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

also weaves in a few interesting details about himself, his childhood in Fissan, and his father, but suddenly something strange and totally incomprehensible happens; Uber-sturmbannführer Neigel’s face grows rigid and serious, as though he had called it to attention, and he makes a rapid, formal declaration, in no way related to anything previously discussed by them. “I have 120 officers and men under my command, Wasserman. And 170,000 persons have arrived here in the transports so far—as of the beginning of this week!” Once again I needed Wasserman (“Did you see? So proudlyEsau spoke his piece, I quickly looked under the table to see if he would click his heels. He did not.”) And he explains to me that Neigel had been impelled to make this perplexing declaration out of “a source deeper than the lesson he learned in Reb Himmler’s cheder,” and that “Nu, such things oftentimes betide me when I chance upon fleshly men of family who read my stories in their tender youth. And strange to say, such men always feel obliged to vaunt their manhood before me, to magnify their accomplishments as princes of Torah scholarship or of the marketplace—in short, to be Moishe Gros! Perhaps they wished to impress me that their latter days had brought no blame to the lessons they gleaned from my stories in childhood. Ineffable are the ways of man, Shleimeleh, and how very schoolboyish they seemed to me, then, boasting before an old teacher in whose presence we all revert to juvenility, and perhaps the same holds true for the writer of children’s stories, so when Neigel said such things here, nu, you understand how sweet the melody was to my ears, and yet I refrained from answering a fool in his folly, and merely stammered a kind of ‘Nu yes, very likely true,’ but he saw he had made a dunderheaded ninny of himself, and he buried his nose between the pages of his black notebook, and there was silence.”)

Wasserman takes this opportunity to tell me what little he knows about Neigel and his adjutant, Staukeh, mentioned earlier by Neigel. Neigel’s nickname in the camp is “Ox,” because of his unusually large head, and because of his outbursts (“You should see him in a rage! Flames shoot out of his mouth, balls of fire!”). His assistant, Ober-sturmführer Staukeh, is called “Lalakeh,” or Dolly, by the prisoners. (“Because of his face, he has the face of an innocent child, the pure-hearted son of the Passover Haggadah! But a killer nonetheless, with the bite of a fox and the sting of a scorpion.”) Neigel is different from Staukeh in every conceivable way. Staukeh, according to Wasserman, and judging by the written testimony I looked through recently, was a sick sadist for whom “the gates of intelligence were ever open for the devising of new schemes to harrow and torture, and he grabs and guzzles and kills with a pleasure and a passion not of this world.” Staukeh was also corrupt, not above a bribe here and there, or getting drunk at the officers’ club, and sometimes, “Nu, well, mangling a young doc of a farmer’s daughter.” No, Neigel is no Staukeh, and Staukeh is no Neigel. “They are different yet they complement each other, like Tweedledumand Tweedledee. Or Pat and Patashon!” Neigel, according to Wasserman, “is all of a piece, felled, as it were, by one swing of the ax. We never saw him inebriated, nor did he ever smile at us. Not even viciously, like Staukeh. Zalmanson liked to call him ‘Bellyache,’ because he looked as if he had eaten bitter herbs, like someone who has no time for nonsense, only duty. And here I am in the nest of the viper himself, for over an hour now, and he has yet to pluck my beard or strike my mouth, and what is more, I have even seen him smile now and again, he has even told me of himself and of his ancestry. Imagine, Shleimeleh, at first he wanted to murder me, and fired a shot, but he did it according to rule, and I noticed he averted his eyes in order not to see. On the whole, it appears he does not know what to do with me, and this troubles him. Sometimes he looks at me strangely and says ‘Humph,’ and, Shleimeleh, though I cannot think what this ‘humph’ might be for, I only hope it is not a ‘humph’ of sadness, heaven forbid, for I do not wish to make him sad, he too was a child once, after all, and read what he read and liked me a little, and who knows what he endured at the SS Führerschule, for surely no one becomes a murderer without forfeiting happiness, and if I knew how a man like Neigel could be turned into a murderer, perhaps I would try to turn him around and reform him, et! Senile musings, Anshel! You want to change the world in your old age? With a kind of prophetic hindsight? But inside, I feel the worm gnaw, because after everything this arch-murderer Neigel did to me, I spent the last hour with him and saw his face as a boy, and I was beginning to think that these many months in Neigel’s camp I was wrong not to count him a human being, with a wife, perhaps, and children, and these musings of mine filled me with amazement, and I put them aside for future consideration, and to Neigel I said that I was distraught to have caused him such inconvenience, and I saw that my words touched his heart, because he gazed upon me like a shaken man. And I confessed to him that it was no small discomfort for me either that the man about to finish me was nu, well, a man with whom I am somewhat acquainted, and to stress my point, I quoted Papa, may he rest in peace, who was a grocer and taught