The Street Sweeper

  ‘I don’t know. Schillinger ordered us to come here. He didn’t tell us why.’

  Hearing Schillinger’s name caused Zalman Gradowski to stop what he was doing. He looked at Mandelbrot for an explanation from within his eyes if one was not to be forthcoming in his words. And it was then that he saw Oberscharführer Schillinger walk into the crematorium accompanied by a number of SS guards.

  ‘Take your pieces out,’ Oberscharführer Schillinger ordered Gradowski, referring to the corpses in the oven. Nobody had ever heard an order like this before. The men working at the other furnaces stopped working and looked around at the scene before them.

  ‘Did anybody tell you to stop working? Get on with it!’ Schillinger yelled at the other stokers and they went back to work without hesitation.

  Zalman Gradowski had no intention of chancing Schillinger’s wrath but, nonetheless, he couldn’t believe he had heard the order correctly. Was it more dangerous to stop burning the corpses he was working on when he and the others were constantly ordered to ‘speed it up’ or was it more dangerous to check his understanding of the order? For a moment everyone, including the SS men who had come in with Schillinger, stared at Gradowski. Only minutes earlier he had been quietly attending to his work, burning people, numb to the task after so many bodies, after so many shifts. His mind had escaped to an event in the past before the war, which is where all of him but his body resided. Now suddenly Oberscharführer Schillinger had appeared, was standing there, singling him out in front of Sonderkommando men who weren’t even supposed to be there. Schillinger was giving him an order that defied the rationale for his continued existence. Did they think he was working too slowly? What was going on? Zalman Gradowski was confused, which meant, in his present circumstances, that he was terrified.

  ‘Take them out, sir?’

  ‘Take them out, Jew!’ Schillinger roared.

  Gradowski opened the door to the oven and, with a metal rake-like implement, pulled the three bodies out of the oven and onto the iron stretcher tray. Now the smell was unbearable and two of the SS men gagged. The hands and feet of the first two bodies, red in some places, charred and badly blistered in others, had already started to shrivel, curving to arch upwards.

  ‘Put them on the floor,’ Schillinger said, calmly this time.

  Using a rake as a pitch fork, Gradowski emptied the tray of the corpses one by one. Nobody said a word as he did this. Nobody knew what was going on. Gradowski was completely at a loss when suddenly Schillinger turned to Mandelbrot, Schubach, Ochrenberg, Touba, Raijsmann, Wentzel and the others who had come from the undressing room on his orders and he began to address them calmly. The other stokers strained to hear what was being said without being conspicuous about it.

  ‘We had some problems with the last transport in the undressing room, didn’t we? It slowed us down. Sometimes we have delays beyond our control. I understand this. We’re all up against it. There’s so much to get through. But we just now experienced a problem that, fortunately, is easily overcome.’

  He stopped for a moment and turned back to the direction of the oven. He took a step towards it, peering in to examine the fire that never went out. The unearthly heat, even from a distance, made his face perspire. He continued calmly, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief from a pocket.

  ‘Listen, men, when you warn them, they panic. When they panic it slows us down and that’s bad for all of us,’ he said, stepping back from the oven and wiping his forehead again and then examining the extent to which the moisture had been absorbed by the otherwise pristine white cloth. ‘We tell you this all the time. You can’t say we don’t. Just say what we tell you to say. It’s not difficult to remember and it will make your work much easier. Don’t warn them. Please, don’t warn them,’ he said softly. Then he closed his eyes as if exhausted and nodded slightly, just once, whereupon, before the Sonderkommando realised what was happening, three SS men grabbed Ochrenberg, one at each arm and one at his legs and they shoved him head first into Gradowski’s yawning oven. The sound of Ochrenberg’s screams from inside the oven made everybody in the room stop their work but now this sudden unscheduled break from their labour didn’t seem to bother Oberscharführer Schillinger at all. The short time lost was an investment in efficiency. Now they could all go back to the undressing room before emptying their gas chamber and a new man could be brought from a new transport to join the ranks of the Sonderkommando to replace Ochrenburg.

  All of this took place within the first seventy-five minutes of one shift of one day of Henryk Mandelbrot’s term in the Sonderkommando at Birkenau.

  ‘Why didn’t you warn them?’ Lamont Williams had asked. Sixty-three years later on the ninth floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, on the day before he was due to be discharged, Mr Mandelbrot told the man from Building Services about the death of a man called Ochrenberg.

  A number of months would pass before they would see each other again. The older man would spend some time with his family in Long Island before eventually coming back to the city to be part of the hospital’s outpatient program. Then as the seasons turned colder he would be readmitted, which is when the two men would find each other again. But in between their meetings, few days passed without Lamont Williams thinking of this man and of what he had told him. There were a lot of questions he wanted to ask the absent patient. On several occasions, at night, on his way home from work or just walking down Second Avenue on his lunch hour, Lamont Williams found himself wanting to tell somebody about the death of Ochrenberg, the man who had warned the young woman in one of the undressing rooms at Birkenau. There were often a lot of people in the Gristedes supermarket, a lot of students around Rockefeller and quite a few people in the bank. There were a lot of people in the nail salons and the drycleaners and always a lot of dog-walkers in the area too. But he found himself with no one to talk to about Ochrenberg.

  *

  Each week in New York, Adam Zignelik received from Sahera Shukri, the Dean of Libraries at Chicago’s IIT, one or sometimes a number of the newly digitised transcripts of the interviews Henry Border had conducted with Holocaust survivors in the DP camps of Europe in the summer of 1946. He did his best to keep up with them but he still had teaching responsibilities to discharge. He read the transcripts to learn more about Henry Border, the little-known psychologist who, without realising it, was one of the pioneers of what is now known as Oral History. He also read them in the hope of discovering the very thing that had led him to Border in the first place; the prospect of finding evidence to support the proposition that African American troops had been involved in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

  He had met William McCray for coffee several times and he knew the old man was always restraining himself to allow a decent interval to elapse before it became polite to ask, ‘What news from Chicago? You find anything in those transcripts about black troops at Dachau?’ Adam hadn’t found anything yet but, as he told William, he had plenty of Border’s transcripts still to read. Not only that, and this especially cheered William, there were many of Border’s wire recordings that had still not been digitally recorded for preservation and translation. There were also wire recordings that Border hadn’t made transcripts of. Who knew what information was waiting to be unearthed?

  Adam thought of this from Border’s point of view. Not only had Border been unable to generate much interest in his lifetime in the wartime experiences of the DPs he had interviewed during his summer with them, but he hadn’t even been able to transcribe all of his recordings of these interviews. He died without knowing whether anyone would ever hear or read the bulk of the most important work he had ever done. And perhaps they never would unless Adam, having stumbled upon them and having realised their importance and the glimmer of inarticulated salvation they held for him, decided to study them.

  The work was delivering Adam hope in spasmodic spurts and arrhythmic drips. He had just returned from yet another trip to Chicago. The cost
was mounting. Out of his own pocket Adam was paying students of the IIT electrical engineer, Arturo Suarez, to digitise Border’s unheard wire recordings. It was expensive but Adam reasoned that paying for it himself would help tie him to the project ahead of any other historians, tenured academics who might not have to be pondering a life without the protection and kudos of a university. So, despite the cost, he was finding it worthwhile to travel to Chicago rather than simply to call or email there. His most recent trip had been to interview another of Border’s former students, a woman, Amy Muirden, who had been one of those whose Masters’ thesis had concerned Border’s ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’.

  A charming, delightful woman in her eighties, a psychologist all her professional life, Amy Muirden had provided Adam with further insight into Border as a teacher, an intellectual and as a man. She was also able to talk, to a certain extent, about Border’s home life, about his daughter Elise, and the live-in housekeeper, Callie, a young black woman who, though not much older than Amy had been at the time, had a teenage son. Amy had met Elise, Callie and even Callie’s son Russell, on many occasions because Dr Border used to hold evening seminars for his postgraduate students at his home. She remembered that Callie got married and that for a time all three of them – Callie, Russell and the new husband, a meat worker – lived in the Border home with Dr Border and Elise, whom everyone called ‘Elly’. The son, Russell, worked at the meat works with his step-father, she remembered.

  Callie used to serve refreshments at the end of the seminar and Elly would help her. Sometimes Elly, who would have been about seventeen or so then, would even sit in on the seminars. The male students showed Elly particular attention, none more than Wayne Rosenthal. Everybody was aware of this. Occasional teasing by the other male students would provoke protests of innocence from Wayne Rosenthal and Elly but there was no denying their interest in each other. Amy didn’t remember Dr Border being at all concerned by Wayne’s attention to his daughter. On reflection, when Adam put it to her, she would have to agree that Wayne Rosenthal was probably Dr Border’s favourite male student, perhaps just ahead of Arch Sanasarian. Who was his favourite female student? Amy Muirden was too polite to say but Adam gauged that it had been her. By all accounts Dr Border had tried not to show favouritism and sometimes his wicked sense of humour was directed against Wayne Rosenthal too. But Wayne never seemed to mind. The bond between Dr Border and Wayne might have been particularly strong because Wayne was able to assist Dr Border with his work more than anyone else.

  ‘You see, not only was Wayne Jewish but his parents were Eastern European immigrants who spoke Yiddish at home. Wayne’s first language was Yiddish so he was able to work on the wire recordings more than any of the others. He didn’t just help with the technical side of things like Arch had; he was able to listen to the recordings and to translate them. He spent many hours on them both on campus and at Dr Border’s home. Well, it was another opportunity to see Elly, wasn’t it?’ Amy Muirden smiled.

  ‘I remember there was a party. Yes! That’s right; Evie Harmon’s brother had a twenty-first birthday party or maybe it was a graduation party but it was a very grand affair. The Harmons were terribly wealthy, certainly by the standards of those days. Oh, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m sorry. Evie Harmon was one of the group. She was one of the Masters students who was also working on Dr Border’s “Adjective–Verb Quotient”. Sometimes Dr Border would tease her, just gently.’

  ‘What would he tease her about?’

  ‘Well, she’d gone to all the right schools, you know, and she didn’t mind letting people know. Her father was the Harmon from the organs. You know Harmon organs? There used to be a Harmon organ in every movie house in Chicago, probably one in practically every movie house in the country. That was her father, interested in any technology that had to do with sound, and I think it was this that led him to be friendly with Marvin Cadden. You know about Marvin Cadden? He was the engineer at IIT who developed the wire recording device Dr Border recorded his interviews on. Of course you would know about him. I vaguely recall that it was the Harmon family connection with Marvin Cadden that led Evie to Dr Border.

  ‘Anyway, the Harmon family was very well-to-do and when her brother had a party, I forget the occasion, Evie was able to invite some of her own friends. I remember she invited the group, all of Dr Border’s Masters students. We were a bit surprised because none of us had the kind of money to invite people who were, you know, not very close friends, to family functions. Not only that but she invited Dr Border too, and even Elly, who had become … what would you call it? She was like a mascot, if that doesn’t sound too insulting. I mean that she was almost a de facto member of the class, encouraged in this by the boys of course and particularly by Wayne. I remember this because Evie had told me that she was going to invite Elly and Dr Border and I really hadn’t expected him to come. I mean, for all that he provided a light supper for us in his home after the seminars, I’d never seen him do anything … you know … nothing that you might call in any way social, nothing, you know, frivolous.

  ‘But he came, possibly because Marvin Cadden was going to be there. Mr Cadden was an important man on campus and I remember being surprised not so much that Elly came but that Dr Border came. You know, I just remembered, even Callie came. Of course she wasn’t a guest. That’s right! Evie’s family needed extra help with the catering and she ended up hiring Callie and her son to help out with the serving and whatever. The Dr Border group didn’t know any of the others so we all sort of hung around together. Elly was with us and Dr Border was never too far away. The house and the garden, it was all terribly impressive but once Evie had given us all the grand tour we tended to stay together not far from where they’d set up the bar. I don’t mean that we were drinking heavily or anything but … There was some incident. I was barely aware of it. There was something. Something happened between Dr Border and Wayne Rosenthal. I don’t know what it was. They might have had words over something. I know that sounds unimaginable because he was always terribly respectful to Dr Border, as we all were, but there was something. None of us knew exactly what had happened but I remember it affected Elly. I’m sorry, I don’t really know the details.’

  ‘Well, it was a very long time ago.’

  ‘It wasn’t appropriate to ask Dr Border and Wayne clearly didn’t want to talk about it with any of us. You have to remember in those days … Well, people were a lot more private about … their feelings. Look, I don’t even know how much Elly knew. I remember thinking that it had to have something to do with her but I don’t know now why I thought that then. I think Wayne Rosenthal is still alive. Have you made contact with him?’

  ‘I’ve tried to arrange an interview but he won’t talk to me. His son sent me an email to say that he doesn’t want to talk about Dr Border or his work.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s not in good health. I haven’t seen him in over twenty years but I know he lost his wife.’

  ‘Possibly, but I don’t think that’s it. The son’s email doesn’t offer any of those excuses. He just states quite specifically that his father, Wayne Rosenthal, doesn’t wish to talk about Dr Border or his work. Amy, I wondered whether perhaps you might approach him, as an old classmate? Maybe –’

  ‘Oh no, Dr Zignelik –’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘Adam, I’m sorry, I couldn’t. I mean, I haven’t seen him in so long. I wouldn’t feel comfortable. Maybe Arch could get him to come ‘round? I know he’s been in touch with him a lot more recently than me. Everybody likes Arch. Who could say no to him, such a lovely man?’

  ‘Wayne Rosenthal.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Wayne Rosenthal could say no to him. He’s already asked on my behalf and Wayne gave him the same answer his son’s given me. All I could do was leave his son with my contact details in case he changed his mind. It might not have anything to do with any of my research. It’s just the way the son made it clear. It was as though if I’d wanted
to interview Wayne about something, anything other than Henry Border, he’d be up for it.’

  Then Amy Muirden seemed to study Adam Zignelik’s face with a seriousness she had not yet displayed before she spoke again.

  ‘So you don’t think you’re going to get to speak to Wayne … at all?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t look that way.’

  ‘I don’t really know if I … It was years ago, but … I promised Wayne I would never say anything … because he swore me to the strictest confidence.’

  ‘Anything you can remember might be helpful.’

  ‘After the incident at Evie Harmon’s family’s party, he came to see me. He was in a terrible state. He didn’t want to say anything, but I got it out of him by promising never to tell a soul – a promise I’m about to break – and by advising him that he needed to tell someone if he wanted a chance to feel better about it. We were all psychologists, after all. I said it didn’t have to be me, but …’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘He said … He said that he thought that he had stumbled on a wire recording that revealed what had happened to Dr Border’s wife … during the war. He’d raised it with him at the party or just before. That’s where the trouble started … at the party.’

  ‘Do you know what the story was, what happened to his wife?’

  ‘No, Wayne wouldn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, really. I would tell you now.’

  ‘Do you remember anything else?’

  ‘No, that’s it … except her name. He told me her name and I never forgot it … isn’t it funny … because of a T.S. Eliot poem, an anti-Semitic poem, actually. Her name was Rosa Rabinowicz. In the poem it’s Rachel, not Rosa, but it was enough for me to remember. Do you know that poem, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”? It always makes me think of young Elly Border. Isn’t it funny what you remember?’

  There were other leads to Border and his work. One in particular was potentially even more fruitful than Wayne Rosenthal might have been but it was much further away than Chicago and so more of a problem. Adam was already using what little savings he had to go back and forth from New York to Chicago and while he felt confident he could get a project and possibly a monograph out of his research on Border and his transcripts that would be of historiographical importance, he hadn’t begun to put together a proposal that could land him an imminent academic job offer. Soon he was going to have to go into debt just to keep flying to Chicago and back. As for his original motivation in connection with the role of black returned servicemen in the civil rights movement, namely his search for evidence for the involvement of black troops in the liberation of Dachau, although it was far from exhausted, nothing had turned up yet.