He knew that Karl had been home all day. Now that it was night, he knew his son would be coming to say good-bye to him. It was a dreadful penance, to sit mute and helpless, unable to utter a word to save him. Unable to force truth on him... Yet what even now did Albrecht Jaeger know of his country’s history? Was there, actually, any final truth?
Oh, yes, he had tried to answer the lies, but with sarcasm, humor, an eyebrow raised ironically to suggest disapproval, nothing that would stop a blow or a bullet. Yet, when he had been ready to speak out with force, the stroke had darkened his mind and scattered his words.
Still the most dreadful truth of all was that the truth itself was not, had never been, in hiding. Everyone knew it well. The talk of the relative merits of carbon monoxide and prussic acid as killing agents... The failure of the diesels at a camp (Belsec, he wondered?) had ultimately resolved that issue.
Everyone knew. Professor Jaeger had seen the large J stamped in the Jewish passports. He knew the law that required all Jews to use Israel as the middle name on official documents. And Jewesses the name Sarah. Confiscation of Jewish property was known... and the system of markings in the camps, colored patches on each prisoner’s uniform, red for political prisoners, black for anti-socials, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, and for Jews, two yellow triangles sewn to form the hexagonal Star of David.
In his own classroom he had suffered the myth of Horst Wessel created by the Nazis, and in tolerating it had abetted it. Horst Wessel was a pimp who lived off his mistress, a whore named Erna Jaenecke he had stolen from another party member, Ali Hoehler. Hoehler shot Wessel through the mouth, and within weeks the whore’s landlady and Hoehler and the whore herself were all dead from mysterious causes and Horst Wessel was officially declared a Nazi hero... “fallen in the cause of justice, killed by the Communists.”
But what if everyone knew of such things? Did the universality of knowledge somehow make it all meaningless? Old Isaac Levy, Rudi’s uncle, believed that, believed the convulsions inside Germany were nothing less than a national aberration “... they know not what they do.” He could write that even as he sent the stories and pictures about Rudi from Buchenwald, pasting them inside leases and court forms. But could old Isaac Levy say from where this national aberration came?
The stars above, the moral law within... Immanuel Kant’s insistence that man was forever unknowable and unaccountable — was that where it came from?
The professor looked down at his heavily veined hands clenched together on the gray shawl over his knees. It was he who had told Rudi Geldman he must leave his schooclass="underline" that was the new law. Rudi hadn’t understood at first. They were friends and he hadn’t expected this, not in the Jaegers’ home, where he had frequently spent holidays and where he had argued with Karl about the Cornet Rilke, gentle and good-humored in the beginning, harsher and more accusing as the political climate darkened with the clouds of the coming war. They had studied this work of love, this famous poem by the great German artist, Rainer Maria Rilke, in the old halls of Albrecht Jaeger’s gymnasium, and they had learned it by heart and knew that this romantic invention of tender and ardent patriotism had been carried in the knapsacks of thousands and thousands of soldiers in the Great War, as treasured as their packets of letters from home:
“He thinks: I have no rose, none. Then he sings. And it is an old sad song that at home the girls in the fields sing, in the fall, when the harvests are coming to an end.
“Then the Marquis strips off his great right glove. He fetches out the little rose, takes a petal from it. As one would break a host.
“ ‘That will safeguard you. Farewell.’
“Von Langenau is surprised. Then he shoves the foreign petal under his tunic. And it rises and falls on the waves of his heart. Bugle-call.
“My good mother, be proud, I carry the flag. Be free of care; I carry the flag. Love me; I carry the flag.”
“Where is the evil in love and patriotism?” Karl had demanded.
“The evil done in their names,” Rudi Geldman had replied.
And who was right? One answer to that question was in the pictures of Rudi Geldman and old Isaac Levy’s letter, both on a shelf of the breakfront within reach of Professor Jaeger’s trembling hands.
Isaac Levy, like his nephew Rudi, an inmate at Buchenwald, had been forced to transfer his shares in an optical shop to his partner, Herr Munder. When the papers came to Munder — lease arrangements, inventory listings, a variety of legal forms — he had discovered that old Levy had sent a letter and pictures of Rudi Geldman along with them, pasting them cleverly inside the thick bundle of documents. Herr Munder’s daughter had brought the letter and pictures to Albrecht Jaeger. She had come to him late one evening, a plain, serious young woman, her leg heavy with the brace she’d worn since a childhood illness. A few years before, she was one of the brightest students in the same class as his son and Rudi Geldman. And she had defied her own father to bring him the information from Levy.
And what if the stars were above, symbols of God’s glory? Where was the moral law within man?
Old Levy might have an answer. In one part of his letter to Herr Munder, he had written:
“Try to understand. Punishment in the camps isn’t related in any logical way to unruly behavior or infractions of the rules. It isn’t designed to correct bad habits. Nor to insure obedience and discipline. Its function is to degrade and shame a human being to the point that he becomes convinced of his own vileness, becomes an accomplice in this brutalizing process of degradation and shame.
“Random victimization is the ultimate terror. The lash has no personal preferences, knows no favorites. Punishment is administered often on a wooden rack to which the young and old, sick or well, men or women, are trussed face down to expose their naked buttocks.
“Rudi’s mistake was to insist that there was no degradation in survival. By any means. His Haison with Captain Sturmer was not degrading to Rudi. It couldn’t touch him so long as he owned the dignity bestowed on him by the will to endure. And so long as the relationship made Rudi seem less than a man, it was not only agreeable but stimulating to the captain. When he realized this wasn’t the case, that Rudi would still talk of philosophies and moral rights, that Rudi was indeed the stronger man, he turned Rudi over to the guards.
“They didn’t care about Rudi one way or the other, he was just another random victim wearing a yellow star. So remember, what they did to Rudi Geldman was done without any particular malice.
“In tears, I say there was nothing personal in it. This same torment was frequently used, I have been told, by soldiers in the old ghettos of Eastern Europe to punish the leaders of uprisings. Some of the guards at Buchenwald must have learned of it down through their great-grandfathers.
“They stretched Rudi’s naked body across a bale of hay in a horse stall and shackled his wrists and ankles to iron stanchions. They spread a thick mixture of salt and flour over his thighs and genitals and the soles of his feet. When this hardened they turned two goats into the stall to lick away the concoction with tongues as ridged and abrasive as metal files. In the ancient punishment, the chest of the victim was cinched tightly with leather straps to restrict breathing. Spasmodic and uncontrollable laughter, the helpless response to such a violation of nerve endings, exhausted the oxygen rapidly and the victim died of asphyxiation within half an hour. Rudi’s chest was unfettered; his convulsive laughter and screams sounded through much of that night and subsided only when his nervous system collapsed in violent shock. Captain Sturmer ordered the pictures taken.”...