers, and between Krausser's superiors and Berlin.
*
Krausser was not an educated man—I doubt he had any Russian history, I doubt he knew whether there ever had been a Czarist treasury, let alone what happened to it. Confirming those details of Maxim's account which
could
be proved must have taken some part of this time.

“Now everything the Germans learn tends to support the authenticity of Maxim's story. In time, as we know, an expedition was sent to look for the gold. But in the meantime.…

“The village had been spared, it appeared. The Spandaus had been dismounted from their tripods. The main body of Krausser's force had moved on to some other slaughtering ground. According to Zalmanson, a platoon of Waffen SS under the combined command of an SS
Leutnant
and some sort of Gestapo official was left to maintain German order in the
shtetl.

“Krausser himself would reappear from time to time—at intervals of four or five days—to meet with his
Leutnant
and, two or three times, in private with Maxim. Maxim never told anyone what was said in these conferences. The villagers knew he had saved them somehow, but no one was able to persuade him to explain it—not even Zalmanson.

“Rather than indicating relief and triumph, my brother became morose and despondent and would not speak to anyone except in grunts. He withdrew completely into himself.

“Late in September the fall rains came, and then an early winter.”

“I never saw this von Bock document. Zalmanson did not see it either. Certain things he said were what led me to believe it must have been produced by Krausser. Besides, I knew my brother's thinking—his way of thinking. I'm sure there must have been such a written guarantee. Zalmanson said that my brother had intimated that von Bock had personally decided to spare the
shtetl.
Maxim wouldn't have made that up.
*

“I have good reason to suspect, however, that to whatever extent this letter existed, it must have been a forgery.

“On October fourth, late in the day, Krausser's battalion returned to the
shtetl.
They came in motorized sleds, the big ones that carried thirty men each. I can remember the grating roar of those machines crossing the valleys of the Ukraine a year later.

“Krausser did not arrive with the force. The SS men posted themselves in the town and said nothing—not a single word—to the inhabitants. No questions were answered. There were several incidents, Jews being knocked down in the snow and trampled, that sort of thing. After dark the Germans became steadily more belligerent, although they still did not speak to the people except to bark obscenities or arrogant orders at them.

“You must recall the mentalities of these necrophiles. This village had been denied them for weeks—they singled it out for special hatred. During the night several Jews were murdered by the SS swine. The corpses were left in the streets, mutilated horribly. Zalmanson told me of the naked severed arms of a small boy lying shriveled in the slush, and an old man's head impaled on a staff before the old synagogue.

“Zalmanson knew what these things portended; he went around to the poultry farm and tried to persuade my brother to join him and many others in attempting to escape in the night.

“My brother refused to go.

“One can spend hours speculating on his reasons, and many more hours recounting the details of the flight which Zalmanson described to me, but there's no point in it. My brother stayed, he wouldn't budge. Zalmanson and perhaps eighty others crept away in the night. He himself was with a party of eight, of whom he was the only survivor in the end—the seven others were killed by the winter, or the Germans, or the Cossacks.…

“I have no further firsthand reports of what happened in the
shtetl.
I do not know whether Krausser arrived and took charge of the slaughter personally; I suspect he must have, he wouldn't have missed that. Undoubtedly they followed the usual pattern.

“My brother undoubtedly protested. Equally undoubtedly, once he saw the hopelessness of it, he did not resist. In a way I'm sure he welcomed his death.”

German documents indicate that
Standartenführer
Heinz Krausser was relieved of his command of
Einsatzgruppe
“E” temporarily, on October 7, 1942, and given a special assignment.