Mila 18 - Leon Uris [186]
The Warsaw ghetto, the largest human stockyard in man’s history, once held nearly six hundred thousand people. That number was decimated by starvation, disease, executions, deportation to slave labor, and finally assembly-line murder in Treblinka. When the Big Action ended, less than fifty thousand remained.
Chapter Thirteen
HORST VON EPP CUT the classic conception of the ramrod German baron as he stood framed before the tall window of Chris’s flat, transfixed by the first snowfall of the winter, and the strains of a Chopin record.
Chris came in from the outside, slapping the cold from his bones. He nodded to Horst, denoting he was pleased at the unexpected visit.
“Hope you don’t mind my breaking in and helping myself to the whisky?” Horst said, fixing a scotch for Chris.
“Why should I mind? There’s nothing in this apartment your friends haven’t examined twenty times.”
The Chopin record came to the end. “I like Chopin. All those blockheads play is Wagner. A tribute to Hitler in absentia. Isn’t there something enormously enchanting about the first snow?”
Chris threw open the drapes to the alcove bedroom, tugged off his shoes and wet socks. He fished around under the bed for his slippers.
“O the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below,
Over the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet,
Dancing,
Flirting,
Skimming along,
Beautiful snow, it can do nothing wrong.”
“Ye gods, Chris, that’s horrible.”
“James Whittaker Watson, 1824-90. My recitation for the second-grade graduation. My mother didn’t come to the graduation. I never forgot snow, beautiful snow.”
Horst handed him a tall drink. They clinked glasses.
“Fröhliche Weihnachten—Christmas cheer,” he said. “I’ll be a sad bastard. Christmas. I forgot all about it.” “I toast those poor misled Aryans laying on their wet bellies in snow, beautiful snow on the eastern front for the glory of the Fatherland,” Horst said.
“Amen. Well, how does it feel to get clobbered?”
“We are going to lose at Stalingrad, aren’t we, Chris?”
“It’s going to be a catastrophe, Baron. Your Chief of Staff should have read Napoleon’s memoirs and taken a lesson of what mother winter does to trespassers.”
“I had it about a week ago. The sudden realization Germany is going to lose the war. It is making a mess out of all the Christmas parties. Everyone is so damned glum. Stalingrad, El Alamein, the landings in North Africa. But you know what really confounds me is those Americans. Guadalcanal. Now there’s a romantic name. Everyone underestimates Americans. Why?”
“The mistaking of gentleness as weakness is like underestimating a Russian winter.”
“Next year,” Horst said, “Berlin is going to be bombed. What a pity. Oh dear, how they are going to pay us back. Well, Christmas cheer.”
Horst set down his drink and again became enchanted with the falling snow. “Chris,” he said, looking outside, “a report has just been published by the Polish government in exile in London. A hasty White Paper detailing alleged extermination camps operating in Poland. Heard about it?”
“Something or other.”
“Tell me,” Horst said, “how did you smuggle it out of Poland?”
Chris made only a nominal attempt to cover his deed. “What makes you think it was me?”
“My male vanity. When a beautiful piece of tail, Victoria Landowski from Lemberg, turns out not to be a piece of tail and not even Victoria Landowski, my masculinity was offended.”
“Find the woman. They are behind all sinister plots.”
“The trouble was, I couldn’t find the woman. My friend Christopher de Monti had become deliciously decadent, a quivering alcoholic mass of sponge. Then Victoria Landowski enters and Christopher undergoes a magic transformation. He returns to being—what do you call it?—a clean-cut All-American boy. I began to add this sudden spiritual resurrection. It was not difficult to figure the rest of it.”
“By God, Horst, you’re downright clairvoyant. Well, does Gestapo Chief Sauer put his dogs on me, feed me a quart of castor oil, or use testicle crushers to