Chapter 3 Photographers in Salzburg - 2

David Setiniaz returned with Blackstock, a doctor, and two infantrymen.Blackstock filmed the discovery of the grave.The photos were never published, or even included in any archives.But thirteen years later, Wang bought them from the Blackstocks.Blackstock believes that the young man's survival was not simply the result of a dizzying series of events.When Reber was rescued, the position of his body indicated that after he had been buried, he had made a desperate effort to climb up to the surface of the pit.Reber had already cut his way through the corpses of eight of his companions, but the work encountered increasing obstacles as he was the first to be thrown into the pit, the top of which was taken by the SS The boots were used to step on it firmly, then spread quicklime, and then cover with soil.

A total of nine people were buried in the pit, all boys, aged between twelve and seventeen.Reb Klimrod was the oldest and only survivor. Reb was finally rescued from the pit, at which point he lost consciousness again.Setiniaz was surprised by Reber's height and weight: he was six feet tall and weighed only about a hundred pounds. In fact, both of his estimates were wrong.On May 5, 1945, Reb Klimrod, who was seventeen years old and still four months old, was 1.84 meters tall and weighed only 39 kilograms. Reber was shot in the back of the head, behind his left ear.The bullet grazed the earlobe lightly, shattered the base of the occipital bone, and plowed into the muscles at the upper nape of the neck, barely touching the vertebrae.In fact, other wounds on his body were more serious, and perhaps more painful.Doctors also removed two other bullets from the teenager, one from his right thigh and the other from just above his hip.In addition, there were no less than thirty places on his body corroded by quicklime.Hundreds of welts and cigarette burns remain on his back, buttocks and lower abdomen, some of which are old scars from years ago.Only his face remained intact.

This face moved the heart not only of Setiniaz, who was the first to see him, but also of all those who saw him afterwards.Not because he is handsome—his facial features are not very regular—but because he looks very calm on the one hand, but at the same time gives people a feeling of looseness on the outside and tightness on the inside.It was by no means the face of a man who resigned himself to fate, though the marks of death and despair abound in the concentration camps.The main thing is that you will notice that these gray eyes with a little green flecks, look at people and things with a mighty power.

For the next few days, Reb slept almost all the time.However, a small commotion started from him.A group of former prisoners came to Strohn, claiming that they were protesting on behalf of all fellow prisoners.They refused to live with an "SS damsel".They use far worse words.But the little red-haired major from New Mexico ignored the request. He had other problems to worry about: Mauthausen was killing people, hundreds of them a day. About the boy, Strohn said to Setiniaz: "I know he would have died without you. Take care of him!" "But I don't even know his name yet!"

"It's your business," Stron answered in his high voice. "From now on, I will hand him over to you." This conversation took place on the morning of May 7th.Setiniaz placed the boy in the shed where the "capo" (note: the prisoner who manages the prisoners in the concentration camp) were gathered whose fate was yet to be determined.Setiniaz blamed himself for that.If anyone tried to blame the strange teenager for anything bad, it would turn Setiniaz off.He visited the boy three times and found him awake only once.Setiniaz wanted to ask him some questions, but the answer he got was a serious look in a daze.

"Do you know me? I pulled the scale out of the grave..." No answer, "At least, you should tell me your name!" No answer, "You told me you were Austrian. You You must really want to get in touch with your family, right?" No answer, "Where did you learn French?" No answer, "I just want to help you..." The boy closed his eyes and turned to face the wall. The next day, May 8, Captain Taras arrived from Munich with news of Germany's surrender. George Taalas is Georgian—not American Georgia, but Soviet Georgia (note: American Georgia (state) and Soviet Georgia (republic) are spelled the same in French and English).At Harvard University, Setiniaz heard that Taras was of Russian aristocratic origin. In 1918, his family immigrated to the United States. age conflict), has apparently given himself the mission of convincing as many people on our planet as possible not to take themselves too seriously.He hated sentimentalism.Taras had a natural (if feigned, at least feigned) indifference to the sheer folly of mankind.His tongue was ready to sneer or sarcasm at any time.In addition to English, he is fluent in a dozen other languages, including German, French, Polish, Russian, Italian and Spanish.

He came to Mauthausen to preside over the relevant work, and the first thing he caught was to select some of the most heinous photos taken by Blackstock in the Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camps and paste them in his office. the wall. "When we interrogate the gentlemen, if they don't give up, we can at least show them the result of their mischief." He quickly finished processing the few files that Setiniaz had begun to sort out, and personally presided over the interrogation. "Mr. Setiniaz, these are small fish and shrimp, is there anything else?" Setiniaz tells Taras about the boy who was buried alive.

"You don't even know his name?" Little is known about this young man.His name is not on any list of the Germans.In the last months of 1944 and the first months of 1945, he was not one of the tens of thousands of prisoners who were sent back to Germany and Austria due to the advancing Soviet Red Army any batch.According to many eyewitnesses, he had been in Mauthausen for only three months, at most four months.Taras smiled. "It seems that the matter is very simple. Some high-ranking SS officers have withdrawn to Austria and are preparing to organize a last resistance. If there is only one officer, it is impossible to need nine lovers, unless he is superhuman. They reached Mauthausen, in vain The guards were strengthened, and when our Seventh Army approached, they turned and fled again, this time towards the mountains, towards Syria, and even towards the tropics. The attitude of the nation to carry out orders seriously, first cleanly dispose of those darlings that are now cumbersome, and then cover them with quicklime and earth.” At Harvard University, a Gogol expert once gave Taras took a nickname - "Bulba" (Note: Taras Bulba is the old Ukrainian Cossack hero in the novel of the same name written by the Russian writer Gogol).Far from being angry, Taras was proud of it, and used it as a signature for review articles and comments on examination papers.Now, through his gold-rimmed glasses, he turned his piercing gaze to the ghastly pictures on the wall.

"Of course, my brother David, we can put aside all other things and care about the boy under your protection all day long. Anyway, there are only hundreds of thousands of war criminals eagerly waiting for us to pay attention to them. A small matter. Not to mention the millions of men, women, and children out there who have died, are dying, or are dying." Taras was fond of tirades, and took great pleasure in embarrassing anyone he spoke to with his sarcasm.Nevertheless, the story of the Austrian boy must have interested Taras.Two days later, on May 10, he visited the boy for the first time.To those "capo" present, he spoke Russian, German, Polish and Hungarian.He cast a quick glance at the young stranger.

This one glance is enough. His reaction was the same as Setiniaz's, but with a considerable difference: the boy shocked him in much the same way.But he knew why he was shocked.Taras found a striking resemblance between the survivor's eyes and another's.Another person Taras had spoken to in Princeton, at the lunch table at Albert Einstein's house, was the physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer.The eyes of these two people have the same gray and white iris, the same unfathomable, as if gazing into a dream that mortals can never enter.Do they have the same secret, the same genius? ...

Of course, the ages of the two were different—Talas estimated that the boy in front of him was only eighteen or nineteen years old at most. For the next few days, George Taalas and David Settiniaz were busy with their official business in Mauthausen, spending most of their time investigating the revelations.They tried to make a list of all those who were in charge of the concentration camp, regardless of their positions, regardless of their crimes, and collected evidence to prepare for later submission to the military courts that specialize in the crimes committed by war criminals in the Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camps.When the American army approached, many of the former Austrian concentration camp guards hid on the spot without taking any precautions. They still used their real names and pretended to be honest people who obeyed their orders, Befehl ist Befehl (German: An order is an order), this sentence became a shield for them to absolve themselves of all guilt.Due to lack of manpower and material resources, Taras used a group of former prisoners, including a Jewish architect named Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of several concentration camps. After a while, at the urging of Setiniaz (at least, that was the reason Taras explained to himself), Taras remembered the young man who had been buried alive, whose identity he still did not know. name.The small group of prisoners who had protested to Major Stron did not return, and the three most active of them, the French Jews, had left the camp and returned to France; the charge was thus effectively dismissed.But now that the file has been established, there must be a conclusion.Taras decided to preside over the interrogation himself.Years later, Taras would look at Rebe Klimrod with a bright eye on a very different occasion, and he would recall the impression this first meeting had left on his mind.