Pursuit (44 page)

“English, German, and Hebrew.”

“It should be enough.”

Well, Herzl thought, I should certainly hope so! “How many do you speak?”

“Eight. Much of the holocaust books are in Polish and Russian, some in Lithuanian. But you are speaking enough languages, I think.”

“Thank you,” Herzl said, slightly deflated. “By the way—what's your first name?”

She looked at him evenly; her eyes, he noted, were hazel, with little flecks of gold in them. “Miriam. Why?”

Herzl felt his face getting red. “I'm sorry. That wasn't what I meant to say at all; it just came out. What I meant to say was, is it possible to see the film clips first?”

“You are interested in only the people. It will be taking a while for Rolf Steiner—he exhibits—exhibits is correct?—the film. I am calling him. In the meantime, you might wish to start.”

“Yes,” Herzl said, and went to work, picking titles from the files, filling in slips, watching Miss Miriam Kleiman's lovely legs as she mounted the movable ladders to get him his choices, then digging into the books, pulling out a small fact here, another there.

Adolf Eichmann
—starting alphabetically—
originally on file as having been born in Sarona, German Templar Colony, in Palestine, later found to have actually been born in Linz, Austria (the birthplace of Adolf Hitler), of deeply religious parents—Presbyterian—whose father was once the guest speaker of honor at the synagogue in Linz. He was actually christened Karl, not Adolf; the Adolf seems to have been adopted later in life, probably due to influence of Hitler's name. He was oddly fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to his native German
. (Where did he learn those languages, and why? Investigate …)
He was raised with Jews as a child, was always friendly with Jews, and had no record of any trouble with Jews at school or elsewhere, nor any record of any rejection by any Jewish girl or woman that might have changed him. He—

“Mr. Grossman?”

He looked up and smiled. “Herzl.”

“Herzl, then. Rolf Steiner says he has enough films for today.”

“Oh? Good!” He came to his feet, surprised at how long he had been at the books, extracting the information bit by bit. “Where?”

“In the cellar—the basement. Two stories downstairs.”

“Will you be joining me?” Alone in a darkened projection room, one arm draped casually across the back of her chair—

“No, no! Here I must do work.”

Herzl felt a tiny stab of disappointment, but put it aside with the knowledge that once the films were over, he could come back and have Miss Kleiman all to himself—if the library wasn't crowded when he got back. But it seemed unlikely; that morning he had been the only one there. An introduction was required, and only serious scholars and researchers took advantage of it, and he hoped that no serious scholar or researcher, other than himself, needed information that day.

He didn't realize he was staring at her until he saw her cheeks begin to redden; then she said rather pointedly, “Rolf Steiner will be waiting for you.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. Well,” Herzl said bravely, “I'll see you as soon as I can.” And he walked out of the room, wondering if Rolf Steiner was handsome, and if a man could work at the same place as a beautiful girl like Miriam Kleiman and not be attracted to her, and if that attraction was mutual.

He need not have worried. Rolf Steiner was a short, pudgy man of seventy years of age, with a red face, a fringe of white hair standing away from his bald head in the manner of Ben Gurion, and with what seemed like a permanent smile on his face. He was a happy little gnome who spent his working days in the basement with his miles and miles of film. He lived just for his films and spent hours upon hours sorting through them, trying to organize them better, cross-filing their contents, or spending hours repairing the sprocket holes on films that went back to the earliest days of the Nazi Party and which had been shown until they were nearly worn out. He loved nothing better than to show his films, and now he seated Herzl in the small projection room, chattering as he went about threading the first master reel into the projector.

“Don't exactly know what you want, Mr. Grossman—”

“Herzl.”

“Herzl, Miriam wasn't too precise, but we have plenty of film, oh, yes, oh, yes, miles and miles on the camps and some of it shows the people who ran them, if you see anything on anyone you'd like in greater detail we may have special film on them, not much on some quite a bit on others, rather decent cross-filing system if I say so myself—” He completed his work and reached for the light switch. “… say so myself …” he said again rather vaguely, and then the lights went out.

The films began to flicker and Herzl brought his thoughts from Miriam Kleiman to the scenes being unfolded before him. Behind him he could hear the heavy excited breathing of Rolf Steiner, enjoying the film he had seen hundreds of times before as if it were his first viewing. The films were mostly copies of official German SS film, and the scenes for the various camps were remarkably similar; each camp site seemed to have been selected to oppress the prisoners as much with the bleakness of the terrain as with the cruelty of the punishment and the discomfort of the facilities. Hangings were quite common; the first made Herzl slightly ill, but after a while the horror of seeing men stare into the lens of the camera with dulled eyes and then silently, unstrugglingly drop to their death began to lose its effect. It was too terrible to contemplate, too gruesome to credit as having actually happened. There was an almost disbelief to see recorded on the film the seemingly endless lines of naked women, children, and men lined up to be shot at the edge of a burial pit without the slightest attempt to flee; each succeeding one lessened the impact of the next. It had to be a scene from some badly acted, poorly directed film, Herzl thought, and swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat.

Behind him Steiner kept up a running comment.

“Auschwitz … that was taken in Poland in the Krepiecki Forest … Russian film … had to make all new sprocket holes, awful job … this was at Mauthausen, terrible place, killed them by pushing them into a quarry … Ravensbrook, that was just for women … Auschwitz, again … only camp that tattooed the inmates, don't know why, they didn't usually live long enough … Maidanek just put a card around the neck and used the number over and over …”

A British official film was being shown; it indicated SS Captain Josef Kramer surrendering the Bergen-Belsen camp to a British officer. Kramer stood at attention, his staff lined up behind him, all in order. Steiner laughed.

“Didn't even know he had done any wrong! Surrendered as if he were an honorable prisoner of war! Hung him, finally. I've some film of his trial at Leuenburg—British court—if you want to see it later …”

“Possibly.”

The film rolled on, Steiner maintaining a running commentary.

“This is an old reel, don't know how it got mixed in.” He sounded really put out by a mistake in his department. “Anschluss, in Austria. March 1938. Might as well run it, just as fast as trying to jump it …” The film rolled on, cars passed the camera, each with a driver sitting stiffly in his place and with a smiling officer beside him. On each side of the road people cheered and threw streamers. The faces rolled on; Herzl stifled a yawn and glanced at his watch. Six-thirty. At the end of this reel he would call it a day. He brought his eyes up and suddenly stared.

“Wait! Hold it!”

Steiner stopped the projector; the figure on the screen froze, the crowd stopped its activity, hands in the air, mouths open. Steiner was looking at him awaiting instruction.

“Can you run it in reverse?”

“Of course. Tell me when to stop.”

The projector was reversed; cars went into reverse, comically; people on the street dropped their arms and walked backward; streamers shot back into little rolls in people's hands.

“There! That car, that man. Stop!” The projector was instantly stopped. Herzl frowned at the smiling face on the screen. It was so familiar! How could he fail to remember a face that well known? “Mr. Steiner, who is that, do you know?”

Steiner knew every inch of his film by heart. “Von Schraeder, the colonel in charge of the extermination at Maidanek,” he said at once, and added proudly, “We identified almost every officer in the entire parade.”

“He looks familiar …”

Steiner shrugged doubtfully. “He died of typhus before the end of the war.”

“I know. Well, let's go on, shall we?”

“Right,” Steiner said, and pressed the proper switch, while Herzl pondered the nagging sensation of having seen that face before.

It was seven o'clock when Herzl slowly mounted the steps from the basement projection room, rubbing the back of his neck wearily. How Rolf Steiner could sit and watch films for hour after hour was beyond him; in any event the fun was going to be in making them, not in watching them. He reached the first floor and glanced up hopefully toward the second floor, but he was really not too surprised to see the door to the library there closed and only darkness visible through the small frosted-glass window in the door. So he would not get to see Miss Miriam Kleiman anymore that day. A pity; it would have been nice to take her out to dinner and get to know her better. Eight languages; his mother would be impressed. And his father would be impressed with the rest of her. He smiled broadly at the thought. Ah, well, there was always tomorrow.…

He heard Steiner climbing the stairs breathlessly behind him.

“Everyone's gone many hours, I'll let you out,” he said in his chattering way, and extracted a huge bunch of keys from his pocket. “I must respool the film, take out the Anschluss film, don't know how it got in in the first place, don't usually make mistakes, oh, no, mind must have been on something else, getting old, oh, yes!” He looked up at Herzl, his head tilted bird-wise, blinking with his tiny eyes. “Will you want to see more film in the morning, anyone special, I might get it ready still tonight …?”

“I'll let you know in the morning,” Herzl said. “You should get some rest tonight. And thank you, Mr. Steiner. Good night.”

He walked out into the evening, hearing the door being locked behind him, wondering if Miriam Kleiman had a friend she saw regularly. He also could not help but wonder in the back of his mind who that face in that parade in Vienna in 1938 reminded him of.

The answer to his first question as to Miriam Kleiman and the possibility of her having a steady friend could not readily be ascertained, although it was not possible to think she would not have. But the answer to his second query came that very evening as he was washing his face before going down to a lonely dinner in the hotel dining room. It made him crow with disbelieving laughter.

The face he had seen in the Vienna parade had been his own!

Chapter 2

He came up the steps and into the main libary room the following morning, pleased to see that Miriam Kleiman was already in, and to note she looked as good the second time as she had the first. She looked up at his entrance and smiled.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning. How are you this fine morning?”

“All right,” she said, slightly surprised by the effusiveness of the greeting. “You are liking how were the pictures yesterday?”

Herzl's cheerfulness diminished but did not disappear completely. “Liking is not the word for those films. Sickening is closer to the mark. Have you seen them?”

“Oh, yes. They are not pleasant.”

“No. Well,” Herzl said, drawing up a chair, “I have a favor to ask. Have you any pictures of a Colonel Helmut von Schraeder? He was in charge of—”

“I know. Very few, I am afraid. ODESSA—you are hearing of them?”

“I've heard of them, yes.”

“They are destroying many of the data of much top war criminals when the war is coming near to a close. We are having very little pictures and none of fingerprints on von Schraeder, for example, or for many others. But for him”—she shrugged—“nobody thinks of, too much, because he is dying in Buchenwald from the typhus before even the war is ended. But I look.”

“Thank you,” Herzl said, and waited. She was back sooner than he expected, placing a book before him, opened to a picture.

“Here. Look,” she said. “It is taken twenty-seven years ago.”

It was not a very clear photograph and had been taken from a distance. It revealed a man in an SS uniform striding toward a line of people who were standing outside a building with bundles and suitcases in their hands. They were quite obviously new arrivals at a concentration camp; at one side of the picture the barbed-wire fence could be seen, and in the background, rising above the low barracks-like buildings and foreshorted by the distance, a chimney could be seen belching smoke. Barbed-wire and chimney bricks, Herzl thought, the way to make a fortune in Nazi Germany! And Zyclon-B crystals, of course. Beneath the photo was a caption:

Colonel von Schraeder inspecting new arrivals at Maidanek
.

He looked up. “Do you have a magnifying glass?”

“Yes.” She reached into her desk, got a glass and handed it over, then said, “I am getting a more better picture from downstairs. From the photograph files. This is from a book, like you are seeing.”

She left before Herzl could answer. He sat and studied the figure in the picture a moment and then brought the magnifying glass to bear upon it, but he could see no resemblance. He must have imagined the likeness the night before; after five solid hours of watching film the mind was prepared, narcotized, to imagine anything! He went back to the photograph. There was an arrogance in the strutting figure of the SS officer. The camera had frozen his motion with his head high, his chest out, one booted and polished leg half extended as he marched along, a baton tucked jauntily under one arm. As far as Herzl could see, the only one the photograph reminded him of was the actor Erich von Stroheim in any one of the many war movies he made. Out of curiosity Herzl moved the lens to the line of people; they were mostly women, toil-worn, disheartened, waiting patiently, for what they did not know. I know what you are waiting for, Herzl thought with a pang, recalling the films of yesterday, and put down the glass and the picture, leaning back, waiting for Miriam Kleiman to return.