Europe Central (76 page)

Where did they catch him, father?

At the Technical University, right in Berlin if you can believe it! He was a cheeky one, not wearing the yellow star. His first name was something Russian. I suppose they’ll have to make an example of him. The things that go on nowadays! Although I remember another case, in which a certain Richard Goldstein of Hamburg . . .

Father, you’ve told us that story many times.

Ludwig Gerstein stared at his son. Then he rose, departing like a dark planet falling silently to one side.

Kurt, why couldn’t you have let him have his say? It’s harmless, and it makes him happy. Now he’ll worry that you think he’s senile . . .

He used to say that he regretted what was being done.

Of course you don’t care that he’ll avenge himself on me after you leave.

But Kurt Gerstein gazed at her with sternness as ungiving as his father’s.

12

She could never understand why he wouldn’t allow her and the children to come to Berlin.—Father needs to be cared for, was all he said. And in times like these, if we give up this house, we’ll never get it back again.

We’d all rather be with you, Kurt. But I suppose you prefer those widow’s sons you’ve taken in.

You’ve seen for yourself how poor Frau Hedwig is!

To be sure, that was a perfectly executed charitable maneuver, said Elfriede with a nasty smile. Meanwhile, you leave your own three children alone with me.

He said nothing. Tübingen was the city of his childhood, the place where he’d failed his theological studies. He’d been someone else here. Thank God for the blackout curtains! He hated the sight of Tübingen.

Well, his wife pursued, and how are they doing now?

Who?

Who’s under discussion? Hedwig’s boys.

Feeling as if they were speaking of people whom neither of them had ever met, he cast about for something to say, and finally told her: They’re in the Hitler Youth, of course.

They must look stunning together, in their matching uniforms. Twins, yet!

What are you implying?

Nothing. I’m going to bed.

God keep you then, he said.

When he was courting her, they used to pretend together that he had saved an enchanted castle from ogres, thereby winning its beautiful mistress. Elfriede had long since grown beyond such foolish games.

13

In spite of his good manners and magnificent pedigree, Obersturmführer Gerstein remained less popular with his
-comrades than anyone would have expected.—He found God, they said of him. We would have liked him better if he hadn’t.—Or, to tell the tale more positively, no friendships distracted him from his official duties. Accordingly, Gerstein’s professional life became as pretty as the mountains one sees to the south on the way to Auschwitz. His service record from this period reads:
G. is especially suitable for all tasks. Proficient and sure. He is disciplined and has authority.
Gassing van inspectors learned to come to Kurt Gerstein whenever they wanted to complain about inappropriate procedures. They’d sink into the low leather sofa, reach for the latest issue of
Signal
magazine from the coffee table, bored by the very first full-page photograph (the shining metal grillework of a Ju-52 transport plane being swabbed clean by our tanned blond soldier-boys in Africa), say sugar or no sugar to the alert schoolmarm of a secretary-typist, and then they’d wait until the man on the far side of that immense office finished roaring into the telephone:
You tell them they’d better finish by noon tomorrow, or they’re up the chimney! Did you hear me? You’d better have heard me. Heil Hitler!
and he’d clang the heavy black receiver down into its cradle, “like a swordsmith with hammer and anvil,” the poets among them thought, and none of them ever caught on that the person to whom he’d been shouting (and for that matter the shouter himself ) did not exist. Now here he came, lopsidedly smiling because those three missing teeth humiliated him; they leaped up for a
Heil Hitler!
and then
-Obersturmführer Gerstein, dear blond Kurt Gerstein, his hair combed back, was asking what he could do for them.—The operators keep calibrating the engines incorrectly, Herr Obersturmführer, and it doesn’t do any good to bawl them out! It’s not very nice for the cleaning crews, I’ll tell you! The Jews shit and puke all over the floor before they . . .—And smiling, blond Kurt Gerstein, the one man in the
who understood them, agreed that this was unseemly, promised to request an investigation, asked for details as to the quantities of Jews being killed, the locations of the temporary extermination centers, the widths and depths of the mass graves, etcetera, which, these matters being
, they really shouldn’t have revealed, but if one can’t trust an
-man, it’s hopeless! In fact, working methods throughout our Eastern territories gradually did improve as Auschwitz came up to capacity. Some of them thanked Kurt Gerstein for that.

Have you ever seen our tank parks and artillery parks all arranged in neat squares upon the green grass of Germany? (If you have, I hope they won’t shoot you!)
-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein’s office was laid out in just that orderly fashion, with every stack of files compulsively squared up, as if he feared inspection, and that latest issue of
Signal
centered on the coffee table, all the file cabinets locked, half a dozen framed portraits of our Führer marching around the walls according to size; and the pens and pencils absolutely vertical, crammed in the holder like Jews in a gas chamber—well, you get the picture. Gerstein was always helpful and correct with his colleagues, no matter that he did pray. An old pensioner named Greisler, who if you ask his former occupation mutters something about being a diesel mechanic, sings Gerstein’s praises to this day: He helped my nephew get into an Adolf Hitler School!—We must not over-emphasize the testimony of Frau Alexandra Bälz, who remembered visiting him at summer’s end ’42; after sobbing that he couldn’t go on, he poisoned her life forever with his horrid secret. (If the
had heard, he would have been shot immediately, and his family all sent to Dachau.) On the very next evening, Obersturmführer Gerstein was dining quite merrily with “Clever Hans” Günther in one of Prague’s subterranean restaurants—an establishment so deep and dim, in fact, that both men had the feeling of being inside a wine cask. Abstaining from the wine, he assured his superior that he longed only to be of use to our Reich. How could he best further the completion of Operation Reinhard?

Gerstein, I had doubts about you at first, but now I can see you’re as firm as iron! I’ll bring you to Theresienstadt tomorrow morning. Captain Seidl is Austrian, like our Führer himself. A real iron man! I think you’ll be impressed by the way he hoodwinks the Bohemian Jews. Even the Red Cross swallows the bait! It’s time to teach you his system, because we have to get ready for Hungary.

By your order, Herr Captain! Thank you for your confidence in me . . .

Nor should we allot exaggerated importance to the recollection of Pastor Otto Wehr that at his final rendezvous with Gerstein, in the fall of 1944, the latter told him: Every half hour, those trainloads of doomed Jews come chasing me . . .—He gasped out to Bishop Dibelius, who’d officiated at his wedding:
Help us, help us! These things must become the talk of the world—
. . .—Why dwell on sad and secret matters? After all, the General Plan for the East was being fulfilled!