Götz and Meyer

e Fairgrounds. When I was there, my entire body itched, but still that was easier to take. Belgrade was resting over there across the river. It was not, of course, the same city the prisoners had stared at hungrily, but it was silent in just the same way. No, that’s not right, I am not telling the truth: there were presentiments, guesses, rumours circulated, people noticed the absences, corpses were seen wrapped in sheets, but no-one did anything, no-one even tried to do anything. What could they have done? Would I have done something had I been in their place? Or would I have buried my head in the sand, happy that I even had a head and that sand still existed? I probably would have done just that, I certainly would have been an ostrich, everyone’s world was shifting then, everyone was learning to live from the beginning again. You can’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, isn’t that true? No, said the woman I met at the Jewish Historical Museum, but I preferred not to argue with her. I didn’t want to argue with anyone. History was a millstone, a millstone doesn’t think why it is grinding grain. I pictured Götz and Meyer all white, covered in flour, and couldn’t help but laugh. What a laugh it would have been for the children at the camp to see their white figures! Even more droll than Götz’s, or Meyer’s, little poodle with a bow on its head. The children would have been even more delighted had more than the amount of milk allotted for daily consumption, more than the regular 30 litres, been delivered. If you count how many children and infants there were at the camp, it works out that every child got a spoonful. After making that calculation, I couldn’t eat dairy products for several weeks. The trembling density of yogurt made me nauseous, while the amount of milk you needed to moisten oat flakes seemed like needless waste. Without the milk and dairy products I had consumed, so to say, my whole life, I felt like a drug addict without my favourite drug. My hands shook, the chalk crumbled in my fingers, my eyes filled with tears, my legs refused to obey me, words lodged in my throat. Sometimes I would stand motionless for hours, rigid and trembling, and then for days I couldn’t stop moving, I was moving constantly, as if all the world’s furies were after me. I only recovered when I read in a book that the quality of the food in the camp improved dramatically in early March. There was no mention of milk, per se, but the prisoners did receive three barrels of marmalade. I am assuming that this was marmalade made from mixed fruit, which would suit all tastes, and all possible different preferences, in equal measure. I rushed off to the market and purchased a pint of sour cream, which I later ate spoonful by spoonful until I got sick. The improvement in the quality of food, it said in the book, and there are statements from witnesses to back this up, was accompanied by a change in the behaviour of the German soldiers and camp command. The earlier nasty treatment disappeared, or at least lessened, the humiliation and punishments stopped, some officers even began smiling. At that point, the stories of transfer to some other camp, in Romania or Poland, or even to a warm island somewhere, became almost real, tangible, and the nights got shorter somehow, passed quicker in guessing and dissuading, melting into days which no longer brought so much anxiety and uncertainty. Commander Andorfer showed the members of the Jewish Administration the rules of the camp, there was no longer any reason to hide them, he hadn’t hidden them earlier, he claimed, he simply hadn’t known they were there, so that he, too, you could see just by looking at him, had been pleasantly surprised. As a sign of gratitude, I guess, they let him win at cards for several days running. Meanwhile, Götz and Meyer were also preparing to travel. If they were married, they whispered tender words to their wives, if they had children, they promised they would be home soon, bringing presents. Nothing big, of course, children needn’t be exposed from a young age to luxury which might only damage them later in life. Geometrically speaking, Götz and Meyer were moving along a horizontal route that would allow the Jews at the Fairgrounds camp to begin their vertical journey. It would seem, of course, that they, the Jews, would be travelling horizontally as well, but the path they’d be taking would head upwards, skywards. In historical terms, the departure of the Saurer with Götz and Meyer from Berlin marked the end of a debate of many months on the fate of the Jews in Belgrade and Serbia. Certain Nazi officials wanted to transfer them eastwards, to one of the newly formed ghettoes or camps; others, obviously more traditionally minded, felt that they should continue with the firing squads; at the very top, however, the spirit of modernity reigned supreme, and there was a readiness to continue providing support for the development of a more humane and painless form of killing. Finally, when it was all put down on paper and compared — the price of ammunition, and the costs of transport, and the number of soldiers necessary for it to function without a hitch, and the amount of food and other supplies, and the unquestionable influences on the psyches of those involved — it was clear that the most efficient method, as those people insisted who believed in the advancement of scientific thought, was to send a gas truck to Belgrade. Two drivers, four guards and five, or seven, prisoners: a dozen people was all they needed to strike one problem off the agenda. Even if one were to add to that the work of the grave- and ditch diggers, it still cost less than organising the transport and overly long and sometimes chaotic shootings. I had to admit that one rarely comes across such crystal-clear and iron-firm logic. Had I been able to apply similar logic to my life, it probably wouldn’t have looked like a messy train schedule gone awry, which was the nearest image of its, or rather my, condition. This was best seen in my attempt to bring order to myself by introducing order to my family tree, and it all ended in nothing but even greater trouble. I wrote letters to my relatives in Australia, Israel, America and Argentina. I introduced myself, apologised for not having written for such a long time, I believe I even remarked that we were the last kernels on a gnawed ear of corn, and then I asked them whether they could tell me anything that might help me to better understand events which, I confess, defy comprehension, but which must have had some sort of meaning, because if they didn’t, then our lives, or at least mine, would be meaningless. No-one responded. At 80 and some, their average age, you are grateful that day and night and tangible things still exist, you no longer ask yourself why you are alive. But nonetheless several times a day I would peer into my letter box, hoping for the postman’s mercy the way a believer prays for a voice from above. I would grasp at the tiniest straw, I admit, just as the prisoners grasped at the straw of the stories they had heard from Commander Andorfer. We’ll be sorry, I told my students, if we ever stop telling stories because if we do, there will be nothing to help us sustain the pressure of reality, to ease the burden of life on our shoulders. Almost at the same moment, as if on command, all of them stopped writing and looked up at me. But, they asked, isn’t life a story? No, I answered, and touched my earlobe, life is the absence of story. Nonsense, said Meyer, or possibly Götz. We were sitting under a willow tree, smoking. I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I knew that there were plenty of things I would rather be talking about with him than the purpose of narration. I was thinking of life, Meyer announced, or was it Götz? and shrugged in his attempt to get rid of a cloud of midges and mosquitoes. It is more precious, he added, than you think, much more precious, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. This had gone too far! A man with no face who has channelled death in the direction of thousands of men, women and children’s bodies with his own hands is explaining the value of life to me, in admonishing tones, no less! Perhaps I should have taken that dermatologist’s index finger a little more seriously? I wrote new letters to my relatives scattered round the continents. Did they have any idea, I asked in these letters, of any illness, not counting poisoning, that belonged to us like some family treasure? No-one answered, the postman began avoiding me. I would go out to wait for his arrival at the entrance, and he would detour all the way round the block of flats and sneak in through the back door. I would be standing on the street corner and he would trot by on the pavement opposite. His mailbag bounced and banged against his buttocks. In the end he started wearing ordinary clothes and carrying the post in an ordinary carrier bag. He even took off his postman’s cap and stuffed it in his pocket. Götz, or Meyer, the one who dreamed he might become a pilot, had no doubts. It may be that the uniform does not make the man, which I do not believe myself, he said sternly, but working on the assumption that this is so, you cannot say the same for headgear. At that he gazed fondly at the pilot’s cap hanging in the cab, right behind him. When he leaned his head back, the leather ties tickled his neck softly. But what about those people who don’t wear caps? I, for instance, wore a cap with a visor as a kid. Now I go bareheaded, summer and winter. My father went bareheaded, so did my mother, except when she did the housekeeping: then she’d put on a kerchief. I leafed through the pictures in our family album. My father had a hat in only one of them, but he was holding it. I sat down and wrote a new round of letters to my relatives, asking them to describe any caps they had, if they had any. No-one responded. When I pounced out of the cellar and interrupted the postman, he was terrified, tried to hit me with the carrier bag crammed with letters and newspapers, and threatened to report me to the police. Commander Andorfer was no nicer. He forbade all writing of letters, he shouted to the lined-up prisoners, and if anyone was caught writing a letter or sending it, they would be punished most severely. From the so-called block commanders, who maintained order in the pavilions, and the camp police, most of them youngish women responsible for discipline, they expected full cooperation. Indeed, just as the Jews fed themselves, so they also guarded themselves. If something went wrong, they had no-one else to blame, least of all the Germans. The Germans were here, as Commander Andorfer explained, to help them and, most important, to free them of the responsibility for punishing those who broke the rules, for instance, anyone who wrote letters or carried letters out of the camp. So it was, for the purpose of making an example, that the courier who used to go to the Jewish hospital on Dorćol every day, and through whom the prisoners sent letters to their ailing relatives and friends, was shot. He was shot on the grounds of the camp, not for the sake of us Germans, as Scharführer Fritz Stracke, Director of the Jewish Office within the Belgrade Gestapo said on the occasion, but for your sake, and therefore, he raised his index finger and paused dramatically, be prudent! However, every student is not a good student, a subject I would have something to say about, not even when attending real-life classes. Letters kept going to Belgrade, so two more women were shot in January 1942. In February another five or six women were shot, and then a girl. Obstinacy, Andorfer said, is bad for the health. Götz and Meyer were already on the outskirts of Belgrade at that point, and when they arrived, the letter-writing stopped. There was no longer any need to inform the world outside the camp, or rather, every person was gradually becoming a letter that, with no address, sped swiftly and reliably to its destination. Persistence always produces results, thought Andorfer while the cool breeze ruffled his hair at Jajinci. In my case, however, obstinacy failed, and not only in the realm of letter-writing. By the way, I no longer sent letters to my relatives, I sent them postcards. I never managed to find a nice view of the Fairgrounds, so I sent them a panoramic shot taken from Kalemegdan, which showed Zemun and New Belgrade. None of them ever responded. People began looking at me suspiciously at the archives and museums, their kindness gave way to distrust, their friendliness to intolerance. The lonely family tree dropped off the wall one night and crashed to the floor. I leaped out of bed, tripped, fell and gashed my forehead on the arm of a chair. The cut wasn’t large, I managed to stop the bleeding, but the next morning, at the infirmary, they put a piece of gauze on my forehead and attached it with a bandage. Marked, I walked around town wondering whether that was how the Jews felt when they had to wear the six-pointed star on their sleeve or on their lapel. The more I tried to be unnoticeable, the more the patch on my forehead gleamed and enunciated mutely, yet distinctly, This is he, this is he. Who am I? Good question, said that woman at the Jewish Historical Museum. When you find an answer to that one, she added, you will answer all the rest. I didn’t know what questions she was referring to. Götz and Meyer didn’t either. I’d like to see them with that white badge and ask them how they feel. It was about then, when summer was well along the way, that I began to give up. I’d get up listless, broken, every bone in my body ached, and the simplest effort, tying my shoelaces, for instance, turned into an unbearable trial. I stood before a glass wall, best to put it that way, and no matter what shoes I was wearing, no matter what I used to steady myself, I could not find a way to climb up and out. I slid, slid, and it got worse just when I thought I had finally figured out how to get a hold on the edge. Some things never can be grasped, and perhaps it is better that they stay that way, meaninglessness being their only meaning. A group of men, for instance, take seats around a table and decide to wipe out an entire people. There are some doubts here, although they are purely technical in nature, questions need to be answered beginning with the words