The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [295]
“But—” Abruptly, as if a shroud had suddenly fallen, Salettl became pensive and somber. In a matter of seconds he seemed to age a decade. “The objective behind what we were doing was the same that led to the death of six million Jews and to the deaths of uncountable millions more on a thousand battlefields and in a thousand towns under falling bombs. The same machination that left the great cities of Europe in ruins.
“I stood in the dock at Nuremberg in 1946 surrounded “by many who had caused it. Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Von Papen, Jodl, Raeder, Donitz—once proud and contemptuous, they were now old, dreary and muddled men. Standing with them, I remembered a warning I received not to go to the Vernichtungslager, the extermination camps. Don’t go because you will not be permitted to describe what you have seen there. Well, I did go. To Auschwitz. And the warning was correct. Not because I was not permitted to describe what I had seen but because I could not describe what I had seen. The piles of glasses. The piles of shoes. The piles of bones. The piles of human hair. I thought that I had never seen the kind of thinking that did this, that I had never seen this kind of reality. Not in movies, not in theater. Yet it was real.
“And here was I, a key member of a secret underground, plotting, even before its demise, its rebirth. It was hideous. Impossible. But had I spoken out or tried to leave, I would have been shot and it would have gone on anyway. So I decided to say nothing and let it grow into adulthood, at the same time raising myself to a rank above suspicion. Then, at the proper time, I would destroy it.
“The German writer Günter Grass has said that we, as Germans, must understand ourselves. We are perhaps the finest technical craftsmen history has ever known. We are capable of making miracles. But nothing we ever do can escape Auschwitz or Treblinka or Birkenau or Sobibór or any of the others, because they are ours, they belong to us—they are in our soul, and we must know what they are, and understand why, and never—ever—allow it to happen again.
“By the time you view this everything we have created will have been destroyed. The new Reich will have been ended. At Charlottenburg. At der Garten. At the station in Switzerland, hidden in the recesses of the glacier beneath Jungfraujoch.
“There will be no Übermorgen.”
With that Salettl simply stood, walked past the camera and out of sight. A moment later the screen went black.
159
* * *
OSBORN LEFT downtown without remembering it, overwhelmed, his mind and emotions blurred together. He tried to separate them. Reflect on what he had just seen. Focus on the scope and history of what Salettl had revealed. To rage at what the Third Reich had done to the world. And at the audacity of what they had tried to do again! He wanted to shout at the horror of the extermination camps. He wanted to see the faces of the foul men in the dock at Nuremberg and superimpose over them the faces of Scholl and Dortmund and the others he knew only by name. He wanted to know if the Organization’s covert incursion into French politics had led directly to the death of Francois Christian.
In one breath he sought to acknowledge the singular burden Salettl had carried alone for so many years and for the dark heroism of his own “final solution.” And in the next, rage furiously at him for giving nothing of the details of the atomic surgery. How the temperatures at, or reaching, absolute zero had been attained. How the surgery had been done! How the recovery process worked! To medicine, to the alleviation of pain and suffering,