The snow lay shimmering under the lamps. There'd been another light fall while I'd been working on the memorandum and the pavement was covered again. It had long gone midnight and the street was empty. After six months of cover protection I was alone; not in any doorway nor in any shadow did a man stand. Control had got my signal and called them off.
As I walked back to the hotel the only tracks in the snow were my own.
4: THE WALL
"Your occupation, Herr Stroebling?"
"Florist."
He blew his nose, taking his time about it so that we could admire the white silk handkerchief. A flower was in the lapel the dark jacket. His legs were casually crossed in the pinstripe trousers and the shoes shone. "You are a florist?"
"I direct a chain of shops."
'Is that why you wear a flower in your buttonhole?"
"I always wear a flower."
Someone tittered.
The light was bleak in the tall cold windows. The heating was full on but many still wore their overcoats, as if in need comfort.
Another objection: personal comment on appearance of accused. Overruled: not customary to enter this court dressed as if for a festive occasion, therefore reason sought.
I watched the spectators particularly. I knew who the accused were. I didn't know who the spectators were. Some were the wives of the accused and had come here with them, for most of the accused were on bail and free to go home at the end of the session. There were others in the gallery who came and went alone, hunched into their coats and with their eyes for no one. A few were women.
One girl had come in late this morning and I had noticed her. She was good-looking but I hadn't noticed her because of that.
"Usher!"
A man was trying to slip out of the doors and on the presiding judge's cry an usher stopped him.
"Where are you going, counsel?"
"I am expecting a message, Herr Richter."
"You must not leave the court. I've told you before."
"It's a message to do with my clients, Herr -"
"Resume your place."
Both spoke wearily, repeating the formula. It was one of the recognised nuisance-tactics designed to wear down the patience of the court: a defence counsel would try to slip out unnoticed, so that later an appeal could be made under the Federal law on the grounds that some of the accused were technically unrepresented during a part of the hearing, their counsel being absent.
Procedural objections were also frequent. In the streets outside, the tabloids militated against this trial and all war-crime trials, while inside the court there were attempts at every turn to make a farce of the proceedings. They were totally unsuccessful. The presiding judge had the patience of a cat, and the legal and lay panel was disciplined by it.
I watched the spectators, only half-listening to the examination.
"Will you please tell us what your responsibility was at the camp, Herr Stroebling?"
He considered the question. Neat, silver-haired, professional-looking, his eyes calm behind heavy black-framed glasses, you'd take him for a top-ranking medical man and trust him with your life.
"To maintain calm, order and of course cleanliness."
"And your special duties?"
"I had no special duties."
"Evidence has been given that your special duty was select men, women and children for the gas-chambers they were unloaded from the cattle-trucks." It was the counsel for the prosecution speaking now: a young man with a face hollowed by months of sifting the reports whose every sheet recorded the unimaginable. The two counsels for the prosecution had been chosen for their youth, so that the new Germany could demand the account of the old. "It is claimed by an established eye-witness that while ordering the selection of disabled deportees for the gas-chambers you took a crutch from a cripple and beat him to death with it because he wouldn't hurry to the chambers."
"I know nothing of that."
"You cannot claim to know nothing. You can say that you did this thing, or that you didn't. You cannot just forget."
Was it a camellia or a gardenia in the buttonhole? I couldn't see from where I sat.
"It was twenty years ago."
"It was twenty years ago for the witness too, but he hasn't forgotten."
I watched the spectators. The voices droned.
"You say these people went willingly into the gas-chambers on that occasion?"
"Yes. We had told them they were de-lousing rooms."
"So they left all their clothes in the changing-room, hanging on pegs, and followed one another into the gas-chamber, peacefully?"
"Yes. There was no persuasion."
"But the evidence has it that some of them knew they were going to die. Several women left their babies hidden under the clothes in the changing-room, hoping to save them. The evidence has it that you personally, Herr Stroebling, led a hunt for such infants, and that you spitted them on bayonets when they were found."
It was too warm in here, too wearisome to lie.
"They were only Jews. I keep telling you."
A man among the spectators, an official of some sort with a peaked cap, broke down, and his sobs were embarrassing; an usher led him out. It was common enough.
The good-looking girl in the black Russian hat watched him go. She never looked in my direction so that I couldn't see her expression. She stared mostly at the accused, with her pale face.
The voices droned.
"… But I was given full and legal power, absolute power to treat these prisoners as I thought right!"
"And you thought it right to mutilate the body of this ten-year-old boy with every instrument of torture known to man, for the amusement of your friends?"
"For their instruction! They were not my friends, they were my junior officers, some of them just out of training college! They had to be hardened, and I had explicit orders to harden them!"
A woman was moaning, rocking on the bench, moaning with anger, her teeth chattering, staring at the accused. She was led from the court on the judge's instruction. I had not ever seen, in six months, a woman sob. It was always the men. The women moaned or cried out in their anger.
"… It was ordered me by Standartenfuhrer Goetz!"
"He is not here to confirm that."
He was still in Argentina, where the Bonn Ministry Justice had asked for his extradition. He was also in my memory, out of the burned memorandum. Goetz, the goitre.
"… And all the time you were on these 'administrative duties', Herr Stroebling, you say you did not know of any deaths taking place among your prisoners?" A fingernail now bitten to the quick. "A few. I knew of a few."