Anyone who says, There is no limit, and thinks they can imagine the limit, must believe.
Obersturmführer Licht looked at Attorney Perl as he stood thundering on the wooden stage. The Commandant approached his prisoner. He thrust his silver pistol into Attorney Perl’s hand and set the terms. “Ten steps, then turn and shoot!” He turned and began walking.
And I have no idea if the Jew Attorney Perl will fight the Nazi officer, like the Jew Grandpa Lolek did, or if he will wisely escape, like the Jew Grandpa Yosef did. Or whether he might do something unexpected, like the Jew Hirsch, something that will transcend logic and imagination.
Anat will ask me, “So, what happened?”
And I will smile at her and say something like, “He ran away.” I have to say something. After all, we know he survived. “Attorney Perl lived, as you know.”
All the wonders, all the treasures, all the miracles. All the secrets, all the riddles, all the questions. It all spun into a gleaming cloud whose center hung over the brown wooden table in Grandpa Yosef’s house.
For three days he asked, and finally I came to meet Hans Oderman at his house. Effi said, “Come this evening, I’ll be there too.” So I did.
We sit within circles of pleasant conversation, bringing each other up to date on what’s new, telling stories, reporting how we’re doing. But over the circles looms a pulsating cloud, its vapors dripping down and baptizing us — the end is near. The childhood riddles, Gershon Klima’s sewage, the letter from Finkelstein, the battle at Monte Cassino, Grandpa Hainek’s sons, the questions I asked Attorney Perl, Grandpa Yosef’s journey, Adler’s philosophy, Hirsch’s theological inquiries, a ray of light from the Rabbi of Kalow, and the memory of Rothschild — all come together like clouds at the edge of a landscape. We sit at the table and talk comfortably, and I am certain: There will be closure here.
Grandpa Yosef serves us dinner. He brings out more and more dishes of increasingly peculiar concoctions. Effi helps him, leaving me and Hans to face one another. Six-foot-three-sapphire-blue-eyes-golden-locks and I converse. Every so often she comes in to interfere:
“I told Hans about your documentation. Talk to him, he’s very interested.”
She has an agenda; she’s promoting a scheme.
Hans smiles awkwardly, having partially understood what Effi said in Hebrew.
“They told me that you have documented what happened to your family in the war. I’m very interested in this.”
“Interested?”
“Yes, Mr. Ingberg said he would translate what you wrote into German for me, if you would agree.” Hans looks at me with a certain discomfort on his face. As if things are about to float to the surface and he can already sense them erupting. “Effi said you found out some unpleasant things about your wife’s grandfather.”
(What else did she tell him? She looks like she’s plotting something. She seems too directed, too arrow-like. As if she is assassinating the life I have now. But she walks past us innocently and asks, “Coffee, anyone?”)
“Umm…yes. He was a sort of Jewish collaborator,” I tell Hans. That’s enough.
“You know, something similar happened to me.”
Similar?
Tribal stories unfold around the campfire, and Grandpa Yosef arrives from somewhere and sits down, and Effi comes, with the coffee miraculously already brewed. We linger over our mugs for a while. Add sugar cubes. Stir politely. More milk?
“When I was here last year and you asked me what my family did during the war, you could say that I lied. Actually, I did not lie. Everything I said was the truth, but it was the truth that I am comfortable with. My father really was an orphan, and he was adopted by a family when he was ten. Everything I told you was about that family. I did not tell you about the real family, not because of lies, but because I have no idea who my family is.”
(All of us are sitting at the table, yet Hans Oderman is talking to me.)
“My father grew up an orphan. As a child, he was moved around from one orphanage to another. He told me very little about that period. It was an unspoken matter in our home. I’m sure you understand…”
(All the secrets, all the riddles, all the questions.)
“It was as though his orphanhood concealed a great secret. Perhaps because of how little he told and how much I tried to fill in with my imagination, I began to take an interest in orphanages. That was how I got to my academic research. And when I was writing my dissertation, I read one day something about the “Fountain of Life” project, Lebensborn in German. This is not something that is talked about very much. There I was, an academic researcher in the field, and I had never even heard of Lebensborn. Much less a layman. The Lebensborn was part of a plan devised by Himmler to encourage the procreation of the Aryan race. That word, Lebensborn, would not leave my thoughts. I felt that it had some connection to my father. I had a clear intuition. Something you cannot understand, but still you sense. I’m sure you understand…
“I began to make calculations, you see. My father never mentioned any details, and in Germany it was not so customary to investigate what had happened during the war years. But I began asking Father about his early years and, as if he had been waiting all that time for me to uncover his secret on my own, he said, ‘Yes, I am a Lebensborn child, and I have no idea where I come from.’”
“What do you mean, ‘no idea where he comes from’?” I ask.
But Hans Oderman heatedly continues a flow of talk that has long been welling inside of him. Questions can be answered later. He tells me about Heinrich Himmler — Reichsführer Himmler — who, more than all the other Nazi leaders, had the appearance of a modest clerk, shy and withdrawn. Behind his small glasses hid a disturbed personality bound by hallucinations, aspiring to fame, unfeeling. He constructed ideals of an eternal Reich and tried to make them come true; he failed, but the remnants of his ideas were left in the world to suffer. He had his scientists calculate the rate of exterminating unwanted peoples and the rate of building the German Aryan race, and they indicated a discrepancy between the required number and the expected outcome. Riechsführer Himmler hatched a scheme. He promised his Führer a hundred and twenty million Aryan Germans by 1980. He came up with a plan that would, in the future, produce half a billion Aryan Germans if everything went according to his calculations. First he began a campaign to encourage higher birthrates, supporting every German child-bearing woman through any possible circumstances of childbirth — every child was adopted by the Reich. Even children born from relations between German soldiers and suitable women in the occupied lands were adopted by the Reich. Heinrich Himmler instructed that not even a drop of German seed should be lost. Still, that was not enough. The population growth was too small and too slow. Himmler ordered that children and babies in occupied countries with potentially Aryan qualities be either kidnapped or purchased. Children were taken from their parents by bribery or by force. In problematic cases, the parents were liquidated, labeled as partisans or outlaws or enemy agents. The children, from all over Europe, were educated in special boarding schools. Those who grew up to be disappointments, lacking in Aryan traits, were exterminated. Those who met expectations joined the Reich. The little girls were treated with hormones to expedite their sexual maturation — without the ability to quickly produce offspring, their annexation to the Reich would be fruitless.
Despite the kidnapping and adoption programs, the birthrate was not promising. And so Himmler declared a new program: Lebensborn, the Fountain of Life. Pure Aryan women were housed in convalescence homes in order to bear children for the Reich. The fathers were all SS men, the purest of the race. Each woman and her offspring were awarded the finest of conditions, in a world completely cut off from the hardships and hunger that were slowly descending upon the people of Germany. All that was required of these women was to give birth, to produce more and more babies for the Reich. The essence of the Lebensborn scheme was to fill the wombs of German women with fetuses, to quickly manufacture rushed progeny and deliver them so the wombs would be available for the next batch of offspring.