The Violent Century (21 page)

– Perhaps I can help, someone says. Who the hell are you, the lead judge says. The man is wearing a flaming red outfit and has a Texan accent. I’m Flame Beast, he says. The judge nods, reluctantly. The Texan clicks his fingers and a flame comes alive in his hand. Gently he reaches towards the box and blows on the flame, which shoots out, expanding, engulfing the box.

– This is a bloody disaster, someone says, groaning. But a moment later Flame Beast extinguishes his fire and the glass box appears to be defrosting. Water puddles cover the floor and inside the cage the prisoner is breathing again, his hands grasping his neck; his colour is slowly returning.

– A bloody
disaster
, someone says again.

– Order! Order!

– Take him away to calm down, the judge on the left, a portly man with brown hair, says.
Honestly
. And fix the prisoner’s stand. The court will adjourn until tomorrow.

The gavel comes down. The audience stands. Soldiers lead Kerach away. He is still unresisting. A cheer rises from the ranks of the Übermenschen as he passes amongst them, and many clap him on the back as he walks.

The Old Man shakes his head in disgust and gets up. A drink in the air-conditioned hotel bar would be just the thing to salvage what’s left of the day.

86.
JERUSALEM
1964

– The court will rise!

– Please sit down.

– Counsellor, I trust that the witness will not be in contempt of court again this afternoon?

– The witness has assured me there will not be a repeat of yesterday’s unfortunate events, Your Honour.

– Very well … the judge rubs the bridge of his nose wearily. The witness is yours, he says.

The counsellor paces. The man in the repaired glass box sits stoically. Anton Gerasimov – Kerach – is back on the witness stand.

– We have established, the counsellor for the prosecution says, that you were a partisan, operating in Belarus during the war. You are – as I think we have all quite conclusively seen—

A small laugh from the otherwise-silent audience.

– An
Übermensch
. One of the changed. Is that correct?

– That is correct, Kerach says.

– I see, the counsellor says. And how long were you in operation, during the war? he asks.

– I was captured in the beginning of nineteen forty-three, if that’s what you mean, Kerach says.

– Captured?

– By the Nazis, Counsellor. By the degenerate Nazi animal. He makes as if to spit. Wolfskommando, he says.

The counsellor makes a show of consulting some papers, fooling no one. You are referring to Gestapo Department F? he says.

– Yes.

– That would be the special department within the Nazi secret police established for the purpose of capturing Allied Übermenschen?

– Yes.

Whispers in the court. The counsellor ignores them.

– Can you tell me how you were captured? he says.

Kerach shrugs. We had gone to a village the Nazis had marked for extermination, he says. The village had a special school for the disabled. Our information suggested that a Nazi death squad had been sent to purify the school.

– Purify?

– Exterminate. The death squads used mobile gas trucks. They would lock the children inside and gas them to death. It was considered humane.

– I see.

The courtroom is deathly quiet. The counsellor says, What happened when you got there?

– We were too late. The school was empty. The Einsatzgruppen had already been, hours before. We found the children buried in a nearby field, in a mass grave. It was … not dug deep.

– I see.

Again the counsellor for the prosecution lets a moment of silence pass. What happened then? he says, gently.

But there is nothing gentle in Kerach’s reply.

– We were set up, he says. It was an ambush. They had been waiting for us and once we were there they closed the trap. They killed my men. Shot them over the same common grave they had dumped the children in. But they didn’t kill me. He smiles, without humour. They went to great lengths not to kill me.

– They?

– Brigadeführer Hans von Wolkenstein, Kerach says. Again that chilly smile. Der Wolfsmann.

A sigh, a gasp from the audience at the mention of that name. Tigerman growls in the front row and Whirlwind lays a hand on his shoulder until he settles back. The counsellor looks at the audience, at the judges, and turns his attention again to the man on the witness stand.

– That would be the head of Gestapo Department F? he says.

– Yes. He is a nullifier.

– Nullifier?

– His presence nullifies other Übermenschen’s abilities.

– So you were not able to—

– No.

Kerach smiles that icy smile again. We met before, he says. He and I. I do not need
powers
to take a man on. When he says
powers
, he looks to the man in the glass box. All I need is a fair fight. He shrugs. That was not something I was given.

– You were captured.

– Yes.

– Then what happened?

– At first they put me in a POW camp on the Polish border. It was a general camp. They didn’t keep me there long. I got the sense it was a temporary arrangement. A few months after I was captured they transferred me again. This time to Auschwitz.

A silence in the court. Auschwitz, the counsellor says quietly.

– Yes.

– And there? the counsellor says.

– I was given into the charge of a Dr Mengele, Kerach says. Dr Josef Mengele.

A murmur in the audience. The name is well known.

– And what did that entail? the counsellor for the prosecution says.

– I was kept in a special quarters separated from the other inmates of the camp, Kerach says. It was referred to by both inmates and camp staff as the Menagerie. It was a secure facility, housing only Übermenschen. Dr Mengele had a special dispensation from the Reich to experiment on the nature of the condition. In another lab he kept twins, he had an obsession with twins – twins and midgets. I don’t know how many people went through his labs during the war. But there were many of us in the Menagerie.

– And you say he experimented on you?

– On all of us. He gassed us. He cut us open. He tested us with electricity, acid, wanting to see how much damage we could take. Some – many – of us didn’t make it.

– Can you tell us of some of the things he did?

– I remember the twins, Kerach said. They weren’t changed. They were nothing. Roma. Gypsies. He … for the first time here Kerach pauses. He blinks. Mengele sewed them together, he says. He wanted to see if he could make conjoined twins. They survived the surgery but the infection killed them, later. He had child patients. He used to call himself Uncle Mengele when he came around to see them. He gave them sweets. Once, he took fourteen pairs of identical twins and injected chloroform into their hearts and once they were dead he cut them open on his operating table and measured up and compared their organs. What he did to us was easy by comparison. We were Übermenschen, we were harder to come by. Still, we didn’t all make it. Those who didn’t were carted off to the crematorium. I will always remember the smell. You can’t wipe away the smell of three million dead. It never goes away. We? Kerach says. We who lived? We were the lucky ones.

A silence in the court, the counsellor for the prosecution turns his head this way and that like a stork. Comes to settle on the man in the glass box. I want you to think carefully now, he says. Speaking to Kerach but looking at the man in the glass box. Did you ever get visitors at the … Menagerie? Nazis?

– Often, Kerach says. Hitler himself came once, to stare. It was not considered safe for him to go inside. We were deemed too dangerous. Instead we were paraded out to him, one by one. Kerach shrugs. Hitler looked bored, he says.

– Anyone else?

– Martin Bormann, the same time as Hitler. Eichmann, twice. Alfred Rosenberg came – he was the main figure behind Nazi philosophy, the Party’s spiritual leader. He argued with Mengele, I remember. Said the Menagerie was a disgrace, and that we should all be exterminated immediately. It was the only time I saw Mengele lose his temper. He was close to tears. It is my life’s work, he kept saying. My life’s work. I guess Rosenberg didn’t get his way, though, because we were still there the next morning. I had rather thought that we wouldn’t be.

– And this man? the counsellor for the prosecution says softly. And in the total hush of the courtroom we realise all of this, the questions, the back-and-forth, were all, simply, a lead-up to this one single question. This man, the counsellor says, in his soft cultured voice, and his hand rises, pointing at the man in the glass box. Did you ever see this man at the holding facility in Auschwitz?

Kerach looks at the man in the glass box. Looks at him for a long moment. The man in the glass box doesn’t look back. He sits quietly, his hands in his lap.

– Yes, Kerach says.

– Silence!

Kerach is stoic, and so is the man in the glass box. But the court is anything but. The counsellor for the prosecution patiently, with a sense of theatrics, waits for order to return.

– Could you identify him for the court? he says at last.

– We were never …
formally
introduced, Kerach says – which draws a few laughs.

– However, I overheard Mengele referring to him as Dr Vomacht, Kerach says, and again there is noise.

– Vomacht, the counsellor says.

– Yes.

– Has he visited more than once?

Kerach shrugs. Two or three times, he says.

– Can you be more exact?

– Three, Kerach says. Three times.

– And you are sure this is the man you saw?

– Yes, Kerach says. Looks at the man in the glass box, who finally, calmly turns his head then, and looks back at him.

– Yes, Kerach says. I’m sure.

87.
JERUSALEM
1964

– No, he says. Shakes his massive head. No, I won’t do it. I can’t.

The Old Man wipes his brow with his handkerchief. From the Friday evening and on through Saturday Jerusalem becomes a veritable desert: shops close, public transport ceases, and a hush descends on the Israeli side of the city. The Old Man and many of the foreign visitors flock to the handful of open bars catering mostly to tourists and visitors. Now he sits at one such place, Mike’s, waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in, drinking a twelve-year-old scotch and rather wishing the whole interminable affair were over.

– So how have you been, Tank? he says.

– Living, Tank says. One day at a time.

The Old Man examines him. We don’t age, he says, but quietly, almost to himself. He’d seen Tank after the war, after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp by the Red Army. The once-giant man had weighed less than eight stone – under fifty kilograms. He was a walking skeleton, his loose skin hung in folds from his bones, his teeth and his hair had fallen out. The Old Man had found him in a Red Army field hospital and pulled him out, shouting at the Russian officers in attendance, who glared at him mutely. A British Übermensch, they seemed to imply, was not high on their list of priorities.

The Old Man had seen Auschwitz, too. The people who died when they were freed, not from violence but from the food the liberating soldiers gave them. Too much, too soon, it killed them. At least they’d died free, the Old Man thinks. He’d seen the crematorium and the mounds of ash and human bones. Had seen the gas chambers. A pile of gold teeth extracted but not yet shipped, which had then been looted by the soldiers. It wasn’t even war, he remembered thinking. He didn’t know what it was. He took Tank from the Soviet hospital and nursed him all the way to base, and thought he’d lost him. But Tank clung on to life. Stubbornly. His hair never grew back and his teeth had been replaced with gold prosthetics. No one had asked where the gold teeth came from. He put on weight again, slowly. Grew back into himself. He never quite healed but he wasn’t dead, either, which must have been something, the Old Man thinks.

– It isn’t Vomacht they should put on the stand, Tank says. It’s Mengele.

– They would if they could, the Old Man says. He … his whereabouts are unknown.

– Bullshit, Tank says. He’s in Argentina, in South America, like the rest of them who left on the ratline.

The Old Man sighs. South America’s a big place, he says.

– Vomacht, Tank says. He was there, in Auschwitz, yes. Two, three times? He was a Nazi. Everyone was a Nazi, Old Man. If you weren’t a card-carrying member you might as well have given up then and there. Why is he really on trial? Is it simply for being a German at the worst time in German history? What choice did he have?

– He could have stood up to—

– And been summarily executed? Tank shakes his massive head. What is he really on trial for? he says, softly. For not being a
hero
?

The Old Man takes a sip of his Scotch. For what he did, he says. Looks at Tank’s ravaged face. For us, he says, with sudden vehemence. He is being judged for what he did to
us
.

Tank shakes his head. I won’t do it, he says. I can’t. I won’t testify.

The Old Man breathes out, seems to deflate. He lays a hand on Tank’s shoulder, gently.

– You don’t have to, he says.

He finishes his drink as Tank walks away.

88.
JERUSALEM
1964

– Please state your name for the court.

– Stanley Martin Lieber, the man on the witness stand says. The Old Man has removed the heavy earphones with the translator’s voice whispering in his ear. This interview is being conducted in good old-fashioned English, at least.

– Your occupation? says the counsellor for the prosecution.

– Historian and author.

The man is thin and wiry, in his early forties, with even white teeth and a tanned face and a New York accent.

– More specifically, says the counsellor for the prosecution, you are the author of the reference work
Le Dictionnaire Biographique des Surhommes
?