Mila 18 - Leon Uris

Reading the Jew Freud was legally banned, but Horst had brought several volumes to Warsaw nevertheless. Freud’s interpretations afforded him a never-ending, amusing list of clues to the strange behavior of his Nazi cohorts. Alfred Funk’s mania for cleanliness, he concluded, was an unconscious effort to wash his soiled soul with soap. However, the ersatz soap was of a very poor quality these days.

Horst reflected on the bizarre reactions at the earlier conference. He had attended many conferences at long polished tables where Funk and other Nazis announced dogma and sent everyone on his merry way with crisp “Heil Hitlers.” But today there was a roomful of unusual performances. The first cracks. The minute trace of doubt and fear.

Rudolph Schreiker loosened with a dozen audible sighs of relief that the ghetto was to be liquidated.

One could see the wheels of Koenig’s mind spinning to shift his fortune to Argentina, which alone showed a friendship for the Nazis.

Stutze was afraid to execute the final liquidation. In a moment he showed outright cowardice.

Sauer. A fine chap, like myself. Sauer never wavers. Knows his job. Plods on. He and I are true stalwarts.

It was Funk who had put on the real show, reflecting Berlin’s panic over some obscure Jewish archives. Funk had backed down from Sauer, something he had never done before.

Funk bundled himself into a large towel robe and padded, still dripping, into the living room.

“You look tired, Alfred,” Horst said. “I have just the relaxation the doctor ordered.”

Funk’s orderly was all over him, trying to dry his master’s hair. He dismissed the man curtly and lit a cigarette and flopped into a big chair, stretched his legs and arms, opening the top of his robe enough to reveal the double streaks of lightning tattooed under his left armpit, the mark of an SS Elite.

“I’ve got a pair of Czech sisters just in from Prague. They come highly recommended. They’re not much to look at, but I understand they do fantastic contractions.”

“Good. I need a little sport.”

Funk left the room with a drink, leaving the bedroom door ajar so that they could speak.

In the beginning of their relationship, Funk had detested Horst von Epp. His cynical attitude, his snide mockery and obvious lack of sincere devotion to Nazi ideals and his constant barbs at the conferences irritated Funk no end. Then Horst began to grow on him.

Horst von Epp ran his office with enviable German efficiency. Moreover, he was the best officers’ pimp in Europe, and once one got used to his sense of humor it lost much of its offensiveness. Funk came to understand that Von Epp was actually berating himself most of the time through his jokes.

He liked Von Epp for another reason too. He was reluctant to admit it, but he liked to talk to Horst. Since he had joined the party in 1930 he was in a league of tight-lipped, humorless men who considered it dangerous to speak one’s inner thoughts or even admit to having them.

He had taken vows as harsh as those of a monk in one of those silent ecclesiastical orders.

After the first shocks of Von Epp’s curt observations of the Nazis subsided he found himself looking forward to coming to Warsaw. With Von Epp he could share thoughts, speak, fence verbally, confide frustrations. He could indulge himself in a way he dared not, even with his own wife and children.

Horst leaned against the doorframe while Funk primped himself to his blond Aryan best before the mirror.

“How is our defeat at Stalingrad being taken in Berlin? Graciously, I hope.”

Funk dropped the hairbrush and spun around angrily, then contained himself. “We will break through at Stalingrad.”

“That is what I was afraid of. You spoilsports will be too bullheaded to see the handwriting on the wall. And the crushing of our Afrika Korps in Tunis?”

Funk quickly spouted the line of Nazi logistics. The Russians would collapse soon. America was too weak-spined to fight a sustained war, give up her sons and her luxuries and make the sacrifices necessary for victory. England? Washed up.

“Oh, for Christ sake, Alfred,” Horst said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I wrote most of that nonsense after Dunkirk. Know what I’ve been doing lately? Soul-searching. Do you ever soul-search?”

“That is a dangerous avocation reserved exclusively for those whose advanced age makes them otherwise useless. I gave it up twelve years ago when I joined the party.”

Funk pulled up his suspender straps and assured his servant he was capable of buttoning his own tunic. Horst followed Funk back to the living room, where they settled down to await the arrival of the sisters from Prague.

“Why is Hitler suddenly concerned over a few Jewish writings? Is it guilt? Is there a realization that Germany will lose the war unless they break through to Stalingrad? Does Hitler liken these writings to the other book the Jews wrote which has tormented the conscience of man for two thousand years? Does he fear two millennia of a Jewish curse gnawing at the souls of unborn German generations, thwarting their growth? Is it a fear of divine retribution?”

“Nonsense,” Funk snapped. He was about to recite the Nazi line about the war’s being fought because of international Jewry but decided to spare Horst, or rather spare himself from Horst’s retorts.

“Would you say this strange desire to find a few books when you own half the world points out that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword?”

“Nothing of the sort. Every conqueror has justified his actions. In our case the obliteration of the Jews is our holy mission, just as the obliteration of other peoples has been a holy mission for other empires.”

“Would you say that this desire to find the archives is more like a dog scratching frantically to cover up his dung pile?”

“Put it away, Horst. You talk as though the German people have committed some sort of crime.”

“Haven’t they?”

“Of course not. Precedent is all around us. Even the ancient Hebrews destroyed their enemies ... attributed to the commands of their God. Mongols made pyramids of skulls. The Chinese used human bodies as mortar to build the Great Wall. Napoleon had his Gestapo and the Russians have theirs. We are merely making variations on an ancient theme. Every man wants to be the best. The drive to rule is a completely natural expression of human behavior. In an individual the drive finds its expression by pushing the writer’s pen to create a book, by driving the athlete to strain his heart and his muscle. When the drive becomes a national expression it takes the form of conquest. Every people in every age have taken their turn. The world has only one standard for proof that one is better than the other, and that is conquest.”

Horst grunted at Funk’s cruel but accurate logic. “Granted,” he said, “that the desire to dominate is an unalterable trait in the human being. Let us take it a step farther. A woman wants to commit adultery. She has a family, children, position in the community. Does she walk naked in the streets to her lover and perform sex acts in a store window? No. Why? Adultery is a sin we all indulge in, but the woman finds a secluded place, deceives her husband, and avoids scandal. She plays by the rules. You see, Alfred, even the game of sin must be played by the rules. So must war be fought by the rules.”

Funk set his glass down. “What you are saying is that when the sloppy aim of the Luftwaffe kills women and children in London it is permissible. When it is deliberate we break the rules. Isn’t that a hypocritical double standard? Is it a greater sin for a submarine to kill a man on a ship without warning or to blast him, gentlemen’s style, off a battlefield? Your rule says ‘Kill soldiers.’ Is the killing of an armed man really less a murder than the killing of a child? We have learned that other conquests have failed because one cannot go to war with compassion. Total war means total death. If victory means reducing Poland to a pool of cultureless serfs, then that is what must be done.”