Wunderland(88)
It’s quickly followed by another: “Murderer!”
A rock comes flying from the pulpit area and hits the man on the forehead. As he staggers back, Kai and two others hurl themselves into the debris-filled aisles, fists and weapons raised.
“Go!” shout the others. “Assassin! Get him! Don’t let the scum get away!”
Run, thinks Ilse reflexively; and as though he has heard her the man whips around. Still clutching his forehead, he staggers into the darkness, the three boys taking after him in hot pursuit. A moment later she hears thuds, screams. A garbled plea for mercy.
Then, nothing but the men shouting KIKE! KIKE!
They are laughing.
A few minutes later they reappear, arms around each other’s shoulders as though they are coming back from a night’s worth of hard drinking. There is blood spattered over Max’s khaki pants. “One down,” he shouts, to no one in particular.
“Two hundred thousand to go!” shouts someone back from the balcony, and the room roars its approval.
Looking down at her notebook, Ilse takes a deep breath. Rabbi, she writes, carefully. Blood.
* * *
After an hour and a half, there is literally nothing left in the chapel that hasn’t been defiled or destroyed. Disappearing outside briefly, Kai and Max come back carrying four cans of petrol. These he and the others distribute liberally over the wreckage before retreating to the street. Standing in the splintered doorway, they flick lit matches into the darkness, watch them fall like tiny comets of doom. Within seconds the entire building is in flames. The mob stands before it as though it were a campfire, singing and swaying in triumph:
Germany, awake from your nightmare!
Give foreign Jews no place in your Reich!
We will fight for your resurgence!
Aryan blood shall never perish!
They finish with a communal piss into the flames, the urine hissing like a thousand hostile snakes. Then Max shouts out the next stop on his list—someplace on Unter den Linden—and the crowd sets off at a bellowing jog.
“What happened to the rabbi?” Ilse asks Max as she clambers back onto his BMW.
“Why?” Turning, he lifts an eyebrow behind his protective glasses. There is still blood on his left cheek.
“I just want to include it in my article,” she says quickly.
He shrugs. “Write that he was taken into protective custody. Him and thousands of others.”
“Thousands?”
He nods curtly. “Those are the orders. We’re to arrest as many male Jews as we can fit into the vans.” He points at the black truck she’d spotted earlier, the driver of which is now starting the engine.
“Where do the vans go?”
“Various holding sites. Then the camps. Dachau, Sachsenhausen. Oh, and a new KZ out in Ettersberg. Buchenwald, I think it’s called.” He revs the engine.
“How long will they be there?” she shouts over the rumble.
He shrugs. “Who cares?”
* * *
As the dawn breaks they make two more stops in rapid succession: a stationery store that explodes in flame with a single match. A delicatessen that they leave looking as though the floors and walls have been renovated in rotting meat. Both owners are beaten and dragged off like the rabbi, while policemen look on benignly. Meanwhile, firemen stand at attention in the early-morning light, soaking adjacent buildings and warning rioters to be careful not to get burned. They do nothing whatsoever to put out any of the blazes. Indeed a few actually feed them, tossing in bits of broken furniture and other debris.
As the sun streaks the gray sky with silver and pink the mob surges on to its next target, a small row of shops on Unter den Linden. The tea shop and sundries store bearing red-and-black Christian-Aryan Enterprise signs have been left alone. Gerstel’s hat store, however, swarms with drunken rioters who have shattered the show window and painted Jude and a crude Star of David on the door. Hats and gloves lie flattened on the street, amid shards of glass and shiny mirror and puddles of what looks like drunken vomit. Scattered throughout are small yellow spheres that Ilse recognizes as lemon drops from the big crystal jar the jovial merchant used to keep on his sales counter. She also spots what she at first takes to be a pile of dirty, wet rags before realizing with a chill that the wet and dirt is actually blood, and the “rags” are a man lying facedown on the pavement. When one of the rioters turns the prone form over with his boot Ilse doesn’t know which shocks her more: the sight of Herr Gerstel’s lifeless face, the eyes open, blank and staring, or the casual way in which the man above him kicks the body before moving on.
She manages to tear her eyes away as Max pulls up next to three men who have dragged what appears to be a shop safe through the wreckage and are hammering at it ferociously with clubs and crowbars.
“No looting, right?” he calls out to them. “We’re patriots. Not thieves.”
“Klar,” says one, pausing and wiping his brow. “We’re not after money. We’re after records.”
“What records?”
The man slaps his right fist into his left hand. “Customer records. To see who’s been betraying their country by doing business with this scum.”
Ilse looks back at the ruined shop, swallowing again. Though she and Renate probably tried on every hat in the store at one point, she has never bought anything from the Jewish merchant. She wonders uneasily what the punishment for his Aryan customers will be. At the delicatessen on Friedrichstra?e, she’d seen the mob turn on one of its own with dizzying speed, a dozen or more of them pummeling an older man until he’d collapsed into a fetal-shaped ball. When Max asked a bystander what had happened, the man spit in disgust.