Mendelssohn is on the Roof (5 page)

Schulze II was in a hurry. Not only because the order came from Wancke, but mainly because he hated this kind of job. There was peace and quiet in the office. Now they wanted him to bring a Jew, but that was demeaning for a member of a military unit. If Wancke had told him to liquidate a Jew, that would have been all right. Too bad conditions were different here in the Protectorate than in the East.

‘I need a learned Jew. Call up and get me one here immediately. Or else …’ he screamed at Reisinger.

It was clear to Reisinger what that ‘or else’ signified. If only he could figure out what the SS man meant by the words ‘learned Jew’! SS men never said anything properly.
They only barked out orders and expected him to carry them out immediately. The fellow might not even know himself what he wanted but might have simply got an order from his superiors. The trouble was that Schulze II didn’t feel like waiting for Reisinger to figure out whom to call. Schulze II started to hit him with his gloved hand. Then, when Reisinger still didn’t answer, he struck him in the teeth with his fist and knocked out an incisor. The blood ran down Reisinger’s chin. Suddenly it occurred to him that he could get rid of the SS man by sending him to another building. He couldn’t think of anything better to do at that moment. He just wanted to get rid of him so he wouldn’t beat him to a pulp.

He stammered: ‘The Town Hall. Montova Street. That’s where the learned Jews are.’

The Elders of the Community, who answered directly to Stresovice, had their headquarters at the Town Hall. That was where orders for all the official activities of the Jewish Community came from. That’s where the people responsible for carrying out the orders issued by the higher German authorities were located.

Schulze II screamed, ‘Get a move on, you filthy Jew, and show me the way there! Did you think I’d go looking for it myself?’

Reisinger wasn’t too worried about leaving the
guardhouse
: someone could always be found to stand in for him; inside, they’d even be grateful to him for taking the SS man elsewhere. Of course, there’d be a terrible commotion at the Jewish Town Hall when they arrived, even though the people there were fairly safe from arrest, because Stresovice provided them with a certain amount
of protection for as long as they worked for them. But not from being beaten up – no one protected them from that.

Reisinger flew out of the guardhouse, the blood dripping from his mouth, the SS man in pursuit. Reisinger kept trying to figure out how to extricate himself from this, but in vain. His head was buzzing from the blows, and his thoughts were confused. He kept repeating the words ‘balance scale’ as if it were some sort of magic spell. Perhaps he repeated the words because they stood for something ordinary, something familiar to him. As the horror-stricken clerks and secretaries stopped and stared, he led Schulze II directly to the office of the Chief Elder of the Community.

The Chief Elder didn’t lose his head. He was experienced in dealing with people from the Security Police. They often called him to Stresovice to receive orders and to listen to abuse for not carrying them out properly. He knew he mustn’t show his fear, that he must maintain a military posture, that he mustn’t argue, but that he also mustn’t whine. He knew his survival depended on acting with
complete
confidence. But he realised immediately that this SS man did not come from his superiors in Stresovice. He was wearing the uniform of the Elite Guard. The Chief Elder was well versed in these fine distinctions.

When Schulze II began to scream that he wanted a learned Jew, the Chief Elder calmly asked him who had sent him there, since he’d come without an appointment. The other thing he did was to send Reisinger, still bleeding from the mouth, back to the guardhouse on Josefovska Street.

The calm manner of the Chief Elder stopped Schulze II short. He wasn’t so stupid as not to know the role Stresovice played. The Elite Guard had nothing in common with the
people there, who were neither their superiors nor their inferiors but powerful men who answered directly to Berlin. One had to be very careful with such men. Not even the chief of the SS Elite Guard could stand up to them, to say nothing of Untersturmführer Wancke. Therefore he answered the Chief Elder’s questions, even answered them politely, saying that he’d been sent from the SS barracks, that some officials from the Municipal Division needed a learned Jew, and that they had an order for it from the Acting Reich Protector. Nothing bad would happen to the Jew.

The Chief Elder waited until Schulze II finished speaking. ‘I’ll call in one of our scholarly workers. He’ll be here in a second.’

Then he dialled a number on the intercom system.

‘Send Dr Rabinovich in at once.’

Schulze II stood and waited. The Chief Elder also stood. He didn’t dare sit in the presence of an SS officer.

In a little while an older, stooped man with a small red beard walked in at the door. When he saw Schulze II he turned a deathly white, but he kept silent.

‘This is our best scholarly worker, Dr Rabinovich. You can take him with you.’

He turned to Rabinovich. ‘The Rottenführer has assured me that nothing bad will happen to you. They seem to need an expert opinion.’

Schulze II left unceremoniously. Dr Rabinovich shuffled along behind him.

When they were gone, the Chief Elder sat down at his desk, picked up the receiver of an official telephone, dialled a number, and reported to his superior’s office in Stresovice about Schulze II’s visit. No one responded, but the Chief
Elder knew that someone was carefully listening to his report. When he finished he dialled a number on the
intercom
and gave an order:

‘Fire the guard Reisinger immediately for incompetence. Send him to the Work Force Division and let them find him another job.’ This time someone answered at the other end, saying that the order would be carried out.

Only now did the Chief Elder begin to feel queasy, only now did he feel weak in the arms and legs. He looked out of the window into the street. There the little knots were forming and re-forming as usual. Someone was unloading some junk from a moving wagon into the warehouse across the street. Suddenly the Chief Elder stopped and stared. They were unloading a wooden statue, a statue of Moses. Moses was wearing a long, flowing robe, his beard was plaited, and in his hand he carried the Ten
Commandments
. The statue must have come from some Catholic church that had closed its doors for good long ago and from which it had been acquired by some rich Jewish collector. What a lot of junk they kept sending. ‘Thou shalt not make graven images …’ His religion forbade all representations. But he’d have to take it in. He was forced to take in everything those bandits in Stresovice didn’t want and that had been declared Jewish. If he were sent a stuffed crocodile, he’d have to put it away in the warehouse as well.

The Chief Elder stepped away from the window and sat down at his desk.

T
HE VILLA at the edge of town did not stand out in any way. It was spacious, it had a garden and a garage, but there were many such houses in this neighbourhood – by no means a working-class suburb. Still, people seemed to avoid it. They crossed to the other side of the street and averted their eyes to keep from seeing the guard at the entrance or the groups of people standing in orderly lines for hours at a time. These people wore stars with scraggly letters in a foreign language sewn on the left side of their chests. They looked at the ground. They didn’t speak at all. They were so quiet they hardly seemed to be breathing.

The villa was the headquarters of the Central Bureau, a division of the Security Police with direct orders from Berlin for the solution of the Jewish question in the Czech and Moravian Protectorate. The ‘final solution’.

Death was lurking in hundreds of documents, in file folders, in property deeds, in photographs of houses, villas and factories. It dwelled in signatures and symbols, abbreviations and initials, rubber stamps and graphs. It was neat and orderly, perfectly typed on fine paper, on file cards of various colours. It was everywhere and it filled the house with fear. Over there, where the children’s room had once been, where little animal figures could still be seen peeking out of the whitewashed plaster, was the ‘Jewish room’. That’s what they called it, because Jews were working there, filling out forms, writing names on file cards, dispatching mail. But power over the abbreviations, initials,
rubber stamps and graphs belonged to others, those engaged in planning the journey to death with stops along the way. The Jewish room adjoined the offices of less important workers, the coroners and financial experts. For death was connected with complex financial operations, with neat and clean columns of numbers, with adding machines and ledgers. And in the last room on the ground floor sat the executioner’s henchman in a uniform of the lowest rank. He held a rubber stamp which he pressed repeatedly on a stamp pad. He stamped list after list, each time mechanically repeating the word ‘Done’.

On a closely guarded upper floor sat the true masters over life and death. They wore uniforms with braids and fringes on one shoulder, or two, according to their military rank, while their secretaries were bedecked with French perfumes and stolen jewellery. The Reich resided in these rooms with their flower-filled vases and portraits of the Leader, with their thick Persian carpets and luxurious antique furniture, with paintings and chandeliers made of cut crystal. Here death wore a different face. Though it was surrounded by comfort and luxury, it retained its military character – uniforms, official reports, clicking of heels, crisp commands. For stolen luxury must never soften an official of the Reich. These were the spoils of a victor; yet an official of the Reich knows that he must strike hard to pay for such luxury, he must eradicate, liquidate and root out all enemies, those identified by the signatures, symbols and initials. Once the enemy is turned into numbers, then the numbers must be transformed again into graphs. At first the graphs go up. They keep going up and up, regularly and steadily. And then they go down, also regularly, neatly, until the numbers fade away
into nothingness. The officials of the Reich don’t need to concern themselves with these graphs or keep track of these numbers. But they must speed up or slow down their movement according to the interests of the Reich.

There is no room for shouting and excitement in the world that prevails in the upstairs rooms. There the work is done by servants whose final goal was assigned them by the Leader himself. The head of this branch, the one in charge of it all, knows the secret of the final solution. He receives briefings from the head office in Berlin. He travels to conferences, he submits quarterly, semi-annual and annual reports; these are neat and clean, with carefully drawn graphs and photographic enclosures. The text is businesslike and gratifying. It shows precisely how the property in the warehouses is increasing, how many new objects have been acquired. It also specifies by how many the numbers have decreased. The pages covered with meticulous writing are contained in hard black covers.

The head of the Central Bureau was a young man; most of his staff were older than he. For when the interest of the Reich and the eradication of its enemies are concerned, regular promotions and years of service don’t count. Yet this agency wasn’t an ordinary office – it was a military, fighting unit. Of course the enemy had no weapons. They were powerless, weak men, women and children. But the Reich couldn’t be hoodwinked in such a manner. The Reich knew well that this enemy was worse, far more dangerous than foreign armies in the field. That was why the Reich considered it more important to exterminate this enemy than to occupy whole countries with subjected populations.

The head of the Central Bureau had recently returned from the East. He had examined the extermination camps,
he had carefully studied the technology of murder. They were obliged to show him everything – he was one of the select circle of the enlightened, after all – he would actually provide the numbers. They complained that liquidation was progressing too slowly, that it required too much
ammunition
which would serve a better purpose at the front. Other means of killing – clubs, axes, hammers – weren’t effective enough; they were even more time-consuming. At some camps they were trying benzene injections, at others the exhaust fumes of trucks. But now that the proposal to use gas had been approved, the operation would go full-steam-ahead. Zyklon B was a speedy and safe medium.

The commanders of the camps, of course, had no idea who had conceived of the idea that saved them so much work. The commanders didn’t know that it was the man personally entrusted by the Leader with the execution of the whole campaign: Reinhard Heydrich. They assumed that he was simply the Acting Reich Protector, who was keeping order in Bohemia and Moravia. But his mission was greater, encompassing all of Europe. It was he, the enemy of all enemies, who would carry out the final solution.

Only a few people were aware of Heydrich’s true mission. Even he, the head of the Central Bureau, learned about it merely by chance from Eichmann. For while Eichmann was ostensibly responsible for all orders and was in charge in the main city of the Reich, the real commander, the source of all orders, was actually here, quite nearby. But needless to say, the head of the Central Bureau never dealt directly with Heydrich. He always went through the agency of his staff in the Reich.

The head of the Central Bureau smiled to himself. One
of the common features of all members of the National Socialist Party was this: they never revealed their goals. Thus they were able to lull and gull and dupe their opponents. Nobody in the Protectorate knew what was going on in the East. Even his own staff did not know, though they could guess certain things because some of the spoils, the stolen goods, came from there. And those who passed through the gates of the Radio Mart with numbers hung around their necks, carrying bundles of their belongings, hurried along by kicks from the SS men, even those did not suspect what was awaiting them at the end of their journey.

Knowing the secret means invisible power. It means standing high above all people and looking down on them in scornful safety, like a statue. It means being made of stone or bronze. Here on the upper floors, everything is clean, no sounds of screaming ever penetrate these walls, no blood has ever flowed here, nobody ever writhes with pain here. Here you can smell the flowers in vases, and sometimes, when they have parties, you can hear music here, classical music, none of your common popular songs or marches. He wouldn’t stand for any other music.
Heydrich
is his model in that. After all the head of the Central Bureau had majored in Oriental Studies at the University of Göttingen. Even then he’d been preparing himself for his future service. Of course, he had prepared himself because he foresaw the Leader’s goals – he had diligently read his writings and knew long ago what his task would be. He knows the alphabet and language of those inferior races, that is, the former alphabet and the former
language
, for the majority of Jews have never learned it. He is even knowledgeable about their literature. He can talk easily with any learned Jew from the Community, with
Dr Rabinovich, for example. Such knowledge makes his work easier.

To expunge, to liquidate, to tear out the weed with all its roots, yes, that was his task. But why shouldn’t he leave them a little bit of hope for a while? Why shouldn’t he confuse and lull them? The dirty work is done by others, after all – that is not his responsibility. Only he is the master over life and death. Only he knows the secret, and he doesn’t need to bring about death by his own hand.

He looked in his daybook. He kept it carefully, model bureaucrat that he was. He fulfilled his daily obligations precisely, and he demanded the same from his staff. They must understand that they weren’t in the Protectorate to have an easy time of it, to obtain furniture and rare delicacies. They must understand that their service here was the same as at the front, perhaps even more important.

The first entry in the daybook was about the fortress city and the transports. That was his most important task. The Acting Reich Protector himself kept careful track of it and required regular reports. He took a folder listing the areas designated as ‘ghettos’ out of the cabinet. His first command from the Acting Reich Protector had been to find all enclosed Jewish settlements. Death was supposed to stop briefly in some ancient Czech town. That was a necessary part of the plot to deceive foreigners. It was also important to give the victims temporary hope, so that they wouldn’t be inclined to resist.

Next the command travelled from his office in the form of an order to the Jewish Community. It directed them to find the settlements and prepare them for transports. Among his papers were maps with suggestions of various towns and villages in Bohemia and Moravia. The investigation
proceeded swiftly but carefully. It examined the various advantages and disadvantages. And finally Terezin was chosen.

He announced the selection to Frank, who later informed him that the Acting Reich Protector himself was satisfied with the choice. Such a town could be easily guarded. It had walls and gateways. It was not an industrial centre but an old fortress town with little shopkeepers’ and
tradesmen’s
houses stuck on. The inhabitants wouldn’t put up a fight when they were moved out. The Jews could be stuffed into the barracks as well as the little houses. It didn’t matter how many of them there were – it would even be good to have the town overfilled. An excess number was always easy to eliminate. Right next door was the Small Fortress, an annex of the Gestapo prison. That meant more security, even though the Gestapo was a different division.

Other documents gave evidence that the project was in full swing. There were reports of the first transports, made up of workers who had to put the emptied barracks in order and prepare the lodgings. The first family transports gathered at the Radio Mart. The schedule was strictly adhered to. Reception camps were set up in the
countryside
. Simultaneously, the machinery was set into motion for the confiscation of property. Warehouses began to fill up with carefully sorted objects. Moving vans and
handcarts
travelled all over the city. Seized apartments were refurnished and scrubbed to provide a clean welcome for their new tenants. Architects provided them with new furniture. Bed linens, paintings, refrigerators, rugs and curtains made their way to them from the warehouses.

Then the graphs began to appear, careful and reliable curves neatly drawn and issued in quarterly reports. The
machine gained momentum, reaching ever farther, ever deeper. The first transports were already leaving for the East with a brief stop in the fortress town. The death camps in the East, with their gas chambers and crematoria, were already in full operation. It was a well-run organisation, the very sort of organisation that the Reich could thank for all its triumphs. Nobody could escape it, and everything was planned in advance. The documents and graphs gave a reliable picture, and the head of the Central Bureau could use them to follow everything that was happening. The numbers enter the Radio Mart, the trains leave for the fortress town, and from there still other trains leave for the East. In the camps the crematorium flames blaze from morning to night, and the ashes are carted away in bags to the Reich to serve as fertiliser for future crops. And the gold is caught in collection sieves with jewels and dental fillings among the rest, while other things pile up in
warehouses
, sorted according to categories. Property is going up and the numbers are going down. The unnecessary is decreasing, and the useful is increasing – the charts show all this to be true. He is satisfied with his work. He will receive the same decoration for it that German men in the field who are conquering the world for the Reich and its Leader receive. And the Acting Reich Protector is satisfied, too, because the task assigned to him by the Leader is being carried out according to plan.

The head of the Central Bureau closed the folder and put it back in the cabinet. He looked at the next entry, yes, an amusing little business. The Elite Guard of the SS seemed to be encroaching on his territory a bit. On his desk lay a telephone message received by an assistant. The message came from the Chief Elder of the community. It seems that
a Rottenführer from the Elite Guard had burst into the Jewish Community, beat up the guard and made him lead the way to the Chief Elder’s office, where he demanded that they bring him a learned Jew whom some officials at Municipal apparently needed to identify a statue on the German House of Art. The Chief Elder of the Community put Dr Rabinovich at their disposal. The Rottenführer promised that nothing would happen to him. The Chief Elder didn’t quite understand what the Rottenführer meant by ‘learned Jew’. Apparently that’s what he had been told at the command headquarters of the Elite Guard to get. Another message revealed that Dr Rabinovich had, indeed, returned, but in bad physical condition and that he had not been able to identify the statue.