They struck out briskly across the campus. Neither spoke for some minutes.
It was Marie who broke the silence. “Who invited that guy anyway?”
The question startled Janet. “Guy? What guy?”
“Klaus Krieg.”
“Oh. My predecessor. The former director of development.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t get to know Jack Regan very well. He resigned to take a job at UCLA, and I was named director just before he left. We had only a few meetings. He handed me this conference as a fait accompli. And when I saw your name as one of the participants, I paid no attention to the rest. I was just so happy we would be able to get together again.” Janet paused a moment. “What’s the matter with the Reverend Krieg anyway?”
“Please don’t debase the title ‘Reverend’ by bestowing it on that creep!”
Janet giggled. “Creep? He is an evangelist, after all.”
“Come on, Jan; you know better.”
“All right, so he’s a creep. But Jack Regan seemed to think he’d draw a crowd. And-no offense intended-but wouldn’t you agree that Klaus Krieg is the major drawing card of this workshop? I don’t mean to take anything from you or the other writers,” she added hastily. “The students undoubtedly will learn a lot from all of you. But their prime objective is to get published. And Krieg
Marie smiled fleetingly. “And he’s rich.”
“Very.”
Still, Marie thought to herself, Krieg must have had a motive for accepting. Why exactly is he here?
3
He heard their voices. Although he had met her only once, he recognized one of them as belonging to Sister Janet Schultes.
He was good at that. At one time in his history, Rabbi Irving Winer had sustained the thin strand of his life by honing his every resource and faculty, not the least of these his five senses.
He had tabbed them the instant they exited the elevator. Clearly, they were making no effort to keep their voices down. But he had made every effort to be silent, hoping they would not accost him.
He assumed, correctly, that the other female voice belonged to the nun-author, Sister Marie Monahan. Janet was serving as, for want of a better title, hostess of this workshop. Earlier this afternoon, she had welcomed him, shown him to his room, given him a map of the campus and a schedule for the workshop, and answered the few questions he’d had. She’d suggested he might be tired and want to rest. Eagerly, he’d assented as a way of assuring seclusion.
He had no idea that Janet and Marie were long-lost friends, wanted to be together, and had no intention of invading his privacy. So he made no sound.
In time they left, again taking the elevator. Once more a gladly received silence pervaded the third floor’s private residence wing.
Rabbi Winer gazed out the window. The immediate scene seemed downright bucolic. There were about as many trees as God allowed to grow in one place. Beyond the woods, he could make out the city in brick and neon, and pedestrians and homeowners and muggers and apartment dwellers and hope and despair. If he consciously tried, he could hear the city’s sounds. But he preferred not to hear. It was easy to block out the far-off noises.
Although the room’s temperature was pleasant, even a bit on the coolish side, the rabbi was perspiring. The window revealed his present reality. But his mind, his memory, continued to invade the present with the past. Even as he tried to suppress the ancient images, he knew from experience he would not succeed. Little by little, the unwanted but vivid whispers from the past grew until they blotted out the present.
It was November 9, 1938, not September 3, 1989. And it was Munich, not Detroit. God! Dear God! He did not want to live it again, but a perverse power decreed that he must.
Earlier in November, Ernst von Rath, the German Embassy attache in Paris, had been assassinated by a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan.
Although at the time Irving was only twelve, he knew things were changing radically and rapidly. More and more Germans were wearing the Nazi uniform. His parents and older sister grew more secretive, as if trying to shield him from what he sensed was happening. It seemed the Nazis were eager for an event they could designate as the “final straw” calling for what would eventually be termed the “final solution.” As it happened, the von Rath incident was it. And November 9, 1938, would forevermore be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Crystal, or the Night of Shattered Glass.
And that was precisely how young Irving Winer was introduced to Kristallnacht. Heavy-booted feet tramped up the stairs, followed by pounding on the door, followed by orders shouted in imperious German. Then the sound of glass shattering, furniture splintering, voices pleading, voices commanding.
In bed, covers pulled over his head, young Irving never saw the Nazis who destroyed his home, the precious musical instruments, the heirlooms, the works of art. He never saw the Nazis who seized and dragged his father from their house that night. But he knew; somehow he sensed, as he cowered beneath the covers, that his boyhood, his youth, was ending prematurely that night.
In the days and weeks that followed, his mother determined to stay in Munich and await her husband’s return. She was equally determined to get her children out of, and as far away from, Germany as possible. In both resolves she failed. Never again would they see her husband, their father. He was among the earliest to be cut down in the brutal resolution of Hitler’s “problem.”
In his first twelve years, as a member of a traditional, loving Orthodox family, Irving Winer could never have guessed or imagined the depth of cruelty to which humans could descend. This brutal phase of his education began immediately after Kristallnacht.
The synagogues were burned, repeatedly if necessary, to destroy them utterly. Jewish-owned stores and businesses were vandalized. Jewish people-men, women, and children-were insulted, publicly humiliated, and abused. They were forced to wear the Star of David as a mark of degradation.
Finally, in a seemingly random choice, Jews were rounded up like animals and taken away to a secret fate.
By the time the three remaining Winers were packed into a cattle car and started on their train trip to Dachau, Irving had already learned what it was to be treated as subhuman refuse. He was about to learn that there was nothing he would not do, no service he would not perform just to stay barely alive. Dachau taught him that.
On their arrival at the concentration camp, decisions were made. Olga Winer was transported to Hartheim, where the ovens worked overtime. Her ashes were indistinguishable from thousands of others. Olga’s daughter, Helen, became a subject for experimentation before following her mother.
Irving’s young, strong body was judged useful for the moment.
He slept whenever they let him. He ate whatever they gave him. The rest of the time, he labored. He did whatever he was told to do. And, unlike almost every other inmate of the camp, he survived.
When, toward war’s end, the beasts who ruled him told him they needed him to betray his fellow prisoners- God help him! God forgive him! — he did so.
He survived.
After the Allies liberated his camp and he began slowly, tentatively, to become accustomed to a far more human existence, the enormity of his experience began to trouble, then torture him. Chronologically, he was nineteen. In every other way, he was older-much, much older.
As soon as he could, he emigrated to the United States.
He tried to lose his very identity in a series of enterprises. Religion came closest to giving him a certain small measure of absolution. And so he became rabbi of a Reform congregation, two steps removed from his strict Orthodox upbringing.
His motives for embracing the Reform branch of Judaism were unclear even to him. But it was conceivable they had something to do with his experience with the strictness of Nazi discipline that had controlled so much of
