He said he would come. His voice was as gentle as his face. Only the eyes revealed the weakness that had brought him to this day; they were the eyes of a man who is ready to show fear, even when he is smiling.
We found the superintendent with the captain and sergeant. He'd obviously been primed; his face was set in the aftermath of shock. It was quiet in the room. We could hear one another breathing. The captain went into his routine and I saw the fear come flooding into the older man's eyes, and looked away.
"I must therefore ask you to come with me, Herr Professor."
"Yes," he said softly. His gentle head was raised and he stared through the windows at the black trees that stood in the snow, a group of waiting skeletons. "Yes," he said in soft answer to the summons he had lived in fear of, for twenty years.
They took him away. The superintendent had asked me to stay a moment.
"It's unbelievable," he said. "I'm sorry."
"He was of my race." He stood staring at me and his hands were fumbling one against the other as if they were something he'd picked up and didn't know where to put. "Why did he betray us?"
"Out of fear."
"Was he tortured?"
"Not at that time. He knew he would have been if he refused to talk." For his sake I said: " It may be accepted in mitigation by the court."
"Mitigation?" I might have used a totally foreign word. "But there were thousands who were threatened with duress, and they didn't -"
"Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Six millions. He wasn't one of them. I'm sorry."
The blockwarts has used him, and then the Zellenleiters, and the kreisleiters, and at last the gauleiters, playing on his fear and using him as a more and more valuable tool. The evidence on file recorded that he had ‘caused the deprivation and ultimate death of his friends, his neighbours and hundreds of his own kind, by revealing their names and hiding places to the Gestapo.’
The shortest and most graphic of the testimonies held him responsible for ‘a good ten truckloads of deportees who had gone up the Auschwiq chimney.’
"Do you know anything about the Star of David School, Herr Quiller?" He was eyeing me reflectively, as if deciding to give me a confidence.
"It's modern, progressive, with a bias towards the Arts -"
"I don't mean that. Come to the window. I will tell you."
Beyond the window-bay the land rose gently towards the south. Behind the trees were scattered the black oblongs of roofs in the snow. There was the track of a stream running east-west through the floor of the hollow, but there were no willows to mark its banks.
"The school is modern and progressive, yes, and the Arts have a greater place in our curriculum than usual; but it has this in common with other schools: it's full of children. It was built for them especially. They run across these fields and climb those trees in freedom. It is their land, all theirs. And do you find the building itself bright and well-lighted with the big windows? And the decor vital with bright colours?"
I said I did.
"The architect was Joseph Steiner himself. Long rooms, wide corridors, a beautiful synagogue of white and purple stone from Bavaria, after the Finnish style of church. The children are very happy here. You can tell from their singing. You have heard them singing. You should see them in summer – that field is a carpet of clover and they picnic there. You should hear them sing on a summer evening, Herr Quiller." He pointed through the window. "That looks like a stream, but it's really the remains of a railway embankment – a siding. The rails were taken up and used in the construction of the building, and the embankment has slowly fallen almost level with the meadow. The trucks used to come in there from Magdeburg, and that farm behind the trees was the medical experimentation block. The gas-chambers were this side of the railway, here where we are standing. The foundations are built of their rubble. Some of the arrivals were hanged from those trees so that those who were brought here could see them and be warned about disobedience."
He turned from the window. "Few have heard of the camp, because it was one of those successfully destroyed by the Nazis under the last-minute ‘Cloud Fire’ order designed to obliterate evidence of atrocities. You won't find any record of it. But some knew of it." He turned his eyes on mine and I knew he wasn't looking at me but at men who had been here before me. "So we built this monument to our dead. We thought it was better than just a stone with a plaque. Some of the children laugh and play where their grandparents died. Of course they don't know it. This is in confidence, and I think you are a man to respect such a confidence. I have told you this because I can't believe this thing about Professor Foegl. He was so gentle. The children are going to miss him, you know."
He suddenly flung out his hands – "But what made him come here, to us? Did he know what this place was? Do you believe he knew?"
"He may have."
"Then why?"
"Remorse. Guilt. Cowards have the biggest consciences." I remembered how Foegl had stared out at those trees just now when he knew it was all up with him. "We don't know how much he might have been punishing himself, making himself face his past, everywhere he looked. It might have been that."
He stood for nearly a minute, motionless. Then he said:
"I'm glad he's gone. This is holy ground." He suddenly offered his hand. "You'll have to forgive me. The choir had only just started, you know. I must go and do my best with them, but goodness knows I'm practically tone-deaf."
I walked through the wide glass doorway alone, between the rows of galoshes and gum-boots. The tracks of the black Mercedes were on the snow. I looked across to the dark gnarled trees. For a minute the silence brooded, and I made myself wait, my breath half-held, standing beside the car.
Then it came again, the singing.
A thaw had set in and the evening streets were slushy. Snow was melting on the ruined shell of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche and the wrecked bones of its spire stuck into the sky, naked again and oddly beautiful.
Die Leute had me on the front page, a good full-face picture standing beside Rauschnig outside his beauty-salon. Three other papers had the same picture and two of them carried the later shot of the police-captain and myself leaving the offices of Schrader-Fahben.
Other front-page news was that Franz Rohm, Secretary of the Road Safety Committee, had hanged himself, as I had known he would.
It would have been difficult to get photographers down to the Star of David School because we didn't want the children worried, but I had sent in the word to F.A.P. and Die Leute carried a picture of Professor Foegl and a full paragraph, linking him with Rauschnig and Schrader and commenting on the ‘lightning wave of arrests’ that marked the day. I would therefore be linked, myself, with the Foegl snatch, and Phoenix wouldn't miss it.