‘It’s about Paul Louis Broum,’ I said. ‘You knew him.’
The old man spoke with deliberation, choosing each word like a lawyer. His voice was shrill and yet dignified. ‘I did. Yes. I knew Broum.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘did you know him well?’
‘Well?’ said Jan-im-Glück. He thought about it. ‘I knew him ill. That’s the only way you know anyone in a concentration camp. You watch the ones that are taken away to die and you are happy because you are left alive. That’s our guilt, you see; all Europe suffers from a feeling of guilt. That is why the world is so spiteful. The ex-gaoler remembers someone he has beaten or selected for beating, the people who watched us move through the towns remember that they forgot five minutes afterwards, and we victims remember that we were happy to see our friends die because it meant that we lived. So you see we are all racked with guilt.’
‘About Broum,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ the old man cried. ‘My conversation embarrasses you because you too feel it.’
‘If the world is guilty,’ I said, ‘who remains to pass judgement?’
The old man patted his knee and said, ‘Ganz meschugge.’
‘Can you tell me about Broum’s life in prison?’ I said.
‘Better than that,’ said Jan-im-Glück. ‘I’ll tell you of his death.’
‘Tell me about that,’ I said.
* * *
1 Obsazeno: occupied.
2 ganz: completely; meschugge (Yiddish): batty, crazy, nuts.
Chapter 32
JAN-IM-GLÜCK, 1945
It was moving-day at the camp. Everyone suspected that the Russians were getting closer but there was no way to find out. At the week-end the Germans detonated the crematoria in explosions that went on all night. Sunday was devoted to burning down half the huts, which meant that on Sunday night each remaining hut was twice as crowded as usual. Scarcely anyone slept that night; it was early summer and the windows were shuttered to make the sentries’ job easier. Inside the huts the temperature was unbelievable. Most of the huts put two or three unconscious people out of the front door the next morning before the march had even begun.
One side of the camp was a railway siding. All the sick were taken there just after dawn. Someone asked a guard what was happening and he said that the sick were being taken to Siedlce by train, but that all the others must march. The sick left before the food was distributed; it was an ominous sign.
The next group to leave were the children. They were marched away before the shutters were taken down from the huts, but everyone was listening.
The remainder of the prisoners formed up in the main compound. There was an acrid smell of burnt wood and burnt bedding. Great pieces of soot floated on the air like dandelion seeds. The guards were all carrying new automatic rifles and outside the gates there was a large group of soldiers. They wore camouflage smocks and steel helmets and were dirty and unshaven. They were front-line troops, not Waffen SS. The guards had formed up near by too, but the two sorts of soldiers didn’t speak to each other. Each prisoner was given four raw potatoes and some hard dried meat. Some of the prisoners got extra potatoes but only those in the front rank. They began to eat the food as they walked out of the gate.
Everyone knew that they were walking westwards because the shadows stretched very long and very thin in front of them as they walked. They walked for two hours, then they rested, then they walked for another two hours. The second or third time they stopped, there was the distant sound of heavy artillery. It was very faint and, when the march recommenced, the sound of moving feet made it impossible to hear.
At noon the soldiers and guards lit fires and began to cook food that came out of the carts that were being hauled by manpower. They spoke and laughed together. The soldiers didn’t speak to the prisoners at first. It was as though the very existence of the concentration-camp prisoners embarrassed them; that although they were guarding them they didn’t want to admit that the prisoners existed. The first soldier to have a conversation with any prisoner was a middle-aged Latvian who heard two prisoners speak his language. They exchanged the names of their birthplaces, then marched in an awkward silence until one of the regular guards came near to them. Then the soldier moved farther down the marching column. Later he brought a small piece of tobacco for his countrymen; they chewed it but it made them feel sick, for their stomachs were not strong enough for such things.
In the fields there were only women. They attended to their work and seldom turned to watch the great shuffling army. In the villages there was no one to be seen at all, but if a prisoner watched carefully he saw a movement of lace curtain or a door opening an inch or two.
There were many crucifixes at the roadside and some of the prisoners would shake their fists as they passed. One man spat. Broum said, ‘Do not blaspheme,’ and the man replied, ‘Our very existence is a blasphemy.’ Then the man who had spat shouted a prayer as loud as he could shout and a guard came along and hit the prisoner. Broum called to the guard, ‘Don’t strike him, let him grow weary.’ Strangely enough the guard moved away and the man who had spat became quiet.
Soon after that, other men began to tire and fall to the rear of the column. It was a long line, the tail of it seldom visible to the men at the front, so they didn’t know what happened to those who lagged behind, but all day there had been the sound of rifle shots. Some said that the soldiers were shooting birds and hares for food.
Jan and Broum found themselves walking side by side. Broum began to talk. They talked about their days in the prison camp and the prisoners they both remembered. Later Broum began to talk of his life before he came to the camp. This was unusual; origin and family were topics prisoners preferred to leave undiscussed. At first Jan thought that he must be some sort of Kapo employed to ferret information, but he seemed more interested in speaking of himself than in discovering facts about Jan.
Broum’s father was a Frenchman who came to Czechoslovakia to work in the wine business. His mother was a member of one of the best Jewish families in Prague. ‘I’m a Jewish Roman Catholic,’ Broum said to Jan. ‘I was ten before I realized that not everyone in the world has a Jewish mother and a Catholic father.’ At home they mostly spoke German although his mother also spoke fluent French.
Broum’s mother was an accomplished amateur musician and sometimes would participate in the musical soirées they regularly held. His father used these occasions to get silently drunk, sitting glassyeyed in the back of the room and none of the guests dared to turn round.
Broum was studying at the German University in Prague until 1940 when the Germans expelled him because he was half-Jewish. Even then he had no strong political ideas, not even feeling hatred for the Nazis after he was expelled. He described himself as a ‘political virgin’.
He found it impossible to get a job—not because the Nazis were persecuting him but because the Czechs were anxious not to provoke them. Ironically the job he finally got was working for the Nazis direct. The fall of France brought an urgent need for French-speaking interpreters. Broum went to France as a civilian interpreter for the Wehrmacht.
Even as a civilian Broum found himself a member of the master race: a strange and frightening experience for a young man visiting his father’s native land for the first time. Broum became an interpreter with the HQ group 312 Geheime Feldpolizei in Caen. The job of that unit was investigating crimes committed by local civilians against the German Army.
Many of the French prisoners reminded Broum of his father. In spite of himself, he became emotionally involved in their fate. Sometimes he was ordered to be present as a witness at executions, sometimes information was gained only by torture and as a translator he was required to be present.
Broum began to dread each day’s work. Sometimes he would stay awake all night knowing that the moment he fell asleep morning would arrive next. Indigestion became stomach pains—the stomach being the focal point of fear—and these developed into severe abdominal cramps. Some
times he used his fast, fluent French to slip a word of sympathy or advice into the translations. The word spread that Broum was a sympathetic German. For some time Broum played a double game, revealing pieces of information that he would never have got had the prisoners not trusted him to a limited extent.
Finally Broum cracked. Perhaps the local French knew enough to blackmail him. Perhaps he started out as a betrayer but stayed as a believer. In any case he made contact with local resistance leaders. He reported to them regularly; train times, barge concentrations, movements of prisoners and rations. When his position became too precarious the French resistance gave him false papers and sheltered him in Douai with a Jewish family. Broum became a Jew in manners and thought. He passed himself off as a Frenchman but eventually he was caught—as they were all caught—by betrayal.
He was passed from civil prison in France to Wehrmacht prison in Holland to civil prison in Essen. No one knew quite what to do with a half-French, half-German civilian who had deserted from the Army, until he told them how proud he was to be a Jew. He was a figure that attracted legends as a magnet attracts iron filings. Stories were told of Broum’s close friendship with Goering until Goering coveted Broum’s wife—or in other stories his art collection—and had him imprisoned. There were stories that made Broum a relative of Pierre Laval, in jail as a hostage for the latter’s collaboration. Some stories insisted that Broum was a member of the German General Staff who had been secretly working for the Russians. Whatever the truth was, it had brought Broum to Treblinka. It was an extermination camp but Broum found ways to stand aside from the stream of prisoners who entered and died within a week. Jan too earned his nickname. The art of survival—the old man said—was the only Jewish art form.
The great dirty column of ragged, smelly prisoners kept moving west. There were several times when the old man Jan would have slipped behind and solved the riddle of the rabbit guns but for the voice and the arm of Broum. The column halted before it was dark. Fires were built but there were no axes to chop wood and the food didn’t last long.
The prisoners were counted endlessly, when all the totals tallied the food was distributed. Each prisoner got three raw beets and a slice of black bread which they were permitted to dip into a canister of hot soup. One man dropped his bread into the soup. He was a strong, intelligent man but he wept like a child. The guards laughed. The prisoners crowded together in vast groups—some of a hundred or more—and shared their body heat to stay alive.
All night the horizon flickered with gunfire. All night long men were getting to their feet and flailing their bodies to move their thin blood. As dawn broke the guards ordered everyone to their feet. Some didn’t get to their feet; the cold had nibbled the last calories of life away from them. Counting began. The live moved hastily away from the dead. Broum was one of the dead. The cold hadn’t killed him; he had, they said, been strangled. No prisoner was surprised, for Broum had many enemies, but the Germans were surprised and angry. Death was something which only they dispensed. They began to ask questions. They wanted to know who slept near Broum. Jan-im-Glück had slept beside him and had heard nothing and seen nothing. Jan-im-Glück said nothing to anyone. An SS medical officer examined the body and then questioned five suspects. Jan was one of the thousands of prisoners who looked on. The wind was screaming and tugging at the flaps of their clothes like an angry child. The officer questioned each suspect in turn. Sometimes the words were audible to the watchers but generally the wind tore the words away from the wide-moving jaws. The prisoners watched with unseeing eyes the moving mouths of the men; not hearing, understanding or caring that they were arguing, pleading, crying for their lives.
Some of the guards grew impatient at this lengthy attempt at justice. They pointed to the enormous column of men and to the horizon and they too wasted their pleas upon the deaf ear of the wind. The officer sent two of the suspects back into the ranks and motioned for the other three to kneel. They knelt. He drew his pistol without haste and shot the first man in the neck. He stepped forward and shot the next man in the neck, the third man got to his feet and began shouting—his hands cupped to carry his voice better. The officer shot him in the chest.
As the column began to move again Jan-im-Glück noticed that the man next to him was covered in blood and tiny splinters of bone. He had been standing in the front row. Three soldiers pulled the executed men to the side of the road and the SS officer looked pleased as he threw an army greatcoat over the body of Broum who had caused it all. The prisoners were pleased that something had been decided, for as they walked the circulation began again in their cramped frozen limbs.
Chapter 33
Two hostile bishops can be used to block the
advance of passed pawns since between
them they control access to all squares
of both colours.
Monday, October 21st
I shook Harvey and his head revolved on his folded arms until his cherubic features smiled at me sideways.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. Harvey reached for the bottle of slivovice.
‘Come along, Harvey,’ I said and unlocked his fingers from around the neck of the bottle. The old man blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief that was covered with the cross-hatching of meticulous darns.
The night was as clear as a planetarium. Once outside Harvey did a little gavotte and sang a tuneless, improvised song.
‘You’ve got to escalate or even quantify For pre-emptive counter-strateg-y-y-y-y.’
The cross country detour was softened by the independent suspension of the slivovice. When we turned on to the sealed surface of the main road to Prague we began to pick up speed.
‘Did you hear all that, Harvey?’ I asked.
‘What do you think I am?’ said Harvey. ‘A goddamned snooper?’
‘Yes,’ I said and Harvey laughed and belched and went back to sleep until I woke him up.
‘Something ahead,’ I said.
‘An accident,’ said Harvey. He was sober. Harvey could get drunk like some people cat-nap. There was a vehicle with its lights on and a red and white illuminated bull’s-eye device was swinging in blurred arcs across the road.
I stopped the car. The man holding the signalling light was wearing a white crash-helmet, leather riding-breeches and a brown leather jacket with huge stiff red epaulettes. He tucked the signallinglamp into the top of his black jack-boots as I wound down the window. He looked at us both, then said in German, ‘Who is the owner of this vehicle, please?’
He examined the insurance papers and the documents the hire company had given me and then he went over each page in our passports and tugged at the binding. Behind him was a motor-cycle and sidecar and on the far side of the road a jeep-like vehicle without lights. The man in the crash-helmet took our papers over to the jeep and I could hear the music of the voices; the questions were vibrato and flute-like Czech, but the decisions were played on a Russian bassoon. The two men in the jeep climbed out on to the road. One was dressed in the very English style of a Czech army officer, the other wore the uniform of a Russian corporal. They held the papers on the bonnet of the jeep and studied them with a flashlight before climbing back in. Then—still without switching on its lights—the jeep reversed at full speed a matter of twenty feet. Then the corporal gave it full lock and roared up the road, taking the pot-holes in easy style.
‘Follow,’ said the man in the white crash-helmet, pointing after the jeep.
‘Better follow it, boy,’ said Harvey. ‘There go our passports and in this country an American passport is worth more than a sixteen-ounce can of instant coffee.’
The jeep turned down a wide fire lane. We turned off the road after it; the rough ground hammered the suspension. Above us the tips of the firs almost closed out the stars as we sped down the long claustrophobic track like bugs in a hair-brush. Through the fire gaps I caught glimpses of rolling countryside, dusty in the white moonlight. The jeep slowed and in a clearing ahead a soldier in a brown an
orak was waving a torch. It was a large clearing and a small farm fitted snugly into the corner of it. Inside the hollow feudal plan of the farmhouse a cobbled courtyard held half a dozen soldiers, some motor-cycles and a close-harmony quartet of dogs. I parked behind the jeep and climbed out of the car. A soldier pointed from the back seat of the jeep, the curved magazine of a Model 58 Assault gun peeping from his cradled arms. We obeyed his signal and stepped through the small door.
The building into which we were ushered had one simple wooden table standing amid straw, three hens moving sleepily and a staircase leading up to a landing where the army officer was standing. As we entered the doorway he said ‘Good evening’ in English. Harvey turned to me and began to relight his cigarette. Americans don’t often relight an inch of cigarette so I watched Harvey’s lips. He mouthed, OBZ1 under the cloak of his cupped hands. I didn’t nod.
The Czech army officer pointed to two grey weather-beaten chairs and Harvey and I sat. Harvey had thrown his match down and the officer went across to where it lay and planted a carefully polished boot on it. He looked at Harvey in an admonishing way that could have meant anything from ‘I wish this was your neck’ to ‘That’s how fires start’. The Czech officer had a face like a half-erased pencil drawing. His skin and his eyes were grey. His forehead was tall and his ears, nose and chin a little too long, like a wax doll that has been out in the sun. Behind him on the stairs was the Russian corporal intent on opening a bottle. The corporal smiled widely at us. ‘English,’ he said. ‘What a wonderful surprise, poputchik.’2
‘You know this guy?’ said Harvey.
‘Colonel Stok,’ I said. ‘Red Army Security Berlin.’ Stok pulled down the front of his brown soldiers’ summer-issue blouse with its corporal’s insignia.
One of the Czech soldiers brought in four thimblesize glasses and a plain tin the size of a floor polish tin.