Hear O Albert
For Yom Hashoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a story about a numb Nazi murderer, Jews, God, and faith.
Hear O Albert
Scrubbing the pellet-dust from his hands, Albert mumbled it out loud, and then again while filling his plate with cheeses, gherkins, and wurst. Finally, lifting the food to his mouth but hesitating before biting, he stated, “Shma, Yisroel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Ehaaaad.”
His comrades gaped at him in horror.
“What’s got into you, Albert?” They needled him. “Have you gone insane? Better not let the Sturmbannführer hear you.”
But Albert just shrugged. “What do you want from me. It’s what I’m hearing every day, all day, over and over., Men’s voices, women’s, kids’.” He nibbled on a pâté-slathered biscuit. “Always those same words. Shma, Yisroel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Ehaaad. Not just Ehad but Ehaaaad, like a sheep’s bleating. It’s enough to drive any man crazy.”
“Maybe you have gone crazy,” one of the guards, Kravchenko, suggested. “Maybe you need a break.”
But Albert merely shrugged. After all, the work was relatively easy. Just open the conical top of the vent and drop in a handful of pellets. Wait for them to hit the floor of the chamber below and burst into florets of gas. Be careful not to breathe in or listen too closely to the howls and cries for mercy, the scrape of ten thousand fingernails on concrete. Hell of a lot easier than supervising the squads charged with cleaning up afterward, that frantic wielding of mops and hooks before the next consignment arrived. The hours were regular, the food almost gourmet. No bombs raining down on you, no Ivans trying to gut you with bayonets, just a handful of little white balls no bigger than the marbles he used to flick, each one an entire world of death. No, his job was pretty sweet, Albert admitted, except for that one nagging sentence.
Shma, Yisroel, Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Ehaaad.
He’s heard it rising through the vent, even with the cone tipped down. A single supplication at first but soon joined by others. Whispered. Shouted. Screamed. A deafening chorus. He tried ignoring it and succeeded for several weeks, but slowly, insipidly, like pellet dust, it penetrated his skin. His mind. His soul, Albert feared. Not that he ever thought about it much, but with those six strange words embedded in it arrow-like, his soul was hard to ignore.
Pretty soon, he realized, those words were resounding in his skull, pounding behind his eyes. His heart was giving them tempo. Not a month passed and already he was murmuring them under his breath before retiring to the bunker, on rising each morning, and taking his meals. It was only a matter of time before someone heard him, a danger which, for all his worth as a pellet-deliverer, in this peculiar place could prove fatal.
Finally, he couldn’t help himself but showed up at work early enough to meet the latest consignment. There they trudged, goaded by dogs and rifle-butts, ragged, wide-eyed with thirst and panic, a gullible rabble convinced of the existence of showers. Still, Albert needed to ask one of them, a learned-looking one, not too old or benumbed, who preferably knew exactly where he was headed. Albert waited, trying to appear entertained, until the Sturmbannführer was busy with his whip. Then he made his selection.
An old man about Albert’s father’s age, modestly but not shabbily dressed, his beard trimmed and pince-nez not yet askew, a velvet skullcap on his crown. A schoolteacher, perhaps, or a minor municipal official, perhaps even from Albert’s hometown. Yet there was something learned in his face, an unforced sternness, a determined calm. Here is a person who could give him the explanation he needed, Albert thought. A man with the ultimate answer.
With a furtive jerk, Albert pulled him aside. “Tell me,” he rasped. “That ‘Shma, Yisroel, Adonoi Elohenu’ stuff. What does it mean?”
The man stared at him with a mixture of shock, curiosity and, Albert couldn’t help feeling, pity. As if he understood Albert’s plight and relished his power to solve it. “It means,” the man began softly in polished German, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
Albert looked perplexed. “Hear o Israel? Not ‘Help me! Help me?’ The Lord our God? Not ‘God can go straight to hell!’ And the Lord is one. One what, one selfish bastard who ignores all our prayers and thinks only of himself?”
The man smiled—Albert swore he could detect it—a fleeting, empathetic smile. “No. It means that, no matter what our fate, we believe in God and that he is one that just of himself but with us.”
His bewilderment only thickened. “But He’s up there.” Albert’s chin lifted toward the sky and then jerked in the direction of the chamber. “And you’re in there. How does that make you one?”
One not in the physical sense, but in the spiritual. A sense far beyond all this, beyond agony and death. Beyond evil.”
“And why that bleating at the end, that ‘Ehaaaad’’?
The man’s eyes narrowed. Was he possibly losing patience with these questions, anxious to get the inevitable over with? “To show God’s unity over space and time, his sovereignty over the universe, and our acceptance of it.”
“But he can’t save you!” Now it was Albert’s turn to show impatience. Besides, he had work to do. “He can’t take you out of this consignment!” he berated the man. “He can’t send you back to your home.”
The dignified man nodded. “Perhaps not.. But He has made me one with Himself, created and recreated my soul. Mine and yours both.” A long, elegant finger—a finger that once no doubt flipped the pages of dusty books and ledgers—pointed to the chamber ahead. “It’s not to the showers, as men with the dogs assured us, that we go. It’s to oneness.”
Enough, Albert thought. Enough of this hogwash. And just in case the Sturmbannführer was looking, slapped the man so hard his pince-nez and skullcap went flying, then kicked him back into line. Then, revolving on his boot heels, he scurried back to the roof. To the cone-covered shaft, to the pellets, and the fingernails gouging the concrete. And try though he did not to listen, to concentrate on the caterwauling and shrieking instead, still the words wafted up to him. Still, later in the mess, he absently repeated them to his comrades’ horror, while in his head—waking, dressing, cleaning his gun—they drummed.
A year passed and countless consignments. The pellets fell, the toxic fumes bloomed, the mops and hooks pistoned. And in Albert’s mind, the words he heard were no longer words but a single, hypnotic hum. He scarcely noticed the booms of approaching guns or the first shots and shouts in Russian.
There was no escaping it. Even as he stood on a stool with his hands tied behind him and a noose around his neck, Albert silently chanted. Only when he looked up at the sky with its bountiful clouds and beckoning birds and then at the ground below, stippled with the first blades of spring, did he begin to understand. Perhaps if he’d had more time. But there wasn’t, as the Ivan officer, spitting and cursing, kicked the stool out from under Albert. No time but to gasp and utter once more, “Adonoi Ehaaaad.”