Steven Hartov - The Soul Of A Thief

My father would not, however, relinquish his religious beliefs. And although he supported the economic and political precepts of Nazism, he refused to rein in his attendance of Mass, regular confessions or charity efforts for the Church. Such behavior greatly frightened my mother, of course, who was edgy enough given our genetic status and the questionable position of her only son. Yet the authorities, recognizing my father to be a man of some age and granted eccentricities, declined to rigorously pursue his conversion to Hitlerism. That is, until he strayed too far.

My father was, by trade, a book seller. Adolf Hitler was, by choice, a book burner. It required no more than one massive, flaming pyre of the classics to set my father’s inner rage alight, and thereafter he was a changed man. He quietly joined “O 5,” the Austrian anti-Nazi resistance movement. On the evening after Kristallnacht, during which every Jewish shop and synagogue in Vienna was burned to the ground by the Brown Shirts, along with approximately twenty thousand copies of both the Old and New Testaments, three members of that thugly gang were found murdered in the Tenth District. My father returned late that evening, exuding an odor of fear and adrenaline, and he packed a single suitcase, hugged myself and my mother to him, and informed us that he would have to leave immediately or endanger our lives.

I never saw him again. But still today, there remains etched into the exterior of the great St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, a white scrawled carving of defiance, the figures “O 5.” I have been told that my father was the very chiseler of that message from the underground.

So, you can well understand why my first few months with Himmel were so fraught with the constant urge to pee, even though he appeared to regard my history as irrelevant.

The second trait which so endeared my master to me, as it were, was his choice of women. I refer not, of course, to the long line of prostitutes and desperately widowed wives we encountered in our travels throughout Italy, the Rhineland or France. Some of these Himmel paid well as he invited them to bed, and some he spontaneously mounted in empty castle keeps and haylofts. These he regarded as the spoils of war and nothing more.

The true measure of his good taste was revealed in the selection of Gabrielle. We had settled temporarily near Le Pontet, a village beside the fabled French town of Avignon, for a spate of rest and recreation. Much of the small ville had suffered from errant Allied bombs, and a large German field hospital had been erected in the meadows as a sort of waypoint and triage center for the wounded from all fronts. The slim bridges of the Rhone were constantly awash in horse-drawn wagons, with the local French girls essentially enslaved as nurses to transport and tend the injured. It was there, above the bloody river waters that would someday be bottled and sold by the shipload to American supermarkets, that Himmel spotted her.

She was virtually a child, barely eighteen years of age, the daughter of Le Pontet’s mayor, who had been executed by the Gestapo. Despite the soiled appearance of all the other females employed by our army, Gabrielle’s skin was pure and translucent, her fingernails unbroken, the flaxen blond hair that framed her diamond blue eyes falling straight and true to her slim waist. As she sat upon the bench of a caisson that contained the writhing forms of three wounded panzer crew, her chin erect and her hands lightly snapping the reins of her horses, it was clear that she had inherited a strand of royal French genes. Himmel ordered the driver of his Kübelwagen to halt, and he immediately fell in love. He was done with whoring.

The rest of how I came to know her, I shall leave for later telling.

And finally, the Colonel’s third trait which I came to temporarily admire was his greed. Perhaps that is unfair, and a more generous description of his calculations might be called practicality. After all, his strategic assessments of any given situation were almost always correct, and his analysis of the war’s progress, despite his own personal victories, was untempered by emotion. By the time I joined him, Himmel knew that Germany was going to lose this war. He also knew that the Allies were about to mount a massive invasion of the continent, the furious tide of which would not be repulsed. Despite the erroneous hunches of Hitler and the endless arguments of the High Command, Himmel would regularly spread a map of Europe across any makeshift dining table or vehicle boot, jab a finger at the coast of Normandy and state, “Here. It will come here.”

Although I shall never be so immodest as to claim that I had become the Colonel’s confidant, practicality dictated that he place his trust in my circumspection. Someone had to safekeep the Colonel’s papers, plans and plots, and inasmuch as I was imprisoned by my Mischling lineage and apparently no threat to him, he chose to trust me implicitly. Of course, before actually doing so, he did remind me that any slip of my tongue would result in an instant and painful death, without benefit of a hearing.

Thus, I came to know that Himmel planned to finish out the war not only as a survivor, but as a very wealthy one. He surmised that there were other high-ranking officers who had made the same calculations, some of whom had access to the whereabouts of Nazi gold stores and caches of jewels and works of art accrued during various occupations. But as my supremely practical commander determined, gold and trinkets were simply too heavy and unwieldy a treasure; difficult to transport, impossible to conceal.

He reasoned that the Allies would storm ashore in France sometime in the summer of the year. He also reasoned that with so many hundreds of thousands of Allied troops on the march, their paymasters would not be far behind. With the end of the war nearly visible on the horizon, all currencies in Europe would become essentially useless, save the American dollar, or the British pound.

The Allied Army’s treasury corps would doubtless be following their troops in heavily armored convoys of some sort. This would be Himmel’s swan song, his epitomal target, his final mission.

He was going to steal it from them.

And I was going to steal it from him...

II

IN APRIL OF 1943, I first faced my death on the second week of my employment.

Lest you think me of a timid nature and overly dramatic, I shall relay to you the first of many such events which sowed the seeds of a conviction that my survival might be in question.

I had just commenced my tasks for Colonel Erich Himmel of the Waffen SS, and at first it appeared that serving as the Colonel’s adjutant was certainly an insurance policy among the many uninsured. Himmel’s Commando was presently hosted in one of the many glorious castles astride the eastern banks of the Rhine, not far from Rüdesheim, a tiny village nestled in a bend of the swollen waters of the river. Early spring had blessed the rolling hills with greenery and flowers, cool morning fogs caressed the church spires, and as we were far from any of the industrial cities, the Allied bombings were no more threatening than, or discernible from, the occasional spates of evening thunderstorms. Surely, no matter the dangerous adventures to be undertaken by the unit, I would remain here in this virtual paradise of tranquility, while the SS did its duty elsewhere.

Inasmuch as I was not a combat soldier, and had never been trained as one, at first I served the commander in the only threadbare suit I owned. It was a loose and comfortable gray tweed, hanging a bit on my scrawny frame, but perhaps it comforted me somewhat, offering the illusion of being nothing more than a civilian secretary. I began by simply serving the commander his coffee and cakes, meals of goat cheese and rough breads, tending to the condition of his uniforms and boots, and making sure that his supply of eye patches was in order. He had lost his left eye early in the war, a wound that he dismissed as a blessing, for it obviated the requirement to squint when he fired his pistol.