Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright Page 10

  “No, I’ve come about Rudi, of course. I know Peter’s staying with you, and I admire your courage. But can’t we do anything else?”

  “I think we’ve got Peter sorted.”

  “Good to know. But Rudi’s situation is more dire. What can we do for him?”

  Frederica seemed to sink farther into her winter coat as they hurried along the street toward nowhere in particular. “I know what you’re thinking, that I should approach Dr. Goebbels and ask him to intervene, but I absolutely can’t do that.”

  “Why not? You could argue that he’s an artist who has worked on the Führer’s own documentary.”

  Frederica shook her head. “First of all, whatever makes you think Dr. Goebbels will do something against his own program of ethnic cleansing just for me? And secondly, if you think you can argue for him being an artist useful to the Reich, ask Frau Riefenstahl to make that argument to the Führer.”

  “She won’t. She’s afraid to endanger her position.”

  “So you want me to endanger mine?”

  “Endanger you? No, of course I wouldn’t do that. But the subject was Rudi. I thought the two of you were close. How can you simply abandon him?”

  Frederica stopped short. “Don’t accuse me so lightly. You have no idea of the circumstances.”

  Katja faced her, the steam of her breath mixing with Frederica’s. “Then explain the circumstances to me. Please, don’t just become paralyzed. What about some of the other department heads in the ministry? Isn’t there one for photography? Maybe we can approach him.”

  “Look, I’m doing the best I can for both Rudi and Peter, and all your naïve passion for them will only make things worse. Please, just stay away from the ministry and let things take their course. There are bigger issues at stake that you simply don’t understand.”

  “Bigger things at stake. That’s what Leni Riefenstahl said. I had expected more from you.” They came to a corner with a stop for the Strassenbahn that went toward Grünewald. Katja halted; she was not accomplishing anything and might as well go home.

  “Thank you for helping Peter, but if that’s all you’re willing to do, it’s not enough. We’re going to have a glorious new Reich, but half of our friends will be dead.”

  Frederica winced at the remark, but as she walked away, her reply was, “My regards to your husband. I’m sure you wish him great success in his battle for the new German order.”

  Katja looked away abruptly. It was like a slap in the face.

  *

  Peter stood at their usual spot as she walked toward her own street. Katja embraced him and took hold of his arm. “My father has a late rehearsal. Come in for awhile. I’ll make us something to eat.”

  As soon as they had taken off their coats, Katja drew him into the kitchen. “Sit down. I’ll warm up some Erbsensuppe.” She fetched a bowl of something yellowish-green from the windowsill.

  Peter stretched out his legs. “I love your house. Cozy, in good taste. Your parents must be nice people.”

  She scraped the paste from the glass into a pot, sprinkled some pepper onto it, and turned the stove on low. “There’s just my father now. He plays in the orchestra of the Staatsoper, like his father did. He inherited that talent as well as this house in Grünewald so I got to grow up almost in the country. But I don’t want to talk about me. I want to hear how you’re managing. Are you still with Frederica?”

  Peter pulled out his shirt and wiped the steam from his glasses onto the fabric. “I moved out yesterday, for both our safety. A friend of hers has connections at the zoo and they’re letting me work ‘discreetly.’ I can sleep in the supply room and no one’s likely to come looking for me there.”

  “Really, why not?”

  Peter chuckled. “It’s in the Lion House. I clean the cages of the big cats. I also ride a service bicycle delivering the crates of food, hay, tools, and so forth, around the zoo, but mostly I’m able to blend in. Nobody wants to have a conversation with a janitor. I like it. It’s much better than hiding in someone’s cellar all day.”

  She laid out bowls and oversized spoons for both of them. “What about food? You’ll still need ration cards, won’t you?”

  “Yes, but friends are helping me with that. I get a little here, a little there. Plus, I can sneak food from the canteen sometimes. I just worry constantly about Rudi.”

  “Do you have any news of him?” Katja asked from the stove.

  “Yes. I finally got the courage to call his father yesterday. He was pretty nasty to me, but at least he told me he’d got notice that Rudi’s in Sachsenhausen. Then he went into a tirade and blamed me for ruining Rudi’s life. You know, that I turned his son into a pervert. He said if I ever called him again, he’d denounce me. I told him, ‘Too late, old man. I’m already running.’”

  “I’m glad to know where he is. Now I wonder if there’s any way to get word to him.” She carried the pot to the table and ladled the steaming soup into their bowls.

  “Who would dare contact him? I’m a criminal, his father wants nothing more to do with him, and you’d only draw suspicion to yourself if you tried. It kills me to think he’s there, maybe starving, maybe sick, and I can’t even tell him I’m thinking about him.”

  “I’m sure he knows. And people are let out of Sachsenhausen sometimes. You just have to hold onto that hope and concentrate on taking care of yourself. If…when he gets out, he’ll need you to take care of him.”

  Peter shrugged half agreement and continued spooning up the hot soup, taking off his glasses, which persisted in collecting steam.

  Sitting across from him, Katja studied his face, worn now from a week of dread but still handsome. She decided her initial assessment of him was correct. He did look like a cadet, yet he had nothing in common with her husband, an active soldier.

  “Were you together long?”

  “We met at university when I joined a dueling fraternity he was in.”

  “Ah, I wondered about the scar on your chin. So it’s a Schmiss after all.”

  “Yes, though I just got it to impress Rudi. In fact, I dueled only twice before the other boys found out about my Jewish mother and threw me out. Rudi was so upset, he quit too. Our relationship just developed naturally from there.”

  “You never had any desire to marry?”

  “Is that a polite way of asking if I’ve always preferred boys? Yes. Always. The same way, I suppose, you’ve always liked them.”

  Katja chuckled, “Well, I don’t always like them. But it’s the way things have to be if you want children.”

  “I don’t want children. I just want to make pretty things. My family had a small factory in the district of Wedding. After university, I worked there designing clothes. You can imagine, all that pretty fabric. I was in heaven. And all the while I was seeing Rudi. When we decided to live together, my father told me I had to choose: marry a nice girl and stay in the family business or leave. I was really in love, so I chose Rudi. I’ve never regretted it. Not even now.”

  She considered for a moment whether she would have accepted expulsion from her family and from respectability to live with Dietrich. Except she had done the opposite; she had left her freedom to marry into respectability, and it was stifling.

  His bowl empty, Peter stood up and settled his glasses back on his nose. “I’d better be going before your father comes in. Much better if you don’t have to explain me.”

  “Yes, you’re right, of course.” She helped him put on his coat. “Wait. Take these with you.” She snatched a net bag from the kitchen wall and filled it with whatever was at hand. A dried salami, some winter apples, the two rolls left from lunch.

  She handed him the net and took hold of his arm. “I know how angry you are about what happened to Rudi, but please don’t think about anything subversive. Just stay low until things get better. I’ll help you as much as I can.”

  Peter looked away. “No, you don’t know how angry I am, but I thank you anyhow for your help. I promise not
to do anything to endanger you.”

  “Or yourself either,” she added, and embraced him warmly. “I want us both to be here when Rudi comes out.” It sounded like a lie, but they both needed to hear it.

  Then he disappeared into the night.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rudi Lamm had been amusing his three friends with tales of his work on the two Riefenstahl projects when the Viennese police arrived. It made no difference that he was German. The Anschluss had united Germany and Austria into one Reich, and he was subjected to the same humiliating interrogation as the Viennese men to establish that he was homosexual. Doctors examined his anus and demanded that he name at least two women with whom he’d had sexual relations. He could provide no names, and certainly no one in Vienna would lie for him, so his only possible defense evaporated.

  The Gestapo separated him from his Viennese friends and put him on a prison train that took thirteen days to travel from Vienna to Salzburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and finally to Berlin-Oranienburg. Those thirteen days gave him ample time to reproach himself for his obtuseness.

  The Nazis had never concealed their loathing for homosexuals, even while some of their leaders in the SA and the SS actively pursued boys. The party leaders tolerated the homosexual behavior of the widely popular Ernst Roehm and his coterie only so long as they continued to increase the numbers of Stormtroopers. When that moment passed and the party no longer needed its Brownshirt leader, his homosexuality provided the justification for his murder.

  Rudi could scarcely bear the irony. Not only had he not fled Germany when he had the freedom to do so, out of excitement at working with the great Leni Riefenstahl, he had helped produce the party’s powerful propaganda documentary. The party that clamored now for his death.

  His prison train was divided into tiny cells, each with a wooden bench. But he had no water and no place to relieve himself until nighttime, when the prisoners shuffled in leg chains to the local prisons where they slept. For thirteen days he suffered hunger and thirst, but the real torment was the constant fear of what might happen to Peter. The Gestapo had his Berlin address and it was only a question of time before they would seize his apartment. Would Peter know in time to escape? And where would he go? Lovely, gentle Peter, who cooked and sewed and whose only experience with police was the sewing of costumes for Carmen. And a half-Jew. How could he possibly hold out against the Nazi machine?

  On the thirteenth morning, the prisoners were led out of the train cars and trucked to a camp. The sign overhead said SACHSENHAUSEN.

  The several hundred arriving prisoners gathered on the open parade ground of the camp, where men forced them with shouts and blows into rows. A roll call began in which each man had to announce his name and crime. Rudi had called out his name but for his crime said “robbery,” as the two men before him had done.

  The camp commandant checked his transport list and shouted back, “Don’t lie to me, you filthy queer. Get over in that group, you butt-fucker!”

  He stumbled over to join a group of some two-dozen men huddled together. But as soon as he reached them, the SS guard knocked him to the ground with his cudgel. “That’s for lying,” he shouted into his face. “Stand at attention, you scum. Show some respect.” Rudi struggled to his feet and stood with his head ringing until the roll call was complete.

  His group was marched off to their block where they had to strip for showers, shaved heads, and camp clothing. Rudi held up the uniform shirt and noted the badge sewn on the left side of the chest. The rumors were true. They all had pink triangles.

  Block nine, his block, was the barrack for homosexuals. At first he was optimistic; perhaps he might meet inmates like himself, sensitive, reasonable people. But every man was exhausted and fearful, and the block senior prohibited talking.

  Fear and pain and cold kept him from sleeping at first. His head pounded and all his muscles hurt from the assault and the thirteen days on the train. But finally exhaustion overcame discomfort, and he passed out for a few hours on the thin, pillowless mattress.

  At 6:00 am, a buzzer sounded over the public-address system, waking the entire camp, and Rudi lurched from his platform to his feet. The others were making their beds, so he imitated them and followed as they shuffled toward the latrine. He relieved himself and washed in the icy water that trickled from a pipe running across the room over a metal trough. The others seemed to be hurrying, so he hurried too, and then he saw why. Just outside, on a trestle table, something hot was being ladled into bowls and handed out with a slice of bread, and no one wanted to be last.

  Breakfast was brief and in a few minutes he had to line up in the place assigned to him at the end of the fifth row. He huddled with shoulders drawn up, trying to conserve warmth, and watched as two men carried out the body of a third and laid him at the end of their row. The nearest man called out his own number and then that of the dead man.

  When roll call was completed, the camp leader counted off groups of men for assignments. Rudi waited patiently, with no idea which were the “good” assignments and which were dangerous. “Block nine, clay pit!” the camp leader announced. “Dear God,” his neighbor muttered, sending a wave of fear though him.

  The appeal to God was justified, he found, for the clay pit of the Klinker brickworks was a scene of damnation. It seemed to be worked solely by pink triangles, and it seemed to be a death sentence. In the dead of winter, the old snow had frozen to gray ice in and around the pit. The Kapo explained that a fixed number of carts had to be filled with clay from the bottom of the pit and dragged up toward the brick-making machines and ovens. The molding of bricks depended on the flow of clay from the pit, which had to be constant so that the ovens would not have to stop and be reheated.

  Rudi was issued a shovel and assigned to hack through the ice and fill his shovel with clay, then fling the shovelful of clay into the cart. The lack of food and sleep had weakened him, so after only three hours, he fell to his knees. The Kapo was on him in a second.

  “Get up, you scum. You fuck up the system here and get me in trouble, I’ll cut your faggot balls off. Now get up and dig.”

  Rudi hauled himself to his knees, but the pain in his arms from the repeated motion was too great, and he couldn’t heft the shovel again. “I can’t any more. Can you give me another job?”

  “Another job?” The Kapo’s voice was full of derision. “I’ll give you another job.” He hauled him up by the shoulder and shoved him against the cart he had just been filling.

  “You can help your sissy-ass friends push the cart to the top. You there, you do the digging.”

  The speed with which the other prisoner relinquished his cart and snatched the shovel told Rudi that things would get worse, not better. He soon saw why. The slope that led up to the rim of the pit was steep and the track was slick with ice. No pulley system had been installed, so only brute force brought the cart each time up to the surface. Under the icy conditions on that day, it seemed almost impossible.

  Yet terror and constant beating drove them on, four men pushing the car, each one in turn slipping and falling to his knees and struggling to his feet again while the other three strained to keep the full cart from rolling back down.

  In the following days, he fell into a sort of toiling stupor, and a dumb-animal resistance kept him going through the pain and exhaustion. Like King Sisyphus, he thought, though he was in too much agony to appreciate the irony. Almost every day, carts fell back, crushing someone’s fingers or feet, and once fracturing a skull.

  “What’s to keep someone from sacrificing a finger, to get to rest in the hospital barrack?” Rudi asked someone when he was back on shovel duty. “At least you’d get a day off while they bandaged you up.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” one of the older men growled. “Don’t you know what they do to queers here? Us and the Jews. We’re the lowest of the low. If you get admitted to hospital, that’s the end of you. They use you for experiments, and you know why? Because no one gives a shit what
happens to queers and Jews. No one wants to know. Even our parents have disowned us. No. You just put your back to it and try to stay alive.”

  Day after day, Rudi marched with his blockmates to the clay pits, and ten hours later the columns of men followed their Kapo back into the camp. They marched in darkness until they came to the spotlight-lit entrance gate, and always Rudi stared numbly at the man in front of him. Once he found himself just behind the Kapo, and when they neared the gate, the spotlights illuminated him in the front and the fierce glare radiated around his head and shoulders like a demonic halo. It reminded Rudi of a frame in Leni Riefenstahl’s film.

  When he reached the entry of the camp he glanced up at the familiar cruel message over the gate. It said Arbeit macht frei.

  Chapter Seventeen

  January 1940

  Katja strode through the public entrance with the dozens of visitors into the Lion House. In the January cold, the big cats stayed indoors, so one could see them all at once simply by marching down the center aisle of the house.

  The leopards and the cheetah were curled up in their corners, and the panther paced. Though Katja was late, she stole a minute to look over the heads of the schoolchildren toward the wrestling lion cubs, then spotted Peter working in the next cage, where the lioness was temporarily blocked outside.

  Katja watched as he hosed down the newly scrubbed concrete floor and then climbed down out of the cage.

  She caught his eye and he nodded, padlocking the cage door, then reached overhead to open a connecting door with the turn of a key. The lioness bounded in from outside and sniffed at the soapy water that still ringed the drain. Then, to the huge merriment of the children, she squatted on the newly washed floor and urinated.

  Rolling up the hose, Peter withdrew to what was apparently the storage room and signaled Katja to come after him. She followed to find him washing his hands in a small sink between two iceboxes. On the wall beside him, crates were piled high with cleaning products, and on the other stood a table with a cutting board.