Götz and Meyer

le cannot command superior letters. Later you could see that at the Fairgrounds camp, too, where everyone, particularly the men, was expected to greet any German by doffing his cap and bowing to the ground. I could not have done it, not with this spine I’ve been troubled with for so many years. All it takes is a single, incautious gesture, too great a strain or a sudden twist, and I can barely move for days, stiff as a mast pole, and I spend those nights on the floor or sleeping on a board with only a thin mattress over it. Götz and Meyer, I’m sure, wouldn’t have been fazed by this in the least, I mean the hardness of the floor or the board. They were soldiers used to the exigencies of war, and they could drop off to sleep anywhere, in the truck, in a meadow or in a ditch, although Götz, and Meyer, too, was fondest of sleeping under a feather quilt. First you shiver a little from the coolness of the sheets, then warmth slowly envelops you, and then you dream dreams soft as feathers. If, as you settle into bed, you can see a quince on top of your bureau, and its fragrance gradually fills your nostrils, the experience will be complete. Of course, the women and children at the Fairgrounds camp could only dream of quinces and feather quilts. Although some of them had brought bedding with them, most of them slept on bare boards, here and there spread with a thin layer of straw. In those war years there wasn’t much of anything. The same went for straw: there was never enough, which, in the end, suited only the fleas. As soon as I think of fleas, I start to scratch and run my fingers through my hair. Götz, or was it Meyer, the one who gave sweets to the children, clearly was not as squeamish as I am. Perhaps at home, in Germany or Austria, he had a dog, so he was used to fleas, was quick to catch them and, with a little crunch, crush them between his fingers. I never saw Götz or Meyer, so I can only imagine them, but somehow I feel certain that Götz, or Meyer, had a poodle, a small fluffy thing called Lily. If Lily had only come to the Fairgrounds camp once, what joy she would have brought those children! They would have crowded round her, touched her little nose, patted her little tail and paws, forgotten all about the chocolates. In a report dated February 6, 1942, sent by Commander Andorfer to the Municipality of Belgrade, there were 1, 136 children at the camp who were under 16 years of age, and 76 children still nursing. The total number, clearly, kept changing, new prisoners arrived at the camp until late February, and even later. Among them were about three hundred Jewish women and children from a camp in Niš, while there were certainly children among those dying of disease, cold and abuse. The dead were laid out in the Turkish Pavilion. Whenever twenty or so corpses were collected, they’d be carried across the frozen Sava, shrouded in white sheets, to the Belgrade shore. In short, according to my calculations, assuming that there were a number of children, mostly somewhat older, among the victims of the firing squads from the time before Götz and Meyer’s truck arrived, and continuing, in some instances, in parallel with their activities, it turns out that death, in the back of that truck, sought — though death does not, in fact, seek but simply arrives — at least a thousand children and no fewer than fifty infants. According to another calculation, much more precise and based on counting the branches and twigs on my family tree, among them were about a dozen children from my parents’ families between the ages of 2 and 15. Although Götz, or Meyer, did not have as many chocolates as there were children at the camp, I allow myself to presume that at least one of those twelve got hold of one of the tasty dark brown balls which, like a magic spell, at least momentarily made his or her life happier. Happiness, however, melts every bit as fast as chocolate in the mouth, and no matter how much my little cousin tried to keep that taste on his tongue, it melted away, disappeared and gave way to the vagaries of memory. Memory, no matter how strange this might sound, was the single constant at the Fairgrounds camp, especially at 5.00 in the morning, when the prisoners were awakened by a bugle and then filed out for the inspection conducted by the camp commander or his deputy. At 6.00 a.m. they were given breakfast, at noon, lunch, and at 6.00 p.m., dinner, and at 8.00 all the prisoners had to be in their pavilions, on their cots. An orderly life, no two ways about it, though not what the Belgrade Jews had had in mind, exactly, if they had had anything in mind, when they began to respond to the summonses of the Special Police for Jews. By then, almost all the Jewish men had been shot, so it was women, children and the elderly who were standing in the long queues in front of the police station. They were permitted to bring with them three days’ worth of food, eating utensils, bedding and as much luggage as they could carry themselves. From there for the next five days they were taken, group by group, over the Sava River to the camp. First they had to lock their apartments and cellars, and surrender their keys marked with legibly written tags indicating their names and addresses. These bundles of keys, jangling cheerfully as they changed hands, were their tickets for transport. You handed them the keys, you took your place in the truck — nothing simpler. Among them, along with those twelve children, again a calculation of mine, there were twenty-three of my relatives, eighteen women and five older people. Only one man, named Haim, whose name was gloriously altered to Benko in certain documents and who, as a doctor, had been kept on duty at the Jewish hospital in Dorćol, was still among the living, not counting, of course, the cousins who I later learned were living abroad, or my father, who, as a reserve second lieutenant of the pre-war Yugoslav Army, had been taken into custody at one of the prisoner-of-war camps for officers in Germany. My mother was already hiding, with me, in the Serbian village of S—. She never spoke of it to me. While she was still alive, she refused to talk about the past, and at that point the past didn’t interest me either. I learned that detail later, when I immersed myself in the sea of documents and testimony kept at the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade. I was one and a half years old when we got to that village, and four and a half when we left, and all I remember are chickens pecking at crumbs from my little palm. My mother was 27 at the time, and my father, 35. They had married in April 1939, and I came into the world on May 18th of the next year, though it might just as well have been May 17th, because I was born at midnight. Götz and Meyer did not know this as they drove towards Belgrade. At one moment, during the drive, Götz, or Meyer, burst into lively yodelling to cheer up Meyer, or was it Götz, who was saddened by the thought of his ailing little daughter. Götz, or was it Meyer, despite his yodelling, felt that Meyer, or maybe it was Götz, was a bit too soft for such responsible duties, though he never said as much. Softness is the first step to insecurity, their officers told them time and time again, but the fact that Meyer, or maybe Götz, completed every assignment fully and promptly dissuaded Götz, or maybe Meyer, from his doubts. And so they travelled, the mountains gave way to plains, the forest to ploughed fields, the rapids of mountain streams to the phlegmatic, sluggish Danube, and finally they caught sight of Belgrade. The truck chugged along, reliable as ever, and there was every suggestion, including a lovely sunset, that Götz and Meyer would complete the task they had been assigned to everyone’s satisfaction. You could count those who were dissatisfied, with the exception of the camp inmates themselves and those five or seven Serbian prisoners, on the fingers of one hand. And as for instances of dissatisfaction with the Saurer truck that drove the Fairgrounds — Jajinci route, that hand might as well have been fingerless: there wasn’t a single criticism to count. Commander Andorfer’s request, when he asked, right in the middle of the extermination process, to be transferred to a new post closer to the front lines, can be explained by his nose: he could smell, symbolically speaking, the stench of carbon monoxide and felt it was high time to be smelling, instead, the fragrance of gunpowder. These smells are all of them unknown to me. I missed the carbon monoxide by a hair, as people often say, and, thanks to certain health problems I don’t intend to go into here, I was freed of my obligation to serve in the Army. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether carbon monoxide has much of a recognisable smell, and gunpowder, they say, stinks more than it smells, though that is no excuse for my ignorance. But if you admit you don’t know, you always have the edge over those who guess. That was how I consoled myself while I sat there collecting data for my family tree. Only when I had finished it did I realise that I was only at the beginning, that there is no such thing as ultimate knowledge, rather each new step forward in knowing something is a vestibule leading into new realms of ignorance. I wanted to discover who I was and what I was, and where I had come from, and the closer I got, the further I was from it. I took a city bus down to the Fairgrounds and walked among the crumbling buildings, stared at the ground as if I might find something there, listened to the wind in the trees, hopped carefully over the cracks in the concrete slabs. I didn’t find a thing. The windows in the tower blocks of New Belgrade gleamed, in front of me Belgrade was outlined against a stormy sky, a void swelled inside me, beneath me murmured the dead. The completed family tree, drawn on a large piece of white paper, lay on the desk in my sitting room. I carefully wrote out all the names and dates, underlined in black marker all the family lines, circled in red all the names of people who were still alive. I started drawing the first version from above, descending in all directions, and then I stopped, thinking that the network of life and death shouldn’t look like a fern dangling from a flowerpot suspended from a hook on the ceiling. The next time I started from below, at the spot where the tree should have its roots, and only then was I able to breathe a sigh of relief. Above the dense treetop, my branch protruded like a young shoot stubbornly refusing to admit that the tree had withered. At the age of 50, especially taking my ailing spine into consideration, I would have been better off speaking of myself as a stick rather than as a young shoot, but therein lies the absurdity of every representation of life, and any representation of reality will never be the same as reality itself, and there is nothing I can do about it. So, I figured, if I couldn’t dive into life, perhaps I could dive into death. Hence Götz and Meyer. By the way, Götz was called Wilhelm, and Meyer’s name was Erwin. I never saw them and I could only imagine them, as I did from the moment when I first stumbled upon their names, and as I shall do until the moment I close my eyes forever — I have always been appalled at the prospect of dying with my eyes open — and go off to wherever it is that nearly all my relatives went. My life split in an orderly and painless fashion into three parallel lives. One continued to belong only to me: in that life, I got up in the morning, shaved, had breakfast, went to work, came home, unlocked my letter box, read the paper, had lunch and dinner, watched television. My second life was one of constant transformations: in that life, staring at the family tree, which, like some sort of masterpiece, I had framed and hung on the wall, I would become, by turns, one of my vanished cousins: sometimes a woman, sometimes a little girl or boy, or perhaps an old man resting his hand on a prayer book, a merchant’s assistant among his bolts of cloth, a baker or a pharmacist. The third life had two heads: I was at once both Götz and Meyer, the angel of death and the driver, a soldier and a simple man, the pretend saviour and the real executioner. In such confusion, it is not difficult to imagine that there were moments when I did not know who I was. I would pour myself a glass of water, drink it as Götz, or Meyer, but my throat would still feel parched like little Estera’s when the door slammed at the back of the Saurer. In the evening I’d get into bed as my father’s brother, and I’d be assaulted by dreams of a village in the Austrian Alps. There were countless such examples, which does not mean, I hope no-one will think this, that I was a nut case. From the outside you wouldn’t have noticed a thing: from the inside, if such a thing were possible, you wouldn’t have noticed any changes either; it was my same feeble body, my same spineless spirit. It would make more sense to say, if I may allow myself the freedom, that I was holding an enchanted fairy-tale looking glass, and its surface would cloud over from time to time, and suddenly you could see a woman’s smooth countenance or a man’s grimace in it. In short, I was the reflection of other people’s reflections, a compilation of ingredients, the result of subtraction and a product of multiplication, pure mathematics. Neither Götz nor Meyer cared for maths. They were simple people and loathed abstraction. What you see, exists, and what you don’t see, doesn’t exist, at least until you catch sight of it. Life was simple and there was no reason for it to get all tangled up like an unravelling sweater. You could learn all sorts of things from the two of them. They knew, for instance, that the diameter of the movable exhaust pipe on their truck was 58 to 60 millimetres wide, the diameter of the metal pipe welded to a hole of that size on the underside of the back part of the truck. And they knew that the 15 or so kilometres they drove with their load every day was, in fact, an unnecessarily lengthy route, that the load could have been delivered earlier in the desired state. But they had no say in the matter, and as good members of the SS, they learned not to overstep their authority. How was it all explained to them? Was something drawn on a blackboard, with diagrams, letters and arrows, or were they given a brief lecture couched in such vivid terms that no visual aids were needed? On the other hand, those five, or seven, Serbian prisoners knew nothing. How surprised they must have been when they first opened the back door of Götz and Meyer’s truck and out billowed the dense, bluish cloud of poisonous gas! They stood there and stared at that sluggish cloud, which wafted lazily skywards, as if they were witnessing an act of divine revelation. They cocked back their heads and watched it float, and their jaws dropped further and further, as is often the case with the ignorant. Had Götz, or maybe Meyer, gone over to them then and said the word