Group Portrait with Lady (34 page)

A word or two more on the subject of Margret. It would be a mistake to call her a whore. All she had ever done for money was get married. Assigned since 1942 to a huge reserve military
hospital, she had far more trying days and trying nights than Leni, who could carry on undisturbed making her wreaths, was constantly in her beloved’s company, and was protected by Pelzer’s benevolence. From this point of view Leni is by no means
the
or even
a
heroine: it was not until she was forty-eight that she treated a man with compassion (i.e., the Turk by the name of Mehmet, whom the gentle reader may possibly recall); Margret never did anything else, even when on duty at the hospital as day or night nurse she treated “anyone who looked nice and seemed down in the mouth with total compassion”—and the only reason she carried on with a cocky cynical fellow like Boldig was as a cover for Leni’s blissful hours on a couch of heather in the Beauchamp cemetery chapel, to divert Boldig’s attention from Leni. Let us allow justice to prevail and take note of what Margret herself has noted after a long life of total and compassionate dedication: “I’ve been loved a great deal, but I’ve loved only one person. Only once did I feel that insane joy I saw so often on the faces of others.” No, Margret is not to be classed among Fortune’s favorites, she has had far more bad luck then Leni—like the embittered Lotte, yet neither of these two women has shown any sign of envying Leni.

The Au., by now totally engrossed in his role of researcher (and always in danger of being taken for an informer while his sole purpose at all times is to present a taciturn and reticent, proud, unrepentant person such as Leni Gruyten Pfeiffer—a woman as static as she is statuesque!—in the right light), had some difficulty in gaining, or searching out, from those involved a reasonably factual picture of her situation at the end of the war.

There was only one point in which all those presented and quoted here in greater or lesser detail were in agreement: they did not want to leave the city; even the two Soviet individuals Bogakov and Boris had no desire to move eastward. Now that the Americans (Leni to Margret: “At last, at last, what ages they’ve taken!”) were approaching, they alone guaranteed what everyone was longing for but could not believe: the end of the war.
One
problem was solved starting January 1, 1945: Boris’s and Leni’s—for simplicity’s sake let us use the term “visiting days.” Leni was seven months’ pregnant, still quite “perky” (M.v.D.) albeit somewhat hampered by her condition, but—“visiting,” lying together, wrestling, whatever we decide to call it, “was now simply out of the question” (Leni according to Margret).

But where and how to survive? It sounds simple enough if we disregard who had to hide from whom. Margret, for instance, ought—like any soldier she was subject to orders and regulations—to have crossed the Rhine eastward with the hospital. But she did not, nor could she take refuge in her apartment, from which she would have been forcibly removed. Lotte H. was similarly placed, being an employee of a government department that was likewise shifting to the east. Where was she to go? If we recall that as late as January 1945 people were being evacuated to almost as far as Silesia, i.e., were being transported directly into the path of the Red Army, a brief geographical reminder will not be amiss: in mid-March 1945 that German Reich to which frequent allusion has been made was still some five to six hundred miles in width and scarcely more in length. The question of where to go was of the most pressing urgency for the most varied groups. Where were the Nazis to be sent, the prisoners of war, the soldiers, the slave workers? There were, of course, tried and true solutions: execution, etc. Yet even that was not always a simple matter since the executioners were not all of one mind and some were inclined to play a rather different role, namely that of rescuer. Many a man who was in principle an executioner became a nonexecutioner, but how, for instance, were the potential victims of execution—let us call them the executees—to behave? It is not that simple. One is inclined to think that all of a sudden there occurred something called the end of the war, that at some point there was a date, and that was it. How was a person to know whether he had fallen into the hands of a reformed or unreformed executioner, let alone into the hands of a specimen of that emerging breed whom we might call the “now-more-than-ever executioners,” many of whom had previously belonged to the nonexecutioner group? There were even branches of the SS that disclaimed their reputation as executioners! Correspondence ensued between the SS and the glorious German Army in which each side tried to palm off the dead onto the other, like so many
rotting potatoes! “Elimination” and “disposal” were expected to be carried out by honorable persons and institutions which—like their correspondents—were bent on arriving with reasonably clean hands at that state which it would have been wrong to call peace but right to call the end of the war.

The Au. reads, for example: “The commandants of the concentration camps complain that some 5 to 10 percent of the Soviet Russians marked for execution arrive at the camps either dead or dying. This gives rise to the impression that the POW base camps use this method to dispose of such prisoners.

“In particular it has been noted that on foot marches, e.g., from railway station to camp, a not inconsiderable number of prisoners of war collapse dead or dying from exhaustion and have to be collected by a truck bringing up the rear.

“It is impossible to prevent the German population from noticing these occurrences.

“Despite the fact that the delivery of prisoners to concentration camps is as a general rule carried out by the Army, the population will nevertheless hold the SS responsible for this state of affairs.

“In order as far as possible to prevent a repetition of such occurrences, I hereby order, to take effect forthwith, that in future any condemned Soviet Russians already manifestly moribund (e.g., from starvation-typhoid), hence no longer equal to the exertions of even a short foot march, be excluded from transportation to concentration camps for purposes of execution.

(Signed): Müller (Deputy)”

It is left to the reader to meditate on the phrase “not inconsiderable” as applied to those marked for death. This had been a problem as early as 1941, at a time when the German Reich was sufficiently large in extent. Four years later the German
Reich was, God knows, much smaller, and there were not only Soviet Russians, Jews, and the like, to be eliminated and disposed of, but also a sizable number of Germans, deserters, saboteurs, and collaborators; furthermore, concentration camps and towns had to be emptied of women, children, and the aged, the intention being to leave nothing but ruins for the enemy.

Not surprisingly, problems of morality and/or hygiene arose. For example, the following:

“It is not unusual for the district chiefs and/or village elders (many of whom are corrupt) to cause the skilled workers whom they have selected to be taken at night from their beds and locked up in cellars awaiting transportation. Since the male and/or female workers are frequently allowed no time to pack their belongings, etc., many of them arrive at the assembly camp with totally insufficient equipment (without shoes, two dresses, eating and drinking utensils, blanket, etc.). Hence in extreme cases new arrivals must be immediately sent back in order to collect the bare necessities. Threats and beatings administered by the aforesaid village militiamen to the skilled workers in cases where the latter do not immediately obey orders to accompany them are common practice and have been reported from most communities. In numerous cases women were beaten until incapable of participating in the march. One particularly flagrant case has been reported by me to the head of the military police (Colonel Samek) for severe punishment (Village of Zotsolinkov, District of Dergachi). The excesses of the district chiefs and militiamen are of a particularly serious nature in that, in order to justify their actions, the persons cited usually maintain that everything was undertaken in the name of the German Army. The truth is, however, that in almost every case the latter has behaved with exemplary consideration toward skilled workers
and the Ukrainian population. However, this cannot be said of many administrative departments. As an illustration of the above: in one instance a woman arrived wearing not much more than an undershirt.”

“With reference to reports received, it must also be pointed out that it is irresponsible to keep the workers locked up for many hours in railway cars so that they are not even able to relieve themselves. Opportunity must as a matter of course be given at intervals to allow these people to fetch drinking water, wash, and relieve themselves. Railway cars have been shown in which workers have bored holes in order to relieve themselves. It is to be noted, however, that when trains are approaching large railway stations the opportunity to perform bodily functions must, wherever possible, be given beyond the limits of such stations.”

“Reports of impropriety have been received from delousing stations, where some male staff or other male persons have been employed or have circulated among the women and girls in the shower rooms—even to the point of soaping such females!—and, vice versa, female persons among the men, and in some cases men have spent protracted periods taking photographs in the women’s shower rooms. Since most of those transported during recent months emanate from the Ukr. rural population, whose female portion has a strong moral sense and is accustomed to a strict code of behavior, such treatment must inevitably be regarded by them as a national degradation. The first-named improprieties have meanwhile to our knowledge been eliminated by the action of those in charge of transportation. The photographing was reported to us from Halle, the instances of soaping from Kievertse.”

Can it be that the sex wave had already begun, and that many photographs being pressed upon us today were taken at delousing stations for slave workers from Eastern Europe?

Now it is important to realize that the conquest of continents or worlds is by no means easy, that those people had their problems too, and that they tried to solve them with German thoroughness and to document them with German meticulousness. Whatever you do, don’t improvise! Nature’s calls remain Nature’s calls, and it simply won’t do for people destined for execution to turn up on delivery as corpses! It is an outrage and must be severely punished, and it won’t do either for men to soap women or for women to soap men during the delousing process, and as for taking photographs! It simply won’t do. Then no one’s hands remain clean. Have libertines and fiends infiltrated a procedure that is “in itself” perfectly proper?

Now that disputes over corpses and/or partial corpses have become a hallmark of modern conventional warfare, and libertines and fiends—in uniform!—admit to assaulting women and even taking photographs in the process, there is no further need to bore the reader with similar examples.

The only thing was: how and where were they to survive, the pregnant Leni, the hypersensitive Boris, the strong-minded Lotte, the overly compassionate Margret, Grundtsch—that grubber in the soil—and Pelzer, who was never a monster? In March 1945, what became of our Marja, of Bogakov and Viktor Genrikhovich, of old Gruyten, and so many others?

First of all, in late December ’44 or early January ’45 Boris was the cause of a totally unnecessary complication about which Leni tells nothing, Margret everything, and of which Lotte and Marja were ignorant.

Margret, now under the strictest supervision to prevent the Au. slipping her an occasional something (The doctor to the Au.: “She simply has to starve now for four or five weeks,
that’ll give us at least half a chance to restore her endocrine and exocrine balance: she’s in such a mess right now that tears might come out of her nipples and urine out of her nose. So talking’s O.K., but no gifts.”). Margret, already used to asceticism, in fact hoping it would cure her: “But you can give me a ‘regular’ “ (which the Au. did), “well, I was furious with Boris at the time, really angry, and that didn’t let up until later, when we were all living in one another’s pockets and I got to know him—saw how wise and sensitive he was, but at the end of ’44, around Christmastime, or it may’ve been early in ’45, around the first week in January but certainly no later, that Leni came home one day with a name in her head, though this time she at least knew it was a writer, and a dead one at that, so at least we didn’t have to start phoning around.

“Again it was all about a book, and the author was called Kafka, Franz Kafka; the book:
In the Penal Colony
. I asked Boris later whether he’d really had no idea of the trouble he was causing by recommending a Jewish writer to Leni at the end of 1944 (!), and he said: ‘I had so much on my mind, so much to think about, that I never thought of that.’ So: off goes Leni again with the request slip to the public library—there was still one functioning, and luckily for Leni it was quite a sensible older woman who tore up Leni’s slip, took her aside then and there and spoke to her exactly as the mother superior had done when Leni had pressed her for information about Rahel: ‘My child, have your wits deserted you? Who sent you here with such a request?’ But believe me, once again Leni was persistent. That woman in the library must’ve seen right away that Leni was no agent provocateur, so she took her aside and explained to her in great detail that this Kafka was a Jew, that all his books had been banned and burned and so on, and no doubt Leni once again countered with her shattering ‘So what?,’ and the woman must have explained to her with great thoroughness, although belatedly, all about the Jews and the Nazis, and
she showed her a copy of
Der Stürmer
—for of course she had it right there in the library—and explained the whole thing to her, and Leni was horrified when she came to see me. At last she was beginning to understand. She still wouldn’t give up though, she just wanted her Kafka, she wanted to read him and she got him! She actually went to Bonn and looked up a few of the professors her father had once worked for, men she knew had large libraries of their own, and she actually found one who was already a grandfather by then, past seventy-five and living in retirement surrounded by his books, and do you know what he told her: ‘My child, have your wits deserted you? Why Kafka of all people—why not Heine?’ He must’ve been very nice to her then, he remembered her and her father, but he didn’t have the book himself so he in turn had to go first to one colleague and then to another till he found one who could trust him and whom he could trust and who also had the book. It wasn’t that easy, it took a whole day, believe me, she came home in the middle of the night with the book in her handbag, it hadn’t been all that easy, for they’d had to find someone who could not only trust the professor and whom the professor could trust, he had to be able to trust Leni too, and not only did he have to have the book but he had to be willing to part with it! It seems they found two who had the book, but the first one didn’t want to let it out of his hands. It was really crazy, the things she and that Boris of hers were worrying about, while all the time it was our bare lives, our bare naked lives, that were in danger.