Schreiber's Secret (7 page)

“I’m trying,” said Danielle halfheartedly. It was all she could think of to say.  “Good.” Sonntag breathed heavily, as if he knew the knowledge he was about to impart was of necessity too much for any human being to fully comprehend.

“I was born in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, north of the Kurfürstendamm ...”

For the next forty minutes Danielle listened spellbound to the most horrifying, and yet most inspiring, story she had ever heard. She neither interrupted nor added to her notes. By the time her first tape was exhausted, Henry Sonntag had revealed the history of his life to her. The history of a man who had lost everything dear to him, who had later gained riches most men could only dream of, but who was still essentially a husk. She fought to control her emotions. At times she had felt close to tears, yet now that she had heard the details, she wanted Sonntag truly to bear his soul. At the same time she felt like an inquisitor, and this did not sit well with her Jewishness. As she turned over the cassette, she looked up at Sonntag apologetically. His face was ashen. Her host took out a handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. “Henry, how do you live with it?” she asked, her voice full of compassion.

“Excuse me, I don’t usually show such emotion ... I don’t live with it. It lives with me. It’s like constant pain. You never forget, you never get rid of it. It sets you apart from other people. That’s not to say I’m never happy. But I know the difference. That difference is like muzak in the background. Yet there’s also another side ...”

“Yes?”

“I recognized that in order to become part of society I had a choice to make: either to stay a survivor and be in a mental prison all my life, or try to preserve my sanity by putting this away and integrating into society as if nothing had ever happened. I chose the latter.” He paused, then said, “Maybe I’m fooling myself.”

“What do you mean?”

Britain’s richest refugee clasped and unclasped his hands. “I envy people who can really get out of themselves for one minute. They can laugh, enjoy. Deep inside I can never do those things. Only superficially, you understand. Always in the back of your mind is everything that happened. How can you ... how can you enjoy yourself? It’s almost a crime against the people who died.”

Danielle felt an almost overwhelming surge of compassion. The man before her was obviously coping with a thousand devils. “Would you like to break off for a short while?”

Sonntag cleared his throat. “No, it’s quite all right.” He smiled weakly. “This is doing me a power of good. And anyway, you haven’t really started asking me questions yet. The third degree, as they say.”

Danielle smiled. There were so many questions in her mind. She stared at her blank notepad. “Tell me, Henry,” she said at length, “these Nazis ...what, if they were going to kill you all anyway, was the point of all the humiliation and cruelty.”

“Pavlov’s dog,” replied Sonntag sharply, eagerly. “To condition the reflexes of those who had to actually carry out the policies. After you’ve butchered one man, it becomes easier. Also, to achieve the extermination of those millions of men, women and children, the Nazis committed not only physical but spiritual murder ... on those they killed, on those that did the killing, on those that knew the killing was being done and did nothing and also, to some extent, on future generations. It was dreadful.”

Every word struck home for Danielle. Both sets of her grandparents had lost relatives in the Holocaust. In the final analysis, it all boiled down to an accident of birth; being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whenever she read books or saw films about the Holocaust, she had tried to envisage herself and her loved ones in the same circumstances, yet the vision was always incomplete. Sonntag was right. No one could put himself in the place of a victim.

“You spoke earlier of Demjanjuk,” she said. “Was there anyone in Theresienstadt who was particularly brutal?”

Sonntag’s eyes glazed. His lips quivered, prompting the collection of small scars into a macabre dance. He breathed deeply as if some memory was too terrible to reveal. “There were individuals with their own peculiarities,” he said quietly. “Some worse, some better. There was incredible rivalry amongst the SS. Almost everyone had his protegé among the prisoners. The SS played one off against the other.”

Apparently warming to his task, he became increasingly animated. “You see, Danielle – may I call you Danielle? – everything was reduced to a primeval level: life and death. Some SS men developed a kind of loyalty to one prisoner or another, though one hesitates to call it that for there was always a nefarious reason for any sort of kindness or charity. Never forget the incredible power they had. Yet most of the Nazi officers hated and despised one another. They would do almost anything to get at each other. This created an indescribable climate of fear for the prisoners. Spared one moment, damned the next.”

Danielle sat transfixed by the intelligence of the man before her. She began to feel it an honour to be in his presence. Even before he had paused for breath, she asked the question that had been bothering her for some time.

“Tell me, Henry, what is the secret of survival in these circumstances?”

“People just do not understand, my dear, that it wasn’t ruthlessness which enabled us to survive, but an intangible quality, not peculiar to educated or sophisticated individuals. Anyone might have it. It is best described as an overriding thirst, perhaps a talent for life and faith in life.”

“A tremendous will to live.”

“Yes, but I don’t mean to say that these were deliberate acts or even feelings. They were largely unconscious qualities. Another talent needed was a gift for relationships. There were people who survived who were loners. Maybe they say they survived because they relied solely on themselves. But even if they don’t admit it to themselves, they survived because at some stage or other
they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much as for themselves. They are now the ones who feel the guiltiest ... not for anything they did, but for what they didn’t do.”

“Did anyone help you, Henry?”

“Yes,” he sighed, “but they were all murdered for their pains. You see, Danielle, to be chosen to live an extra day was nothing but luck, one chance in a thousand. Luck combined with the qualities I have mentioned gave us a chance to survive longer. In the Small Fortress you could never pretend. You could never take refuge in the imaginary.”

“What do you think of Germans today?” Danielle asked. She herself had found it hard to blame the sons for the sins of the fathers.

Sonntag raised his hands in a gesture of resignation. “Listen, Jews have lived in Germany for sixteen hundred years. Anti-Semitism was nothing new when Hitler came to power. You know what they say: anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than is necessary.”

Danielle smiled. “Yes, I’ve heard that one before.”

“I would never personally step on that tainted soil again,” the old man continued. “It’s the fatherland of barbarism. It’s not that I hate the young Germans of today – except the neo-Nazi thugs, that is – but they must accept that they were responsible for the Holocaust as much as for producing the likes of Goethe, Bach and Beethoven. We Jews will never forget, but neither must we allow the world to forget, otherwise it will happen again.”

Danielle pushed her point. “But do you believe in collective guilt?”

Sonntag hesitated. The beady eyes misted. She knew he was undergoing a moral crisis.

“Listen, Danielle,” he said at length, “it was Simon Wiesenthal who said that any Jew who believed in God and in his people could not believe in the principle of collective guilt. We Jews suffered for thousands of years because we were said to be collectively guilty – all of us, including the unborn children – guilty of the Crucifixion, the epidemics of the Middle Ages, communism, capitalism, bad wars, bad peace treaties. All the ills of mankind, from pestilence to the atomic bomb, are supposed to have been the fault of the Jews. We are the eternal scapegoats. We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse the other nations, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?”

“I think you’re right, Henry, and there are many who say we brought this catastrophe upon ourselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that a lot of young people, that is young Jews of today, especially in Israel, think that the older generation didn’t put up enough of a fight.”

“There was the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka,
Sobibor ...”

“Yes, but the incidences were few and far between.”  The old man pondered for a few moments. He then stared at Danielle with a steely gaze that made her feel slightly uncomfortable for the first time.

“My dear,” he said, the eyes narrowing, “do you know what happens to an animal, say a wildebeest, when it is attacked by a pride of lions? As soon as it is caught, it goes into mind-numbing shock. When the lion applies the coup de grâce, the poor wildebeest doesn’t feel a thing. From the moment the Nazis dehumanized us, we were in that state of shock.”

For a moment the whirr of the cassette recorder seemed to take over the room. Danielle felt that she, too, was in a state of shock. Everything the man had said made complete sense. She glanced at her tape. It was nearing the end. She still had a couple of questions left.

“Henry, in a way I asked this earlier, but do you believe it’s right to continue to prosecute war criminals?”

“Yes. There are still Nazi criminals around, and the only thing they regret is not winning. They are my generation and their presence among us casts a shadow, even now.”

“What about revisionist historians like David Irving?”

“Those who try to rewrite history by saying the Holocaust never happened are the worst type of evil. I hate them.”

She skipped back through her notes. “But before you said you had hated too long.”

“Correct. Hate clouds the mind. But you see, and this is off the record, I cannot stop hating. I hate myself for being German. To be sure, I never deny being Jewish, but I have never come to terms with the fact that I am a German myself, that part of me is German, part of me is Jewish. You see, my dear, I hate to some extent both the Germans and the Jews. And I am both. I find the mixture unbearable and I am part of that mixture. You have the cringing, arrogant Jew and you have the superior, arrogant and insensitive German and all that is part of me as well. And in any case, if I had not been a Jew I might have made a very good Nazi. I am an absolute perfectionist, you know.”

For a few moments Danielle was dumbstruck. Henry Sonntag’s words were extraordinarily candid. This was a man who was hurting badly, a man whose patent honesty allowed him to admit that, had he not been a Jew, he might have been one of the very monsters who had tormented him. He would no doubt suffer this torment until his dying day.

She cleared her throat, but the words still came out hoarsely. “Henry, can you ever bring yourself to forgive?”

“Forgive?” The old man laughed, relieving the gloom once again. “Ah, now that is an interesting question.” He raised his thin yellowy-white eyebrows. “If I may, I’d like to tell you a story. It’s long, so bear with me. Many years ago there was a rabbi from Brisk, a scholar of extraordinary renown, revered also for his gentleness of character. One day he boarded a train in Warsaw to return to his home town. The rabbi, a man of slight stature and not particularly distinguished, found a seat in the compartment. There he was surrounded by travelling salesmen. As soon as the train began to move, they started to play cards. Now, as the game progressed, the excitement increased.

The rabbi remained aloof and was absorbed in meditation. Such aloofness was annoying to the rest of the people and one of them suggested to the rabbi that he join in the game. The rabbi answered that he never played cards. As time passed, the rabbi’s aloofness became even more annoying and one of those present said to him, ‘Either you join us, or you leave the compartment.’

Shortly afterwards, he took the rabbi by his collar and pushed him out of the compartment. For several hours the rabbi had to stand until he reached his destination, the city of Brisk.”

“Where’s that?” Danielle cut in, fascinated.

“Poland somewhere. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, Brisk was also the destination of the salesmen. The rabbi left the train and he was immediately surrounded by admirers welcoming him and shaking his hand.

“‘Who is this man?’ asked the salesmen who had spoken to him. ‘You don’t know him? You don’t know the famous rabbi of Brisk?’ The salesman’s heart sank. He had not realized whom he had offended. He quickly went over to the rabbi to ask forgiveness. The rabbi declined. In his hotel room, the salesman could find no peace. He went to the rabbi’s house and was admitted to his study. ‘Rabbi,’ he said, ‘I am not a rich man. I have, however, savings of three hundred rubles. I will give them to you for charity if you will forgive me.’ The rabbi’s answer was brief: ‘No.’

“The salesman’s anxiety was unbearable. He went to the synagogue to seek solace. When he shared his anxiety with some people in the synagogue, they were deeply surprised. How could their rabbi, so gentle a person, be so unforgiving? Their advice was for him to speak to the rabbi’s eldest son and to tell him of the surprising attitude taken by his father.

“When the rabbi’s son heard the story, he could not understand his father’s obstinacy. Seeing the anxiety of the man, he promised to discuss the matter with his father. As you know, it is not proper, according to Jewish law, for a son to criticize his father directly. So the son entered his father’s study and began a general discussion about Jewish law and in time turned the conversation to the laws of forgiveness. The son mentioned the name of the man who was so anxious. The rabbi of Brisk said, ‘I cannot forgive him. He did not know who I was. He offended what he thought was a common man. Let the salesman go to him and beseech forgiveness.’”