See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

Anshel Wasserman wears a gown of gorgeous silk, and a large watch on a chain that bounces against his chest as he runs. He is bowed and wizened, with a wispy beard and an incipient hump on the back of his neck. Though I’ve looked through hundreds of pictures of concentration-camp prisoners, I never saw anyone dressed like that before. Now they pass the parade grounds and stop in front of the commander’s barracks. Wasserman is panting. The barracks are a grim-looking wooden structure, two stories high, with curtained windows. A small brass sign on the door says CAMP COMMANDER, and another, on the outer wall, CONSTRUCTION—SCHOENBRUN INC., LEIPZIG, AND SCHMIDT INC., MÜNSTERMAN. I know countless details of this sort. What I need, though, are the essentials. Hoppfler says something to the Ukrainian sentry at the door. Now Anshel Wasserman turns and sees me. It’s only a side glance, but I feel reborn: after the gloom and fog of recent months, his glance is like a clap on the backthat makes all the seemingly unrelated pieces of the mosaic fall neatly into place. Grandfather Anshel recognized me, I sensed him. He was terror-stricken. Behind the door, Camp Commander Obersturmbann-führer Neigel awaited him. Maybe I shouldn’t be putting Grandfather through this, I reflected, maybe it was wrong of me to bring him back Over There, but I knew that he was my only chance since he had been there personally and was, I daresay, one of the few who knew the way out again, so having made up my mind to go in, I decided it would be better for me to go in with him.

The door opens and they enter the barracks. And there stands Herr Neigel. Well, well. Not at all as I imagined him over the years—fat and bestial, a butcher with a cruel grin. He is rugged-looking, though: tall and muscular, with a well-developed cranium, visibly balding, despite his close-cropped black hair, with two deep inlets over the forehead. His face is unusually large, his features elongated, with dark patches of stubble where the razor missed. His mouth is small and tense, and there’s a kind of aggressive contempt in the corners of his eyes. The overall impression he makes is of a strong man who wishes to avoid attention. In my childhood, Grandfather always called him by his civilian title, Herr Neigel. A certain rapport must have been struck between them at some point, or was it a bargain? And what did Neigel call Grandfather? Dreck Jude? No, I don’t think so. His face attests a dry pragmatism incompatible with dreck Jude. He looks up from his orderly desk, suppressing an ill-humored scowl at this interruption. “Yes, Untersturmführer Hoppfler?” he says, his voice loud and measured. Hoppfler reports a strange case. Neigel quickly interrogates him (“Did you try shooting?” “Yes, Commander.” “Did you try the truck?”

“Yes, Commander.” “And gas, you say you tried gas?” “Yes, Commander, it all began with the gas.” “And what about the others? Maybe the gas was defective?” “But no, Commander! The others died as usual. No irregularities, except for him”).

Neigel groans at this waste of his time, stands up, smooths his trouser creases, and begins to fiddle absentmindedly with the silver medal on his lapel. Somewhat wearily he asks, “Is this some kind of joke, Untersturmführer Hoppfler?” But when the younger officer launches into a garbled explanation, Neigel dismisses him with a wave of the finger and an order to return a few minutes later after the short examination has been completed, “to remove the body.” Neigel watches the youngman leave the way people of a certain age watch an ambitious young man who never does anything right.

He draws a gun from his holster. A shiny black toy with a mag—Wait! Oh no! He’s going to shoot Grandfather! I turn away. I look at the military placards on the wall behind the desk: THE FÜHRER COMMANDS—WE OBEY, RESPONSIBILITY DOWNWARD, OBEDIENCE UPWARD. And then Neigel steps forward and puts the gun to Grandfather’s temple and I hear myself scream out in fear with Grandfather, and the gun goes off, and Grandfather says inwardly, “It was like a fly buzzing between my cars,” and the wooden stag head over the door falls down, nebuch, and one of its horns cracks. “Sholem aleichem, Shleimeleh, how you have changed, though I recognize you all the same. Hush, not a word. Time is running out and we have much to do. We have a story to tell.”

This is how he addressed me. Not in his own voice, of course. I wrote “Grandfather says inwardly” because it’s more accurate. His voice sounded like the voice I heard under water: like the faint crinkling of a thousand broken shells. Not like speech exactly, more like a steady flux of drab gray verbiage without the vigor of speech, yet closely resembling written language. Grandfather Wasserman spoke to me in the language he wrote, in the words that crumbled out of that torn yellow sheet of an old children’s magazine, preserved since the beginning of the century among Grandma Henny’s belongings. This was the first time I had ever heard him speak about his story. The story was really his life, and he always had to write it again from the beginning. Once when he was a little discouraged he told me he was rolling the story uphill like Sisyphus. Then he apologized for never having enough time or energy to listen to my story, but as he saw it, all stories were cut from the same cloth, “except that sometimes you have to push the stone uphill, and at other times you yourself are the cumbersome stone.”

But now the German is incredulous: he looks from Grandfather to the gun, and twists the old man’s head this way and that in search of a bullet hole. Later Neigel asks dryly in fluent Polish (his mother was Polskdeutsch, and, of course, the SS language course), “Are you getting smart with me,