Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

One night they had been presented as a secret gift to a visiting dignitary from the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, a high-ranking concentration-camp inspector who was known to enjoy the company of young men. But the exalted official’s preferences were not what had been assumed; he was a lover of young men, not a rapist. He had the prisoners untied and washed and shaved and dressed in civilian clothes. What he wanted was to engage them in conversation, as though they were all at a party. He had them sit on sofas in his private quarters and share delicacies with him-tea and cakes, when what they’d lived on for the past three years was thin soup and beweeviled bread. The inspector was charmed by Polaner’s French and his knowledge of contemporary art and architecture. It turned out that the man had known the late vom Rath, to whom he had been a kind of political mentor. By the end of the evening he had decided to have Polaner transferred to his personal service at once. He brought Polaner to his private apartments at another camp a hundred kilometers away, and registered him as a kind of underservant, a hauler of coal and blacker of boots; in actuality Polaner was treated as a patient, kept in bed and nursed by the camp inspector’s domestic staff.

At the end of two months, when Polaner had recovered his health, the inspector performed a kind of alchemy of identity: He had false records drawn up to show that Eli Polaner, the young Jewish man who had been transferred to his service, had contracted meningitis and died; then he procured for Polaner a set of forged papers declaring him to be a young Nazi Party member by the name of Teobald Kreizel, a junior secretary with the Economic-Administrative Main Office. With Polaner dressed as a member of the inspector’s staff they traveled to Berlin, where the inspector installed Polaner in a small bright flat on the Behrenstrasse. He left Polaner with fifty thousand reichsmarks in cash and a promise that he would return as soon as possible, bringing with him books and magazines and drawing supplies, phonograph records, black-market delicacies, whatever Polaner might want. Polaner asked only for news of his family; he hadn’t heard from his parents or his sisters since he’d entered the Foreign Legion.

The high-ranking inspector returned as often as he could, bringing the promised drawing supplies and records and delicacies, but he was slow to produce news of Polaner’s family. Polaner waited, rarely venturing out of the apartment, thinking of little else but the fact that he might soon learn his parents’ and sisters’ fate. He nursed a hope that they might have found a way to emigrate, that against the odds they’d gotten themselves to some benign and distant place, Argentina or Australia or America; or, failing that, that the inspector might be able to lift them out of whatever hell they’d fallen into, might reunite them all in a neutral city where they would be safe. It wasn’t an entirely baseless hope; the inspector had often used his position to arrange favors for his lovers and protégés. In fact, during the six months Polaner lived on the Behrenstrasse, those past favors took their toll: a series of irregularities came to the attention of the inspector’s superiors, and the inspector fell under investigation. Fearing for his position and for Polaner’s life, the inspector concluded that Polaner must leave the country at once. He promised to get Polaner a visa that would allow him to travel anywhere within the area of the Reich’s influence. But what was Polaner supposed to do? Where was he supposed to go? News of his parents had failed to arrive; how was he to choose a destination?

Later that same week, the first week of January, 1943, the inspector’s inquiries about Polaner’s family yielded answers at last. Polaner’s parents and sisters had died in a labor camp at Plaszow-his mother and father in February of 1941, and his sisters eight and ten months later. The Nazis had appropriated his family home and the textile factory in Kraków. There was nothing left.

The night he received the news, Polaner had removed the gun from his bedside table-the inspector insisted he keep a pistol for protection-and had gone out onto the balcony and stood there in his nightclothes, in a cataract of freezing wind. He put the gun to his temple and leaned over the balcony railing. The snow below him was like an eiderdown, he told Andras-soft-looking, hillocked, blue-white; he imagined falling into that clean blankness and disappearing beneath a layer of new snow. The gun in his hand was an SS officer’s Walther P-38, a double-action pistol with a round in the chamber. He cocked the hammer and put a finger against the curve of the trigger, envisioned the bullet shattering the ingenious architecture of his skull. He would count to three and do it: eins, tsvey, dray. But as the Yiddish numbers sounded in his mind, he experienced a moment of clarity: If he killed himself with this gun, this Walther P-38-if he did this because the Nazis had killed his parents and sisters-then they, the Nazis, would be the ones who had killed him, the ones who had silenced the Yiddish inside his head. They would have succeeded at killing his entire family. He removed his finger from the trigger, reset the safety, and slid the round out of the chamber. It was the bullet, and not Polaner himself, that fell three stories to that eiderdown of snow.

The next morning he fixed upon Budapest as his destination, in the hope of finding Andras there. The high-ranking inspector provided Polaner with the letters and documents necessary to obtain legal residency in Hungary; he even got him a doctor’s certificate declaring Polaner unfit for military service due to a chronic weakness of the lungs. He gave Polaner twenty thousand reichsmarks and put him into a private compartment on a train. When Polaner arrived, he made his way to the grand synagogue on Dohány utca, where he found an ancient secretary who spoke Yiddish; he communicated that he was looking for Andras Lévi, and the secretary had directed him to the Budapest Izraelita Hitközség, which provided him with Andras’s address on Nefelejcs utca. Klara had taken him in, and here he’d remained ever since. Just a week ago he’d received his official Hungarian papers, which he produced now from a brown portfolio as if to prove to Andras it was all true. Andras unfolded Polaner’s passport. Teobald Kreizel. Permanent resident. The photograph showed a thin hollow-eyed Polaner, even paler and more horror-stricken than the young man who sat across the kitchen table from Andras now. This passport was as crisp and clean as Andras’s had been when he’d left for Paris; it lacked only the telltale Zs for Zsidó. The brown portfolio also contained a party identity card stamped with the ghost of a swastika, declaring Teobald Kreizel to be a member of the National Socialist Party of Germany.

“These papers will serve you well,” Andras said. “Your German friend knew what he was doing.”

Polaner shifted in his seat. “It’s a shameful thing, a Jew posing as a Nazi.”

“My God, Polaner! No one would begrudge you that protection. It’ll keep you out of the Munkaszolgálat, at the very least, and I know what that’s worth.”

“But you’ve had to serve for years. And if the war goes on, you’ll serve again.”

“You did your time,” Andras said. “Yours was far worse than mine.”

“Impossible to weigh them,” Polaner said.

But there were times when it was possible to weigh suffering, Andras knew. He, Andras, hadn’t been raped. He hadn’t lost his country or his family. Klara was asleep in the bedroom, their son beside her. Tibor and Ilana lay in each other’s arms on a mattress on the sitting-room floor. Their parents were well in Debrecen. Mátyás might be alive still, somewhere beyond the borders of Hungary. But Polaner had lost everything, everyone. Andras thought of the Rosh Hashanah dinner they’d eaten together at the student dining club five and a half years earlier-how Andras had marveled that Polaner’s mother had let him return to school after the attack, and what Polaner had said in reply: She’s never glad to see me go. She’s my mother. That woman who had loved her son was gone. Her husband was gone, and their daughters were gone. And the young Andras Lévi and Eli Polaner-those boys who had spent two years in Paris arguing about a war that might or might not come, drinking tea at the Blue Dove, making plans for a sports club at the center of the Quartier Latin-they, too, were gone, grown into these scarred and scraped-out men. And he lowered his head onto Polaner’s sleeve and mourned for what could never be returned.