Fatherland (37 page)

They left and walked two blocks to the Friedrich-Strasse station, where they caught the southbound U-bahn train. The carriage was packed with the usual Saturday night crowd—lovers holding hands, families off to the illuminations, young men on a drinking spree—and nobody, as far as March could tell, paid them the slightest attention. Nevertheless, he waited until the doors were about to slide shut before he dragged her out onto the platform of the Tempelhof station. A ten-minute journey on a number thirty-five tram brought them to the airport. Throughout all this they sat in silence.

Krakau

7/18/43

[Handwritten]

My dear Kritzinger,

Here is the list.

Auschwitz
     
50.02N
   
19.11E

Kulmhof
          
53.20N
   
18.25E

Blezec
              
50.12N
   
23.28E

Treblinka
        
52.48N
   
22.20E

Majdanek
      
51.18N
   
22.31E

Sobibor
           
51.33N
   
23.31E

Heil Hitler!

[Signed] Buhler [?]

Tempelhof was older than the Flughafen Hermann Göring—shabbier, more primitive. The departure terminal had been built before the war and was decorated with pictures of the pioneering days of passenger flight—old Lufthansa Junkers with corrugated fuselages, dashing pilots with goggles and scarves, intrepid women travelers with stout ankles and cloche hats. Innocent days! March took up a position by the entrance to the terminal and pretended to study the photographs as Charlie approached the car rental desk.

Suddenly she was smiling, making apologetic gestures with her hands—playing to perfection the lady in distress. She had missed the flight, her family was waiting... The rental agent was charmed and consulted a typed sheet. For a moment, the issue hung in the balance—and then, yes, as it happened, Fräulein, he
did
have something. Something for someone with eyes as pretty as yours, of course . . . Your driver's license, please . . .

She handed it over. It had been issued the previous year in the name of Voss, Magda, age twenty-four, of Mariendorf, Berlin. It was the license of the girl murdered on her wedding day five days ago—the license Max Jaeger had left in his desk, along with all the other papers from the Spandau shootings.

March looked away, forcing himself to study an old aerial photograph of the Tempelhof airfield. BERLIN was painted in huge white letters along the runway. When he glanced back, the agent was entering details of the license on the rental form, laughing at some witticism of his own.

As a strategy it was not without risk. In the morning, a copy of the rental agreement would be forwarded automatically to the police, and even the Orpo would wonder why a murdered woman was hiring a car. But tomorrow was Sunday, Monday was the
Führertag
, and by Tuesday—the earliest the Orpo was likely to pull its finger out of its backside—March reckoned he and Charlie would either be safe or arrested—or dead.

Ten minutes later, with a final exchange of smiles, she was given the keys to a four-door black Opel with ten thousand kilometers on the odometer. Five minutes after that, March joined her in the parking lot. He navigated while she drove. It was the first time he had seen her behind the wheel: another side of her. In the busy traffic she displayed an exaggerated caution that he felt did not come naturally.

The lobby of the Prinz Friedrich Karl was deserted: the guests were out for the night. As they passed through it toward the stairs, the receptionist kept her head down. They were just another of Herr Brecker's little scams— best not to know too much.

Their room had not been searched. The cotton threads hung where March had wedged them between door and frame. Inside, when he pulled Luther's case out from beneath the bed, the single strand of hair was still laced through the lock.

Charlie stepped out of her dress and wrapped a towel around her shoulders.

In the bathroom at the end of the hallway, a naked bulb lit a grimy sink. A bath stood on tiptoe, on iron claws.

March walked back to the bedroom, shut himself in and once more propped the chair up against the door. He piled the contents of the case onto the dressing table—the map, the various envelopes, the minutes and memoranda, the reports, including the one with the rows of statistics, typed on the machine with the extra large letters. Some of the paper crackled with age. He remembered how he and Charlie had sat during the sunlit afternoon with the rumble of traffic outside; how they had passed the evidence backward and forward to each other—at first with excitement, then stunned, disbelieving, silent, until at last they had come to the pouch with the photographs.

Now he needed to be more systematic. He pulled up a chair, cleared a space and opened the exercise book. He

tore out thirty pages. At the top of each sheet he wrote the year and the month, beginning with July 1941 and ending in January 1944. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. Then he began to work his way through the heap of papers, making notes in his clear script.

A railway timetable, badly printed on yellowing wartime paper:

TRAIN
    
DEPARTURE
          
ARRIVAL

DATE
    
NO.
        
FROM
                    
TIME
      
TO
                      
TIME

1/26
   
Da 105
  
Theresienstadt
    
               
Auschwitz

1/27
   
Lp 106
   
Auschwitz
                             
Theresienstadt

1/29
   
Da 13
     
Berlin
                    
1720
      
Auschwitz
        
1048

             
Da 107
  
Theresienstadt
                    
Auschwitz

1/30
   
Lp 108
   
Auschwitz
                             
Theresienstadt

1/31
   
Lp 14
     
Auschwitz
                             
Zamocz

2/1
      
Da 109
  
Theresienstadt
                    
Auschwitz

2/2
      
Da 15
     
Berlin
                    
1720
      
Auschwitz
        
1048

             
Lp 110
   
Auschwitz
                             
Myslowitz

2/3
      
Po 65
     
Zamocz
                 
1100
      
Auschwitz

2/4
      
Lp 16
     
Auschwitz
                             
Litzmannstadt

And so on until, in the second week of February, a new destination appeared. Now almost all the times had been worked out to the minute:

2/11
   
Pj131
     
Bialystok
               
900
        
Treblinka
                
1210

             
Lp 132
   
Treblinka
              
2118
      
Bialystok
                 
130

2/12
   
Pj 133
    
Bialystok
               
900
        
Treblinka
                
1210

             
Lp 134
   
Treblinka
              
2118
      
Grodno

2/13
   
Pj 135
    
Bialystok
               
900
        
Treblinka
                
1210

             
Lp 136
   
Treblinka
              
2118
     
Bialystok
                 
130

2/14
   
Pj 163
    
Grodno
                 
540
        
Treblinka
                
1210

             
Lp 164
   
Treblinka
                              
Scharfenwiese

And so on again until the end of the month.

A rusty paper clip had mottled the edge of the timetable. Attached to it was a telegram from the General Management, Directorate East of the German Reich Railways, dated Berlin, January 13, 1943. First, a list of recipients:

Reich Railway Directorates

Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Halle (S),

Karlsruhe, Königsberg (Pr), Linz, Mainz, Oppeln, East in Frankfurt (O), Posen, Vienna

General Directorate of East Railway in Krakau

Reichsprotektor, Group Railways in Prague

General Traffic Directorate Warsaw

Reich Traffic Directorate Minsk

Then, the main text:

Subject: Special trains for resettlers during the period from January 20 to February 28, 1943.

We enclose a compilation of the special trains (Vd, Rm, Po, Pj and Da) agreed upon in Berlin on January 15, 1943 for the period from January 20, 1943 to February 28, 1943 and a circulatory plan for cars to be used in these trains.

Train formation is noted for each recirculation and attention is to be paid to these instructions. After each full trip, cars are to be well cleaned, if necessary fumigated, and upon completion of the program prepared for further use. Number and kinds of cars are to be determined upon dispatch of the last train and are to be reported to me by telephone with confirmation on service cards.

[Signed] Dr. Jacobi

33 Bfp 5 Bfsv

Minsk, February 9, 1943

March flicked back to the timetable and read it through again. Theresienstadt-Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Theresienstadt, Bialystok-Treblinka, Treblinka-Bialystok: the syllables drummed in his tired brain like the rhythm of wheels on a railway track.

He ran his finger down the columns of figures, trying to decipher the message behind them. So: a train would be loaded in the Polish town of Bialystok at breakfast time. By lunchtime it would be at this hell, Treblinka. (Not all the journeys were so brief—he shuddered at the thought of the
seventeen hours
from Berlin to Auschwitz.) In the afternoon, the cars would be unloaded at Treblinka and fumigated. At nine that evening they would return to Bialystok, arriving in the early hours, ready to be loaded up again at breakfast.

On February 12 the pattern broke. Instead of going back to Bialystok, the empty train was sent to Grodno. Two days in the sidings there, and then—in the dark, long before dawn—the train was once more heading back, fully laden, to Treblinka. It arrived at lunchtime. Was unloaded. And that night began rattling back westward again, this time to Scharfenweise.

What else could an investigator of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei deduce from this document?

Well, he could deduce numbers. Say: sixty persons per car, an average of sixty cars per train. Deduction: three thousand six hundred persons per transport.

By February, the transports were running at the rate of one per day. Deduction: twenty-five thousand persons per week; one hundred thousand persons per month; one and a quarter million persons per year. And this was the average achieved in the depths of the Central European winter, when the switches froze and drifts of snow blocked the tracks and partisans materialized from the woods like ghosts to plant their bombs.