“Everyone listen clearly!” the stocky one shouts. “If your name is called, you will raise your hand and keep it raised until you have received a placard. You are to wear the placard at all times hung from around your neck until tomorrow when you are boarded onto the train. If you have infants or children under the age of six, they will travel with you but do not require a placard. Is this understood?” He does not wait for the answer that is not forthcoming anyway but goes straight into his list. “Grünberg, Moses. Grünberg, Silva. Hirsch, Otto. Hirsch, Shira. Hirsch, Eva!” And so it goes. As the ordner continues to shout out names—“Blume, Alfred. Blume, Gottfried!”—the prisoners dutifully raise their hands, even the children, and the second ordner distributes small placards on strings bearing the letter T.
T for Transport.
“Rosen, Karlotte. Rosen, Ernst. Rosen, Angelika!”
“Must we raise our hands, Tatte?” Mamme wants to know.
He replies with his eyes still locked into Angelika’s stare. “Yes, Mamme. We must raise our hands.” And so he does. Mamme anxiously follows. But Angelika’s hand remains unraised, and her face is coolly decisive.
“Give me the name,” Angelika says.
“The
“The name of the forger,” she tells him.
He swallows. “Angelika. That’s a death sentence for the man.”
“You want me to do something, Tatte?” she asks him. “Then I must give something.
Angelika is seated again at the battered table but with the T placard around her neck. The same Waffen-SS man stands by when the door creaks again sharply, and in comes Kommandant Dirkweiler, now in a necktie and his shirtsleeves. He is no sooner in the room when Angelika blurts it out.
“Heinz Zollinger!”
The man stops dead.
“You asked for a name, Herr Kommandant. I have given you a name,” she says. “Heinz Zollinger. He is a printer’s apprentice in the Warschauer Strasse, Horst-Wessel-Stadt.
The Herr Kommandant slumps slightly at the shoulders. He looks satisfied, perhaps even slightly entertained. “Well. That wasn’t so difficult, was it? To be a little useful after all to the Reich?” he asks. “To me?”
Angelika raises her eyes level with his, those eyes that can cut a man to shreds. “No, Herr Kommandant. Not so difficult. All I ask is for a small amount of mercy. For me,” she says, touching the placard. “For my parents.”
“Fine,” he answers in quite an offhanded manner, waving the matter off, like swatting away a buzzing insect. “You and your parents are off the list.” An inconsequential matter when there are so many Jews in his custody to replace them. “I will see to it that you and they can turn in your necklaces,” he says, indicating the card hung from her neck.
Angelika breathes. “
“But perhaps you are unaware?” he says, frowning.
She is confused.
“Unaware of the special privileges available to some in this lager. There are Jews here who I
His service? “Herr Kommandant. I don’t understand.” Does he mean as a concubine? She’s heard rumors of such arrangements with lecherous types in the party or the SS. Men who keep a Jewish girlfriend for fun. “
Dirkweiler smiles briefly, a spasm. “By catching up with your fellow Jews still out on the streets. Your fellow Israelites on the run,” he clarifies, obviously proud of his clever operation. “The Jew Cronenberg, for instance, who brought you in. He’s one of my top hounds, and he seems to think that you are worth my consideration,” the Herr Kommandant informs her. “I’m beginning to believe he might be correct.”
15.
Der Suchdienst is what it’s called. The Search Service in the employ of Kommandant Dirkweiler. Search Service Jews are allotted special permits typed on green card stock that authorize their travel to anywhere in the city where they prowl the cafés, the cinemas, the street corners. They patrol the parks and the air raid shelters looking to net Jewish U-boats. They are known as “Greiferen.” Grabbers. Catchers. They are given extraordinary privileges inside the Grosse Hamburger Lager. A share in the loot. Nice clothing that’s free of the Judenstern. Jewelry, liquor, and money to pocket. The best are issued their own pistols. They travel with Gestapo handlers, or sometimes they work without supervision in pairs, surveilling the U-Bahn stations, the S-Bahn routes, the parks, the foreign embassies of neutral countries. They are Jews who hunt Jews.