Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Eight

December 13, 1944. Dresden, Germany. Friday, 1500 Hours.

Karl Jaeger picked up his leather field case and slung it over his shoulder. His greatcoat and visored cap were in the hall but he still hesitated, glancing about the bedroom, remembering the soft impression of his wife’s head on the pillow and studying framed pictures of their children, Hannah and Rosa, and bending to look closer at a silver cup he had won in a cadet shooting contest a dozen years ago.

He’d put away the clothes he had worn on this precious leave, flannel trousers and fleece-lined house boots, a chamois hunting shirt and the cable-knit sweater that reminded him of ski slopes and hiking trips with British friends in Devon and Cornwall.

Hedy had taken the girls to visit a neighbor. It was as he wanted it. No tearful good-byes. He would be gone when they came back.

Jaeger poured himself a glass of schnapps from the decanter on a night table and sipped slowly, composing himself for what might well be the last meeting in his life with his father.

Hedy had spent the night in his arms, and he remembered especially now the strong beat of her heart. Hannah and Rosa joined them early in the morning, their round, blond heads bright against the muslin pillows, and their heartbeats had mingled with Hedy’s and his own, and the sound seemed lonely and courageous in the little bedroom, and in his fancy he had imagined the heartbeat of his father in his room off the kitchen, and around all of them the heartbeat of Germany, to mark this moment in their lives...

Jaeger went into the living room, where the windows faced a small roof garden with plantings protected by screens of isinglass. The wooden troughs his father had tended were empty now except for some carrot tops dark with frost and a few heads of stunted cabbage.

Stretching beyond was the fairy-tale beauty of Dresden, the rich expanse of spires and cupolas embraced by the great curve of the Elbe River flowing smoothly in thin winter light under the city’s arched bridges. It was a great comfort and solace for Karl Jaeger to have his family safe in Dresden. The old city had been bombed only once during the war and that was judged to have been a mistake, a result of faulty flight instructions.

It was widely known that an agreement had been reached by German and British leaders, guaranteeing that if this historic city were spared, then the Luftwaffe would in turn spare the university town of Oxford — an arrangement that had been made as Hitler and Neville Chamberlain spoke of “peace in our time” at Munich.

Jaeger placed his field case on his desk, unbuckled its flap and began to pack away the maps and reports of Operation Christrose, which he had checked and double-checked once again last night.

The start-line of Das Reich was on a north-south front east of the Losheim Gap. From there the division would strike west at dawn on December 16th with its infantry and tanks moving at maximum speed to smash the thin American line loosely held between the towns of St. Vith and Houffalize. Once behind the American lines, their columns would swing north to trap the enemy divisions caught between them and the Kampfgruppe commanded by Colonel Joachim Peiper.

Troops and supplies had been funneled to the twenty-three attacking divisions from Norway, Poland, East Prussia and Austria. The forests of the Ardennes concealed more than a thousand tanks and hundreds of battalions of artillery and assault troops. Steel ramps had been constructed across strategic sections of the Siegfried Line to give the armor faster access from their defensive positions into the valleys of the Ardennes. The onslaught would be masked and ferocious; V-1s flying toward Liège and Antwerp and London would create blankets of sound to smother the noise of motors and tank treads.

Jaeger had memorized the names and features of dozens of towns on his line of march — Roqueblanc, Lepont, Spa and Werbomont — and was familiar with their roads, bridges, rivers, as well as their distances from Allied supplies and gasoline depots.

He had been working on these maps and notes yesterday when Rosa and Hannah ran in from school. They were shy with him at first but broke into giggles and laughter when he sang their favorite song to them, “Der Jaeger aus Kurpfalz,” which they had always thought had been written especially for them:

He shoots the wild game, just the way he likes best.

Trara, trara

Gar lustig ist die Jaegerei

Allhier auf gruener Heid.”

He had bounced them lightly on his knees as if they were on horseback, and the motion made their blond hair swing and catch sparks of sun coming over the church steeples and through the tall windows. Yet the silly, jolly old song had sadly caused the only time of friction between Jaeger and his wife.

“It’s a waste of time to give them memories from the past,” Hedy had said. “It’s not what other people will remember about us.”

Jaeger felt an anger impossible to control. “So they won’t let us forget our past? And just whom do you mean by they? The rootless Americans with their idiot culture of chewing gum and cowboys? Or the English whose passion for freedom never extended to the continents they enslaved? Or are you perhaps speaking of the French, Hedy, who collaborated with us in their own disgrace? Is that the they you mean? Or the Poles whose brains would shame oxen, or those blockheaded Dutchmen?...”

Their enemies knew nothing of Germany’s struggle against intellectual decadence, Jaeger thought as he now buckled his field case, perversions flourishing in the name of freedom, standards proclaiming that right and wrong existed only as concepts to frighten children. Who were they in their insolence to damn Germany? His country had been gutted and its ashes ground into mud and slime. But the world knew only enemy propaganda, the beer hall rowdies, the smashed windows, the yellow stars...

He paced in front of the dead winter garden, hands clenching and unclenching as he attempted to control his erratic thoughts... The so-called avant-garde artists and architects weren’t welcome in Germany because they represented a sickness and distortion that drained the strength of a healthy people. Hitler himself had been shocked by the spectacle of Expressionist paintings in this very city of Dresden and had ordered the gallery closed. Nudity was banned and the American Negress, Josephine Baker, expelled from Berlin, not for her songs or because she was black but because she had had the audacity to perform naked... And with her had gone the gypsies and homosexuals and beggars. And the so-called artists and whores. But what of the Jews? Hadn’t they flourished here? Only an imbecile would deny it. Who had destroyed this? The Germans, or the intellectuals, or the Jews? Kurt Tucholsky with his taunts at humiliated veterans, attacking whatever shreds of patriotism the German people had been left with. And George Grosz’ cartoons as savage as a knife thrust, caricaturing his German hosts as thick-necked brutes with bulging eyes and nostrils like snouts fit only to be lowered into gutters or foaming steins of beer. What in God’s name had they expected? Tucholsky had proudly proclaimed, “There is no secret of the German Army I would not readily hand over to a foreign power.” Was that sentiment to be taken lightly by a nation on its knees from a brutal war and an even more brutal peace? No, he thought — he turned back and forth in front of the frosted windows, his boots matching the furious rhythm of his heart — after Versailles the pacifism of the intellectuals was the highest treason. Yet it was these same aesthetes, tireless and clever with their talk, Germans as well as Jews, a cutting edge of self-styled advanced thought that proposed a mingling of German and Jewish bloods, arguing that the Hebraic strain would provide a healthy correction to the dullness and heaviness of the German character. An infusion of agile Jewish genetic stimuli to turn Germany into a more lively place, a nation of sly humors, and shrewder heads and hands.

He tried to calm himself, standing quite still and breathing slowly and deeply. Why should it concern him? They were all gone now, the artists, the intellectuals, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the whores. But again he thought of the Jews. Was anti-Semitism some peculiar miasma rising only from Germany? He had read in a newspaper... What is the fastest thing in the world? A kike on a bike in the Reich. But not in a German newspaper, no, an American newspaper.

His thoughts swung with pendulum force in an opposite direction, and his heart began to pound so hard that the sound frightened him. He tried to dam up a flood of agonizing memories, to obliterate the shadows forming in his mind. Taking the briar pipe from his pocket, he drove the stem with all his strength into the back of his hand, but the pain didn’t distract him and the inside of his head felt hot, his thoughts revealed to him in pitiless clarity... Armies were marching against him, he could hear them clearly, and the effect was so vivid, dismaying that he put a hand against his desk for support. But it wasn’t boots sounding with the crash of war or trumpets leading a charge, it was a dance of sound and music and in the ranks of that army there were the accusing eyes of those whose homes and shops stood empty now in cities and hamlets across the German fatherland. They looked at him as Rudi Geldman once had, and Jaeger knew where they had gone, even though a part of his mind still shouted that he did not.

They all knew those names, the names of Dachau and Belsen and Buchenwald at Weimar, where Goethe wrote Faust, and Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka, Belsec and Auschwitz... His strange faintness left him when he heard a voice from his father’s room, the old man coughing or calling out weakly for him, but Jaeger resisted the plea and continued to stare through the windows at the thin sunlight on the spires of the city.

Albrecht Jaeger sat alone in the small bedroom off the kitchen. In the daytime his view was of church steeples and a shining curve of the Elbe, but Hedy had drawn the blackout curtains earlier and now the only light in the room came from a gooseneck lamp on his night table. A breakfront, its glass doors removed, bulged with books and correspondence.

He had suffered a stroke three years ago, almost a month to the day after his fifty-sixth birthday. He knew he looked much older than his age; without exercise, his once powerful body had collapsed in on itself, leaving him frail and weary in the grip of his wheelchair. His left eye was covered with a black patch, a vivid contrast to his thin white hair. Since his stroke, that eye had become painfully sensitive to the light but his good eye glowed brightly, almost fiercely, in his ravaged face and he was grateful that he had no difficulty in reading with it. He wore the same dark and simple suit that he had worn in his classrooms for many years. Across his knees was a gray woolen shawl that Hedy had knitted for him, and on top of it his pale and heavily veined hands were locked together to prevent them from trembling.

He called out again, a contorted sound, but his son didn’t answer him; the silence in the small flat remained heavy and oppressive.

The worst effect of his stroke was that it had deprived him of coherent speech. He could recall words and form them into linked sentences in his mind, but the massive temblor in his brain had destroyed his mnemonic sensors so that it was literally one chance in millions that the words he uttered would have any connection with what he was trying to say.

He knew that Karl had been home all day. Now that it was night, he knew his son would be coming to say good-bye to him. It was a dreadful penance, to sit mute and helpless, unable to utter a word to save him. Unable to force truth on him... Yet what even now did Albrecht Jaeger know of his country’s history? Was there, actually, any final truth?

Oh, yes, he had tried to answer the lies, but with sarcasm, humor, an eyebrow raised ironically to suggest disapproval, nothing that would stop a blow or a bullet. Yet, when he had been ready to speak out with force, the stroke had darkened his mind and scattered his words.

Still the most dreadful truth of all was that the truth itself was not, had never been, in hiding. Everyone knew it well. The talk of the relative merits of carbon monoxide and prussic acid as killing agents... The failure of the diesels at a camp (Belsec, he wondered?) had ultimately resolved that issue.

Everyone knew. Professor Jaeger had seen the large J stamped in the Jewish passports. He knew the law that required all Jews to use Israel as the middle name on official documents. And Jewesses the name Sarah. Confiscation of Jewish property was known... and the system of markings in the camps, colored patches on each prisoner’s uniform, red for political prisoners, black for anti-socials, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, and for Jews, two yellow triangles sewn to form the hexagonal Star of David.

In his own classroom he had suffered the myth of Horst Wessel created by the Nazis, and in tolerating it had abetted it. Horst Wessel was a pimp who lived off his mistress, a whore named Erna Jaenecke he had stolen from another party member, Ali Hoehler. Hoehler shot Wessel through the mouth, and within weeks the whore’s landlady and Hoehler and the whore herself were all dead from mysterious causes and Horst Wessel was officially declared a Nazi hero... “fallen in the cause of justice, killed by the Communists.”

But what if everyone knew of such things? Did the universality of knowledge somehow make it all meaningless? Old Isaac Levy, Rudi’s uncle, believed that, believed the convulsions inside Germany were nothing less than a national aberration “... they know not what they do.” He could write that even as he sent the stories and pictures about Rudi from Buchenwald, pasting them inside leases and court forms. But could old Isaac Levy say from where this national aberration came?

The stars above, the moral law within... Immanuel Kant’s insistence that man was forever unknowable and unaccountable — was that where it came from?

The professor looked down at his heavily veined hands clenched together on the gray shawl over his knees. It was he who had told Rudi Geldman he must leave his school: that was the new law. Rudi hadn’t understood at first. They were friends and he hadn’t expected this, not in the Jaegers’ home, where he had frequently spent holidays and where he had argued with Karl about the Cornet Rilke, gentle and good-humored in the beginning, harsher and more accusing as the political climate darkened with the clouds of the coming war. They had studied this work of love, this famous poem by the great German artist, Rainer Maria Rilke, in the old halls of Albrecht Jaeger’s gymnasium, and they had learned it by heart and knew that this romantic invention of tender and ardent patriotism had been carried in the knapsacks of thousands and thousands of soldiers in the Great War, as treasured as their packets of letters from home:

“Where is the evil in love and patriotism?” Karl had demanded.

“The evil done in their names,” Rudi Geldman had replied.

And who was right? One answer to that question was in the pictures of Rudi Geldman and old Isaac Levy’s letter, both on a shelf of the breakfront within reach of Professor Jaeger’s trembling hands.

Isaac Levy, like his nephew Rudi, an inmate at Buchenwald, had been forced to transfer his shares in an optical shop to his partner, Herr Munder. When the papers came to Munder — lease arrangements, inventory listings, a variety of legal forms — he had discovered that old Levy had sent a letter and pictures of Rudi Geldman along with them, pasting them cleverly inside the thick bundle of documents. Herr Munder’s daughter had brought the letter and pictures to Albrecht Jaeger. She had come to him late one evening, a plain, serious young woman, her leg heavy with the brace she’d worn since a childhood illness. A few years before, she was one of the brightest students in the same class as his son and Rudi Geldman. And she had defied her own father to bring him the information from Levy.

And what if the stars were above, symbols of God’s glory? Where was the moral law within man?

Old Levy might have an answer. In one part of his letter to Herr Munder, he had written:

The door opened and his son entered the room, put his leather field case on the floor and inclined his head to his father in a gesture of respect.

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said. “I think you’ll be comfortable here until it’s over. Herr Moeller assures me there’s enough coal to last until the days are milder...”

His son was so tall. Professor Jaeger thought, his strength seemed to fill the room. And with the thought, the father’s mood became suddenly wild with anger and frustration. He wanted so desperately to tell his son now that nothing could be created in hatred, that hatred consumed rather than nourished, and while it gave an angry glare to eyes, it could never help one to see.

When the words sounded, the noise was meaningless to Jaeger, and looking into his father’s naked eye was like staring into the flame of an open furnace.

The professor wheeled his chair toward the break-front. Breathing heavily with the effort, he pulled down a leather yearbook and opened it to a page of photographs, his hands fluttering on the dry pages with a sound like leaves skittering over winter fields. When he found the photograph he was searching for, he put a finger on it and raised the book with trembling hands to his son.

Jaeger looked at the solemn and unformed features of young Rudi Geldman, the black hair brushed back neatly and only the hint of a smile to suggest his amusement at the absurd solemnity surrounding the taking of class pictures. There was something so graceful and charged with potential in his expression. Karl felt a spasm of pain at the waste of it.

But his father had more to show him, smudged pictures he was removing from an envelope with trembling fingers, and Karl had a fleeting glimpse of a slim, naked body shackled to iron posts, but he looked away quickly and with a swing of his hand knocked the photographs to the floor.

His father cried out something to him and the words the son heard were, “Water is green and love! And cry it forever.”

Turning as if on parade, Jaeger strode into the kitchen and filled a glass with water at the sink. He was trembling now with an anger that matched his father’s. Where did the old man’s moral superiority come from? To dare to weaken him, take the heart from him when within hours their tanks and soldiers would be smashing into the Ardennes... and was it not his own father. Professor Albrecht Jaeger, who had expelled Rudi from school? Of course, it was the law. But had he even tried to defy it? And what about the fat geese given loyal Germans by Nazi block and cell leaders? Those plump birds decorated with mushrooms and truffles had graced the table of Professor Jaeger when heads were bowed in grateful prayer and the evils of the times forgotten in the steaming aroma of roast fowl and the fragrance of good German wines that accompanied it.

Karl returned to his father’s room and put the glass within reach of the old man. “Let me tell you something, father,” he said. “After Crystal Night I offered to drive Rudi across the border to Switzerland. But no, he believed this was his country, and he sacrificed his life — he threw it away — and to prove what? That in his deepest heart he believed in the Cornet Rilke?”

Karl slung his field case over his shoulder. He had to leave now; his car was waiting. But he couldn’t live with the memory of his father’s terrible eye glaring up at him... “I hope you’ll pray for me, father. Pray for Hedy and the children and all our people. And pray for yourself too, father. Because you are the river that flowed into my life.”

He turned and walked from the room and the heels of his boots rang hard through the apartment, an impersonal counterpoint to the incoherent words his father cried after him.