PAUL-LOUP SULITZER
The Green King
Translated from the French by Denise Raab Jacobs
First publishing in Great Britain by Granada publishing
1985
Some say he’s mad; others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury; but, for certain,
He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause
Within the belt of rule.
Shakespeare, Macbeth,
V, 2
Prologue
I hadn’t been
in Munich one hour when captain Tarras informed me that advance units of the
seventh army had just discovered another camp, in north Austria, near Linz; the
place was called “Mauthausen”. Tarras insisted that I leave right away; he had
secured three seats in a military plane. He would join us in two or three days.
I had many good reasons to obey George Tarras; he was a captain and I was only
a first lieutenant; he had been, until the summer of 1942, my international law
professor at Harvard; and finally it was he who having accidentally run into me
in Paris two weeks earlier, had recruited me to serve under him on the war
crime commission. If that was not enough, I liked him, although I had some
difficulty in recognizing, beneath the olive-drab uniform, the sarcastic and
brilliant professor who used to hold forth within the ivied walls of Harvard
yard.
Three of us
left. I was accompanied by Mike Rinaldi, a sergeant, and by Roy Blackstock, a
photographer. I had little in common with either of them. Rinaldi was from
Little Italy in New York city, Blackstock was from Virginia. Although totally
different physically, one, small, stocky, with a thin black waxed moustache;
the other six feet four inches of soft and still expanding bulk, they seemed to
share an impressive and cynical nonchalance I took as proof of maturity, of
experience I had not yet acquired.
It was May 5,
1945. I knew little of the war then ending in Europe, except for the news of
the taking of Berlin by the Russians, three days earlier, and the imminence of
a total and official surrender of the Third Reich. The war was ending and I
hadn’t killed anyone and hadn’t seen any fighting. Four mounts from my
twenty-second birthday, I was like an adolescent entering a theater for the
first time just as the curtain is coming down. Having returned to Europe for
the first time in six years, I had seen my French grandmother again, in Paris.
The fact that I had become an American, giving up my father’s nationality for
my mother’s. had affected her ever so slightly; actually, she had barely reacted
to the news, being too preoccupied with describing to me what had become of
Paris and her Provence under German occupation.
Once in Linz,
Rinaldi managed to get us aboard a truck going to Vienna, where the red army
had been since April 13. At about 2:00 P.M., we crossed the Danube at Enns.
There, Rinaldi intercepted a Jeep and convinced the driver, an Italian-American
like himself, to take us father. We went first to the Mauthausen train station,
and there we coerced the driver, with constraints bordering on pure and simple
blackmail, to cover the last three and a half miles separating us from the
camp.
There, for the
first time, did my footsteps cross the those of Reb Michael Klimrod.
Among the many
clear memories I’ve kept of that day, there is, first, that lightness of the
Austrian air, sunny and mild, balmy, with the perfume of a spring that seems
eternal.
Only then came
the stench.
It hit my
nostrils when we were still two or three hundred yards from the camp. A large
convoy of covered trucks forces us to stop, and our improvised chauffeur took
this opportunity to proclaim with furious determination that he would go no
farther. We had to get out and proceed on foot. The stench became perceptible;
it hung in the air in successive and unmoving masses. ‘Crematorium’, said
Blackstock, with his Southern drawl. And the placid tone, the very accent,
seemed to rid the word of its horror. We passed through the wide open doors.
Tanks had come, then gone , leaving fresh tracks on the ground. In their place,
trucks kept arriving in a continuous flow, discharging supplies, medicine and
bandages, bolstering the medical units already on the spot. But this flow. Once
inside the doors, lost itself instantly in the huge mute sea of living corpses,
almost still, strangely, like a tide suddenly frozen. The arrival of the tanks,
five or six hour before, had probably caused this sea to shudder, to become
animated, but now, the excitement had dropped, the joy of freedom had dimmed,
and the faces were rigid masks. It was as if they had entered a second stage,
now that the end of the nightmare was excepted reality. In the hallucinatory
glances cast towards me, Rinaldy, and Blackstock, who used his well fed mass to
make a path, I could see a strange apathy, and short of resignation, but also
hatred, an angry reproach; ‘Why didn’t you come sooner?’.
‘And they
stink’, said Blackstock, ‘how they stink; it’s unbelievable.’ With
determination and without any gentleness, the giant pushed through the
scarecrows in the striped rags.
The American
officer in charge of the camp wore gold maple leaves on his collar. He was
short, stiff, had red air, and was name Strachan. He told me that if there was
anything at this moment that preoccupied him less the war crime, he would like
to know what it was. Right now he was trying to bring some order to this
unspeakable mess. He had under taken to separate the former prisoners into
three categories; beyond help, critical, out of danger. Those beyond help were
numerous. ‘Two or three thousand of them are going to die on me within the next
few days, but at least they’ll die free, and
that’s something’. He stared at me with his brown, almost yellow, eyes.
THE GREEN KING (part 6)
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The grave was a few feet away. It
measured only six by six feet. The earth that had been removed was neatly piled
in a triangular hill, in which a shovel was planted. A few handfuls of dirt had
been carelessly thrown into the grave, but the layer of quicklime placed there
before had already corroded the mounds.. as well as the naked bodies of the men
they had tried to bury hastily. One could guess what had happened; the eight or
ten naked bodies thrown into the ditch, pushed down with a gun butt or a heel
to form an even surface. Then the quicklime, then the earth. But the dead kept
rising to the surface. I could see hands, abdomens, penises, mouths, and
nostrils charred and eaten away by the calcium oxide, the bones sometimes
exposed and already rotted.
And alright in the middle of the
nightmarish tangle, I saw a face, frightfully drawn, covered with black spots
of dried blood, in which a pair of light eyes shone with amazing sharpness…
They followed me every moment as I
drew away from the wall against which I’d been leaning. And I remember thinking
of the steadiness of a stare frozen by death. I stepped closer to the grave.
And I voice rose, in slightly accented French reciting Verlaine.
“ Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est
la, simple et tranquille…” (My God, my God, life is there, simple and
tranquil..).
What happened then was out of a dream.
“Cette pisible rumeur-la vient
de la ville..” (That peaceful murmur comes from the town…) The verses
came automatically to my lips, and it seemed I spoken them.
I know only that I went up to the
grave. I crouched at the edge of it, put out my arm, and my fingers touched the
large bony hand of the seventeen-year-old boy we would later call “The King”.
TO BE CONTINUED
____________________________________
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
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