Mila 18 - Leon Uris

“Oh, cut that nonsense out. Those dreary people at the Gestapo won’t figure this thing out for months. How did you get the reports out? Italian diplomats?”

“Something like that,” Chris answered.

“See! I told Hitler personally not to trust the Italians. Those people are far too romantic to really carry out a first-class war of annihilation. As soon as we come to the acid tests, they abandon us.”

Chris laughed. “I’m only an Italian by passport. Come to think of it, I’m really not much of anything. But I do know the Italian people. They were sold a bill of goods that they were a reincarnation of the noble Romans, twenty centuries removed. So why in hell shouldn’t they believe it? All they really wanted was to be somebody again.”

“On German coattails.”

“The bride awoke to find her maidenhead broken, but the Teutonic god she married had turned into an ugly black gorilla. Sort of a beauty and the beast in reverse. Horst, the Italian people have no stomach for what you are doing in Poland. It was no chore at all getting five men to carry out five separate copies of the extermination-camp report.”

“Archetype German villain that I am,” Horst said, “I cannot comprehend why those who are utterly crushed insist on dying gestures of defiance. Martyrs are dreadful. I watched you sink to degeneration. What was that voice that called you out of Satan’s arms? What did it say to you?”

“It told me ... I must become worthy enough to receive the spit of a man who was once my friend.”

“Morality.” Horst shook his head. “Just before the war I saw that big hammy American baritone—what was his name?—Tibbett. Lawrence Tibbett. He sang in Paris. After a song about mother’s southern-fried cake he bellowed some more dreadful poetry. Somehow, the damned verse keeps going through my mind these days.

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be ... “

“ ‘For my unconquerable soul,’ ” Chris said. “To William Ernest Henley, 1849-1903.

“Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

“This immediately brings to mind the question of why all poets have three names and why wasn’t my mother at the fifth-grade commencement ceremonies, either?”

“It will never replace Schiller or Heine—that is, before Heine became a Jew. I know, you cannot put man’s soul in a ghetto or gas his spirit at Treblinka. It looks fine in the hands of poets but puzzling when it really happens. Why did you do it, Chris? A few sermons by minor bishops, a few editorials by minor newspapers, a few pasty statements by minor politicians, a few protest suicides by minor idealists. What did you hope to gain? Ach. Now I have to spend the whole winter writing counterpropaganda.”

“I’m sorry it’s making you lose so much sleep, Horst. I thought perhaps the report itself might annoy you.”

“Don’t give me that snide journalist’s sneer. I know—how could we do this? The fine, cultured German people, after which I rattle off the names of musicians, poets, doctors, and list all our gifts to mankind. How could we do this? It will take the great philosophical and psychiatric brains a hundred years to find a standard of morals to explain this behavior.”

“I’ll simplify it,” Chris said. “You’re a pack of beasts.”

“Oh no, Chris, we are not even to be classed with beasts. Man is the only animal on this planet which destroys its own species. But how in the devil did I get involved in this? I’m no more guilty than you are. Less, perhaps. I’m trapped. But you, dear Chris, are all the moralists in the world who have condoned genocide by the conspiracy of silence.”

“The conspiracy of silence,” Chris mumbled. “Yes, I buy that.”

“Hell, my own skin isn’t important. After the war all this business will be unearthed and mankind will register a proper shock and horror. Then they will say, ‘Let us all forget about the past. Let bygones be bygones.’ And all over Germany you’ll get a chorus of ‘Amen.’ What will the song be? There was nobody here in Germany but us anti-Nazis. Extermination camps? We knew nothing about them. Hitler? Always did think he was crazy. What could we do? Orders were orders. And the world will say, ‘Look at all the good Germans.’ They will string up a few Nazis as showpieces, and all the good German folk will slink back to their cobblers’ benches and sulk and wait for the next Führer.” Horst broke into a sudden sweat and lost his composure. He downed a shot of whisky quickly.

“What’s eating you, Horst?”

“The Jews. They’ll pin a curse on us. They’ll make us a scourge among men for a thousand years.”

“History is written by survivors. There will be no Jewish survivors,” Chris said.

“Hell! They’re uncanny. They have this maddened, insatiable desire to put words on paper. This mania to document their torment.” Horst calmed and thought. “Last time they documented their destruction we got a Bible, then a ‘Valley of Tears’—now what? You know, Chris, my brother was in a Knight Templar colony in Palestine before the war. Every winter he would climb around in caves near the Dead Sea looking for ancient Hebrew letters.”

“Why, Horst, you’re afraid of your hereafter. I wouldn’t have dreamed it.”

“I have a crawling suspicion that inside that ghetto wall are ten thousand diaries buried beneath the ground. And that is what is going to crush us. Not the allied armies, not a few tokens of retribution, but the voices of the dead, unearthed. From this stigma we can never. ... Forgive me, Christmas has a habit of putting me in a mood.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Chris asked sharply.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought I can’t let you out of Poland. I mean, after all, we have to play the game. We both played fairly and I lost I made a bad guess. On the other hand, no use letting Sauer get his hands on you. I am a believer in grandiose gestures! Pack a bag!”

Horst steered his auto down Jerusalem Boulevard. About them a dismal attempt to find Christmas cheer was being made by the Poles and despondent German soldiers.

“Chris, one thing I must know. This Victoria Landowski. Was she a good piece?”

“The truth? I wouldn’t know.”

“Amazing. Simply amazing. Well, we will find her one day.”

“When you do, do me one last favor. Give her a chance to finish herself off before Sauer roughs her up.”

“Chris, you’re asking entirely too much.”

“She is very important to me.”

“Oh well, it is Christmas. My promise. By God, I’m forgetting all my good German training and turning into a downright sentimentalist.”

The car stopped before the ghetto gate opposite the Tlomatskie Synagogue. Horst handed Chris a Kennkarte and special papers. “Into the ghetto. These papers will keep you out of police hands until you find your friends. In three days I’ll turn in a report you are missing. That should give you enough time to get buried in there.”

“I am afraid I have no friends left,” Chris said.

“Don’t be too sure. Jews have an Infallible intelligence system. They will somehow know how the extermination-camp report was spirited out of Poland.”

Chris got out of the car. “You’re one for the books.”

“Well, three cheers for the final triumph of morality in men. If we ever run across one another after the war, put in a good word for me. There is always a demand for ex-German barons as gardeners, bartenders, villain parts in movies. I am a man of many talents.” He sped away.

The ghetto streets were devoid of life. Chris turned up his coat collar and walked aimlessly through the swirls of snow. Eyes were on him from the rooftops the instant he entered. He wandered until he grew weary. Where to go? Whom to see? What a strange ending. Were there people behind the stillness? Was there life left?