Kolchak's gold

“At my brother’s village the infantry stopped just short of the town. A scout company went among the houses to make sure it was secure, but the main body encamped outside the shtetl. The soldiers unfolded their shelter-halves and dug holes while the villagers watched. Whenever a German patrol came close, the villagers would put their hands in the air to indicate their noncombatant status. Many of them went around with white handkerchiefs displayed at all times.

“These Germans did not arrest them. They hardly paid attention to them at all. Civilians were of no interest to the Wehrmacht as long as they stayed out of the way. The soldiers were too tired for sadistic sport.

“Zalmanson said they all trembled in terror that whole night, but there were no incidents and the next day the Germans folded up their shelter-halves and moved on past the village, leaving only a small squad to secure it.

“The sound of the guns dissolved to the southeast. The German squad kept to themselves, having commandeered a farmhouse on a small height overlooking the village.

“The lines of battle had veered away to the south, and there were no heavy movements of Germans through the area; the rear echelons and reinforcements had gone past to the south, on their road eastward to the fighting. For a few days it appeared there was room for hope that the Germans had forgotten their existence in the little valley.

“Finally, of course, some sort of minor official of the German Occupation arrived in the village in the sidecar of a motorcycle, and that was that.”

“It was in September that this Heinz Krausser came on the scene. The shtetl was only one of several on his list.

“He arrived in one of those open armored cars and he was carrying a Schmeisser machine pistol in one hand. His headquarters platoon was with him-fifty or sixty men. They went through the village tacking up posters on the walls, ordering all Jews to present themselves at eight o’clock the next morning in a field at the edge of town, for what was called “registration and resettlement.” At the bottom in very large letters it said Bei Fluchtversuch Wird Geschossen’-anyone who tries to escape will be shot. I have seen these posters in other villages.

“The SS went through people’s houses, looting them. They did everything except rape. They didn’t wish to be contaminated by contact with Jewish women. Zalmanson told me there were no rapes reported in the shtetl. These SS were often expert rapists. Many of them were only sixteen years old.

“Krausser was a different sort, much older than his troops. At his home in Bavaria, I was told by one of the sergeants, Krausser kept a Rumanian slave in the kitchen and a young Jew was chained outside the house like a watchdog.

“Zalmanson described him to me-he had a shaven head and one of those inhumanly monotonous German voices. He would walk strutting around the village square, slapping the Schmeisser into his open palm. He had a crude sort of humor-very cynical, a sort of dull sarcasm. The sergeant told me one of Krausser’s favorite remarks-‘Our little war is going better. Much better than next year.’ He was referring to the fact that there wouldn’t be so many Jews to kill next year. Otherwise the story would not ring true. I think he was a fatalist, but not a defeatist, and anyway at this time it still looked as if the Nazis were winning the war, didn’t it?

“The village was not fooled by the resettlement announcement. Too many refugees had told them what happened to villages where the Jews lined up for ‘registration.’ In the afternoon there was a meeting out at the poultry farm-the Nazi SS had not come that far yet. Zalmanson was there, and my brother.

“It was too late to flee, yet there was no other choice. They did not know what to do. The SS were already setting up Spandaus on tripods along the edge of the field where the people were ordered to assemble in the morning. A truckload of shovels had arrived.

“They must have been chilled by the hopelessness. You know the kind of paralyzing fear which prevents flight?

“Zalmanson said my brother withdrew to meditate privately. When Zalmanson came upon him, Maxim was retching into his handkerchief.

“Dear God we can never forgive them! Never in a thousand years!

“Zalmanson told me he saw Maxim’s face drawn with pain. But Zalmanson had no way of understanding the dilemma my brother faced. The community was scheduled for annihilation-this is what Zalmanson knew, and he attributed Maxim’s agony solely to this. I never told Zalmanson the truth, but the events themselves can only be explained by the assumptions I must make.”

“Maxim had a giant’s gentleness. He had made himself over into a man of faith, a man of peace. Through that blind indifference of fate he found himself, as I did, a forgotten survivor of that terrible Civil War in Siberia.

“Whatever material loyalty he owned, he felt he owed to the Jewish people of his homeland-those whom we had betrayed by denying them. Obviously he was no more a Communist than I am, even though he had elected- almost as a sort of penance-to remain in Russia. He had no allegiance to the Moscow regime.

“We carried in our heads the secret of that heavy royal treasure, buried in the Sayan heights. Neither of us had ever revealed the secret.

“Why? Well that is easiest to explain by asking another question: to whom could we have revealed it? The Red government? Hardly. Some other government? What for?

“I had thought of discussing it with my fellow Mossad people but it seemed pointless. Granted we needed money, we were chronically without it in Palestine. But you cannot simply go into Siberia and remove five hundred tons of deep-buried gold. Or so I assumed. And also of course we had no way to know whether the gold had already been removed from its hiding place. In fact I rather took it for granted that it had. I assumed the Bolsheviks had got it, in the end. Evidently Maxim did not make the same assumption; at least he acted as if he had not.

“So we kept the secret because there was no one to whom we could usefully reveal it.

“But then Krausser came to the shtetl.”

“I have pieced these things together. Many of them are guesses but I shall relate them as if I know them to be fact; the outcome we know.

“At first Krausser refused to listen to my brother’s pleas for a hearing. He had heard Jewish pleading before, he was not interested. But Maxim did get the ear of an amused junior officer, a Waffen SS Hauptmann.

“Maxim implored this Hauptmann to persuade Krausser to spare the village. In return for the lives of the Jews, my brother offered to tell the Nazis where to find the gold we had buried for the Admiral.

“I have said my brother acted as if he assumed the gold was still where we had hidden it. Perhaps he did not believe that any more than I did; perhaps he only wanted to make the Germans believe it.

“Now I am on uncertain ground. I cannot describe the sequence of events, only the possibilities.

“It is likely, to me, that this Hauptmann was unimpressed by my brother’s wild story. But perhaps he repeated it at the evening mess, and perhaps his fellow young Hitlerites agreed that there was probably nothing to it-a desperate lie by a cowardly Jew trying to save his skin-but if there were any truth at all in Maxim’s story, it was possible they would find themselves in serious trouble for failure to report it.

“A hypothesis. A report goes to the Oberst-Krausser. Krausser feels there is probably nothing to it, but it cannot hurt to listen to the Jew-the story sounds entertaining.

“I know from Zalmanson that my brother was granted an audience with Krausser that night. I do not know what was said; one can guess.

“My brother is earnest, compelling. Perhaps he begins by demanding the lives of all surviving Russian Jews in return for leading the Germans to the gold. Krausser replies caustically that even if this fantasy has truth in it, the gold is hidden a thousand miles beyond German lines in the deep heart of the Soviet Union. What good is this to the Third Reich?

“But Maxim is adamant-persuasive. Krausser hears him out. Finally Krausser probes: an offer. If what Maxim says proves to be true, the villagers will indeed be spared. His promise, on his word as a German officer.

“Not the villagers, Maxim insists. Consider the value of this hoard. Billions of Reichsmarks. Billions. All the Jews who are still alive must be spared.

“The village, Krausser says. Only the village. Gold is not that important. Important but not that