Daniel Silva: A Death in Vienna

He passed through the curtain again. He was in Berlin, sitting in the office of Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo. Müller is scraping a bit of lunch from his teeth and waving a letter he’d just received from Luther in the Foreign Office. It is 1942.

“It seems that rumors of our activities in the east have started to reach the ears of our enemies. We’ve also got a problem with one of the sites in the Warthegau region. Complaints about contamination of some kind.”

“If I may ask the obvious question, Herr Gruppenführer, what difference does it make if rumors reach the West? Who would believe that such a thing was truly possible?”

“Rumors are one thing, Erich. Evidence is quite another.”

“Who’s going to discover evidence? Some half-witted Polish serf? A slant-eyed Ukrainian ditchdigger?”

“Maybe the Ivans.”

“The Russians? How would they ever find-”

Müller held up a bricklayer’s hand. Discussion over. And then he understood. The Führer’s Russian adventure was not going according to plan. Victory in the east was no longer assured.

Müller leaned forward at the waist. “I’m sending you to hell, Erich. I’m going to stick that Nordic face of yours so deep in the shit you’ll never see daylight again.”

“How can I ever thank you, Herr Gruppenführer?”

“Clean up the mess. All of it. Everywhere. It’s your job to make sure it remains only a rumor. And when the operation is done, I want you to be the only man standing.”

He awakened. Müller’s face withdrew into the Polish night. Strange, isn’t it? His real contribution to the Final Solution was not killing but concealment and security, and yet he was in trouble now, sixty years on, because of a foolish game he’d played one drunken Sunday at Auschwitz.Aktion 1005? Yes, it had been his show, but no Jewish survivor would ever testify to his presence at the edge of a killing pit, because therewere no survivors. He’d run a tight operation. Eichmann and Himmler would have been advised to do the same. They’d been fools to allow so many to survive.

A memory rose, January 1945, a chain of ragged Jews straggling along a road very much like this one. The road from Birkenau. Thousands of Jews, each with a story to tell, each a witness. He’d argued for liquidation of the entire camp population before evacuation. No, he’d been told. Slave labor was urgently needed inside the Reich. Labor? Most of the Jews he’d seen leaving Birkenau could barely walk, let alone wield a pickax or a shovel. They weren’t fit for labor, only slaughter, and he’d killed quite a few himself. Why in God’s name did they order him to clean out the pits and then allow thousands of witnesses to walk out of a place like Birkenau?

He forced open his eyes and stared out the window. They were driving along the banks of a river, near the Ukrainian border. He knew this river, a river of ashes, a river of bone. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands were down there, silt on the bed of the River Bug.

A shuttered village: Uhrusk. He thought of Peter. He had warned this would happen. “If I ever become a serious threat to win the chancellery,” Peter had said, “someone will try to expose us.” He had known Peter was right, but he had also believed he could deal with any threat. He had been mistaken, and now his son faced an unimaginable electoral humiliation, all because of him. It was as if the Jews had led Peter to the edge of a killing pit and pointed a gun at his head. He wondered whether he possessed the power to prevent them from pulling the trigger, whether he could broker one more deal, engineer one final escape.

And this Jew who stares at me now with those unforgiving green eyes? What does he expect me to do? Apologize? Break down and weep and spew sentimentalities? What this Jew does not understand is that I feel no guilt for what was done. I was compelled by the hand of God and the teachings of my Church. Did the priests not tell us the Jews were the murderers of God? Did the Holy Father and his cardinals not remain silent when they knew full well what we were doing in the east? Does this Jew expect me now to suddenly recant and say it was all a terrible mistake? And why does he look at me like that? They were familiar, those eyes. He’d seen them somewhere before. Maybe it was just the drugs they’d given him. He couldn’t be certain of anything. He wasn’t sure he was even alive. Perhaps he was already dead. Perhaps it was his soul making this journey up the River Bug. Perhaps he was in hell.

Another hamlet: Wola Uhruska. He knew the next village.

Sobibor…

He closed his eyes, the velvet of the curtain enveloped him. It is the spring of 1942, he is driving out of Kiev on the Zhitomir road with the commander of an Einsatzgruppen unit at his side. They are on their way to inspect a ravine that’s become something of a security problem, a place the Ukrainians call Babi Yar. By the time they arrive, the sun is kissing the horizon and it is nearly dusk. Still, there is just enough light to see the strange phenomenon taking place at the bottom of the ravine. The earth seems to be in the grips of an epileptic fit. The soil is convulsing, gas is shooting into the air, along with geysers of putrid liquid. The stench! Jesus, the stench. He can smell it now.

“When did it start?”

“Not long after winter ended. The ground thawed, then the bodies thawed. They decomposed very rapidly.”

“How many are down there?”

“Thirty-three thousand Jews, a few Gypsies and Soviet prisoners for good measure.”

“Put a cordon around the entire ravine. We’ll get to this one as soon as we can, but at the moment other sites have priority.”

“What other sites?”

“Places you’ve never heard of: Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Our work is done here. At the others, they’re expecting imminent new arrivals.”

“What are you going to do with this place?”

“We’ll open the pits and burn the bodies, then we’ll crush the bones and scatter the fragments in the forests and the rivers.”

“Burn thirty thousand corpses? We tried it during the killing operations. We used flamethrowers, for God’s sake. Mass open-air cremations do not work.”

“That’s because you never constructed a proper pyre. At Chelmno, I proved it can be done. Trust me, Kurt, one day this place called Babi Yar will be only a rumor, just like the Jews who used to live here.”

He twisted his wrists. This time, the pain was not enough to wake him. The curtain refused to part. He remained locked in a prison of memories, wading across a river of ashes.

THEY PLUNGED ON through the night. Time was a memory. The tape had cut off his circulation. He could no longer feel his hands and feet. He was feverishly hot one minute, and shivering with cold the next. He had the impression of stopping once. He had smelled gasoline. Were they filling the tank? Or was it just the memory of fuel-soaked railroad ties?

The effects of the drug finally wore off. He was awake now, alert and cognizant and quite certain he was not dead. Something in the determined posture of the Jew told him they were nearing the end of their journey. They passed through Siedlce, then, at Sokolow Podlaski, they turned onto a smaller country road. Dybow came next, then Kosow Lacki.

They turned off the main road, onto a dirt track. The van shuddered:thump-thump… thump-thump. The old rail line, he thought-it was still here, of course. They followed the track into a stand of dense fir and birch trees and came to a stop a moment later in a small, paved carpark.

A second car entered the clearing with its headlights doused. Three men climbed out and approached the van. He recognized them. They were the ones who had taken him from Vienna. The Jew stood over him and carefully cut away the packing tape and loosened the leather straps. “Come,” he said pleasantly. “Let’s take a walk.”