Mother Night Read online

  "Oh?" I said.

  "Leichentrager zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed.

  Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse." In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry.

  "After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job."

  "I can understand that," I said.

  "You can?" he said. He shook his head. "I can't," he said. "I will always be ashamed. Volunteering for the Sonderkommando--it was a very shameful thing to do."

  "I don't think so," I said.

  "I do," he said. "Shameful," he said. "I never want to talk about it again."

  3

  BRIQUETS ...

  THE GUARD who relieves Andor Gutman at six each night is Arpad Kovacs. Arpad is a Roman candle of a man, loud and gay.

  When Arpad came on duty at six last night, he demanded to see what I'd written so far. I gave him the very few pages, and Arpad walked up and down the corridor, waving and praising the pages extravagantly.

  He didn't read them. He praised them for what he imagined to be in them.

  "Give it to the complacent bastards!" he said last night. "Tell those smug briquets!"

  By briquets he meant people who did nothing to save their own lives or anybody else's life when the Nazis took over, who were willing to go meekly all the way to the gas chambers, if that was where the Nazis wanted them to go. A briquet, of course, is a molded block of coal dust, the soul of convenience where transportation, storage and combustion are concerned.

  Arpad, faced with the problem of being a Jew in Nazi Hungary, did not become a briquet. On the contrary, Arpad got himself false papers and joined the Hungarian S.S.

  That fact is the basis for his sympathy with me. "Tell them the things a man does to stay alive! What's so noble about being a briquet?" he said last night.

  "Did you ever hear any of my broadcasts?" I asked him. The medium of my war crimes was radio broadcasting. I was a Nazi radio propagandist, a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite.

  "No," he said.

  So I showed him a transcript of a broadcast, a transcript furnished to me by the Haifa Institute. "Read it," I said.

  "I don't have to," he said. "Everybody was saying the same things over and over and over in those days."

  "Read it anyway--as a favor," I said.

  So he read it, his face becoming sourer and sourer. He handed it back to me. "You disappoint me," he said.

  "Oh?" I said.

  "It's so weak!" he said. "It has no body, no paprika, no zest! I thought you were a master of racial invective!"

  "I'm not?" I said.

  "If any member of my S.S. platoon had spoken in such a friendly way about the Jews," said Arpad, "I would have had him shot for treason! Goebbels should have fired you and hired me as the radio scourge of the Jews. I would have raised blisters around the world!"

  "You were already doing your part with your S.S. platoon," I said.

  Arpad beamed, remembering his S.S. days. "What an Aryan I made!" he said.

  "Nobody ever suspected you?" I said.

  "How would they dare?" he said. "I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan that they even put me in a special detachment. Its mission was to find out how the Jews always knew what the S.S. was going to do next. There was a leak somewhere, and we were out to stop it." He looked bitter and affronted, remembering it, even though he had been that leak.

  "Was the detachment successful in its mission?" I said.

  "I'm happy to say," said Arpad, "that fourteen S.S. men were shot on our recommendation. Adolf Eichmann himself congratulated us."

  "You met him, did you?" I said.

  "Yes--" said Arpad, "and I'm sorry I didn't know at the time how important he was."

  "Why?" I said.

  "I would have killed him," said Arpad.

  4

  LEATHER STRAPS ...

  BERNARD MENGEL, a Polish Jew who guards me from midnight until six in the morning, is also a man my age. He once saved his own life in the Second World War by playing so dead that a German soldier pulled out three of his teeth without suspecting that Mengel was not a corpse.

  The soldier wanted Mengel's three gold inlays.

  He got them.

  Mengel tells me that I sleep very noisily here in jail, tossing and talking all night.

  "You are the only man I ever heard of," Mengel said to me this morning, "who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way."

  "What makes you think I have a bad conscience?" I said.

  "The way you sleep, the way you dream," he said. "Even Hoess did not sleep like that. He slept like a saint, right up to the end."

  Mengel was speaking of Rudolf Franz Hoess, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz. In his tender care, literally millions of Jews were gassed. Mengel knew a little about Hoess. Before emigrating to Israel in 1947, Mengel helped to hang Hoess.

  And he didn't do it with testimony, either. He did it with his two big hands. "When Hoess was hanged," he told me, "the strap around his ankles--I put that on and made it tight."

  "Did that give you a lot of satisfaction?" I said.

  "No," he said. "I was like almost everybody who came through that war."

  "What do you mean?" I said.

  "I got so I couldn't feel anything," said Mengel. "Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other.

  "After we finished hanging Hoess," Mengel said to me, "I packed up my clothes to go home. The catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice within an hour I did the very same job--once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the same."

  5

  "LAST FULL

  MEASURE ..."

  I, TOO, knew Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz. I met him at a New Year's Eve party in Warsaw during the war, the start of 1944.

  Hoess heard that I was a writer, and he got me to one side at the party, and he said he wished he could write.

  "How I envy you creative people--" he said to me. "Creativity is a gift from the gods."

  Hoess said he had some marvelous stories to tell. He said they were all true, but that people wouldn't be able to believe them.

  Hoess could not tell me the stories, he said, until the war was won. After the war, he said, we might collaborate.

  "I can talk it," he said, "but I can't write it." He looked to me for pity. "When I sit down to write," he said, "I freeze."

  What was I doing in Warsaw?

  I had been ordered there by my boss, Reichsleiter Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Head of the German Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. I had a certain amount of skill as a dramatist, and Dr. Goebbels wanted me to use it. Dr. Goebbels wanted me to write a pageant honoring the German soldiers who had given their last full measure of devotion--who had died, that is--in putting down the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Dr. Goebbels had a dream of producing the pageant annually in Warsaw after the war, of letting the ruins of the ghetto stand forever as a setting for it.

  "There would be Jews in the pageant?" I asked him.

  "Certainly--" he said, "thousands of them."

  "May I ask, sir," I said, "where you expect to find any Jews after the war?"

  He saw the humor in this. "A very good question," he said, chuckling. "We'll have to take that up with Hoess," he said.

  "With whom?" I said. I hadn't yet been to Warsaw, hadn't yet met with brother Hoess.

  "He's running a little health resort for Jews in Poland," said Goebbels. "We must be sure to ask him to save us some."

  Can the writing of this ghastly pageant be added to the list of my war crimes? No, thank God. It never got much beyond having a working ti
tle, which was: "Last Full Measure."

  I am willing to admit, however, that I probably would have written it if there had been enough time, if my superiors had put enough pressure on me.

  Actually, I am willing to admit almost anything.

  About this pageant: it had one peculiar result. It brought the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln to the attention of Goebbels, and then to the attention of Hitler himself.

  Goebbels asked me where I'd gotten the working title, so I made a translation for him of the entire Gettysburg Address.

  He read it, his lips moving all the time. "You know," he said to me, "this is a very fine piece of propaganda. We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are."

  "It's a very famous speech in my native land," I said. "Every schoolchild has to learn it by heart."

  "Do you miss America?" he said.

  "I miss the mountains, the rivers, the broad plains, the forests," I said. "But I could never be happy with the Jews in charge of everything."

  "They will be taken care of in due time," he said.

  "I live for that day--my wife and I live for that day," I said.

  "How is your wife?" he said.

  "Blooming, thank you," I said.

  "A beautiful woman," he said. "I'll tell her you said so," I said. "It will please her immensely."

  "About the speech by Abraham Lincoln--" he said.

  "Sir--?" I said.

  "There are phrases in here that might be used most impressively in dedications of German military cemeteries," he said. "I haven't been happy at all, frankly, with most of our funeral oratory. This seems to have the extra dimension I've been looking for. I'd like very much to send this to Hitler."

  "Whatever you say, sir," I said.

  "Lincoln wasn't a Jew, was he?" he said.

  "I'm sure not," I said.

  "It would be very embarrassing to me if he turned out to be one," he said.

  "I've never heard anyone suggest that he was," I said.

  "The name Abraham is very suspicious, to say the least," said Goebbels.

  "I'm sure his parents didn't realize that it was a Jewish name," I said. "They must have just liked the sound of it. They were simple frontier people. If they'd known the name was Jewish, I'm sure they would have called him something more American, like George or Stanley or Fred."

  Two weeks later, the Gettysburg Address came back from Hitler. There was a note from der Fuehrer himself stapled to the top of it. "Some parts of this," he wrote, "almost made me weep. All northern peoples are one in their deep feelings for soldiers. It is perhaps our greatest bond."

  Strange--I never dream of Hitler or Goebbels or Hoess or Goering or any of the other nightmare people of the world war numbered "two." I dream of women, instead.

  I asked Bernard Mengel, the guard who watches over me while I sleep here in Jerusalem, if he had any clues as to what I dreamed about.

  "Last night?" he said.

  "Any night," I said.

  "Last night it was women," he said. "Two names you said over and over."

  "What were they?" I said.

  "Helga was one," he said.

  "My wife," I said.

  "The other was Resi," he said.

  "My wife's younger sister," I said. "Just their names--that's all."

  "You said 'Goodbye,'" he said.

  "Goodbye," I echoed. That certainly made sense, whether I dreamed or not. Helga and Resi were both gone forever.

  "And you talked about New York," said Mengel. "You mumbled, and then you said 'New York,' and then you mumbled some more."

  That made sense, too, as do most of the things I dream. I lived in New York for a long time before coming to Israel.

  "New York City must be Heaven," said Mengel.

  "It might well be for you," I said. "It was hell for me--or not Hell, something worse than Hell."

  "What could be worse than Hell?" he said.

  "Purgatory," I said.

  6

  PURGATORY ...

  ABOUT THAT purgatory of mine in New York City: I was in it for fifteen years.

  I disappeared from Germany at the end of the Second World War. I reappeared, unrecognized, in Greenwich Village. There I rented a depressing attic apartment with rats squeaking and scrabbling in the walls. I continued to inhabit that attic until a month ago, when I was brought to Israel for trial.

  There was one pleasant thing about my ratty attic: the back window of it overlooked a little private park, a little Eden formed by joined back yards. That park, that Eden, was walled off from the streets by houses on all sides.

  It was big enough for children to play hide-and-seek in.

  I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child's cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, that those still hiding were to come out of hiding, that it was time to go home.

  The cry was this: "Olly-olly-ox-in-free."

  And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful--

  "Olly-olly-ox-in-free."

  7

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY ...

  I, HOWARD W. CAMPBELL, JR., was born in Schenectady, New York, on February 16, 1912. My father, who was raised in Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister, was an engineer in the Service Engineering Department of the General Electric Company.

  The mission of the Service Engineering Department was to install, maintain and repair General Electric heavy equipment sold anywhere in the world. My father, whose assignments were at first only in the United States, was rarely home. And his job demanded such varied forms of technical cleverness of him that he had scant time and imagination left over for anything else. The man was the job and the job was the man.

  The only nontechnical book I ever saw him look at was a picture history of the First World War. It was a big book, with pictures a foot high and a foot-and-a-half wide. My father never seemed to tire of looking at the book, though he hadn't been in the war.

  He never told me what the book meant to him, and I never asked him. All he ever said to me about it was that it wasn't for children, that I wasn't to look at it.

  So, of course, I looked at it every time I was left alone. There were pictures of men hung on barbed wire, mutilated women, bodies stacked like cord-wood--all the usual furniture of world wars.

  My mother was the former Virginia Crocker, the daughter of a portrait photographer from Indianapolis. She was a housewife and an amateur cellist. She played cello with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra, and she once had dreams of my playing the cello, too.

  I failed as a cellist because I, like my father, am tone-deaf.

  I had no brothers and sisters, and my father was seldom home. So I was for many years the principal companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was drunk most of the time. I remember a time when she filled a saucer with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and table salt. She put the saucer on the kitchen table, turned out all the lights, and had me sit facing her across the table.

  And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her.

  "There--" she said, "that's what we'll look like when we're dead."

  This queer demonstration not only scared me; it scared her, too. My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. From that moment on she hardly spoke to me--cut me dead, I'm sure, out of fear of doing or saying something even crazier.

  All that happened in Schenectady, before I was ten.

  In 1923, when I was eleven, my father was assigned to the General Electric Office in Berlin, Germany. From then on, my education, my friends, and my principal language were German.

  I eventually became a playwright in the German
language, and I took a German wife, the actress Helga Noth. Helga Noth was the elder of the two daughters of Werner Noth, the Chief of Police of Berlin.

  My father and mother left Germany in 1939, when war came.

  My wife and I stayed on.

  I earned my keep until the war ended in 1945 as a writer and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the English-speaking world. I was the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

  When the war was ending, I was high on the list of war criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public.

  I was captured by one Lieutenant Bernard B. O'Hare of the American Third Army near Hersfeld on April 12, 1945. I was on a motorcycle, unarmed. While entitled to a uniform, a blue and gold one, I was not wearing it. I was in mufti, in a blue serge suit and a moth-eaten coat with a fur collar.

  As it happened, the Third Army had overrun Ohrdruf, the first Nazi death camp the Americans were to see, two days before. I was taken there, was forced to look at it all--the lime pits, the gallows, the whipping posts--at the gutted and scabby, bug-eyed, spavined dead in heaps.

  The idea was to show me the consequences of what I had done.

  The Ohrdruf gallows were capable of hanging six at a time. When I saw them, there was a dead camp guard at the end of each rope.

  And it was expected that I would hang soon, too.

  I expected it myself, and I took an interest in the peace of the six guards at the ends of their ropes.

  They had died fast.

  My photograph was taken while I looked up at the gallows. Lieutenant O'Hare was standing behind me, lean as a young wolf, as full of hatred as a rattlesnake.

  The picture was on the cover of Life, and came close to winning a Pulitzer Prize.

  8

  AUF WIEDERSEHEN ...

  I DID NOT HANG.

  I committed high treason, crimes against humanity, and crimes against my own conscience, and I got away with them until now.

  I got away with them because I was an American agent all through the war. My broadcasts carried coded information out of Germany.

  The code was a matter of mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences. Persons I never saw gave me my instructions, told me in which sentences of a broadcast the mannerisms were to appear. I do not know to this day what information went out through me. From the simplicity of most of my instructions, I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus. Occasionally, as during the buildup for the Normandy invasion, my instructions were more complicated, and my phrasing and diction sounded like the last stages of double pneumonia.