“They stayed in Berlin and were eventually deported to the camps,” Gabriel said. “My grandfather was a rather well-known painter. He never believed that the Germans, a people he believed were among the most civilized on earth, would go as far as they did.”
“What was your grandfather’s name?”
“Frankel,” Gabriel said, again veering toward the truth. “Viktor Frankel.”
Klein nodded slowly in recognition of the name. “I’ve seen his work. He was a disciple of Max Beckmann, was he not? Extremely talented.”
“Yes, that’s right. His work was declared degenerate by the Nazis early on and much of it was destroyed. He also lost his job at the art institute where he was teaching in Berlin.”
“But he stayed.” Klein shook his head. “No one believed it could happen.” He paused a moment, his thoughts elsewhere. “So what happened to them?”
“They were deported to Auschwitz. My mother was sent to the women’s camp at Birkenau and managed to survive for more than two years before she was liberated.”
“And your grandparents?”
“Gassed on arrival.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“I believe it was January 1943,” Gabriel said.
Klein covered his eyes.
“Is there something significant about that date, Herr Klein?”
“Yes,” Klein said absently. “I was there the night those Berlin transports arrived. I remember it very well. You see, Mr. Argov, I was a violinist in the Auschwitz camp orchestra. I played music for devils in an orchestra of the damned. I serenaded the condemned as they trudged slowly toward the gas.”
Gabriel’s face remained placid. Max Klein was clearly a man suffering from enormous guilt. He believed he bore some responsibility for the deaths of those who had filed past him on the way to the gas chambers. It was madness, of course. He was no more guilty than any of the Jews who had toiled in the slave labor factories or in the fields of Auschwitz in order to survive one more day.
“But that’s not the reason you stopped me tonight at the hospital. You wanted to tell me something about the bombing at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”
Klein nodded. “As I said, this is all my doing. I’m the one responsible for the deaths of those two beautiful girls. I’m the reason your friend Eli Lavon is lying in that hospital bed near death.”
“Are you telling me you planted the bomb?” Gabriel’s tone was intentionally heavy with incredulity. The question was meant to sound preposterous.
“Of course not!” Klein snapped. “But I’m afraid I set in motion the events that led others to place it there.”
“Why don’t you just tell me everything you know, Herr Klein? Let me judge who’s guilty.”
“Only God can judge,” Klein said.
“Perhaps, but sometimes even God needs a little help.”
Klein smiled and poured tea. Then he told the story from the beginning. Gabriel bided his time and didn’t rush the proceedings along. Eli Lavon would have played it the same way. “For the old ones, memory is like a stack of china,” Lavon always said. “If you try to pull a plate from the middle, the whole thing comes crashing down.”
THE APARTMENT HAD belonged to his father. Before the war, Klein had lived there along with his parents and two younger sisters. His father, Solomon, was a successful textile merchant, and the Kleins lived a charmed upper-middle-class existence: afternoon strudels at the finest Vienna coffeehouses, evenings at the theater or the opera, summers at the modest family villa in the south. Young Max Klein was a promising violinist-Not quite ready for the symphony or the opera, mind you, Mr. Argov, but good enough to find work in smaller Viennese chamber orchestras.
“My father, even when he was tired from working all day, rarely missed a performance.” Klein smiled for the first time at the memory of his father watching him play. “The fact that his son was a Viennese musician made him extremely proud.”
Their idyllic world had come to an abrupt end on March 12, 1938. It was a Saturday, Klein remembered, and for the overwhelming majority of Austrians, the sight of Wehrmacht troops marching through the streets of Vienna had been a cause for celebration. For the Jews, Mr. Argov… for us, only dread. The worst fears of the community were quickly realized. In Germany, the assault on the Jews had been a gradual undertaking. In Austria, it was instantaneous and savage. Within days, all Jewish-owned businesses were marked with red paint. Any non-Jew who entered was assaulted by Brownshirts and SS. Many were forced to wear placards that declared: I, Aryan swine, have bought in a Jewish shop. Jews were forbidden to own property, to hold a job in any profession or to employ someone else, to enter a restaurant or a coffeehouse, to set foot in Vienna ’s public parks. Jews were forbidden to possess typewriters or radios, because those could facilitate communication with the outside world. Jews were dragged from their homes and their synagogues and beaten on the streets.
“On March 14, the Gestapo broke down the door of this very apartment and stole our most prized possessions: our rugs, our silver, our paintings, even our Shabbat candlesticks. My father and I were taken briefly into custody and forced to scrub sidewalks with boiling water and a toothbrush. The rabbi from our synagogue was hurled into the street and his beard torn from his face while a crowd of Austrians looked on and jeered. I tried to stop them, and I was nearly beaten to death. I couldn’t be taken to a hospital, of course. That was forbidden by the new anti-Jewish laws.”
In less than a week, the Jewish community of Austria, one of the most vital and influential in all of Europe, was in tatters: community centers and Jewish societies shut down, leaders in jail, synagogues closed, prayer books burned on bonfires. On April 1, a hundred prominent public figures and businessmen were deported to Dachau. Within a month, five hundred Jews had chosen to kill themselves rather than face another day of torment, including a family of four who lived next door to the Kleins. “They shot themselves, one at a time,” Klein said. “I lay in my bed and listened to the whole thing. A shot, followed by sobs. Another shot, more sobs. After the fourth shot, there was no one left to cry, no one but me.”
More than half the community decided to leave Austria and emigrate to other lands. Max Klein was among them. He obtained a visa to Holland and traveled there in 1939. In less than a year, he would find himself under the Nazi jackboot once more. “My father decided to remain in Vienna,” Klein said. “He believed in the law, you see. He thought that if he just adhered to the law, things would be fine, and the storm would eventually pass. It got worse, of course, and when he finally decided to leave, it was too late.”
Klein tried to pour himself another cup of tea, but his hand was shaking violently. Gabriel poured it for him and gently asked what had become of his parents and two sisters.
“In the autumn of 1941, they were deported to Poland and confined in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. In January 1942, they were deported one final time, to the Chelmno extermination camp.”
“And you?”
Klein’s head fell to one side-And me? Same fate, different ending. Arrested in Amsterdam in June 1942, detained in the Westerbork transit camp, then sent east, to Auschwitz. On the rail platform, half-dead from thirst and hunger, a voice. A man in prison clothing is asking whether there are any musicians on the arriving train. Klein latches onto the voice, a drowning man seizing a lifeline. I’m a violinist, he tells the man in stripes. Do you have an instrument? He holds up a battered case, the only thing he had brought from Westerbork. Come with me. This is your lucky day.
“My lucky day,” Klein repeated absently. “For the next two and a half years, while more than a million go up in smoke, my colleagues and I play music. We play on the selection ramp to help the Nazis create the illusion that the new arrivals have come to a pleasant place. We play as the walking dead file into the disrobing chambers. We play in the yard during the endless roll calls. In the morning, we play as the slaves file out to work, and in the afternoon, when they stagger back to their barracks with death in their eyes, we are playing. We even play before executions. On Sundays, we play for the Kommandant and his staff. Suicide continuously thins our ranks. Soon I’m the one working the crowd on the ramp, looking for musicians to fill the empty chairs.”
One Sunday afternoon-It is sometime in the summer of 1942, but I’m sorry, Mr. Argov, I cannot recall the exact date-Klein is walking back to his barracks after a Sunday concert. An SS officer comes up from behind and knocks him to the ground. Klein gets to his feet and stands at attention, avoiding the SS man’s gaze. Still, he sees enough of the face to realize that he has met the man once before. It was in Vienna, at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, but on that day he’d been wearing a fine gray suit and standing at the side of none other than
