I’d been asking myself the same question. There was no such thing as privacy anymore, not in the old decadent pre-Liberation sense of the word, and even the most hardened criminal couldn’t escape the law once his identity was known to the authorities. So how had the Jew lasted for the past twenty-five years?
“Fritz,” Kohler asked, “were there any escapes from Barbarossa, or the camps out in Michigan and California?”
“Sure there were. I’d have to check the exact figures, but offhand there must have been over 3,000. There was a mass breakout at Encinido in ’48, aided by the local Resistance, and over 500 made it to Mexico. Hell, we had a case right here in the first couple months of my command. There was a Pattonite cell among the camp guards, they were systematically taking Jews out on work details and shooting them with blank cartridges, piling the bodies into our meat trucks for burial and then smuggling them across the border to Canada. They got over 300 out that way till we got wise, but every one of them was back behind barbed wire within a month. The same at Encinido, Detroit, everywhere. A few got out, sure, no security is foolproof, but we always got ’em back. And none of ’em made it out twice.”
“Not even one?”
“Not even one.” Kastendieck chuckled. “God, when I think of the trouble we had tracking ’em down, and the flack we got from Himmler, much less the logistics problems we had here at camp, sometimes I used to wish they’d all just disappear and leave me alone. But we had to expend as much time and effort and manpower to get one man back as a thousand. You know the orders, right from the Fuhrer himself. They wanted a clean sweep, and a clean sweep we gave them.”
“But in the early days,” Kohler persisted, “right after Liberation, when the Resistance was still strong, there must have been a lot of subversives harboring Jews, hiding them out in the cellar or attic, that kind of thing.”
Kastendieck nodded.
“Damn right there were. Shit, over at the Allegheny Camp we had to gas a hundred and fifty thousand people, all on harboring charges. Too bad too, all good Aryan stock, most of them anyway, some Polacks and Sicilian, but mainly Nordic. Completely perverted by the Jews and Bolsheviks, of course, no room for re-education. And we had to be harsh in those days, we’d only been in power a year and there was still a lot of opposition. What was it the late Doctor Goebbels said: ‘Nature is not kind.’ That became sort of a motto of ours.” He smiled. “I remember right here in the neighborhood, we found ten Jews harbored over in Mount Kisco, that’s only a few miles away, one of the men involved had been a guest at the Officers’ Club, I knew him personally. We took the Jews out, cordoned the town off with tanks, and opened fire. Wiped out the whole town and everybody in it, even those who didn’t know anything.” He took a greedy gulp of beer. “Too bad about them, in a way. The kids in particular, there were a lot of kids, but still, you can’t afford to make exceptions, not in wartime. We razed the whole site and macaddamed it over with bulldozers, just like Lidice, took us three days. A fair-sized town, you know. We left it that way as a warning till ’56, it’s a shopping center now I think, but we never had any more trouble. People got the message, and it was the same across the whole country. Knock off a few towns like that, the innocent along with the guilty, and everybody has his eyes on his neighbor to make sure he’s not harboring, or to turn him in if he was. We spared informers, of course, good intelligence incentive.”
Kohler seemed interested in all this, but I couldn’t see where it was getting us.
“Look,” I said, “you say no Jews could have escaped. That’s line, but we believe one did. Just accept that for the sake of argument, and take it the next step—who would be most likely to hide him out, and where?”
Kastendieck frowned. I got the feeling that he considered any discussion of Jewish survival an implicit slur on his professional abilities, but tact was never my strong point. The Colonel took the question at face value, though, and didn’t waste any time defending the Sonderkommando.
“First of all, Lieutenant, all Jews on the books—and that means anybody listed in the records of the Jewish community itself or identified as Jews by neighbors and government files—were accounted for by 1955. But okay, let’s start with the assumption that there was a slip-up, that somewhere along the way there was a Jew we couldn’t pinpoint, maybe a Jew adopted by an Aryan family, who changed his name to theirs at an early age. You’d be surprised at how many cases like that we came across, and the parents weren’t helpful at all—we had to terminate most of them along with their kids as a matter of fact, they were completely irrational on the subject. But let’s say by some miracle this Jew escaped detection and managed to get by the Nuremberg Racial Classifications, well, then you’re up shit creek. Because he would be listed in our files, but as an Aryan, and I don’t see any way you could prove otherwise. Hell, you couldn’t even tell by circumcision—since the early forties half the Aryan kids in the country have been circumcized. I’ll tell you quite frankly, this scenario was the one nightmare all of us had during the Final Solution.” He puffed on the cigar, his brow furrowed, and then finally shook his head, firmly, decisively. “But no, I still don’t think it could happen. Precisely to foreclose that danger we spent two years checking the records of every adoption agency in the nation. I just don’t believe it.”
His self-confidence, which had flickered for a moment, seemed to return, and he got up from behind the desk and got us all fresh beers from the icebox.
“I tend to agree with you on that, Fritz,” Kohler said. “In any case, the make we have on this guy is that he’s in his sixties, which would have made him an adult at the time of Liberation. And what’s more, he doesn’t sound like the type who’s been hiding out for thirty years. He wore a mezzuzah around his neck…”
“One of those religious medals, a little silver tube?” Kastendieck broke in.
“Yeah, we recovered it after an incident in Manhattan.”
Kastendieck looked worried.
“That’s not good. We took thousands of those things away from the inmates, we had a special smelting process to melt them down, we used to ship the silver to a vault in the Reichsbank.” Abruptly, he ground out his half-finished cigar in an ashtray. “A mezzuzah. God, it could be at that.”
“What I was getting at,” Kohler continued, “is that a; man trained in eluding the authorities would never hold onto something like that. I mean, it’s a dead giveaway, a one-way ticket to the ovens. He’d have to be crazy to wear something like that around his neck.”
“Or very brave.”
Kohler looked up at Kastendieck in surprise.
“Brave? Jews?”
Kastendieck smiled, a bit grimly I thought.
“Forget the propaganda, Ed, I was here. You’d be surprised how few begged. Not even the kids. A lot of them would go out praying, or singing, they’d sing right to the end. Sometimes, late at night, I still think…”
He broke off abruptly, and I noticed with some surprise that a small muscle was twitching at the corner of his mouth. It was the first break I’d spotted in the Colonel’s impressive facade, but he recovered quickly.