Part I - MANCHESTER
March, 2018
Ella Grunebaum called me shortly after I returned to Lancaster House. It was a Tuesday I remember, one of those middling days that test your last resolve, and I wished for nothing more than an evening on the couch, a glass of single malt and the kind of innocuous telly that justifies the endtimes. I had delivered four lectures that day on topics ranging from the Devisenstellen to the Esh Kodesh and was plagued by the same catatonia that visited my students moments before I dismissed them. The last time I’d spoken to Ella, we were at the Science Museum in London, where my book The Bone Grinder: Death and Industry at KZ Mauthausen-Gusen won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. I didn’t expect to win, hadn’t prepared anything to say if I did win (much to the chagrin of Krsto Bandović, the Serbian expat from The Independent who sat at a nearby table busily revising his speech throughout the ceremony), and I was more than a bit surprised when, after I collected the award and returned to my table, I heard the words mazal tov and saw Ella and her husband Noah smiling, the latter refilling my champagne glass to the brim.
I was alone, of course, since this late success happened to coincide with the collapse of my marriage. Ruth and I hadn’t recovered from our son Zach’s death three years earlier (I was correcting the final proofs of The Bone Grinder when we received the news) and we’d been living apart for the past year, she at her mother’s in Nottingham and myself at the family home in West Didsbury. Our oldest daughter, Gaby, was living with her boyfriend (now husband) in Edinburgh, and my agent Phillip Stokes couldn’t attend because of a racquetball injury that prevented him from walking without an angry hop. I did extend an invite to Ella and Noah anticipating an alibi, and promptly received word they’d be in Brussels that week for a European Jewish Congress working group. Unfortunately, this completed my list of family and close friends.
Ella explained the working group had ended early and they caught the quickest flight to London, booking a room at the Baglioni in mid-flight and landing hours before the ceremony. She worked like that, a prolonged and knotty service routine that delivered an ace down the centre line. She and I met under the most random of circumstances in Frankfurt, where I accompanied a colleague with a dreadful fear of flying who also happened to be a keynote speaker at a Hannah Arendt retrospective organized by the Fritz Bauer Institute. Following several presentations and my colleague’s careful discourse on Eichmann and the categorical imperative, there was a luncheon for the hundred or so attendees. The last thing I’d eaten was on the plane and I found it difficult to gab with anyone who wasn’t a takeaway container from Nando’s.
The Institute failed to provide a full course menu and we had to fight over tiny plates of krapfen, butterplätzchen, and kosher bockwurst baked inside even tinier pretzels. Despite their dimensions, the bockwurst was quite good and went quickly, and I grabbed the second to last before organizers from the Institute said that a subsequent order (and more localised nosh) would arrive in minutes from the deli on Bertha Pappenheim Platz. I sipped my coffee and waited twenty minutes with a dozen people whose impatience exceeded my own. A fortyish woman in a grey pantsuit and brownish bob was one of these people and we traded glances as competitors for the last bockwurst, which refused to be eaten by anyone until reinforcements reached the front. I’m not and never have been easy on the approach but felt that some idle conversation with a perfect stranger might dim the exasperation of the moment.
It turned out that Ella was the Educational Manager at the Mauthausen Memorial office in Vienna. Her business in Frankfurt was a clandestine mission of sorts for the Innenministerium, as she intended to procure the Institute’s Director for a virtual event on the very same day he was scheduled to be at Yad Vashem (where he sat on the Directorate) to discuss budgetary concerns in a closed session. I didn’t pry any further and said that my grandfather on my mother’s side had been interned at Gusen, and that I was preparing a book on the Mauthausen-Gusen camp system. Truth be told, the book hadn’t gotten much further than a national grid of sticky notes.
No one wants to hear about somebody’s work in progress, but Ella listened with a keen ear as I went into far too much detail. Like my first and universally ignored book on Simon Wiesenthal, this new work would take an anti-historicist approach (Even at fifty-one, Walter Benjamin’s influence remained in a solid state. At university, I learned German so I could read him in the original.), that was part midrash, part loci et res. As his health and memory declined, my grandfather began keeping a diary. He never talked about his experiences and his diary was hardly of interest to the scholar, but I wanted to use it as a source. What his diary lacked were the tangibles (camp organizational structures, state contracts), and I ended my worrisome exposition by saying that it would be at least a year before I could begin the book in earnest.
I feared Ella might run for the nearest exit, then realised she couldn’t until the Director emerged for the afternoon session. She produced her card and said if there was anything I needed, her research team could assist. I pocketed the card, not expecting to see her again, and were it not for a case of writer’s block and a bumbling, after-hours phone call, I might not have. She hadn’t forgotten my name and invited me to Vienna, where I met with scholars at her office on the Argentinierstraße and the Research Head Gregor Hass, a frowning, but not unlikable man who reminded me of my own father, minus the short attention span and general air of retreat.
Vienna was my home for the next month. In the morning, I’d take a taxi to the Argentinierstraße and spend the remainder of the day in the Archives, sifting through many damp-smelling boxes with Gregor and becoming a permanent fixture at the Microfiche reader. At night, I ate solitary dinners in my international business class hotel and went over the day’s notes (which exceeded five spiral notebooks by trip’s end), filling in gaps and completing a timeline of MauthausenGusen, beginning with its construction by häftlinge transferred from the Dachau camp, mostly political prisoners or those deemed asozial. The more I read, the less I thought about Walter Benjamin or my grandfather, the story I meant to tell taking on an encyclopedic scope, the apotheosis being Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer’s failure to transform Linz into the Führerstadt, the building blocks of a National Socialist utopia furnished by the forced labour at Mauthausen-Gusen. I didn’t stray from the hotel during non-working hours, and when Ruth wasn’t calling me about her potential merger with the NHS Foundation Trust that would bring ten hospitals together in Greater Manchester, I interested myself in Austrian reality shows and tiny bottles of wine from an oversized minibar.
Before I flew back, Ella and Noah invited me to dinner to discuss my plans for the Mauthausen-Gusen book. When Noah wasn’t tormenting postgraduates at Universität Wien on the finer points of Le Différend, he served on the Editorial Department at Passagen Verlag, and had many questions about my book’s subjective history and if it was a good idea in the context of the Shoah, especially given the current state of hyperreality devouring much of the general population through a glut of simulacrums, mindless consumerism and the parody of truth forecasted by the previous century. He believed a personal touch could be used by denialists and those members of the academic community trolling Alt-Right poison on social media. In ethical debates, Noah could be downright combative (I initially found him coarse and aloof, only to learn that anyone who entered his orbit was subject to a trial period. If you passed muster, and luckily, I did, he’d carry you wounded to the ends of the earth.), and he bluntly veered from technocracies to post-scarcity economies before touching on Leo Strauss and the issue of political rationalism. He said the decline of Western liberalism could trace its origins to a profligacy of relativism, to a notion of natural right marching blindly towards progress, a material progress without limitation that prided itself on heterogeneity and permissibility to assert and sustain itself. In this scenario, objective truth is impossible, and the world becomes mired in opinions and canards that fashion a crisis of meaning, leading to nihilism and the same pitfalls of the Weimar Republic.
His digression spiraled into a cursory analysis of Alfred Döblin and erlebte rede, and Ella poured him more Cabernet Franc. Detecting an entry point, I explained that his concerns weren’t unwarranted, and that I wasn’t completely decided about incorporating my grandfather’s diary, thus making me an impartial juror at the proceedings. My grandfather’s voice would add an extra layer to the material (a voice that spent years in the adits under Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and whom the 11th Armored Division mistook for dead when they liberated the Gusen subcamp in May 1945), but I had to admit that it ran contrary to Theodor Adorno’s famous exhortation that after Auschwitz, there could be no poetry. I didn’t introduce the more ambitious design I had in mind, keeping that to myself, and told him I wouldn’t know what lay ahead until I returned to Manchester and took stock of my plunder from the Archives. An oversimplification if ever there was one.
I liked Ella and Noah. Both were lapsed Jews, like me (we shared a mutual guilt), and I carried on with them in ways I hadn’t attempted for ages. Behind a rich Sachertorte and countless bottles of wine, we spent the rest of that evening at the bar watching Austria Vienna and FC Salzburg in the Austrian Bundesliga playoff. Noah was an undying supporter of Austria Vienna and flashed a scarf at the table as soon as the waiter delivered us the bill. Austria Vienna didn’t win the match and the bar erupted in a solemn rendition of, “Land der Berge, Land am Strome,” that Noah conducted from afar with a drinking straw, his exaggerated aerial maneuvers taken from Harpo Marx in A Night at the Opera. Ella and I kept menus on our faces for the duration.
My indecision about my grandfather’s diary wasn’t altogether baseless. In the end, I chose a less familiar tone for The Bone Grinder that focused on Heinrich Himmler, Oswald Pohl and Theodor Eicke, the Karamazovian knot who established Mauthausen-Gusen and whose administration toppled any hope for the Führerstadt. I didn’t completely abandon my beloved saba (The Bone Grinder was dedicated to him), though I recognized the need for objectivity and on a salient level, the lack of substance in the things he jotted down (in my grandfather’s nondescript musings, Gusen’s spectre stalks the shadows but never emerges). He hardly competed with the great survivalist works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, and perhaps I was tooting my own horn a bit by even considering him.
Sales picked up from the Baillie Gifford win and I did a handful of book signings in New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and the Mauthausen Memorial itself with Noah and Ella in attendance (seeing “Dr. Owen Schoenberg, Author” on a cardboard nameplate brought mixed emotions). Phillip arranged appearances on Radio 4, NPR, RFERL and enough podcasts to make Zoom a permanent fixture on my desktop. With the cash prize, I hired contractors to install the raised patio and garden in the backyard that Ruth had wanted the day we moved to West Didsbury. She’d already moved to her mother’s, and I was busy fattening the house for market, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms and repainting the living and dining rooms myself. I did whatever I could to escape that big empty house (which sold fast and reduced my life to a Lusitania of moving boxes). Phone conversations between us never strayed far from financial matters and avoiding the topic of divorce. Gaby was more disposed, better prepared to discuss the elephant in the room, but everything we said circled back to her wedding plans and if she’d have to apply for Scottish citizenship because of the proposed second independence referendum.
After closing on the home, I moved into a fully furnished flat in Lancaster House, a short trip to the university by foot. I kept my car in storage, more as a memento than for any practical use. I’d resumed my post at the Centre for Jewish Studies and accepted an invitation from the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation to join its Academic Advisory Board, our first order of business the Holocaust Memorial in London and a Tory MP’s complaint that the memorial, due to its proposed location next to the Houses of Parliament, could be a target for terrorist groups. Besides Lancaster House and the immediate area around Oxford Road, I scarcely went anywhere else (even our meetings at the Academic Advisory Board were conducted via Zoom), spending most of my non-working hours behind four walls plotting a future of diminishing returns.
I started a new book, mostly from itchy boredom than some invocation to the muse. While researching The Bone Grinder, I’d read my fair share about Jewish collaborationism in the Reich, from the Jüdische Ghetto-Polizei to the Trzynastka to the funktionshäftlinge. I drafted an outline based on old notes, reaching out to Gregor Hass and my friend Jeremy Lowd at the National Archives to validate sources while simultaneously wondering if this was a story that should even be written (everybody has a story, but some only need to be told once). The kapo book (as I hastily dubbed it) stalled right out the gates. I erased as much as I wrote and didn’t feel the creative spark until I had to invent excuses to Phillip why I had no pages to show. I’m ashamed to mention it even now.
Things continued like this for the next year or so until I heard from Ella on that fateful Tuesday. I turned the telly down and she asked how I was getting on. A middle-aged, soon-to-be divorced university professor with one child in the ground and another in the stars doesn’t have many moods, but I put on a good show and said my latest book was progressing, and that a draft would be complete by the end of the year (when she called, I’d scrapped the kapo book and was assembling fragments for an equally rash successor). She said her usual words of encouragement and distracted me by recalling the river cruise we took on the Old Danube during a break from my book tour. There was a fourth guest on this cruise (a professor of Comparative Literature Noah and Ella tried to set me up with), and Ella couldn’t erase the memory of the professor’s face when Noah and I dared each other to jump ship like a couple of idiots playing Lord Jim. I admitted to Ella that drink had been taken and, in turn, she admitted to a couple glasses of Riesling before phoning me.
I could tell she had weightier matters to discuss but didn’t press the issue, preferring this pleasant diversion to the blank sorrow I occupied most evenings. I asked about Vienna, and Ella said Gregor Hass had announced his retirement, and that she was on the board interviewing potential candidates for the Research Head. She paused, and touched on something else at the Argentinierstraße, a fascinating discovery that would absolutely consume my days and nights in the coming months.
In a previous email, Ella had casually mentioned some structural issues at the main Mauthausen complex, namely the Visitor Centre built on the former SS-Mannschaftsbaracken, the living quarters for the SS men charged with overseeing the day-to-day operations in the Stammlager and sub-camps. These flaws were uncovered during routine preventive maintenance and most evidenced in the bistro and seminar rooms, which showed floor cracks from the poor installation of reinforced slabs during the Visitor Centre’s initial construction. The book shop and library were unaffected, but the Mauthausen Memorial would be requesting funding from the Innenministerium for renovations and repairs. The wheels of government being what they are, an inch of caster carrying a morbidly obese magistrate, funding was approved by the narrowest of margins and a remodeling company hired for repairs, in the case of the seminar rooms having to tear up the floors and restabilize the reinforced slabs in the foundation. These rooms would be closed for the span, and speaking events diverted to the bookshop. The bistro employees would have access to the kitchen, but service was strictly takeaway, and the menu restricted to coffee, tea, bottled water and wrapped sandwiches.
With reconstruction underway, a crew in one of the seminar rooms was forced to dig trenches to reach the footing. The earth underneath hadn’t been touched since 1947, when the Austrian Republic announced that a memorial be established at MauthausenGusen over the demolished SS barracks. A digger in the seminar room hit something with his shovel that lay two feet in the dirt, a Stollwerck chocolate box wrapped tightly in an SS-issued blanket. The box itself, dating from the 1920s based on its labeling and design, had moderate nicks and scratches but was in otherwise remarkable condition. The contents of the box included a small 5″ x 7″ merkbuch, a Totenkopfring, a packet of Eckstein cigarettes, a whiskey flask with the initials “MT,” a black and white photograph of an unidentified woman in her early twenties, and an American edition of The Shadow Magazine dated 15 July 1936. Not an uncommon list of keepsakes for an SS soldier, but the pulp magazine stood out. Judging by its date, it may have been purchased from an illegal foreign vendor at the Summer Olympics in Berlin or possibly through the black market. Either way, the magazine immediately got the attention of another worker who tore its cover when he held it aloft.
The Stollwerck chocolate box and its contents were packaged into a supply crate and driven to Ella’s office the next morning. She’d already contacted the Innenministerium and two officers from the Bundespolizei Anti-Terror unit escorted the courier inside the Mauthausen Memorial offices and waited as Ella removed each item. Laws against selling, owning, trading, displaying, or replicating Naziera relics or weapons are strictly enforced in Austria and Germany, but the Bundespolizei officers only confiscated the Totenkopfring, deeming the other artifacts worthy of the rubbish bin. She didn’t oblige them and kept the items in the temperature-controlled storage facility at the Archives, stealing away occasionally to ensure they hadn’t been catalogued as part of the regular collection inventory.
I stopped Ella there and wondered if she’d looked through the merkbuch, the key piece of evidence in this cache of verlassenschaften. She’d been busy of late and hadn’t given the merkbuch more than a glance but was required to produce a Summary Memorandum on this unusual finding for her superiors in the Innenministerium. The line went dead, and Ella said no more on the subject, switching course again and flooding the receiver with a difficult sigh.
On a recent visit to his physician, Noah had complained about an abdominal pain that wouldn’t go away. He could feel it in his back, too, and had taken to leaning on the lectern instead of standing in that animated posture his students loved to compare to Wittgenstein. This ailment, combined with the grainish color of Noah’s skin, his dark urine, and age (two years older than me), required a CT scan that turned into late Stage 2 pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Ella broke off and any interest I had in the merkbuch’s sordid details flew away from its perch. I slumped in my chair and stared at the tepid amber lagoon in my scotch glass, Ella’s sobs melting the last ice cube. She said Noah listened to the doctors and had begun a course of chemotherapy in order to shrink the tumor, but surgery offered no guarantees due to the pancreas’s location next to major blood vessels and arteries. The oncology ward at Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien had called in a top surgeon from Munich, which brought hope without assurances. She confessed to not sleeping much and that her waking hours were fraught with a ringing silence and terrible thoughts of the future. Noah and Ella didn’t have children (unless you considered their labradors), and I sensed her anger at not having the maternal instinct like her four sisters, who gave her a bounty of nieces and nephews she couldn’t keep straight. Noah had three children from his first marriage and wasn’t interested in an encore performance when he and Ella met.
I finished my glass and told her to expect me tomorrow. This meant taking an indefinite leave of absence in the middle of term, but I didn’t see it any other way. I wanted to walk into my office bright and early and nail my resignation letter to the door like Martin Luther. I’d reached that point in my academic career. Ella said little else as I talked and talked and opened my laptop to look for the earliest flights to Flughafen Wien-Schwechat. She invited me to stay with her and Noah, which I much preferred over a hotel. She rallied at the prospect of my visit, and we said our goodbyes, exchanging a piteous laughter that amplified the melancholy surrounding our reunion. I ended the call not having found a booking, though I promised to text her my arrival time when I did.
My fingers got a workout for a solid hour as I searched for a proper seat. There were no redeyes and I settled on a flight that left early Thursday morning and landed in Schwechat by noon. While making the reservation, my hand lingered above the plus symbol for the number of passengers and I pivoted my head to Zach watching me from the couch, his gaze reticent and brow rumpled like a nomad. This tête-à-tête began at his funeral, and we forever rehashed the banquet scene from Macbeth, Zach assuming the role of Banquo’s ghost and myself the chastened Thane of Cawdor. He was with me every minute of the day, in the street, the lecture hall, the kitchen, and the bathroom mirror (more on that later). He didn’t say a word, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to. Maybe it was the scotch, but I almost made reservations for us both. I settled on a single seat by the window, realizing it didn’t matter where I went or who I sat next to or what flew past the porthole. I would hear nothing but his secrecy.
