The Odessa File

At the door the colonel looked the figure up and down with approval and shook hands.

‘Welcome home, Major Uri Ben Shaul.’

The agent felt better back in his own identity, the one he had taken in 1947 when he first came to Israel and enlisted in the Palmach.

He took a taxi back home to his flat in the suburbs and let himself in with the key that had just been returned to him with his other effects.

In the darkened bedroom he could make out the sleeping form of Rivka, his wife, the light blanket rising and fa

lling with her breathing. He peeked into the children’s room and looked down at their two boys. Shlomo who was six, and the two-year-old baby, Dov.

He wanted badly to climb into bed beside his wife and sleep for several days, but there was one more job to be done. He set down his case and quietly undressed, taking off even the underclothes and socks. He dressed in fresh ones taken from the clothes chest, and Rivka slept on, undisturbed.

From the closet he took his uniform trousers, cleaned and pressed as they always were when he came home, and laced up the gleaming black calf-boots over them. His khaki shirts and ties were where they always were, with razor-sharp creases down the shirt where the hot iron had pressed. Over them he slipped his battle jacket, adorned only with the glinting steel wings of a paratroop officer and the five campaign ribbons he had earned in Sinai and in raids across the borders.

The final article was his red beret. When he had dressed he took several articles and stuffed them into a small bag. There was already a dim glint in the east when he got back outside and found his small car still parked where he had left it a month before in front of the block of flats.

Although it was only February 26th, three days before the end of the last month of winter, the air was mild again and gave promise of a brilliant spring.

He drove eastwards out of Tel Aviv and took the road to Jerusalem. There was a stillness about the dawn that he loved, a peace and a cleanliness that never ceased to cause him wonder. He had seen it a thousand times on patrol in the desert, the phenomenon of a sunrise, cool and beautiful, before the onset of a day of blistering heat and sometimes of combat and death. It was the best time of the day.

The road led across the flat, fertile countryside of the littoral plain towards the ochre hills of Judea, through the waking village of Ramleh. After Ramleh there was in those days a detour round the Latroun Salient, five miles to skirt the front positions of the Jordanian forces. To his left he could see the morning breakfast fires of the Arab Legion sending up thin plumes of blue smoke.

There were a few Arabs awake in the village of Abu Gosh, and when he had climbed up the last hills to Jerusalem the sun had cleared the eastern horizon and glinted off the Dome of the Rock in the Arab section of the divided city.

He parked his car a quarter of a mile from his destination, the mausoleum of Yad Vashem, and walked the rest; down the avenue flanked by trees, planted to the memory of the gentiles who had tried to help, and to the great bronze doors that guard the shrine to six million of his fellow Jews who died in the holocaust.

The old gatekeeper told him it was not open so early in the morning, but he explained what he wanted and the man let him in. He passed through into the hall of remembrance and glanced about him. He had been there before to pray for his own family, and still the massive grey granite blocks of which the hall was built overawed him.

He walked forward to the rail and gazed at the names written in black on the grey stone floor, in Hebrew and Roman letters. There was no light in the sepulchre but that from the Eternal Flame, flickering above the shallow black bowl from which it sprang.

By its light he could see the names across the floor, score upon score: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald … There were too many to count, but he found the one he sought. Riga.

He did not need a yarmulka to cover himself, for he still wore his red beret which would suffice. From his bag he took a fringed silk shawl, the tallith, the same kind of shawl Miller had found among the effects of the old man in Altona, and not understood. This he draped round his shoulders.

He took a prayer-book from his bag and opened it at the right page. He advanced to the brass rail that separates the hall into two parts, gripped it with one hand and gazed across it at the flame in front of him. Because he was not a religious man he had to consult his prayer-book frequently, as he recited the prayer already five thousand years old.

‘Yisgaddal,

Veyiskaddash,

Shemay rabbah …’

And so it was that twenty-one years after it had died in Riga, a major of paratroops of the Army of Israel, standing on a hill in the Promised Land, finally said kaddish for the soul of Salomon Tauber.

It would be agreeable if things in this world always finished with all the ends neatly tied up. This is very seldom the case. People go on, to live and die in their own appointed time and place. So far as it has been possible to establish, this is what happened to the main characters.

Peter Miller went home, married and stuck to reporting the sort of things that people want to read over breakfast and in the hairdresser’s. By the summer of 1970 Sigi was carrying their third child.

The men of the Odessa scattered. Eduard Roschmann’s wife returned home and later received a cable from her husband telling her he was in Argentina. She refused to follow him. In the summer of 1965 she wrote to him at their old address, the Villa Jerbal, to ask him for a divorce before the Argentinian courts.

The letter was forwarded to his new address, and she got a reply consenting to her request, but before the German courts, and enclosing a legal document agreeing to a divorce. She was awarded this in 1966. She still lives in Germany, but has retaken her maiden name of Müller, of which there are tens of thousands in Germany. The man’s first wife, Hella, still lives in Austria.

The Werwolf finally made his peace with his furious superiors in Argentina, and settled on a small estate he bought from the money realised by the sale of his effects, on the Spanish island of Formentera.

The radio factory went into liquidation. The scientists working on the guidance systems for the rockets of Helwan all found jobs in industry or the academic world. The project on which they had unwittingly been working for Roschmann, however, collapsed.

The rockets of Helwan never flew. The fuselages were ready, along with the rocket fuel. The warheads were under production. Those who may doubt the authenticity of those warheads should examine the evidence of Professor Otto Yoklek, given at the trial of Yossef Ben Gal, June 10–26, 1963, Basel Provincial Court, Switzerland. The forty pre-production rockets, helpless for want of the electronic systems necessary to guide them to their targets in Israel, were still standing in the deserted factory at Helwan when they were destroyed by bombers during the Six-Day War. Before that the German scientists had disconsolately returned to Germany.