Mila 18 - Leon Uris [160]
Paul was afraid to take a position. Suppose he said the deportations would stop and they did not. Suppose the rumors of death camps were true and the Civil Authority had taken no stand on them. He had run out of maneuvering room. For two years and seven months he had found one more escape, and one more, and one more. This was the dead end.
“I am reasonably certain the deportations will stop as soon as the Germans decongest the ghetto. Decongestion of the ghetto will alleviate many of our problems here, and the population shifts to strengthen their labor pool closer to the eastern front will obviously satisfy the Germans.”
“Would the Civil Authority ask the Germans if your reasonable certainties are reasonable certainties with them also?”
Rabbi Solomon’s trap sprang shut. Paul wanted no more of the man. He mumbled quickly that the matter would be pursued.
Boris Presser had performed his duties as chairman of the Jewish Civil Authority almost as a nonentity. He was a quiet little man whose forte was an extraordinary ability to stay out of people’s way and to carry out his office in a mechanical manner, without emotional attachment. The murder of Emanuel Goldman, the first Civil Authority chairman in the early days of the occupation, clearly outlined the limitations of his power.
Presser dexterously avoided clandestine meetings with the underground, the social agencies, or the smugglers. He was learned at knowing nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He kept himself untainted through deftness. He was, in fact, the perfect tool in the Nazi logic which pointed up that Jews were killing each other off. When boxed in from time to time, Presser could always justify the existence of the Civil Authority. Without it, he explained, conditions would be far more severe. He made himself believe it was an instrument of survival.
When Paul Bronski confronted Boris with the ground swell of apprehension over the deportations Presser would not be talked into a meeting with the Germans. As he had done a hundred times before, he delegated Paul Bronski.
The choices? Schreiker and the Reinhard Corps were impossible to speak to. Could he move through Max Kleperman? No, the Big Seven wanted to know nothing about the deportations. Move through Brandel and David Zemba? No, it was they who brought the pressure on the Civil Authority.
Dr. Franz Koenig was his only choice.
Koenig’s new residence was a forty-room palace, the latest confiscation in his capacity as chief of confiscations. In a few short years he had become a multimillionaire.
Koenig had grown abnormally obese. His body resembled a pear and his head a puffy tomato with an obnoxious flat clipping of fuzz on top.
Power was unbecoming. After the first sweet taste of revenge and fulfillment, he came to loggerheads with the reality that he had placed himself in league with men of a bestiality he did not believe could exist among civilized people. His wonderful Germany, his land of the gifts of culture, was being run by maniacs and sadists. He remembered his very first discussion of the mass murders. Now he wondered what he had done. Yet, irresistibly, he rose higher and higher. Himmler himself received him regularly. All that Franz Koenig had known of truth and beauty was abandoned by him. A victim of fear, he had been purchased—soul, heart, and mind.
Paul’s throat was caked dry as he stood before Dr. Koenig. It was a long way from the university to this forty-foot office. Yet Paul’s presence always had the disconcerting effect of making Koenig remember that he had once been content to read Schiller and listen to Mozart in the sanctity of his study, away from his fat Polish wife.
Paul managed to blurt out the message of apprehension over the deportations.
“You have a militia at your disposal. Use it,” Koenig snapped in irritation.
“But if we use it more than we already have to implement the deportations, it will only serve to confirm the people’s suspicions.”
Koenig rocked back and forth in his outsized chair. He could turn the matter over to Rudolph