The Emigrants

as far afield as the Tyrol, Ulm or Lake Constance, as Paul liked to recall. Theodor Bereyter died on Palm Sunday, 1936; this too I heard from Mme Landau, who must have talked endlessly to Paul about these things, as I came to realize more clearly with every visit. The cause of death was given as heart failure, but in fact, as Mme Landau emphasized, he had died from the fury and fear that had been consuming him ever since, precisely two years before his death, the Jewish families, resident in his home town of Gunzenhausen for generations, had been the target of violent attacks. The emporium owner, escorted only by his wife and those in his employ, was buried before Easter in a remote corner, reserved for suicides and people of no denomination, behind a low wall in the churchyard at S. It is worth mentioning in this connection, said Mme Landau, that although the emporium, which passed to the widow, Thekla, could not be "Aryanized" after Theodor Bereyter's death, the family nonetheless had to sell it for next to nothing to Alfons Kienzle, a livestock and real estate agent who had recently set up as a respectable businessman. After this dubious transaction Thekla Bereyter fell into a depression and died within a few weeks.

All of these occurrences, Mme Landau said, Paul followed from afar without being able to intervene. On the one hand, when the bad news reached him it was always already too late to do anything, and, on the other, his powers of decision had been in some way impaired, making it impossible for him to think even as far as a single day ahead. For this reason, Mme Landau explained, Paul for a long time had only a partial grasp of what had happened in S in 1935 and 1936, and did not care to correct his patchy knowledge of the past. It was only in the last decade of his life, which he largely spent in Yverdon, that reconstructing those events became important to him, indeed vital, said Mme Landau. Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes — on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Gunzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or of thirty-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schadenfreude that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazaar in the town the following morning, taking several weeks' supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz, powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

What I was least able to understand in Paul's story, after all that, was the fact that in early 1939 — be it because the position of a German tutor in France in times that were growing more difficult was no longer tenable, or out of blind rage or even a sort of perversion — he went back to Germany, to the capital of the Reich, to Berlin, a city with which he was quite unfamiliar. There he took an office job at a garage in Oranienburg, and a few months later he was called up; those who were only three-quarter Aryans were apparently included in the muster. He served, if that is the word, for six years, in the motorized artillery, variously stationed in the Greater German homeland and in the several countries that were occupied. He was in Poland, Belgium, France, the Balkans, Russia and the Mediterranean, and doubtless saw more than

any heart or eye can bear. The seasons and the years came and went. A Walloon autumn was followed by an unending white winter near Berdichev, spring in the Departement Haute-Saóne, summer on the coast of Dalmatia or in Romania, and always, as Paul wrote under this photograph,

one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away — but from where? — and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.