Making History

MAKING AMENDS

Axel Bauer’s story

Leo wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. I sat quietly in the armchair, plucking horsehair and watching him nervously. I had never seen a grown man cry before. Outside a movie that is. In movies grown men cry all the time. But silently. Leo was crying with noisy sobs and great gulping catches of breath. I waited for this horrible tempest to blow itself out.

After two or three minutes he had taken off his spectacles and was polishing them with the fat of his tie. He blinked his wet red eyes across at me.

‘Oh, I know. Why did I not tell you before? Why did I let you believe that I was a Jew?’

I made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a whine, intended to convey assent, open-mindedness, understanding…I don’t know, something like that. But the way the noise emerged I seemed to be suggesting that the ball was with Leo, that it was up to him to do the talking, that I was reserving judgement.

He must have taken it that way too. ‘You must know that this is not something you talk about so easily. Indeed it is something I have never talked about before. Except to myself.’

I cast around for a constructive observation. ‘Zuckermann…’ I said. ‘It is a Jewish name, isn’t it? There’s a conductor, musician, something like that?’

‘Pinchas Zuckermann. He is a violinist and conductor. Viola player too. Every time I see his name on a record, in a newspaper, I wonder…”

Leo replaced his glasses and sank down into the armchair opposite me. We sat facing each other as on the day we met. No coffee or hot chocolate this time. Just the space between us.

‘My father’s real name was Bauer,’ said Leo. ‘Dietrich Josef Bauer. He was born in Hanover, July 1904. Throughout the 1920s he trained in histology and radiology and took a research post at the Anatomical Institute at the University of Müster, under Professor Johannes Paul Kremer, about whom you shall hear more. My father joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1932 and was for two years Sturmarzt in Number 8. SS-Reiterstandart.’

‘Sturmarzt?

‘Doctor. Almost everything in the SS begins with the word “storm”. What else do you need to know about them, other than that they called their physicians Storm Doctors? Storm doctors.’ New tears were springing up in his eyes and he shook his head back and forth. ‘Nature cries out.’

For the first time in my life, I really wished that I smoked. I noticed that my left leg was bouncing up and down uncontrollably on the ball of its foot, a habit I thought it had abandoned since I was a screwed-up sixteen-year-old.

‘Be that as it may,’ said Leo, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes once more. ‘In 1941 my father was enlisted to the Reserve Waffen-SS with the rank of SS-Hauptscharfuhrer, a kind of senior sergeant, like a sergeant major I suppose, but without the duties of drill and so forth. A courtesy rank. This much I found out from my own research.’

‘You didn’t know him, then? Your father?’

‘We come to that. In September 1942 he was practising at the SS Hospital in Prague and received a message from his old teacher Professor Kremer, who had first encouraged him into the SS and had since been promoted to the junior officer rank of Untersturmfuhrer, working on temporary assignment in a small town in Poland no one had ever heard of, a town called Auschwitz. Kremer wanted to return to his post in academia and recommended my father as a suitable replacement. I was four years old. My mother and I were living still in Müster. My Christian name was Axel. I have no memory of that time. We were summoned to join Papa in Poland in October 1942 and there we remained for two and a half years.’

‘Actually inside Auschwitz?’

‘Good God, no! In the town. Yes, the town. Always the town.’

I nodded.

‘You ask if I remember my father. I tell you what I remember now, memories that have come back to me after years of absence. This happens as one ages as doubtless you know. I remember now a man who was forever injecting me. For diphtheria, typhus, cholera. Auschwitz town had many outbreaks of fever and he was determined that I should not succumb. I remember too a man who would come home in the evenings with packages. Bottles of Croatian plum wine, whole freshly killed rabbits and partridges, cakes of perfumed soap, jars of ground coffee and, for me, coloured paper and crayons. These were all supreme luxuries, you must understand. Once he even brought home a pineapple. A pineapple! He never spoke of his work, except to say that he never spoke of his work. That is why I use the word “work”. It was his word. He was kind and funny and at the time I believe I loved him with my whole heart.’

‘And what exactly…what was his work?’

‘His job was to treat the sick amongst the officers and men of the SS and to attend the Sonderaktionen as a medical observer.’

‘Sonder… ’

‘Special Actions. The actions for which the death camps were built. The gassings. They called them Special Actions. Also…’ Leo paused and looked beyond me towards the window for a moment. ‘Also, my father continued some medical experiments that had been initiated by Kremer. The removal of live organs for study. The two of them were interested in the rates of cellular atrophy amongst the malnourished and the physically weak. Particularly where this affected the young. Kremer wrote to my father from Müster in 1943 asking him to carry on with the work and to send him the data regularly.’

I watched as Leo rose and went to the bookshelf. He took down a small black and white book and rifled through the pages.

‘Kremer kept a diary, you know. It was his downfall.

He was at Auschwitz for three months only, but it was enough. The diary was confiscated by the British who allowed him to be extradited to Poland. Extracts are included in this book which was published in Germany in 1988. I read to you:

10th October 1942. Extracted and fixed fresh live material from liver, spleen, and pancreas. Got prisoners to make me a signature stamp. For first time heated the room. More cases of typhus fever and Typhus abdominalis. Camp quarantine continues.

Next day. Today, Sunday, there was roast hare for lunch — a real fat leg — with dumplings and red cabbage.

17th October. Attended trial and eleven executions. Extracted fresh live material from liver, spleen and pancreas after injection of pilocarpin. Attended 11th Sonderaktion in cold wet weather this morning, Sunday. Horrible scenes with three naked women who begged us for their lives.”

And so on and so on and so on. This was Kremer’s three months. His entire contribution to the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe. My father’s life there must have been very similar, but he kept no diary. No diary and no letters remain from his two and a half years.’ Leo placed a pause between each word. ‘Two. And. A. Half. Years.’

I swallowed. ‘And was your father also captured? At the end of the war?’

‘Always my mind goes back, I can’t think why,’ said Leo, ignoring me entirely, ‘to that one entry of Kremer’s: “Got prisoners to make me a signature stamp.” Why is it, when one contemplates history, that one never considers things like this? You picture the gas chambers, the ovens, the dogs, the brutality of the guards, the disease, the terror of the children, the anguish of the mothers, the imponderable cruelty, the horror that cannot be described, but “Got prisoners to make me a signature stamp.” A brilliant Professor, head of an anatomy school, finds himself assigned to a concentration camp. After a week or so he gets tired of signing endless orders. Orders to do what, do we suppose? Orders for new supplies of phenol and aspirin? Orders to have these or those sick prisoners declared unfit for work and processed for Special Action? Orders to authorise the extraction of live organs? Who knows? Just orders. So, “Damn it,” he says one morning to a colleague. “I can’t persuade the quartermaster to issue me with a signature stamp. He tells me that I am only a temporary and that it will take two months for a stamp to come through from Berlin.”

“What’s the big deal?” says his friend. “Get the prisoners to make you one.”

‘And how does he proceed, this brilliant Professor with two PhDs, who has sent two generations of trained healers and surgeons into the world? How does he go about putting this simple, obvious idea into action? Does he send for a prisoner, a Jewish Kapo perhaps, and tell him to sort it out for him? Does he walk one day into a hut and say, as the prisoners stand to attention, “Look here, do any of you have skills m stationery? I need someone to make me a signature stamp. Volunteers, please.” Who knows? Somehow, whatever the procedure, it is conveniently arranged. Kremer signs his name, “Johannes Paul Kremer” on a piece of paper and gives it to the chosen prisoner. What is the process, do we suppose? While the ink is still wet, the prisoner presses an uncut rubber stamp to the paper. The mirror-image of the signature is transferred onto the stamp. The prisoner carefully cuts away the rest of the rubber. He does this maybe in an office, in a workshop, someplace where he is allowed access to knives. Maybe it takes him an hour, maybe longer to be sure of doing a good job and pleasing Herr Professor Obersturmfuhrer Kremer, who is a man worth pleasing. So now Professor Kremer is the proud owner of a stamp bearing the perfect simulacrum of his signature, the twentieth century equivalent of a signet ring or Great Seal. He no longer has the arduous task of having to sign his own name to pieces of paper. All he has to do is stamp. Bang, bang!’ Leo thumped the side of his right fist into the open palm of his left hand with a violence and volume that shocked me upright. ‘And what of the prisoner who made the stamp? Will one day his name be above the signature he so carefully cut out? Bang, bang! And what of my father? When he arrived did he too have a signature stamp made for him by a prisoner, or did he wait for Berlin to supply him with something more official, something a little classier? Bang, bang!’ He paused from breath. ‘Here, I make myself some chocolate. Coffee for you. Maybe some cookies to nibble.’

I nodded dumbly.

‘How sick to talk of chocolate and coffee and cookies after such a conversation, you are thinking,’ Leo said when he had returned from setting the kettle. ‘You are right. The same disgusted thought strikes when one reads the writings of the men who ran the camps. “Pathetic attempt at a rebellion in the shower rooms this morning. A dozen or so naked Muslims —” they called Jewish women Muslims, did you know that? “— a dozen or so naked Muslims tried to escape. Kretschmer shot each one in the leg and made them hop up and down for ten minutes before liquidating them. The most comical sight. Wonderful beer for lunch, sent up from Bohemia. Excellent veal and real ground coffee to follow. Weather still abominable.” That kind of thing you read again and again and again. Or the letters home. “Darling Trudi, My God this is a dreadful place. The steadfastness of the men in their work is frankly heroic. More Jews arrive every day, always so much to be done. You would be proud if you could see how little complaint the guards and officers make as they go about their tasks in the camp. With so much to provoke them from the apemen Jews and their stink. Give Mutti a kiss for me and tell Erich I want to hear a better report from school!” This is the way of it.’

‘The banality of evil,’ I murmured.

Leo frowned. ‘Perhaps. I am never sure about this phrase. Ah, I hear the kettle.’

Outside the window a lawnmower started up. A telephone was ringing unanswered in the room below. With the same rather feminine care as before, Leo set down the tray on the low table between us and poured out a coffee for me.

‘So. One day in 1945 my mother calls me to her. Papa is standing beside her in his uniform. The black uniform of, by this time, an SS-Sturmbahnfuhrer. The uniform that even today provokes terror in millions and sick admiration and lust in an insane few. The shaped, black cap that bears the Death’s Head along its band, the collar flashes that spell out “SS” in lightning strikes — this alone, such a masterstroke of design! What they would call today a “logo”, no? — the puffed out jodhpurs, the shining boots, the hunting-crop to strike manfully against the thigh, the cuffs, the tie, the crisp shirt. The genius of the Nazis. Such a uniform has the power to turn the most laughable oaf into a towering Ubermensch. Even the names of the rank carry this power of totem. Sturmbahnfuhrer. Straighten the peak of your cap in front of a mirror, raise your right hand in salute, click your heels together and say, “Ich bin Sturmbahnfuhrer. Heil Hitler!” Young children do it in play all over the world. The uniform, the language, the style. To the sane world they are the symbol of all that is strutting, arrogant, cruel, barbarian and bestial. All the things that shame us. To me they are the symbol of all that is Papa.’

‘But that’s not your fault.’

‘Michael, we will come to blame later, if you please.’

I raised a hand in apology. Hey, this was his game. His ball. His rules.

‘So, my mother calls to me this one day and I come. Papa kneels down in front of me and smooths back my hair. As he does when he wants to feel my brow for fever.

‘ “Axi,” he says to me. “You are going to have to look after Mutti for a while. Do you think you can do that for me?”

‘I do not understand, but I look across at my mother, who is in tears and I nod my head.

‘My father, still on his haunches, turns to his medical bag. “That’s my soldier! First I must do something that will hurt a little. For your own good. You understand?”

‘I nod my head again. I am used to injections.

‘But this injection hurts more than any other I have had. It takes a long time to perform and I am screaming in pain. Such pain bewilders and upsets me, but Mutti is there, stroking my hair and shushing me. A part of me understands that this is done in love. At last Papa gives me a kiss and then he stands and kisses Mutti. He pulls down sharply on his tunic to straighten the creases, gathers his medical bag and leaves the house. This is the last time I see him.’ Leo paused to blow across the surface of his chocolate before taking a careful sip.

‘So how old were you by this time?’

‘I was six years old. All that I am telling you is what I know, not necessarily what I remember. Some things I do recall very clearly, most I do not. Little flashes, little islands of memory I have. I do not remember my mother explaining to me that we were to have a new name. I do not remember that I was once Axel Bauer, I cannot recall that my name was ever anything other than Leo Zuckermann. I know it, but I do not remember it.’

‘So how did you find all this out?’

‘In 1967 in America I am at Columbia University, New York City, doing well. A young professor, not so much older than you are now, with a big future ahead of him. A Jewish boy, a survivor of the Shoah, teaching at an Ivy League school. If this is not a perfect example of the escape from the European nightmare into the American dream, then there never was one. But I am called one day on the telephone and summoned into the nightmare once more. This time I will never leave. Your mother has collapsed, come at once, Leo. I drive like crazy over the bridge to Queens. When I arrive at my mother’s apartment I find hushed men and women gathered outside the room. A rabbi, a doctor, weeping friends. The old woman had been found on the kitchen floor. She is dying, the doctor says. I enter the bedroom alone. My mother signs for me to shut the door and come sit by her bed. She is weak but she finds enough strength to tell her story. My story.

‘She tells me what I have told you, that my real name is Axel Bauer, that my father was an SS doctor at Auschwitz. She tells me that by the end of 1944 my father knew for sure that the Russians were on their way, knew for sure that there would be a reckoning, a retribution for what had been done. He was convinced that vengeance would be taken not just on him, but on his whole family. The Jewish people, my father believed, whose motto is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, would not be satisfied with his own death. Of this he was sure. Most methodically he prepared a plan for the survival of his family. There was at the time a Jewish prisoner assisting in the surgery. A very brilliant doctor, originally from Krakow, by name of Abel Zuckermann. Zuckermann’s wife Hannah, a German Jewess from Berlin, and their young son Leo had naturally been gassed at once, for they were useless, but Zuckermann’s knowledge of hepatic diseases was deemed of some service and he was given work to do in the surgery. My father it seems was kind to Zuckermann and secretly he gave him small amounts of food and encouraged him to talk about himself. Over the few weeks my father learned a great deal about Zuckermann’s family, his history, his estranged brother in New York, his education, his background, how he met his wife, everything there was to know.

‘But a day came. This was the day the authorities decided that the Jew doctor had outlived his usefulness and that it was his Jew turn to join his Jew family in Jew Hell. Maybe my father had a hand in that decision. It is something I ask myself with fear. But whether my father sent him to his death or not, this was the day Abel Zuckermann died. This was the day Sturmbahnfuhrer Bauer was able to put into operation his plan for the safety of his wife and son. This was the day he came to the house and told me to be strong and to look after my mother like a good soldier. This was the day he knelt down and tattooed my arm with a camp number, the best passport a child could have in the days that were coming. This was the day I became Leo Zuckermann. This was the day my mother, not Marthe Bauer any more, but Hannah Zuckermann, took me from Auschwitz and travelled west. Always away from the Russians, whom my mother feared above all else. We would try to make sure we were picked up by the Americans or the British. Papa had promised my mother he would join us one day, when it was safe. He would find us somehow, and we would be a family once more. In fact, my mother believed, he always knew that he could never see us again.

‘All this I listen to while the rabbi and the friends wait outside. As my mother speaks, memories stir themselves awake and call to me like distant music. The memory of the pain from the tattoo needle. The memory of a pineapple. The memory of my father’s uniform. And then the memory of walking at night, walking for miles at night and crying. The memory of being denied food. The memory of my mother saying to me, over and over, “You must be thin, Leo! You must be thin!”

‘I tell her of this memory and ask if it means anything.

‘ “Poor boy,” she says. “It tore at my heart to starve you, but how could I have persuaded an official that we were refugees from a concentration camp if we looked plump and well fed?”

‘After a week of walking south and west, she told me, we joined up with some Jewish refugees who had escaped from one of the death marches.’

Leo broke off here and looked at me enquiringly. ‘You know about the death marches?’

‘Er…not really,’ I said.

‘Oh, Michael! If you, a historian, do not know, then what hope is there?’

‘Well, it’s not really my period, you see.’

Leo dipped his head in despair. ‘Well, I tell you then. Towards the end, the SS were absolutely determined that not one single Jew would be liberated by the onrush of the Allies. It was clear to them all that the war was lost, but no Jew would survive to see his freedom or tell the tale. As the Americans and British advanced from the west and the Soviets from the east, a huge army of camp prisoners was evacuated from the camps and marched into the centre of Germany. The prisoners were beaten bloody, tortured, starved, murdered out of hand. Forced to travel miles on no greater daily ration than a single turnip. Hundreds of thousands died. These were the Todesmarsche, the death marches. Now you know.’

‘Now I know,’ I agreed.

‘So, one day, a week or so after leaving Auschwitz, my mother and I met up with a small group who had somehow managed to escape one of these marches. Three children and two men. Some others had left with them, but died on the way. They had come from almost the same place as us. From the camp at Birkenau, sometimes known as Auschwitz Two. We struggled west across the Czechoslovakian border together in a pitiful condition, travelling only by night, leaving the road by day and sleeping in ditches and under hedges. One of the men could only hop, he had an oedemic leg that began to stink of gangrene. One of the children died while walking with me. Just fell down dead without a sound. After a week we were picked up by Czechoslovakian communists. My mother and I were moved from one refugee centre to another, each bigger than the last. Finally, yielding to my mother’s incessant talk of her brother-in-law in New York City, we were sent further west to be processed by the Americans. A sergeant ruffled my hair and gave me a stick of chewing-gum, just like in the movies. He questioned us, noted down our tattoo numbers and issued us with travel and identity papers. In 1946 we finally received permission to cross the Atlantic and live with our Uncle Robert and his family in the Borough of Queens.

‘So. My father’s plan had worked perfectly. I grew up as an American Jew, with my American Jewish cousins, knowing nothing of my past beyond the stories I was told of my great and murdered father, the good doctor Abel Zuckermann of Krakow. You wonder that I accepted this story, perhaps? Surely I knew that this was a lie?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I mean, you must have remembered some of your earlier life.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I did, maybe I erased it. I can’t remember now what I remembered then, if you see what I mean. How much of your life do you remember from before you were seven? Is it not just shadows with strange patches of light? Everything my mother told me I believed. Children do. Consider too the trauma of the days of starvation and walking and hiding, the bewilderment of being herded from place to place for endless months, the boredom and nausea of the ocean voyage. All these did much of my mother’s work for her. It was a year and a half after my arrival in America before I was capable of any real conversation. By the time I emerged from my silence I truly believed I was Leo Zuckermann. Nothing else would have made sense.’

‘But your uncle? How could your mother convince him she was really his sister-in-law?’

‘Robert had been parted from his brother for ten years. He had never met the real Hannah Zuckermann. Why should he doubt her? Oh, she had an explanation for everything, my mother. She even explained…’ Leo paused, his face momentarily screwed up in pain and embarrassment. ‘She even explained my penis.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘She told Uncle Robert that the moil in Krakow had been rounded up by the Nazis in 1938 before my circumcision could be performed. It was done to me in New York within a week of my arrival there. That I will never forget. Circumcision, Hebrew classes, bar mitzvah, all those I remember with perfect clarity. And now, as she lay dying in front of my eyes, my mother decides to tell me that it has all been a lie, my whole life has been a lie. I am not a Jew. I am a German.’

‘Wow.’

‘Wow is as good a word as any other. Wow about covers it. I looked down on this woman, this Marthe Bauer from Müster. Her face is as white as the pillow behind her and her eyes are burning with what I can only call pride.

‘ “So now you know, Axi,” she says to me.

‘The use of the name strikes me like a rock. Stirs muddy pools of memory. Axi…it rings a bell, as they say.

‘ “And my real father?” I ask her. “Sturmbahnfuhrer Bauer. What of him?”

‘She shakes her head. “He was captured by the Poles and hanged. I found out. Eventually I found out. It took me years. I had to be careful, you see. At last I hit upon the idea of calling the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna and claiming that I had seen him in the street in New York. They say to me that it must have been someone else, since for sure Dietrich Bauer was tried and executed in ‘49. Then I know. But don’t worry, Axi,” she adds hastily, “I’m sure he died happy. Knowing that we were safe.”

‘ “Why have you never told me this before, Mutti?” I ask, keeping the horror from my voice. This is a dying woman. You cannot badger the dying.

‘ “One thing mattered only. Your safety. In this world it is better to be a Jew than a German, But I always wanted you to know one day what you really are. I have been a good mother to you. I protected you.”

‘Michael, I tell you, there was a kind of ferocity in her voice that terrified me.

‘ “You should not be ashamed of your father. He was a good man. A fine doctor. A kind man. He did what he could. No one understands now. The Jews were a threat. A real threat. Something had to be done, everyone thought so. Everyone. Maybe some people went too far. But the way they talk about us now, you would think we were all animals. We were not animals. We were people with families, with ideals, with feelings. I don’t want you to be ashamed, Axi. I want you to be proud.”

‘This is what she said to me. I sat with her for a while, her hand grasping mine. I could feel the grip of it weaken. At last she said, “Tell the others they may come in now. I am ready.”

‘I turned from the doorway and saw that she had taken up a Hebrew prayer book. I stood staring at her as her friends filed in past me and surrounded the bed, as is the Jewish custom. And that, Michael, is the last I saw of my other parent. So now you know.’

The coffee was cold in my cup. I looked at the bookcase at the row upon row of books. All on that subject.

Leo followed my eyes. ‘Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table is prefaced by a Yiddish saying,’ he said. ‘Ibergekumene tsores iz gut tsu dertseylin. “Troubles overcome are good to tell.” For him, for others, it may be that the troubles have been overcome. For me they will never be overcome. And they have not been good to tell. There is a stain of blood upon me that can never be washed away in this world. Maybe in another. So let us go, Michael, and create that other world.’