“Therefore, we invite you, Jews among us, friends whom we love, though you perhaps cannot share in the symbols of our sacrament, we yet ask you to join us in heart, to join us in prayer, and to join us in worship of our common God. We will be privileged to likewise join with you. And now… Rabbi, would you like to share your thoughts?”

89 Betrayal

89

Betrayal

As he sped along the familiar road toward Niedersdorf, which he had traversed a thousand times in his young life, the emotions surging through the heart of Gustav von Schmundt were unexpected and altogether unfamiliar.

He had personally betrayed not just a mere man, but an enemy of the Reich.

And the betrayal went far beyond that.

The man in question was his neighbor, the man he had played around as a child. For his own thirtyweight in silver, Gustav had turned in the baron, who had given life to the woman he loved. This was the man he hoped to make his father-in-law—even if, as it now appeared, the baron would become so related only posthumously.

He had done the nefarious deed willingly, by his own choice, knowing full well the implications.

He had been a Gestapo agent long enough to know what this night’s mission was all about, and what would be its inevitable result. It was not a simple infraction of German law to be a Jew, to marry a Jew, to harbor Jews. There were many laws one could break. But this was a crime of treason punishable by only one means when Emil Korsch happened to be involved—instant death. Never did it occur to his twisted mind that he was contemplating committing the same crime himself.

Gustav had done what he had done by an act of his own will. But an unaccustomed feeling of something akin to remorse now attempted to rear its inconvenient and unsought head in what was left of his embryonic conscience.

He hardly knew what to do with the pangs that shot through his gut every minute or two as he bounced silently along in the passenger side of the front seat. He tried to stare into the night with an expressionless dispassion, trademark of the SS. But the loaded rifle sitting in his lap bore down upon his legs every minute with a grim and heavy weight.

90 The Passover Seder

90

The Passover Seder

As Baron von Dortmann resumed his seat, Rabbi Wissen rose, and now stood before the gathering.

“I too have not been in such a setting as this, nor have I heard of one. I will no doubt be roasted myself like a Passover lamb by any of my fellow rabbis who ever hear of what we have done.”

A slight ripple of laughter temporarily broke the solemnity of the occasion, though by now moisture had begun to gather in nearly every eye of the band of people who had become so intrinsically bound together.