The Birthday Buyer (7 page)

And the case of the Frenchmen, Joseph Grosselin and Auguste Friedel. Both went back to Paris and became friends. They worked in banking, and prospered separately in different entities. They met now and then in the synagogue, generally once a year, and then ate in L’Agricole, a Paris restaurant where they talked and recalled the desperate days of extermination, trying to ensure nobody was missed by their memories or in their prayers. But Hurbinek was never present. They forgot him, as they forgot many others who, in all their good will, they didn’t even realize they were forgetting.

The hospital room has got much lighter. Who are these people here with me? One, says the nurse, died yesterday and I didn’t even know who it was. He was in the bed opposite but is no longer there. Was he young or old, did he die of cancer, or because of an accident, during an operation, or was he shot or stabbed, does he leave children, did he love, work, did he like aeroplanes? I know nothing about him. Or about the others. What can they possibly know about me?

Share. Bump into. See each other again. These are verbs only time makes possible. If Hurbinek had lived, he might have bumped into Ernst Sterman in an American spa for those suffering from chronic tuberculosis, or he might have said hello to Scholomo Buczko at the end of a soccer game he’d got into free because he was paralyzed, or he might have become a partner in Chaim Roth’s ice-cream business and now the most famous ice-creams in Israel might carry his name, or he might have helped Franz Patzold, now declared his adoptive father, to find the Moldavian who tortured him, or, on a trip to Moscow, he might have bumped into Yuri Chanicheverov, now a taxi driver or museum guide, who would be curious about the sight of that man with crutches, or shared a table in L’Agricole with Joseph Grosselin and Auguste Friedel the bankers though not one of those three recognized him, or drunk coffee with his friend Primo Levi on an avenue in Turin and both would silently remember Berek Goldstein and Rubem Yetzev, or wept with Claricia Novaceanu at the burial of Henek, the hero, on a cold day in Hungary, in 1956.

And yet Hurbinek did live on in these lives, in some way.

It is impossible not to think about the children the Nazis killed or about the cruel, savage means they employed. And it’s impossible for anyone who knows not to writhe at the thought. When thinking about Hurbinek, when creating Hurbinek’s universe, it is equally impossible to leave aside the thousands, hundreds of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish children, like him, who were crushed by that criminal German whirlwind.

Killing a child is easy, killing thousands of children is even easier, but it isn’t at all easy to erase the memory of children after they are massacred. I’m not sure why, I sometimes think it is because the lives of dead children are lives that were not lived and that must exist as fables, in a kind of timeless limbo set in history, their unredeemed presence returning to wreak a just revenge. If I believed in ghosts, I would only believe in the ghosts of massacred children.

But prostrated in this hospital bed my eyes suddenly meet those of a youngish child, I guess he must be six—double Hurbinek’s age when he died. He is sitting in one of the hospital chairs next to a bed at the end of our small ward. He looks at me now and then, quizzically. He is licking an ice-cream. He has come with a young woman I imagine to be his mother. I can see a man with a thick beard in that far bed, perhaps his father or uncle, or even his elder brother. His head is bandaged. They are all very young and dark-skinned.

I look away from that child and look up to see yet again that slice of blue sky through the barred window. That child made my mind fly off to Vienna and an extraordinary woman, Erika Fisherkant. When Fanny and I met her in 1991, she was still living in Cologne and the Foundation that bears her name was just getting off to a start. Her house was above an inn, in a side street very close to the re-built Gothic cathedral, and the place was packed with half-opened boxes, tall filing cabinets and colored folders that were scrupulously organized and labeled containing all kinds of documentation. It seemed highly chaotic simply because so much was crammed in and because people were continuously rushing in and out. It happened, very inopportunely, to be the day when they were moving for the nth time to a larger building. Three other women worked with her, whose names I never got to know, and a very Polish man whom Erika introduced to us as Tadeusz, her fiancé. Fanny and I helped them move and we became great friends that day.

The Erika Fisherkant Foundation devotes itself, or devoted itself up to a month ago, to the investigation of the crimes the Nazis committed against children. A month ago I heard that Erika Fisherkant had been recently murdered in her office. A man walked in and shot her point blank in the head. He has yet to be arrested as I was well reminded by a copy of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
that I’d been reading in the hospital over the last few days.

Her Foundation’s headquarters had been based in Vienna for two years, in the Ringen. She didn’t like Haider’s Vienna but recognized it was now symbolically important to be there. And that was the last I heard from Erika, when she wrote and told me she wasn’t sure whether to go to Tel Aviv or settle down in Austria. She chose Europe and stayed in Vienna, although ever since she had received death threats and threats of other abuse from neo-Nazis and rightwing extremists. In the letter to me in which she expressed her doubts she wrote, “I am German, I can’t do what I do here in Israel, I would lose all credibility. And here, with a bit of luck, I will end up earning the martyr’s reputation that is just what my guilty conscience as a German woman requires.”

Erika was a tiny, brave woman, between fifty-eight and sixty, originally from Dresden, who had worked as a critical, incisive historian in various German universities, focusing her research on the massacres of Jews from the East perpetrated by the Nazis between 1941 and 1944. The fate of the weakest, of the children, soon made a deep impact on her. Something was unlocked within her, and changed the course of her life, when she heard eyewitness accounts of the horrible death in Auschwitz of a four-year-old boy, Ansel Bloch.

It happened like this. One April morning in 1943, Ansel was forced to kneel and make the sign of the cross with his arms. When his arms were exhausted and dropped down, an SS officer went over and stuck a knife in his legs, but didn’t kill him. They forced him to kneel down again, his arms in a cross, while he bled in sight of everyone. The child cried and his arms dropped down again, three or four times. The officer finally approached him with a man in a white coat, perhaps one of the camp doctors; both were smiling. The officer was carrying his knife: the man in the white coat pointed to a very precise spot on Ansel’s body and said,“That gap there in the collarbone.”

The officer drove his knife in between that soft, white bone and blood spurted out. Four-year-old Ansel fell down dead. His parents were forced to observe him being tortured, because they wouldn’t allow them to faint. Ansel’s father survived and related those cruel events to Erika. His voice, she recalls, resonated with a deep, solemn, respectful sadness, as if he were reading a passage from the Bible.

Erika Fisherkant unearthed reports, whether by the Nazis themselves or Soviet investigators, and assembled an impressive array of eyewitness accounts and gradually became absolutely committed to preserving the memories of all those children who died so brutally and so arbitrarily.

“Arbitrarily?” she would correct me. “Nothing was arbitrary. There wasn’t the degree of arbitrariness you might conclude from the official version that depicts only a handful of murdering Nazis were to blame for everything and the rest simply carried out orders, as if all the other millions of Germans who embraced the anti-Jewish laws and were aware, to a lesser or greater degree, of the final decision to exterminate the whole Jewish people, belonged to a civilian army that implemented orders imposed by the Nazi Party. Orders? Under what threat? Was each German citizen, man, woman or child perhaps forced to kill a couple of Jews to earn the right to be a good, upstanding German? They weren’t forced to, but I know a huge majority did so, to a certain extent, simply by looking the other way. I am a German woman and have always been quite suspicious of that version that removed blame. As many others are, and, naturally, I am not and will never be the only one. My father died in Stalingrad and in his final letters, with censored sentences and his crossings out, between the lines he said we were all mad and that history would judge us mercilessly for what we were doing. It was a brief illumination on his part, because my father was no innocent man, I’m sure he had a lot of blood on his hands, he was a an out-and-out SS, a member of their police batallions. My father killed children, I’m almost sure he did.”

Erika Fisherkant said that in 1991 and her work has fulfilled her spirit of atonement. She created her Foundation so nobody would forget the children. Who could have murdered her? Did some neo-Nazi hothead carry out his threat? Was a Foundation like hers still uncomfortable for a country like Austria that has a lot left to purge? They are still investigating her case.

Back to the children, Erika’s obsession. Killing children is easy. But it was even easier for an SS, since it was like killing a small insect, and for an SS a Jewish child was a small insect or even less, since it lacked any human spirit, which meant it was legitimate to eliminate them and they could do so with total impunity.

Children, especially if they are very young, leave barely a trace. They don’t write letters, leave written or oral accounts in their wake, don’t draw up documents, contracts, receipts, don’t own valuable objects, aren’t remembered by their community because of any common gesture or action, have few friends, and the ones they do have are other children. They live cheek-by-jowel with their families, their parents, their brothers and sisters, the photos in which they appear are family photos, where it is almost impossible to identify even the adults. And if the adults disappear with them, no one, ever, will call them to mind in even the most fleeting of reflections.

For Erika Fisherkant those children that no one remembers because no one is alive to remember them deserve special commemoration, in active protest against the grotesque, complacent unravelling of history. Her project was to find the tiniest details and trace the names and surnames, origins, families, towns, streets and the past geography of the largest possible number of children murdered by the Nazis. The vast majority of those children were Jewish.

Erika Fisherkant knew—of course she knew, because she was there and survived!—that on February 13, 1945, a few days before Hurbinek died, the RAF bombed Dresden and laid the city waste. Thousands of German civilians died, including some of Erika’s cousins and friends. But she used to reply to her detractors who said she was biaised: “I know that many children died, but none like Ansel Bloch, for example. Perhaps all deaths are the same, but they aren’t equal. There are differences. The only one who was guilty was Hitler. In a way, he killed all those children, the ones belonging to others and ours; he poisoned us all.”

Erika Fisherkant took a long time to get the children’s weeping out of her dreams. Sometimes, she would relate, she woke up
aware
she had been dreaming of fear pure and simple, without faces, situations or concrete acts you might call nightmares: she dreamed of fear in a pure form, as if it were a universal category that made her tremble at night in bed. She didn’t dream of her experience of fear, but the accumulated experience of fear of all those children before they died. She came to suffer a kind of chronic, self-inflicted insomnia out of fear that she might dream that fear once again.

Erika’s research was horrific. “They are facts I know and that I cannot pretend I don’t know,” she would say.

I remember how she once let me see the cards where she had noted down eyewitness accounts or events related to her searches. It was my own private walk through human terror, and that was how I discovered the gap in the collarbone could assume many different forms.

Like Erika Fisherkant, I discovered that in a village in Byelorussia they selected a woman and her two children, aged five and seven, from the line. Without saying a word, they cut the head off one in front of the mother and shot the other in the face. They let her live on for a day so her suffering didn’t end quickly. Then they killed her.

I discovered that in Babi Yar the children fell either alive or severely wounded into the graves where they carried out mass executions. They fell on top of their dead mothers and wept for a long time until they were finally suffocated by the next round of corpses that buried them.

I discovered that they systematically smashed the heads of one or two-year-old babies against the road in the outskirts of ghettos.

I discovered that they cut off the breasts of twelve to fourteen-year-old girls in public before executing them.

I discovered that a huge SS on the platform in Auschwitz picked up a child by his hair with one hand and shot him in the ear with the other.

I discovered that in a village in Ukraine the police batallions crushed boys’ testicles under their boots before shooting them.

I discovered that sometimes, to amuse themselves, German soldiers would lift up a child by both ears and shake it several times in the air until its ears were ripped off its body. They laughed and nailed the ears to wooden posts.

I discovered that the Germans always laughed at their own brutality toward children. It was significant or atrocious for them. It was like destroying nests of sparrows or pigeons with their eggs. In these cases, they were only little Jewish chicks. Others needed to drink before they could kill children.

I discovered that in Crematorium 5 in Auschwitz the SS threw live children into the ovens.

I discovered that in a village in Lithuania several soldiers approached a group of children with their mothers. As soon as they were alongside them, on the spur of the moment, they suddenly took out their swords and knives and started to skewer the children. Not one managed even a whimper. It was such a shock. Their mothers went crazy before they died.

When it’s time for my daughters’ birthdays, I feel in a wild party mood. Fanny often tells me I become just one more child, a child like them and that the week before I’m all excited thinking the day is round the corner and that it will be spectacular. Come what may, the whole day is devoted to them, it’s a party for every member of the family, no one works, no one does anything routine, everything is special: the food is more lavish, the day’s timetable more uncharted (unlimited freedom to schedule things as the whim takes us), the clothes we wear are more random, the words we exchange less inhibited and every unexpected detail prompts jokes and laughter. I am an optimist, as Fanny says. The day before I buy presents for everyone, including Fanny and myself. And my own private ritual: our home dawns full of phigonias, Fanny’s favorite yellow flowers. That is how I want to celebrate that my daughters were born, and are alive and will live for a long time to come. My daughters’ birthdays—Mina in January and Zoe in June—are really gifts to me, and I cherish them mentally in my memory, scrupulously, as Fanny cherishes the memory of the phigonias I gave her. I treasure every year that passes with them and treasure the days that remind me how my life and theirs have experienced another year and become part of a common history that makes us what we are—together and alive—I don’t ever want to forget this, trivialize or take it for granted, because it is a gift amid all the suffering that has existed or will exist in the world—and I’d pay whatever price was necessary to guarantee that every birthday takes place inexorably, until, when they are older, they can decide by themselves how they’d like to celebrate their birthdays. Today I would buy lots of birthdays for Hurbinek. Today I would buy lots of birthdays for the children whose deaths are described on Erika Fisherkant’s record cards.