RACHAMIM
MERCY
See under: COMPASSION
RICHTER
An all-but-anonymous Jewish boy, distinguished among the ARTISTS [q.v.] as Obersturmbannführer Neigel’s contribution to the story. Richter’s story was recounted to Wasserman during the urgent hours of the night that Neigel committed suicide [see under: KAZIK, THE DEATH OF] and can be described as lamentably lacking in suitable artistic treatment. The circumstances behind the story are as follows: Neigel, frightened and desperate, informs Wasserman that he has“something” for him, something he thought about on the train to Berlin, on his way home. The Jewish writer pricks up his ears. “On the train,” says Neigel, “on the train I thought about it. Somebody new. For Otto, for the zoo, what do you think?” “At your command,” answers Wasserman. Outside, in the distance, STAUKEH’s [q.v.] melodious whistle can be heard, as he paces up and down waiting for the shots. He is running out of patience now, but he will not go in until Neigel shoots himself. “What do you think?” Neigel implores again. “He’s a boy, let’s say around twenty years old. And—you hear?—he extinguished the sun. Yes! The sun! So give me a name for him, Herr Wasserman, a good Jewish name, and speak a little louder, I can’t hear you all of a sudden. What did you say? Richter? Fine. Let it be Richter, then. Write that down. I want it down in writing. He has to be in this story, and remember, he’s mine. If you ever tell anyone the story again, say I made him up, all right? What are you asking? I can’t hear you. The whistle’s blowing again. The night train has arrived. What can he do? Oh-ho!!” laughs Neigel too loudly, “oh-ho!! The things that boy can do! Write it down, Scheherazade, write it down word for word. He came from one of your ghettos—Lodz, for instance—and he saw things there. There was an Aktion, you know what an Aktion is, Herr Wasserman? An Aktion is—never mind. Forget it. You needn’t know. Go on living in your fairy-tale world, yes, because an Aktion is by no means something pleasant or easy, it‘s—” And he whistles through his teeth, perhaps to illustrate the unpleasantness of an Aktion, or perhaps to drown out the Ukrainians whistling on the platform. “—And he saw things there, and he started looking into the sun, yes! Directly into the sun that witnesses everything and never docs anything, never extinguishes itself or burns the world. And he looked directly at the light—this is what I made up on the train to Berlin. The idea came to me as I was leaving the barracks; at first it was cruel, like your artists, men to the right, women to the left! Children and old people to the Lazarett, where you will be given a little injection by Dr. Staukeh, an injection against the typhus epidemic now rampant in the East, and he looks direcdy into the sun, and his eyes burn, and all the time he cries and his lids swell and fill with pus, but he promised, he swore to do it, strip! Everyone strip! Don’t be ashamed! You have exactly what your neighbor has! And a few days later the sun began to yield to him, really, maybe they didn’t notice it at the Berlin observatory, but what a dif-446)fercncc it made. The sun began to withdraw, now out! Schnell! For delousing! These were Richter’s hardest days, because suddenly he was afraid—run, dreck Jude, run—afraid of the injustice of taking the sun away, but he was a real artist, and so he continued to look into it directly, until it went out—the first fifty march, into the chamber! Silence! This is only for delousing! And it was utterly, utterly dark,” groans Neigel, rolling his maniacal red eyes, flapping his arms and asking Wasserman what he thought of his contribution to the story. “Wonderful,” answered the Jew. “Now you continue from here,” said Neigel, and Wasserman turned the page of his empty notebook and was about to read from it when suddenly he heard Dr. Fried telling Otto that the “contribution,” Richter, does not really suit the original concept of the Children of the Heart, it lacks depth, and is, in fact, pretty raw. And then Wasserman heard Otto quietly and resolutely answer the doctor that he accepts young Richter into his zoo mostly out of MERCY [q.v.]. Because—Otto: “Even when we seek the greatest and purest humanitarian motives, Albert, we must never for a single moment forget to have mercy, because otherwise we’re no better than ‘they’ are, may their names be blotted out.”
STAUKEH
Sturmbannführer Siegfried Staukeh, born in Düsseldorf. Neigel’s adjutant. The medical consensus shortly before he succeeded in committing suicide was that Staukeh had a pathological, sadistic personality. According to his doctors, he was an extremely intelligent man, thoroughly lacking in CONSCIENCE [q.v.], and they could find no reason for what they called his “extraordinary suicidal bent”: there is no scientific explanation why such a cruel man, a merciless killer in his last days at the camp, should
