David Albahari - Götz and Meyer

Applauded. But Meyer, or maybe Götz, meant it. His leather pilot’s jacket hung in the cab, and from time to time he’d put it on, with his fellow traveller’s silent consent. Then he liked to open the window and feel the wind in his face. At first he was distracted from his fantasies by the dull thumps and muted cries audible from the back of the truck, but as time passed he no longer noticed them. A person can get used to anything, why not that? And the thumping never lasted long, or the cries, because most of them in there were women and children. It all took longer with grown men, even the thumping, so, at least as far as that was concerned, their work was easier. Götz and Meyer must have known, how could they not, that almost all the Jewish men in Serbia had already been shot. How this had happened they didn’t know, or how the operation had been organised, but, truth to tell, they didn’t care. I, however, did know how it happened: almost all the men in my mother’s and father’s families were killed in the autumn of 1941. Assembled earlier in various collection camps and jails, they were taken off to be shot in smaller and larger groups, often in retaliation for German soldiers who had been killed. Buried at various execution grounds around Belgrade, they created a tangled web of death that I never managed to disentangle completely. As for the ones at the Fairgrounds, at least we know the precise route: over the Sava River bridge, through Belgrade, to Jajinci. I know the route; they didn’t. While they were in the queue behind the truck, they believed that they were headed for a new camp in Romania, or maybe Poland. Hadn’t that been what the camp commander told them, a man named Andorfer who had even made the effort to produce rules for the new camp and distribute them to the members of the Jewish Administration? Quite by chance, though maybe not, Untersturmführer Andorfer, before he dedicated himself professionally to the SS, worked as the business manager of a hotel. The conditions for accommodation in that hotel in Sölden am Öztal were far better than they were at the Fairgrounds camp, where broken windows were boarded up, cracks yawned in the walls and the roofs leaked. No wonder, then, that, at first, the prisoners in the camp volunteered for the transport: to get as far away from that hellhole as possible. They were humiliated not only by the camp’s subhuman conditions but by its full exposure to Belgrade, which watched them from across the river. The pain is more acute when what has been lost hovers constantly before your eyes. Silence can kill. Order is essential in all things, thought Götz and Meyer as they checked in with Standartenführer Emanuel Schäfer, head of the German police, otherwise a doctor of law. Schäfer informed Camp Commander Andorfer of everything, and he, in turn, told everything to his deputy, Edgar Enge. Before the war, or rather up to the moment he was drafted, Enge had worked as a tour guide. So it was that the operation for the final solution of the Jewish question in Serbia was, in fact, put into practice by a former hotelier and a former tour guide, quite ironic though hardly absurd if one keeps in mind the affinities between the two lines of work, using the same vocabulary: accommodation, transport, daily and weekly menus, the ordering of food supplies, hygiene, guests’ complaints. Perhaps one cannot speak of the camp prisoners as guests, perhaps one shouldn’t, and their complaints were hardly taken seriously. In formal terms, the German occupying forces were the host, but the purchasing of food was financed from funds acquired by selling looted Jewish property. The camp prisoners paid for their own accommodation. A total of 26,900,000 dinars was paid to the Municipality of Belgrade for food, the caloric value of which contributed to the great speed with which the prisoners lost weight, ultimately making Götz and Meyer’s job all the easier. The German occupying forces demonstrated the same efficiency when, in mid-October 1941, they decided to shoot the remaining four thousand Jewish men, excepting from that number approximately three hundred, whom they designated to maintain order among the women, children and elderly people in the Jewish ghetto, which was supposed to be in the “Gypsy Quarter” of Belgrade but which was never built. Instead of a ghetto, they opened the Fairgrounds camp. Here their efficiency came to the fore once more: they used pavilions that had since 1937 been the site of international fairs. So the Turkish Pavilion was, with startling aptness, where they set up the baths and, later, the mortuary. The connection between a bath and a mortuary is not entirely obvious, unless one sees the act of death, no matter how ugly it may be, as a transition to a state of greater purity. The camp-command quarters settled into a little building near the gate that used to house the Fairgrounds administration. The Jewish Administration of the camp was located at the Central Tower. Most of the prisoners lived in the third pavilion, the largest of them all, where all the partitions had been torn down. The surface area of this pavilion was about 5,000 square metres, which means that each person, and as many as five thousand souls were there, had the living space of a single square metre. The mortality rate was rather high among the prisoners even before Götz and Meyer got to Belgrade, so sometimes they had more space, which the prisoners mostly weren’t aware of, and therefore they weren’t able to make use of it. One shouldn’t hold that against the prisoners, because they were glad if they could move about at all. That was precisely why they were so delighted when Götz, Meyer and their truck appeared at the gate to the camp: if nothing else, they’d be going somewhere where there would be more food and where they could stretch their legs properly. At such moments life is measured in small increments: the length of one’s bed, for instance, or woollen socks. It was certainly no better at the first pavilion where the Jews brought in later were accommodated, although I don’t know precisely how large a surface area it covered. A kitchen was later opened in the fourth pavilion; at first, food was delivered by car from Belgrade. The Jewish men, the ones who were spared execution by firing squad, lived in the fifth pavilion. The second pavilion was set aside for Gypsies, and afterwards they made camp workshops there: a locksmith’s, cobbler’s, tailor’s and carpenter’s shop. The camp had its own hospital and apothecary: fifty cots or so at the pavilion of the Nikola Spasić Foundation. A real little city unto itself, make no mistake. Such a shame they had to squat out in the open to relieve themselves; if there had been some tidier solution for this, the Fairgrounds might have become a model Nazi camp. This made Commander Andorfer even more unhappy. He was a young man, in his 30s, brimming with energy, thrilled to be alive in the triumphal time of the German Reich, and if there was a war going on around him, and there was, he wanted to be part of it. His petitions were not heard, and he remained in this position until late April 1942, when the Jewish question in Serbia was almost completely solved, and Götz, and Meyer, began having dreams about going home. Götz, in particular, or maybe it was Meyer, had vivid dreams, so much so that he woke up at night, in a sweat if he had dreamed something unpleasant, radiant if he had stepped, in his dream, into his childhood home. Sometimes he wouldn’t wake up at all, but would howl and tremble, and Meyer, unless it was Götz, had to get up, shake him and squeeze his shoulders. You could hear similar screams in the third pavilion at night, although they were more often caused by water or urine pouring down between the boards of the bunk beds than they were by nightmares. Reality was bad enough, there was no need to dream something else, at least not at night. By day you were lucky to be dreaming, because the conviction that everything was happening to you as if in a dream, to someone else, helped you get through the time from dawn to dusk. I am speaking as if time is a river, as if it was the Sava flowing by them, but they wouldn’t have had the strength to wade across even a little stream. They crossed the Sava only in the truck driven by Götz and Meyer, or shrouded in white sheets, stiff and dead, on stretchers carried by Jewish men across the frozen river, the ones who had been kept from the firing squad, and the Jewish women who hadn’t died yet. So the camp prisoners not only fed themselves, they tended their dead themselves. And Götz and Meyer might say that they even killed themselves, because they breathed poisonous fumes without being forced to, and the more they inhaled, the more, paradoxically, they exhaled of their own lives. Sounds absurd, I know, and, chances are, this never occurred to Götz and Meyer, but this was a way they could shrug off responsibility and pile it on the shoulders of other people. Once you become part of the mechanism, you assume the same responsibility as every other part. Götz and Meyer didn’t know about that. The truck was theirs to drive, and they drove, always smiling, even when the wind blew dust in their faces, and they couldn’t care less what was going on in the back, whether the load was Jews or sugar beet. When the door at the back opens, the suffocated bodies tumble out, the first of them thuds to the ground, the others pile out on top of them with softer and softer thuds, until finally the last corpses slip out onto the others in total silence. Unprepared for this, surrounded by four German sentries, the five Serbian prisoners, or was it seven, step back in the face of this avalanche of the dead, but the grasping, stiffened Jewish hands brush their clogs. And where were Götz and Meyer at that moment? What was Andorfer doing? Was he supervising the unloading, or had he stepped back, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, or chewing, perhaps, on a dry blade of grass? When I first tried to sketch out my family tree, it looked like that blade of grass, like a bare tree, without leaves. I gleaned a few names from a senile old relative of mine who was spending his final days in an old people’s home up on Bežanijska Kosa. I enticed him with chocolates, which he was not allowed to eat because he had diabetes, and so it was that, for a moment, I pulled aside the curtain of his memory loss. At that point I didn’t know that Götz, or was it Meyer, had also used chocolates as a form of deceit, though in his case the sweets served to close the curtain of memory loss rather than open it, which, I have to say, is a big difference. A curtain is a curtain, no doubt, but life does not proceed in nouns, life proceeds in verbs. I read somewhere that the Serbian prisoners did their job in less than an hour that first day, to the unconcealed delight of Commander Andorfer, who felt that the smooth functioning of the staff and the unquestionable efficiency of the effort were a marvellous sign: the special assignment, as he put it in his telegram to the Gestapo, was underway, and now all they had to do was finish it, and after that Andorfer’s dream of a transfer closer to the front lines would come true, and he would be able to join in the struggle against the evil Communists. Andorfer, however, found the camp itself to be a bit unpleasant, because he had got to know, over time, the members of the Jewish Administration, and he even played cards and drank coffee with some of them. I don’t know whether what they drank was genuine or ersatz coffee, and I did not manage to establish what it was they played: tablonet or, perhaps, rummy, or some other game meant to pass the time. My cousin, for instance, played solitaire. He had big, fleshy ears, a drooping lower lip and watery eyes. Despite my best intentions, I could recognise nothing of myself in him. When I put that first chocolate on the table, he reached out, squeezed it, brought it to his nose, then stuffed it in his mouth and mumbled, “Klara.” A thin droplet of chocolate drool slipped down his chin. After the second chocolate, he said, “Flora.” After the third, he asked me if I’d shave him. I demanded to hear another name first. I held my pencil, there was a piece of paper before me on the table, I was ready to write. “Matilda,” my cousin said, “Bukica, Estera, Sara, Mara, Lenka, Rašela, Rifka, Zlata.” I hurriedly wrote down the names, the pencil flew across the paper, I hoped that I would be able to read them later. The cousin fell silent. I took out another chocolate, asking him for men’s names. “David,” said my cousin and closed his eyes, “Isak, Daniel, Bata, Jakov, Moric, Leon, Samuilo, Ruben, Rafael, Haim, Solomon, Ilija, Josif, Marko, Moša, Avram.” Then I shaved him. Götz and Meyer were always freshly shaven, especially the one who came into the camp and picked up the children, because he knew that children were afraid of beards, unless it was a long, white beard like the one Father Christmas had. I doubt the boys and girls who came over to him knew who Father Christmas was, and I am certain that they wouldn’t have been put off by a bristly beard on the face of a man who came in and out of their lives like an angel, leaving them gifts. Their mothers didn’t stop them. After all, Götz and Meyer looked a little like angels to them, too, since their arrival heralded the long-awaited departure. And who else but an angel would be spiriting them away from such a place, who else could have heard their anguish? I went to my cousin’s room three or four more times, always with a paper bag of chocolates in my pocket, and I managed to squeeze out a few more first and last names, to establish the lines of marriage and the closeness of kinship, and to determine, at least roughly, the number of male and female descendants. Then, as I wiped the bits of chocolate and bubbles of drool from his face, I decided I’d end the masquerade, because if I were to continue, it occurred to me, I would most certainly be hastening his end, which would make me no better than Götz, or Meyer, regardless of the fact that at the time I hadn’t heard of him, or rather, them. My family tree now looked quite different, it had filled out with leaves and branches, and it was sturdier. Judging by the image it projected, I ought to have had 67 relatives, some of them close, others more distant, while, as I later discovered, in fact I had only six, including the cousin in the old people’s home up on Bežanijska Kosa. Actually: only five, because my cousin died shortly thereafter, in his pyjamas, in bed, asleep. Every death should happen in one’s sleep, easy and painless, the way the good Lord meant it to be, I said to myself as the rabbi sang over his grave. I hoped that mine, too, would be like that. I started to search, to tour dusty archives and visit museums, I brought home new books from the library, stared at group photographs, compared various reports, compared lists. I buried myself in the lives of others, as if they were mine, which they were, in fact, though my life didn’t know that. I was an ear of corn with nothing but a few loose kernels left on it. One of them, I learned later, was an aunt in Argentina, another stood for a cousin who lived in Israel, a third was a distant relation in America, and the fourth and fifth cousins were off at the edge of the ear of corn, instead of Grandpa’s youngest brother and an even younger sister who were now living, as an old man and woman, in Australia. I had never married. In other words, when all of us died off, when our kernels fell into the washtub of time, nothing would be left from my parents’ families. At first, this realisation stirred a fierce rebellion within me; then I calmed down. You don’t get anywhere with anger, it is only poison coursing through your veins, blurring your reason, and nothing could alter the fact that I was a wrinkled apple at the end of a dry branch on a withered tree. You can’t cure yourself of death. I would be willing to bet that Götz and Meyer never so much as thought of such a thing. At their age, and I am prepared to believe that they were younger than Commander Andorfer, you don’t often think about death, at least not your own, not even when you are in a war. They had all their teeth; their hair, though short, was still thick, their skin taut, their muscles toned, their hearts healthy. Who would be thinking of death, especially at the wheel of a powerful Saurer truck? And powerful it most certainly was, because it didn’t measure its strength in tons or kilometres, but in human souls. From the Fairgrounds to the foot of the Avala Hills it swallowed up eighty souls like a breeze, sometimes a full hundred, and all the while it never tired, there’d be no trace of overheating or exhaustion. Not even on those days when the truck travelled the same route twice, bringing the sum of transported souls dangerously close to a total of two hundred, with not a trace to be seen on the truck. “This is one fine truck,” Götz and Meyer would say, “loyal as a horse, tough as a donkey and stubborn as a mule.” There were no better words to describe that technical wonder, to sum up its inner and outer features so precisely. The prisoners, no doubt, though this has not been recorded anywhere, experienced it quite differently: like a carriage or a magic carpet to transport them high, high above the earth, and then lower them gently back down to reality. They didn’t know just how close to the truth they were. That, of course, is my own fabrication, which I came to later, after I’d reconstructed their lives and tried to decode their deaths. That was also not an easy task, let’s not fool ourselves. First I had to establish their names, then I figured out their addresses and occupations, their membership in various organisations, religious and secular, their political leanings, their involvement in administrative and supervisory boards, the schools they attended, the excursions they went on, the property they owned. I bought a map of Belgrade and marked where they had lived with “x”s. I don’t know what I expected from this, but the little “x”s did not, in their random pattern, spell out any sort of secret message for me. The city had changed in the meantime, and some of the little “x”s were now in the middle of squares or parks, in playing fields or beneath new tower blocks. Some houses, especially in the Dorćol neighbourhood, were still standing, most often with crumbling façades, dented gutters and damp hallways. I went there, stood in front of them and watched, as if they had something they could tell me, and I’d poke around until I started noticing worried faces behind the curtains. I got so heavy with all the lives, with the shadows of these lives, that sometimes I could barely get myself to move. Götz, and Meyer, would most certainly have criticised me for this. Both of them were slender, and both were ready, as soon as they got up in the morning, still in their underwear, for physical exercise. Furthermore, Götz, although it might have been Meyer, regularly ate fresh fruit, but he was also fond of stewed apples and had a particular weakness for prunes. Once, for instance, they talked for a long time about the importance of prunes for regular digestion, and another time Götz, or was it Meyer, the one who was not, perhaps, married, pointed out to Meyer, or was it Götz, the one who probably was, that fresh fruit, if you had enough of it, was just the sort of thing to ease his little daughter’s frequent sore throats. Meyer, or was it Götz, was always anxious about that, and he’d ask his wife in every letter home to take good care of their little girl and to write to him about how the girl was faring. You get a sore throat today, tomorrow it’s pneumonia, and the day after it’s anybody’s guess. A person must remain vigilant, therein lies the art of living. One day you relax your standards, and the next day you are in a camp, so it goes. Jews, this much they knew in the Reich, had been physically unprepared, they dedicated all their attention to spiritual achievements and to mumbling prayers, as if the spirit and prayers could shield them from everything, and as soon as they were faced with physical trouble, they’d snuff out like candles in the wind. Until the spring of 1941, more precisely: until April 16th, the members of my father’s and mother’s families lived to an average age, some of them even reaching a ripe, old age, but between then and May 1942, the percentage of their mortality rises steeply, and their lives get shorter and shorter. All that was left of a healthy family tree was a clipped crown with the occasional rickety branch. I stared at those two years that had gnawed away at the leaves of my tree like caterpillars. I had to press my fists to my chest, my heart pounded so. And Götz, or was it Meyer, once clutched at his heart, but that was when the axle broke on the Saurer. It was my life breaking, that was the difference. You can always weld an axle, and later it will, as they say, be good as new, but once a life breaks, it is broken forever. Wherever you turn, you trip up, no repairs can make it better. In other circumstances, I could have gone to see a doctor and said: Doctor, my heart is broken. Had I been the doctor, I would have chuckled. Instead, I wandered the streets of Belgrade searching for ghosts. From the outside, I looked like an old pensioner trudging down the street, my shoulders hunched, my hands crossed behind my back, but deep inside I was hurrying from place to place, terrified, breathless, feeling myself collapse in the general disarray of my being. No, nothing like that could ever have happened to Götz, and Meyer, even less to Untersturmführer Andorfer or Scharführer Enge. They were the same on the outside and on the inside. Then I still didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t really know anything at all. My parents, while they were still alive, said nothing about their past: what happened happened, and there was no point in discussing it. When they died, I was drawn to other things: strolling in Kalemegdan Park and, above all else, my collection of stamps with portraits of writers and literary motifs. They never even spoke of their own, or my, Jewish identity, convinced, I guess, that if evil were to come knocking at our door again, the silence would make us invisible. So what I knew was limited to the most general facts from textbooks, history, films and works of literature, which didn’t in any way suggest that those facts had anything to do with me. History was, after all, impersonal, at least as a discipline, it couldn’t exist at the level of the individual, because then it would be impossible to grasp. That was why every history came down to searching for the smallest and largest common denominators, as if every person was the same, and all human destinies were equal. Perhaps it might seem that these claims were unfounded, but I will try to explain them with a simple example. History drily informs us that the German occupying forces issued an order on April 16th, 1941 to register and identify all Jews, and that by July 13th that same year, as is stated in the periodical business report which the Municipality of Belgrade submitted to the Ministry of the Interior, nearly 9,500 Belgrade Jews registered. This is where history has no more to say. All you need to do, however, is to wonder how each of those 9,500 men, women and children felt when they donned the yellow armband or the six-pointed star, and history begins to crumble and fail. History has no time for feelings, even less for trauma and pain, and least of all for dull helplessness, for the inability to grasp what is happening. One day you are a human being, and the next, despite the armband or perhaps precisely because of it, you are invisible. No, that is not history, it is a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, in which every individual is a separate cosmos. Nine thousand five hundred universes shift from a steady to a gaseous state, more than merely metaphorically, especially when you think of those five thousand souls who became acquainted with the back of Götz and Meyer’s truck. I’ll give you an example: an order was issued on May 30th that same year by the military commander in Serbia, according to which all Jews, and with them Gypsies, had to report their property within ten days. The Legal Department was responsible for seeing to this by order of the Municipal Assembly President on June 4th, and was, at the same time, responsible for submitting the processed reports to the District Command Office. The Legal Department did its part of the job within the given deadline and, as early as June 14th, sent on a list of 3,474 Jews and Gypsies who had reported their property, pointing out in the enclosed letter that the department would not be able to send on the reports to the District Command Office because, among other things, they had no clerk proficient in German, nor had they a single typewriter that could type in anything but Cyrillic. That much is history. Outside history are all those years, knowledge and skill which each of the people on that list had invested in acquiring their property, whether they were street vendors, chemists, lawyers or housewives, and outside history remains the impact of the fact that in all those documents the wordsЧитать дальше