Ratachusky's Return

by ALAN R. MARCUS

AFTER almost nine months of American Military Government, the German town of Erlbach (pop. 17,000) seemed to have adjusted itself extraordinarily well. The new regime was proceeding placidly. All Nazis in the government, in quasigovernmental agencies, and in other designated trust-holding positions had been thoroughly purged; the new mayor seemed to be conducting affairs with zeal and sincerity. More and more the people had allowed constraint to fall away, and there was evident cordiality among many groups of Germans and Americans. What problems of food, housing, and recreation there had been were either solved or in process of final solution; and while no great claims were made by the small MG team in control of the area, it was felt by everybody concerned, both by Germans and by MG personnel, that Erlbach was perhaps a model of what a well-organized Military Government achievement should be.

The senior officer in charge, Major Catlett, took a deep satisfaction in all this; and despite the fact that work had slackened off considerably in recent months, — allowing him greater time for photography experiments, — he still found much to keep him interested in local affairs. From the beginning, Major Catlett had been steadfastly concerned with one emphasis: denazification. His conviction had been that if Military Government could get the Nazis out, could draw out from the general population those persons who had been passive resisters, or at least had never joined the Party, then the right orientation would have been achieved, the most important first purposes served.

Major Catlett was a fairly intelligent and not very profound man, with a belief in basic liberal propositions and with a deeper faith in people, and all he had wanted to do in his area was to get the “good” people in the saddle, to let the “good” people be the new policy molders. His “good” people did not have to be active underground workers, for the Major realized what terrible alternatives any anti-Nazi idealist had had to face. All he had looked for, himself, was clues; for example, whether a man had been forced to join the Party or had joined voluntarily, whether he had been known among reliable democrats as an old-time democrat, whether he had been a steady churchgoer, and so on. From such touchstones as these, the Major had picked his government, replaced the policy makers, and gathered his coterie of advisers. Nazi textbooks had been thrown out of the schools; the Catholic church had been rebuilt; the large sausage plant had been set in operation again, in charge of one of his “good” people; embryonic democratic political parties had been encouraged.

Major Catlett and his men felt a confidence and a satisfaction from all of this, and would have gone on feeling satisfied if Ratachusky hadn’t come along at the end of February, spinning from out of nowhere to stir up doubts, to plague them, and finally to bring the whole quiet façade of their confidence tumbling down round them like a house of cards.

The first time anyone in the detachment saw Ratachusky was when he burst into the American MG waiting room an hour or so before lunch, very excited and very breathless. He was a tall, stooped, and gaunt man, prematurely old, with a darkbearded face and wild hysterical eyes. He wore a ragged German army coat, zebra-striped concentration camp pants, and in his hand he carried a beatenup bowler hat. He made an altogether preposterous figure and would have attracted immediate attention anyway, even if he had not suddenly exploded his name out in a thunderous voice at the face of the astonished receiving Sergeant.

People in the room were coming and going, business was always brisk just before lunch, but at the sound of this intensely disturbing new voice, all other intercourse abruptly ceased; all eyes converged curiously towards the receiving desk. Ratachusky was speaking German, but in a very thick and quaint Polish accent, and it took the Sergeant a few seconds to get used to it. It became clear immediately that if any sense was to be made from Rataehusky’s flood of words he would have to be slowed down, and one German woman near the desk ventured to suggest this, in a most civil manner. Ratachusky turned upon her instantly in a fury.

“Was I talking to you?” he roared. “What are you listening for? I am speaking to this Mister American here. It is nothing for you to listen to. Get out, get out!”

The astonished woman took a few alarmed backward steps, and Ratachusky wheeled around to stare venomously at the other German civilians in the room.

“What are you all listening for?” he cried. “Get out, get out! I am talking to the Mister American here. I am not talking to you. Get out, get out!”

The wits of the astounded Sergeant suddenly returned to him. By the time he had jumped up and directed Ratachusky to conduct himself in a more disciplined manner or leave the waiting room, a score of people had come running to see what the commotion was. The door to Captain Brown’s office swung open just after Ratachusky began a second breathless and loud harangue, and the Captain rushed out, very annoyed, adding his bass to the already well-advanced confusion.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” ordered the Captain, and even Ratachusky stopped. “Now what’s all this about, Sergeant?”

“Well, sir, this man just flew in here, burned up about something, and I haven’t got him to slow down and tell me about it yet. He just keeps telling the people in the room to get out and yelling at them.”

“Ask him where he came from, Sergeant,” said the Captain.

When the question was put to him, Ratachusky glanced about nervously at the avidly attentive civilians, and said something furtively to the Sergeant with great speed.

“ He wants to speak to you alone, sir,” the Sergeant explained. “He seems to be afraid of the people in here or something.”

Captain Brown looked up and down at the fantastic figure. There was a loud undercurrent among the Germans in the room. More people looked in at the door.

“Tell these other people to never mind, Sergeant,” the Captain said. “Tell them to go about their business, and then come in and bring this nut with you. You shouldn’t let somebody come in here and yell like that to you. You know what that does to the Germans.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Sergeant.

“Be in right away,” Brown tossed over his shoulder.

2

Two minutes later, the Sergeant had Ratachusky, still clutching his bowler hat, seated in front of Captain Brown’s big desk. Ratachusky was deep in excited explanations. It was hard to keep him going in one coherent line. He would break off suddenly and interject a lot of incomprehensible oaths, supplications, and curses in Polish and Yiddish. The story they finally managed to siphon out of his hysteria had to do with an atrocity alleged to have been committed in Erlbach in 1941. According to Ratachusky, many Polish Jews like himself had been forced to labor at the sausage plant in Erlbach, and when the day came for evacuation to another job, fifty or so laborers, too weak for further work, were lined up and shot on the edge of an outdoor latrine, into which they fell and which served as their common grave.

The story was not at all unusual, but for Erlbach it was fantastic. One thing which the whole detachment had been glad about was that there had been absolutely no signs that any of these hideous things had been done in its area. In the beginning, the Major had been adamant about tracking down atrocities; he had made his concern very clear, but his advisers assured him with obvious relief and sincerity that nothing like that had been done there. Erlbach seemed to have escaped bestiality.

Ratachusky’s statement that other witnesses had been there only made his story all the more unbelievable. According to him, it had been some kind of holiday, and where the Jews were shot there had been a road, not many meters distant, on which scores of townspeople were passing. Ratachusky talked, choked up, rubbed his cheek violently, shouted something in Yiddish. But the Captain had already made up his mind that the man was unsettled in his head, and perhaps even an escapee from a hospital. Of course the poor devil had probably been through a lot, and it wasn’t his fault if he now mixed up acts with locations. It was very possible that such a thing had happened, Captain Brown thought, but not in Erlbach, certainly not in Erlbach.

“Ask him where he came from now,” Captain Brown said to the Sergeant.

Ratachusky clutched the side of the Captain’s desk with a huge emaciated hand. “Please,” he implored in a jargon of German. “You go with me, Mister Captain. I know where the bodies are. They shot them, God in Heaven I know where. This was the place. It was here, Mister Captain. I beg of you, please come with me. I can show you, Mister Captain.”

The Sergeant met the Captain’s eye in a significant way as he was interpreting this speech. What the look said was “Shall I get rid of this crazy loon, sir? Do you want me to get him out?” But the Captain was sure that Ratachusky had escaped from a hospital somewhere and he wanted to find out where.

“Where did you come from?” he asked the Jew directly. “Wohin kommen Sie her?”

“From hospital near Munich,” yelled Ratachusky. “I come from Munich all the kilometers to here, because here it was done, Mister Captain. These men must be buried properly. I can show you, I know where. Please, I beg you to come, I beg you.”

“This bird is probably ‘way off his nut,” said Captain Brown after the speech had been translated. “Hell, nothing like that happened out there. Kronenberger, who is now running that place, worked there for the last twelve years and he never said anything. Neither did Schlaubach, the Bürgermeister, who used to work there too. Neither did anybody else. But tell you what, I think this bird escaped from some mental hospital somewhere, and I want to keep him here while we check on him. So go tell Corporal Rail to get a few men from the rubble detail and let them dig a few holes around there where he wants, to satisfy him. Let him get a room from the Bügermeister, too. We ought to be able to check up in a day or two.”

“Do you want me to make a memorandum about it to Major Catlett?” the Sergeant asked.

“Naw, it’s not that important; just so as we keep this nut pacified is all.”

Ratachusky, who had been listening in an agony of vexation at his inability to understand the conversation, suddenly began to shout, “Please, I beg you. Do you understand me? I can tell, Mister Captain. Do you understand me, dear God in Heaven, Mister Captain?”

In a second it is probable that he would have prostrated himself or thrown himself about the officer’s knees, but the Sergeant took hold of his arm and explained that he would have his detail, at the same time guiding him firmly towards the door. Tears came into the man’s brilliant eyes; he dug his great grimy fists into them and said something to the Captain in Yiddish. The Sergeant, who was rather enjoying the whole affair, grasped the Jew’s elbow and propelled him quickly out of the office. Before he shut the door he caught the Captain’s eye, and the Captain gave him a decisive and amused wink. The Captain was also a man who could see the humor in things.

3

AT the end of a day and a half, at least two things had become clear: Ratachusky’s wild tale had no basis in fact, and he himself was an inmate of a fairly large refugee hospital in a suburb of Munich. It took only a little time to trace him, and the hospital’s information was that he had disappeared three days before, without authorization, from a shock ward. He was suffering from a variety of maladies, not the least of which were mental. The hospital did not consider him dangerous, or his condition critical, and it was therefore planned to ship him back on a courier truck which was scheduled to leave from Erlbach at the beginning of the following week.

As for his story, it proved baseless. Karl Kronenberger, the present manager of the sausage works, an MG-approved appointee, mentioned the affair himself at his weekly conference with Lieutenant Smith, the Food and Supply Officer. Kronenberger told how Ratachusky had come there in great temper and excitement; how he had wandered wildly about the grounds, searching for the place to make his excavation; how in his confusion and anger he had picked first one plot of ground and then another, leaving a senseless pattern of fruitless half-dug holes on a score of fields; and how he had ended by screaming wild accusations at Kronenberger himself, charging trickery, deceit, circumvention, and treachery.

They had thought him quite mad, and as Kronenberger explained it, “I would have been very willing to try and locate any particular spot for him just to satisfy him that he was deluding himself, but his whole description was so vague and confused. The plant here has been entirely rebuilt four times because of the bombing; the pattern of the works has changed. How was I to know what he was looking for? Of course the thing is wholly absurd. I have been at the works for a long time and such a story is here, Gott sei Dank, absolutely false. Bestimmt.”

Major Catlett himself remained in ignorance of the affair until the following afternoon at about two-thirty. It had become his custom to stroll leisurely from his billets to the offices after midday luncheon, and he had proceeded about halfway across the main public square when suddenly, without warning, Ratachusky descended upon him. Unshaven, cavernous of eye, mud-spattered, the Jew suddenly plunged from around a corner like a wraith, shouting wildly and gesticulating.

“Mister Officer,” he said. “Please, I beg of you come with me for only half an hour. There are bodies of murdered Jews out at the meat plant, buried, but they hide them from me. They are laughing at me. For God’s sake, I beg of you, come for half an hour.”

The man’s voice and appearance galvanized instant interest on the square, but the Major, although he could understand pidgin German a little, was at a loss. His sympathy was immediately enlisted, however. One look at the poor man’s obviously Semitic face, with its pleading expression, and at the concentration camp clothing, aroused the Major’s commiseration. If there was something to be told him, he wanted to create a more favorable opportunity. He pointed with his finger to the American flag flying from the MG office across the street and motioned for Ratachusky to follow. Germans on the square gaped and nudged each other. Such a sight — the tall American Herr Major walking with that nightmarish ragamuffin who keeps babbling and babbling in a voice loud enough to carry fifty kilometers!

Ratachusky, through an interpreter, wept, wailed, bemoaned, and pleaded in the Major’s office, and the Major finally sent for Captain Brown. When Brown entered the office, Ratachusky swooped up from his seat in a frenzy of recognition and went off into a paroxysm of Yiddish. Brown managed not to smile directly at him.

“This man,” he said. “We checked up on him after he came into my office, Major. He’s a mental case, belongs to a refugee hospital outside of Munich — I forget the name right now. They said he’s harmless but pretty excitable. We planned to send him back with the courier on Monday.”

“Did you go out there with him to the meat place?”

“I told Rail to take some men from the rubble detail and go out there to pacify him. He almost created a riot. Dug holes all over the place. Naturally didn’t find anything. Started screaming at Kronenberger and running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Fact is, his story might be true all right, but in another location. He’s probably got ‘em mixed up in his head.”

“What did Herr Kronenberger say?”

“‘Nuts. Nothing like that here.’ They had some Polish labor for a while but no rough stuff. He just got ‘em mixed up in his head, is all.”

“ Has he got a place to eat and sleep till he leaves?”

“I told Sergeant Jenke to have the Bürgermeister fix him up, Major, but I don’t know what he’s been doing the last couple of days.”

Ratachusky peered anxiously from one to the other as the Americans talked, nervously clasping and unclasping his long bony fingers. He was asked about his sleeping and eating. He blinked for a moment and quickly rushed off again.

“Please!” he shouted. “Mister Americans. Please! You must come with me for half an hour. Yes. Dear God, there are fifty of my brothers buried there, and they lie to me. It was there, but now they will not tell me. I come from Munich to dig up my brothers. Mister Americans, come. Those pigdogs have killed my brothers and they say nothing now: Nobody says something. What can I do? Those pigdogs!”

And he went off into a fit of cursing in an unknown tongue, carried away by his anger and recollection. Major Catlett had already considered the matter closed, although for some reason he was strangely disturbed. He caught Brown’s eye and felt annoyed at his half-amused conciliatory expression. Yet there was nothing more to do. Let the man go. The thing had been thrashed out. He had been proved irrational.

“Okay,” said the Major. “Thank you very much Herr Ratachusky. The Bürgermeister will fix you up until Monday. Thank you very much.”

He rose to signify that the interview was finished, and the German interpreter, after translating, took Ratachusky’s arm to indicate that he should leave. With a roar the stooped Jew wrenched his arm away.

“Away, away!” he roared. “Cursed dirt, get your hand from me. Why do you not come, Mister Kommandant?”

Tears suddenly poured from his eyes.

“Mister American, come, come, come. You must help me dig up these people. Will you let them lie there? I beg of you, I beg of you.”

Both Captain Brown and the interpreter together had a hard time getting Ratachusky finally out of the office, and when he went, it was still with great groans and lamentations. It was as if, by the very violence of his utterance and depth of his sorrow, he hoped to convince the Americans where all the facts he knew had failed.

The image of him remained after the door had closed, and although Major Catlett had abundant papers to sign and considerable reports to study, he found his mind strangely unable to concentrate. He continued to feel deeply and vaguely disturbed and he had to make an effort to rub the gnarled, emaciated, unbalanced Jew from his mind. It was a feeling, a mood, an emotion that he hadn’t felt for months. It was nothing, of course; in a few minutes it would go away. But during most of the afternoon, the Major suffered slightly from some vague duress, and he was glad that a party had been planned for that night, and the whole trifling incident could be quickly forgotten.

4

WHAT happened that evening in the office of the Bürgermeister of Erlbach was later retold by a score of excited witnesses, all of whom were agreed on the main points and none of whom told the story exactly the same way twice. According to Elsa, the receptionist, at about a quarter to six, just as she was getting ready to close up the office for the day, the outer door suddenly burst open and a wild apparition rushed in, wearing striped concentration camp pants and storming loud imprecations. Wilhelm, the office boy, testified that he attempted to hold up the man a moment with his arm and was brushed away. The policeman stationed at the municipal building gate later recalled how he had seen a suspicious-looking character, answering the same description, rush wildly past him at the gate in great agitation, and how a preoccupation with personal problems caused him to let the man pass unquestioned. The Bürgermeister himself, Hans Schlaubach, recounted what happened in his own office and later recorded it in a written statement at Major Catlett’s request.

“The thing was entirely unexpected,” Schlaubach said. “I was seated at my desk, folding away papers and getting ready to retire for the day, when suddenly I heard a tremendous commotion in the outer hall. There seemed to be shouting, cursing, some sort of struggle. I had no more than risen to my feet when my office door was pushed violently inward and this man, this Ratachusky, flew in. He was in high dudgeon; his appearance, trembling and angry, caused me immediate alarm. I inquired his business in as calm a voice as possible; whereupon he seized the end of my desk, leaning forward towards me and directing terrible screams at me in an unknown tongue, which I believe was Polish. I tried to calm him, and suddenly he switched to German. His sentences were incoherent and difficult to follow. He called me an assassin, murderer, German dog, and so forth, and he waved an accusing finger at me. Then he said the Mayor must die as vengeance for some alleged Jewish murders in Erlbach in '41, a time when I, Mister Major, was living in great disrepute here because of my known opposition to the Nazis.

“By this time my office doorway was crowded with a group of alarmed female office workers, who were witnesses to all that occurred. I perceived that the man was deranged and even violent, and managed to communicate to Wilhelm Frick, my office boy, that he should go fetch two policemen from downstairs immediately. My one thought was to prevent any untoward act to anyone. I had thought I could keep him talking until the policemen should come, but he suddenly raised his arm and, turning about, made an abrupt threatening motion to the office people in the doorway. He then went off into his own tongue again, and before I knew what was happening he had come around my desk and had flung himself upon me. His hands fastened on my throat and I struggled with him. All was immediate confusion.

“Some of my office people tried to battle him off of me, and at this moment two policemen from the constabulary downstairs entered the chamber and managed to pry him loose, holding his arms. He was breathing very deeply and shouting in his unknown tongue. As he gave every evidence of continuing violence, and as he had made a premeditated assault upon my person, I told the policemen to take him to the city jail for the night. It was necessary to remove him by force; he continued to yell and shout.

“I had thought to communicate the affair to you, Mister Major, on Sunday morning, when I should have recovered from the shock and when I anticipated that this man, Ratachusky, would have got over his violent attack. I had no intention of pressing charges, since it was clear the man was deranged, but at that hour it seemed the best thing for everybody to confine him for a night to the public jail, where his violence might spend itself harmlessly. He was removed from my office at six-five. That was my last contact with the affair.”

According to the two policemen who escorted Ratachusky to the city jail, the man’s violence continued unabated until they got him finally closeted in a cell by himself on the third floor, away from the other inmates, so that his screams would disturb no one. Then, suddenly, all violence ceased. His voice went completely still. When Hartman, the new MG-appointed jail director, looked in a half hour later, the Jew was slumped in a corner, docile and quiet, staring into space in front of him. He paid no attention to any outside noise.

He seemed quite safe, but Hartman, as he explained it, didn’t want to take a chance on a relapse, and decided that the best thing to do would be to let him stay there the night. There was no real hospital in the town, the clinic was full to overflowing, and actually he would have more space to himself for the night in the jail. Besides, everything would be better in case of another outbreak. Hartman would have liked to call Dr. Memel in to examine the patient, but Dr. Memel was hard to reach Saturday night, and for the moment, at least, everything was calm.

At seven-thirty Ratachusky was given supper in his cell, the same food that Hartman’s family was eating that night, for Hartman later declared that he had felt somewhat guilty all along about putting a poor deranged man, and a Jewish concentration camp survivor at that, into a German municipal jail. It was reported by the employee who took away the untouched food dishes at eight o’clock that Ratachusky was still in the same position, placidly hunched up in a corner of the cell and dreaming with his eyes open, staring at the darkening space in front of him.

The first inkling anyone had of anything wrong was at six o’clock on Sunday morning when Hartman was spiraled up in bed by loud shouting from one of the prison guards. This was followed immediately by other shouts and noises, and Hartman said he could not make out at first what was wrong. When he opened his bedroom door a few seconds later, there were two guards standing there, with shocked looks on their faces.

“Hurry, come quick, Herr Hartman!” one of them was saying. “The old Jew on the third floor has cut his wrists. I think he is dying. There is much blood. You had better come quick, Herr Direktor.”

On the third floor there were some other prison employees running around the corridor, and one of them, a guard, burst into weeping when he saw Hartman, stammering that it was his fault, that he had failed to look into the third floor cell on his nightly rounds, that he had forgotten anyone was on the third floor. Ratachusky’s cell was a horrible sight. The old man was laid out on the cot, and there was blood everywhere — a pool of blood on the floor and incredible quantities of it in the corners. They had run for Dr. Memel when they had discovered it, but it was too late then. By the time Hartman entered the cell, nothing more could be done. The old Jew was dead.

In a corner they found two bloody pieces of sharp stone which he had probably dislodged from the loose wall. His wrists were ghastly to look upon, and there was a terrible smell in the room. When Dr. Memel came, three minutes later, grumbling with sleepiness, nothing much remained for him to do. Flow of the blood had stopped and the prison blanket had been drawn over Ratachusky’s pale, placid face. The awful task of clearing up the blood began, and Hartman went downstairs, shaky, without an appetite for breakfast, to call the night CQ at the Military Government headquarters.

5

IF Colonel Albert Levin had not been down visiting the detachment on that particular Sunday, then the macabre sequel might never have been discovered. The suicide would have been reported to higher headquarters, and proper chastisements would have been given to all concerned. A sober moment or two would have been spent perhaps in attention to certain particulars. Major Catlett would have experienced profound distress over the incident and doubtless would have indicated to the Bürgermeister wherein he had acted wrongly by putting this Jew in the jail. Hartman, the jail director, would also have come in for his share of admonishment, and then after a time, with various degrees of uneasiness melting away, the whole thing would have been laid to rest.

But Colonel Levin was a shrewd man, a New York lawyer, a skeptic, and a Jew. All these factors contributed to the pattern of his actions in Erlbach when he heard about the suicide from Catlett on Sunday morning and when he had got all the incidents of the last few days straight in his mind. Catlett himself, although sure that the Colonel was wrong, was willing to let him make his investigation. The suicide had upset the Major terribly. Nothing like that had ever happened in his area; and even though he felt his friend’s assumptions pointless, what Levin proposed was action, and action would help him greatly at the moment. Still, he could not resist a few words of deprecation.

“Listen,” he said to Levin. “We sent the man out there with a detail. They dug where he wanted to dig, and didn’t find anything. There’s nothing there.”

“Okay, Bob,” said the Colonel. “You know what I’d like to get. I’d like a map of this local area, a very intimate map — you know, one that would show everything in large scale, as it was, say, in '40 or '41. Be better if it was some kind of intelligence map.”

“The best one is Johnson’s at the CIC detachment,” Major Catlett reflected. “But this is Sunday, Al. I don’t know if I could get them. Besides, everybody around there, Kronenberger, the Mayor, they all say that the thing is simply untrue. Hell, they’d know. Kronenberger was at the plant all the time. And he’s no Nazi, I’d swear to that.”

“I’m not saying anybody’s a Nazi,” Levin remarked. “All I’d like is a German map of the area in 1941. Can we call Johnson up on the military phone?”

It took them a little time to get what the Colonel wanted — first, because nobody answered at the CIC house for a long time; and secondly, because they were very reluctant to part with their map over there. They had discovered it at Gestapo headquarters near the town and it was one of their prize documents. The only time they had let Military Government use it before had been on a supposed tip-off on some buried gold bullion, but the trace proved false. Levin had to use rank to get the thing, and he was annoyed; but there was really no other way he could have got it. When a soldier finally brought it over to the MG office three quarters of an hour later, with an expression on his face which said clearly, “You inconsiderate so-and-so, to make me get up on Sunday morning just so you can pore over your blasted blankety-blank map,” Levin’s irritation put him out of sorts.

“Show me where this damned factory is, Bob,” the Colonel exploded. “You know your area better than I do.”

“In the right-hand corner, there.”

The two officers studied the area for a bit and all of a sudden Levin gave a whistle.

“Hell, this is better than I’d hoped for, Bob!” he shouted. “Hell, boy, look at that. They got everything marked here. Do you read German? Look here. ‘Barracks for Foreign Workers, Latrine for Foreign Workers, Mess Hall for Foreign Workers.'”

“They had Polish workers there, we know that,” explained Major Catlett. “We knew all about that a long time ago. That doesn’t tell us anything.”

“Will you do me a favor, Bob?” Levin asked. “All I want is for you to get me some diggers and let me go digging around that place this afternoon. Will anybody be there this afternoon?”

“No.”

“That’s even better. Just get me some diggers and I won’t bother you. I’m probably all wet — I admit it. But what have you got to lose?”

“Go ahead, go digging if you want to. It’ll take at least an hour to scare up your detail though. I’ll be damned if I’ll have any enlisted men doing any fool thing like that today. We’ll have to get krauts at their homes.”

“Okay, get krauts. There’s no great hurry, just so we start it this afternoon.”

“You’re blamed nuts, you know.”

“Okay, I’m nuts, I’m foolish, I’m Jewish. You’ve got all the reasons there. It’s not going to bother you.”

“ Half that factory was razed by bombs. It’s been rebuilt four times. You won’t know where the hell you are.”

“Okay, okay, okay. You think I’m nuts. Okay. I’m not asking you to go up there with me. You’ll probably have the last laugh anyway, and I hope you do.”

“What about our little party for tonight? You’ll be out there digging till all hours probably. I know you. You won’t be satisfied till you strike oil.”

“Drink up my share. You know I can’t drink worth a damn. I’d get drunk and embarrass you before everybody. Just as well.”

“All right, you son of a gun. All right. Go out and make a fool of yourself. But I’ll tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not going to let you go out and make an ass of yourself without me being there to say I told you so. Oh, no. If you’re going to dig, I’m going out there with you. You’re not going to get off so easy as all that.”

The two men laughed suddenly in the office and rolled up the map. It was twelve o’clock; the sun shone; church was out; people promenaded in the streets. At this moment, the Bürgermeister was carefully working on his recorded statement, the factory director was playing with his young daughter, the prison director was satisfying a returned appetite. Up on the third floor of the jail, in a pine box, Ratachusky slept lifelessly on.

6

THE evenings come on quickly in February; by four-thirty Erlbach was swathed in deep shadows, and out at the sausage plant, where, for the last two hours, digging had been going on, there were heavy gloomy stretches. Torches became necessary. Colonel Levin, after trying as best he could to juxtapose and piece together a picture of the layout of the plant in 1941, had made two false starts, wasting nearly two hours of digging time. Starting from a central slaughterhouse which according to the map was still in the same place, and using it as reference, he had tried to trace the area marked Latrine for Foreign Workers. His first calculation had been ‘way off; the wooden floor of a machine storage shed had been ripped up, and after many minutes of digging, it became clear that there never had been any latrine on that particular location.

The second time, he tried with a compass, and the path led to a clearing between storage sheds where there was already a shallow excavation, one of those that Ratachusky had started. This, Colonel Levin set his men to deepening, but the vein proved just as fruitless. There was no sign of anything unusual, certainly not of a macabre mass grave, and everybody in the group — Major Catlett, the kraut diggers, the Colonel himself— felt like calling it quits. Major Catlett could not resist a small note of I-told-you-so in his voice as he suggested to the Colonel that they give up the project as a bad job. To the Major, the digging had been more of a strain than he would have cared to admit. His whole regime had been on trial, as it were, and the fact that they now stood around after more than two hours of purposeful digging, without anything to show for it, bolstered him up; it stood as a kind of justification, both for his official attitude and the way he ran his detachment in the area. He tapped his friend on the shoulder.

“Come on, come on, Al,” he urged. “It’s dark already. You’ve had your digging and we saw the result. There’s no reason why we should lose any more time getting at that cognac of mine.”

Levin stood there, rubbing his head perplexedly.

“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t see why we can’t find the latrine at least. Whether there’s anything in it or not, that’s something else again, but we should be able to find the latrine. Maybe the map is just approximated when it comes to precise distances.”

“In that case,” Catlett protested, “you might have to dig all around this whole area. It’d take you a week. Don’t be an ass, Al.”

“All right, you go on ahead, Bob,”Levin said. “I’m just going to try another spot. If it’s approximated, it could fall either to the right or left of here. I think I’ll try over there where that storage shed is.”

“But hell’s bells,” expostulated Catlett, “you’ve already ripped up one of Kronenberger’s floors around here. It takes time to put those back. Damn it, man, being destructive is one thing, but being destructive for nothing —”

“Ah, don’t bellyache, you sourpuss you,” laughed Levin. “I’ll see that your precious floors get back. Besides, what are you getting so excited about over wooden floors? One would think you didn’t want me to find something.”

Catlett fell silent. A sudden strange anxiety passed through him. He said nothing while the kraut diggers tore out the wooden plankings of the shed to his right and began to scoop up the earth, stained from the blood of butchered animals. An evening breeze sprang up and the torches inside the doorless shed spun their flame, contracted it, strung it out again. The faces of the men were a weird mahogany in the glow of the torches. Fifteen minutes of digging the hard encrusted surface went by, and suddenly there was a terrible smell in the shed, an acid, nauseating stench that rose up from the hole the krauts were digging in. Levin motioned for one of the men with torches to lower the flame nearer the ground and crouched to examine what was illuminated. He jumped up jubilantly.

“That’s the latrine, Bob!” he yelled to Catlett. “That’s the latrine, all right. See it?”

“I don’t have to see it, I can smell it,” the Major groaned. “So now what. You have the latrine. Great. But I’m not going to stay here and be asphyxiated. I’ll wait outside till you satisfy yourself or die of the fumes. Call me when you’re ready to go home.”

Night had thoroughly infiltrated into the city, and by now the oblong pattern of arc lights in the town square could be seen. From where Catlett stood he could just see the offices of his MG detachment reflected in the square, and the people passing in the area of reflection were like distant beetles. The night air was good to breathe; it was sweet with the odors of the farm country around, and you caught a vision of the countryside through the odors, the old, old villages, the patchwork fields, cows used as draft animals in front of ancient plows.

Catlett stood there, revolving his gaze at the calm rural dignity of the country hills, and the months of his assignment revealed themselves to him and were expressed in one long, heavy sigh of satisfaction. He was standing there absorbed in such thoughts, when there was a yell inside the shed and Levin was calling his name urgently and telling him to come inside. He found his friend and a group of krauts bent soberly around some objects on the ground by the side of their pit, and in the light of the torches he recognized human remains. There were an almost formless skull, thighbones, the upper part of a skeleton. A minute later one of the digging krauts gave a cry and wiggled another ghastly earth-molded skull from the ground, and two minutes after that two more human bones were found.

The krauts went on digging steadily. First one, then another, would give a grunt, work his shovel in the ground carefully, and deposit another shovelful of awful bones with the collection; the torches added to the grisliness of the scene. Nobody found a need for words, and Catlett stood there for maybe ten minutes. Then he wandered outside again into the night and leaned against a door jamb, violently shaking his head. He felt severe contradicting emotions crashing through him, and he didn’t even hear Colonel Levin calling him from inside. Levin stuck his head out.

“Hey!" he yelled. “They’ve got two more — that makes at least ten already. Who was crazy? I’m telling you, I know these people.”

Catlett agreed, muttered something, shook his head once as if to clear it, rubbed his finger along a wooden surface. Although the night wind was not very cold, the Major could not keep himself from an odd kind of trembling. It was very silly — he had seen much worse in the course of the war and had always remained quite in control of his feelings; there was no reason to go off half-cocked now. Suddenly his friend was yelling again at some new discovery, calling for him, asking him to come and see. He turned around quickly and went back inside the shed.

Nobody was surprised at MG headquarters, two weeks later, when Major Robert G. Catlett sent in a cancellation of his application for a civilian job with MG and requested to be made immediately eligible for the redeployment schedule. It was happening all the time. Good men, attracted by the salary possibilities and the work itself, would put in their applications and wait around and wait around until their patience was finally exhausted and they couldn’t wait any longer. You couldn’t expect them to. They had been overseas on an average of over twenty months, and their wives and families were as desperately anxious for them to return home as they were to go.

Catlett’s matter was handled in the routine way, and four weeks later the Major was on orders. He transferred to some tactical unit, shipped to Le Havre, and sailed in a Victory ship on a rough fourteen-day voyage to New York. He had a very wonderful reunion with his family, some satisfactory weeks of loafing on terminal leave, and a gratifying welcome when he finally came back to his old company to take over his old job. They even had managed a slight pay boost for him, and the vicepresident made him a nice little speech.

Even with the boost, the pay wasn’t anything compared to the potential salary he had rejected when he had withdrawn his application for a civilian job with MG. But he assured his wife, when she mentioned it in passing, that it wasn’t worth it, and his wife let it go at that. His wife didn’t quite know what wasn’t worth it, but she noticed a tendency on her husband’s part to avoid much discussion of the past year, and she supposed that was very right and natural. Many of the returned veterans lived up to the cliché about not wanting to talk about it, and besides, his wife thought, he had only just come home. After all, her womanish curiosity could wait a while. There would be plenty of time for talking later on.