Greeks Bearing Gifts

TWENTY-FOUR

“I’m not a Jew but I was born in Salonika and lived there as a boy and had many Jewish school friends until I was thirteen years old, when my father got a job with the Commercial Credit Bank here in Athens. To some extent, I’ve always regarded Salonika as my real home. Whenever I go back, it’s almost as if I once had another life, that I’ve been two people: that I had a Salonikan childhood and an Athenian manhood, and the two seem entirely without connection. Now, whenever I’m back there, I can’t help thinking that life isn’t just about working out who we are and what makes us tick, it’s also about understanding why we aren’t where we ever expected to be. That things might have been very different. It’s the best antidote to nostalgia I know.”

I nodded silently. This was the Greek lieutenant’s story but, in this particular respect at least, it was mine as well, and for a fleeting second I felt a strong, almost metaphysical connection with this man I hardly knew.

He looked distant for a moment—as if his mind was back in Salonika—and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. The hair on his head was dark and shiny, with just a hint of silver, and, in the light from the tall office window, it resembled the skin of a mackerel. I guessed he was about forty-five. His speaking voice, which sounded like dark honey, relied a great deal on his hairy hands, as if he’d been trying to negotiate the price of a rug. The tunic of his uniform was tailored and it was a while before I perceived the size of the shoulders it was concealing. They were strong shoulders and probably capable of delivering great violence—a true copper’s shoulders.

“As a boy I wanted to play basketball for Aris Thessaloniki—to be like my hero, Faidon Matthaiou. Not to become a policeman in Athens.”

“A great player,” agreed Garlopis. “The patriarch of Greek basketball.”

“But here I am. A long way from home.”

“I know what you mean, Lieutenant,” I said, hoping to push us all back onto the path of his story.

“Salonika was established by Alexander the Great’s brother-in-law, Ptolemy of Aloros, to be the main port for Macedonia; it’s also been of central importance to Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, even the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But most lastingly, for five centuries it was the Ottoman Turks who controlled the city and gave it a near autonomous status that allowed the Jews to become its most dominant group, with the result that, at the turn of the century, of the hundred and twenty thousand people who lived in Salonika, between sixty and eighty thousand were Jews. This was perhaps one of the largest numbers of European Jews to be found outside Poland; certainly it was the oldest community of Jews in Europe. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that Salonika was the Jerusalem of the Balkans, perhaps even the Mother of Israel, since so many who once lived there are now in Palestine.

“I won’t detain you, Commissar, by trying to explain how, over the many centuries, so many Jews in the diaspora, fleeing one persecution after another, ended up in Salonika; nor will I take up your time to explain what happened between the two wars and how Salonika became Thessaloniki and Greek, but in this most ancient city where change was a way of life, everything changed when the German army arrived and, I’m sorry to say, that change became a way of death. The alacrity with which the Nazis began to take action against Salonika’s Jews was astonishing even to the Greeks who, thanks to the Turks, know a bit about persecution, but for the Jews it was devastating. The Nuremberg Laws were immediately implemented. Prominent Jewish citizens, including some friends of my own father, were arrested, Jewish property was subject to confiscation, a ghetto was built, and all Jews were subjected to violent abuse and sometimes summary execution. But of course much worse was to come.

“Following a series of military disasters for the Axis powers, Hitler reorganized his Balkan front and, as part of this process, it was decided to ‘pacify’ Salonika and its hinterland. Pacify: you Germans have always had a peculiar talent for euphemism. Like ‘resettlement.’ The Jews of Salonika soon found out that these words meant something very different in the mouth of a German. A decision was made at the highest level that the Jews of Salonika should be removed and deported to Riga and Minsk, for eventual resettlement in the Polish death camps. The city’s Jewish community now came under the direct control of the SS and the SD in the person of an officer called Adolf Eichmann. He and several other SD and German army officers set themselves up in some style in a confiscated Jewish villa on Velissariou Street. The villa had a cellar they used as a torture chamber. There, wealthier Jews were interrogated as to where they’d hidden their wealth. Among these was a banker by the name of Jaco Kapantzi in whom the local SD took a special interest since he was also one of the richest men in Salonika. It infuriated these sadists that Kapantzi steadfastly refused to reveal where he’d hidden his money, so they decided to have him transferred by train to Block 15 at the Haidari Barracks in Athens. There, a notorious SS torturer by the name of Paul Radomski could go to work on Kapantzi night and day.

“But something must have happened on the Athens train to infuriate the SD and, in front of several other rail passengers, Kapantzi, still wearing his pajamas and dressing gown, was shot. Perhaps he tried to escape, perhaps he said something, I’m not entirely sure what, but I think perhaps Kapantzi had probably realized that his best chance to escape further torture was to provoke the SD captain in whose custody he was traveling from Salonika into killing him. With his gun in his hand and the body still bleeding on the floor the SD officer asked the other passengers if anyone had seen anything and of course nobody had. The officer got off the train at the next stop and returned to Salonika. When the train eventually arrived in Athens, the man’s dead body was still lying on the floor of the carriage, and there it became the responsibility of the Attica City Police.

“Obviously a murder had been committed and I was one of the investigating officers. Of course, we all knew it was the German SD who’d killed the man and for this reason there was no chance that we’d be able to do anything about it. We might as well have tried to arrest Hitler himself.

“But we still had to go through the motions and I managed to track down one of the other passengers. Eventually, I persuaded him to make a witness statement that I agreed to keep off the file until after the war and I quietly made it my business to find out more about the young SD captain who’d murdered Jaco Kapantzi in case one day I was in a position to bring him to justice.

“Perhaps this will sound strange to you now, Commissar. ‘Why bother?’ I hear you say. After all, what’s the fate of one man when more than sixty thousand Greek Jews died at Auschwitz and Treblinka? Well, to paraphrase Stalin—and believe me, there’s a lot of that in Greece—it’s the difference between a tragedy and a statistic, perhaps. And the point is this: Jaco Kapantzi was my case, my responsibility, and I’ve come to believe that in life it’s best to live for a purpose greater than oneself. And before you suggest there’s something in this for me, a promotion, perhaps, there isn’t. Even if no one ever knows that I have done this I would do it because I want to do something for Greece and I believe this is good for my country.”

It had been a while since I’d had any thoughts like that myself, but I found I could still appreciate finding them in the heart of another man even if it was a cop who was threatening to put me in jail.

“And if all that wasn’t enough, my father had worked for Jaco Kapantzi before moving to Athens. Indeed, it had been Mr. Kapantzi who’d generously helped my father get his new job and even loaned him his moving expenses. So you might also say I took his death personally.”

Leventis lit a cigarette; his voice had lowered now as if he was drawing on something deep in himself, and I saw that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make an enemy of this man.

“There’s no statute of limitations when it comes to murder in Greece. And the killing of Jaco Kapantzi remains open to this day. I’ll never know the names of the men who participated in the murders of my fellow countrymen in Auschwitz and Treblinka and besides, those crimes happened hundreds of miles north of here. But I do know the name of the individual SD captain who murdered Jaco Kapantzi on a Greek train. His name was Alois Brunner. Another German officer, an army captain, witnessed what happened, but I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who he was, only that my witness reports that he expressed some amused astonishment at Brunner’s behavior and advised that they should both leave the train. It’s said that all detectives have a case that gives them a lifetime of sleepless nights. I’m sure you had yours, Commissar. Alois Brunner is mine.

“Not much is known about him. What I do know has taken me the best part of ten years to find out. Brunner was just thirty-one years old when he murdered Jaco Kapantzi on that train. Born in Austria he was an early recruit to the Nazi Party and having joined the SD in 1938, he was assigned to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, where he became Eichmann’s close collaborator in the murder of thousands of Jews. After his time in Salonika, Brunner was named commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. This was in June 1943.

“I don’t know how much you know about this kind of thing, Commissar—more than you’ll ever admit, I expect, if the rest of your countrymen are anything to go by—but Drancy was the place where more than sixty-seven thousand French Jews were first confined and then deported to the extermination camps for resettlement. Seven years ago I took a short vacation in Paris and managed to find someone who’d been in Drancy—a German-Jewish woman who’d been hiding from the Nazis in the South of France until she was arrested. Her name was Charlotte Bernheim and somehow she survived Drancy and Auschwitz before returning to France. She remembered Brunner very well: short, poorly built, skinny—hardly your master-race type. She told me he seemed to have a physical detestation of Jews because once she saw a prisoner touch him accidentally and Brunner pulled out his pistol and shot him dead. Through both his eyes. And it was this particular detail that caught my attention because Jaco Kapantzi was also shot through the eyes.

“You begin to see my interest in the murders of Dr. Frizis and Siegfried Witzel. Of course, Frizis didn’t prick my curiosity until we found Witzel’s body and began to see the German connection, and then of course you mentioned how Witzel’s boat had been confiscated from a Salonikan Jew, which intrigues me even more. That and the killer’s modus operandi, of course. It begins to look like a sort of homicidal signature. The idea that Brunner may even be back in Greece is of course enormously important to me. I’d love to catch this man and see him face the death penalty. Yes, we still execute our murderers, unlike you West Germans who seem to have discovered a new squeamishness about killing criminals. I’d give anything to see this man meet the end he deserves. These days we shoot murderers, but we used to send them to the guillotine. For a man like Brunner I’d start a petition to bring the guillotine back.

“But to continue with the story. In September 1944, Brunner was transferred from Drancy to the Sered Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia, where he was tasked with the deportation of all the camp’s remaining Jews—some thirteen thousand people—before the camp was finally liberated by the Red Army in March 1945. I’ve not found anyone alive from Sered who remembers Brunner. You Germans did your work too well there. After the war, Brunner disappeared. For a while it was even thought he was dead, executed by the Allies in Vienna in May 1946. But this was a different Brunner. It was Anton Brunner, who conveniently also worked for Eichmann in Vienna, who was executed. And my friends in the National Intelligence Service of Greece tell me that they strongly suspect that the American CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Service—the BND—may have deliberately helped to muddy the waters around Anton Brunner’s end to protect Alois Brunner’s postwar work for Germany’s own intelligence services. Yes, that’s right, it’s not just German insurance companies that employ old Nazis.”

“I was never a Nazi,” I said.

“No, of course not,” said Leventis. But it was clear he didn’t believe me. “What’s more certain is that Brunner is still alive and that he has good connections in the current German government. According to my sources in the Greek NIS, it’s strongly believed that Brunner is presently working undercover for the German BND. Meanwhile a French court tried Brunner for war crimes in absentia in 1954 and sentenced him to death. And he’s one of the most wanted war criminals in the world.”

Lieutenant Leventis opened another file and took out a black-and-white photograph, which he now handed to me. “A friend of mine in the Greek NIS managed to obtain this from his opposite number in the French intelligence services, one of the only known photographs of Alois Brunner, taken in France sometime during the summer of 1944.”

I was looking at a man by a wooden fence in a field, wearing a belted leather trench coat, with a hat and gloves in his left hand and, as far as I could see, without even a badge in his lapel that might have helped to identify the man as a Nazi Party official. It was a good leather coat; I’d once owned one very like it myself before it had been stolen by a Russian POW guard. The man in the grainy picture didn’t look like a mass murderer, but then nobody ever does. I’d met enough murderers in my time to know that they nearly always look like everyone else. They’re not monsters and they’re not diabolical, they’re just the people who live next door and say hello on the stairs. This man was slim, with a high forehead, a narrow nose, neat dark hair, and an almost benign expression on his face; it was the kind of picture he might have sent to his girlfriend or wife, supposing he ever had one. On the back of the picture there was a description of the photograph, written in French: A photograph believed to be of Alois Brunner, born 8th April, 1912–, taken August 1944, property of the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux.

“Alois Brunner would now be almost forty-five years old,” said Leventis. “Which is the same age as me. Perhaps that’s another reason why I take a special interest in him.”

Lieutenant Leventis continued talking for a while longer but I was hardly listening now; I kept looking at the thin man in the black-and-white photograph. Immediately I knew for sure that I’d met the man before, but it hadn’t been during the war and he hadn’t been calling himself Alois Brunner. I was quite certain of this. In fact, I still had the man’s business card in my pocket. The man in the photograph was the same Austro-Hungarian cigarette salesman who had struck up a conversation with me in the bar at the Mega Hotel.