The Soul Of A Thief. Steven Hartov
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with scarcely a complimentary word and absently offering that embarrassingly limp handshake of his, that I imagined his primary motive here was to finish with it and hurry to the toilet.
Of course, had I shared my view with a single soul, including any other young adjutant or even a castle cook, I most certainly would have found myself immediately en route to Smolensk, or worse. However, just after the Führer’s departure, I offered Colonel Himmel a champagne glass from a silver tray and congratulated him for his courage, which I had too often personally witnessed along with an accompanying clutch of my sphincter. The Colonel received his drink, nodded his gratitude, and very briefly rolled his single eye. He then smiled at me for a millisecond and quickly issued me an order of some kind, yet the moment had been shared.
For an assassin, a brigand, a tyrant and a thief, my master did have his good points.
To me, Himmel’s most endearing quality was that he never fully inquired as to my background. During the prewar years and throughout the conflict, it was incumbent upon elite Nazi officers to fully vet each member of their command, despite the assumption that the Gestapo had already done so. Yet Himmel had always been a career combatant, regarding Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes as nothing more than a rallying point around which to galvanize the populace. Having not a bone of fear in his body, he dismissed the regulatory racial codes with a snort, and assembled his company of Waffen Schutzstaffel based upon performance, and nothing else. Thus, his command was peppered with a number of racially questionable men of swarthy complexions and altered family names, and I would not be surprised if it included a gypsy or two.
Of course, having none of this information upon being fairly kidnapped by the Colonel, I spent my first two months quivering in his presence. I was waiting for him to summon me and wave a Gestapo document in my face, some horrendously accurate accusation that there was, in fact, a wizened old Jewess concealed among the many branches of my family tree. That, in itself, would have been enough for any other such officer to have me shot. The full truth, in fact, was worse.
My beloved father and mother were devout Catholics, which one might think a guarantee of my immediate lineage. However, one must also realize that devotion to God, under the Nazi reanalysis of religion, was not viewed kindly by the authorities. Adolf Hitler had become the New God of Germany and its protectorates, with Christ a poor third to the Führer and his pagan symbols, such as Albert Speer’s monolithic architectures and the towering iron statues of eagles, stag horns and the like. If you were a devout Catholic, you were expected to display your crucifix as nothing more than proof of your ethnic purity. In Vienna, the city of my birth and youth, the Anschluss had provided Germany’s Nazis with a pool of deeply fanatical followers. Those who claim that the Austrians were so much worse than the Germans themselves are correct, for there is no one more obsessive than a convert.
My father would not, however, relinquish his religious beliefs. And although he supported the economic and political precepts of Nazism, he refused to rein in his attendance of Mass, regular confessions or charity efforts for the Church. Such behavior greatly frightened my mother, of course, who was edgy enough given our genetic status and the questionable position of her only son. Yet the authorities, recognizing my father to be a man of some age and granted eccentricities, declined to rigorously pursue his conversion to Hitlerism. That is, until he strayed too far.
My father was, by trade, a book seller. Adolf Hitler was, by choice, a book burner. It required no more than one massive, flaming pyre of the classics to set my father’s inner rage alight, and thereafter he was a changed man. He quietly joined “O 5,” the Austrian anti-Nazi resistance movement. On the evening after Kristallnacht, during which every Jewish shop and synagogue in Vienna was burned to the ground by the Brown Shirts, along with approximately twenty thousand copies of both the Old and New Testaments, three members of that thugly gang were found murdered in the Tenth District. My father returned late that evening, exuding an odor of fear and adrenaline, and he packed a single suitcase, hugged myself and my mother to him, and informed us that he would have to leave immediately or endanger our lives.
I never saw him again. But still today, there remains etched into the exterior of the great St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, a white scrawled carving of defiance, the figures “O 5.” I have been told that my father was the very chiseler of that message from the underground.
So, you can well understand why my first few months with Himmel were so fraught with the constant urge to pee, even though he appeared to regard my history as irrelevant.
The second trait which so endeared my master to me, as it were, was his choice of women. I refer not, of course, to the long line of prostitutes and desperately widowed wives we encountered in our travels throughout Italy, the Rhineland or France. Some of these Himmel paid well as he invited them to bed, and some he spontaneously mounted in empty castle keeps and haylofts. These he regarded as the spoils of war and nothing more.
The true measure of his good taste was revealed in the selection of Gabrielle. We had settled temporarily near Le Pontet, a village beside the fabled French town of Avignon, for a spate of rest and recreation. Much of the small ville had suffered from errant Allied bombs, and a large German field hospital had been erected in the meadows as a sort of waypoint and triage center for the wounded from all fronts. The slim bridges of the Rhone were constantly awash in horse-drawn wagons, with the local French girls essentially enslaved as nurses to transport and tend the injured. It was there, above the bloody river waters that would someday be bottled and sold by the shipload to American supermarkets, that Himmel spotted her.
She was virtually a child, barely eighteen years of age, the daughter of Le Pontet’s mayor, who had been executed by the Gestapo. Despite the soiled appearance of all the other females employed by our army, Gabrielle’s skin was pure and translucent, her fingernails unbroken, the flaxen blond hair that framed her diamond blue eyes falling straight and true to her slim waist. As she sat upon the bench of a caisson that contained the writhing forms of three wounded panzer crew, her chin erect and her hands lightly snapping the reins of her horses, it was clear that she had inherited a strand of royal French genes. Himmel ordered the driver of his Kübelwagen to halt, and he immediately fell in love. He was done with whoring.
The rest of how I came to know her, I shall leave for later telling.
And finally, the Colonel’s third trait which I came to temporarily admire was his greed. Perhaps that is unfair, and a more generous description of his calculations might be called practicality. After all, his strategic assessments of any given situation were almost always correct, and his analysis of the war’s progress, despite his own personal victories, was untempered by emotion. By the time I joined him, Himmel knew that Germany was going to lose this war. He also knew that the Allies were about to mount a massive invasion of the continent, the furious tide of which would not be repulsed. Despite the erroneous hunches of Hitler and the endless arguments of the High Command, Himmel would regularly spread a map of Europe across any makeshift dining table or vehicle boot, jab a finger at the coast of Normandy and state, “Here. It will come here.”
Although I shall never be so immodest as to claim that I had become the Colonel’s confidant, practicality dictated that he place his trust in my circumspection. Someone had to safekeep the Colonel’s papers, plans and plots, and inasmuch as I was imprisoned by my Mischling lineage and apparently no threat to him, he chose to trust me implicitly. Of course, before actually doing so, he did remind me that any slip of my tongue would result in an instant and painful death, without benefit of a hearing.
Thus, I came to know that Himmel planned to finish out the war not only as a survivor, but as a very wealthy one. He surmised that there were other high-ranking officers who had made the same calculations, some of whom had access to the whereabouts of Nazi gold stores and caches of jewels and works of art accrued during various occupations. But as my supremely practical commander determined, gold and trinkets were simply too heavy and unwieldy a treasure; difficult to transport, impossible to conceal.
He reasoned that the Allies would storm ashore in France sometime in the summer of the year. He also reasoned that with so many hundreds of thousands of Allied troops on the march, their paymasters would not be far behind. With the end of the war nearly visible on the horizon, all currencies in Europe would become essentially useless,