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.He searches for her in the garrison garden, where a few women work cultivating vegetables; and beyond, to the right, where the morgue stands small and dark on its mound of brown earth.He searches for her among the Czech maids at the Herrenhaus at Christmas when the officers of the garrison stroll between the hedges along the graveled paths carrying their gifts and go inside to exchange toasts with the Commandant and admire the Chinese-lacquered furniture and listen to the latest news on the radio and peer nostalgically at the framed landscape prints and listen to Wagner and set down their glasses of brandy on the glass-top tables.And in the women’s section he lashes his whip against his heel and orders them to look up and give him their names as they paint wooden buttons and sew arch supports for boots and knit soldiers’ socks and clean the rooms and offices: Gertrude Schön, Herr Architekt, Karolina Simon, Theresa Lederova, but it is forbidden to give names, Herr Architekt, here we all have numbers.And he tries, raving, to enter the hospital before he forgets her face forever, before it can be wiped away forever by the cresyl and Formalin, the injections of sea water, the experiments with typhus and skin grafts, the transformations and exchanges of faces and hands and buttocks shuffled around in this laboratory where the entire universe is reordered, transplanted freely, without limit, to fulfill the image and semblance of an unspeakable and irrepeatable yet ultimately possible dream.“I promise you that you will find the evening pleasant,” said the Commandant.When the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was assassinated, it was decreed that the lives of three thousand Jews must be given in exchange for his.Heinrich came to Theresienstadt to organize their transport to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Treblinka.As always he was very confident and very lucid.He and Franz walked through the square of the ghetto town with their thumbs hooked in their belts and Heinrich laughed recalling that fight years ago at the students’ party Herr Urs, the dwarf, had crashed wrapped in a pillowcase and refrigerator frost.Franz laughed too, and Heinrich, winking, said that Franz might yet find himself in some difficulties because of the costume Ulrich had worn that night.They walked side by side and laughed a great deal and Heinrich said that no matter how the war turned out it could never be denied that at last German life had been reduced to rationality and exalted to greatness.What they were inflicting on others they risked having inflicted upon themselves, and if that should happen, they would accept it without protest.For in the end human existence is a lonely and bitter footrace which does not go to the fleet or to the daring or even to the patient but to those who have a vision of their own possible grandeur and the courage to live up to their vision.The secret of Germany was that each individual German had such a vision of himself, alone, solitary.It was the accomplishment of the Third Reich to have organized those secret and hidden visions of solitude into a common national purpose, exalted and sufficient.They all had that sense of exaltation.Because of it, if they were defeated, they would be able to accept not only defeat, not only death, but even humiliation.In a few days Heinrich finished his mission.The Attentat auf Heydrich transport was efficiently organized and the three thousand Jews departed from the Theresienstadt ghetto, never, Heinrich assured Franz, to be seen again.“And what if some day you find yourself in the hands of the Americans or the Russians?” Franz asked, smiling, as Heinrich boarded his truck.Heinrich threw his hand to his visored cap in mockery of an American salute.“Then I’ll become an American or a Russian,” he laughed.“I’ll turn traitor, I’ll sell secrets, I’ll swap parties.Treu bis zum Tod!”The truck pulled off and Franz laughed too and swung his arm up to return the salute.Huic ergo pace, Deus:Pie Jesus Domine:Dona eis requiem.Amen.“The Jews,” said the Commandant casually, picking a tooth and covering his mouth with the other hand, “are going to perform Verdi’s Requiem.”Eichmann lifted an eyebrow.All the officers at the long table stopped their conversations.The Commandant went on picking his tooth in the frozen silence.Finally Eichmann began to laugh
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