"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

"You were at Mauthausen?"
"Yes."
"I will check. Everything you say."
The gray eyes didn't even blink. "You would be wrong not to. And you don't have to answer me right away. I couldn't take someone seriously if they were to take me on in a few minutes. Besides, I'm not physically ready to travel."
"When will you be ready?"
"At the same time as Yoыl Bainish. In two weeks."

Barazini conducted his investigation. He specifically went to see the people of the Jewish Committee in Linz, one of whom was Wiesenthal. The name Klimrod was not known to them. Only one man remembered having seen him at the camp- "made up like a woman and accompanying a group of SS officers."
He managed to find at least a dozen men and women who came from Lvov, and who were waiting in Leonding; none of them had met, in July of 1941, in Lvov, a Hannah Itzkowitch Klimrod accompanied by three children.
Around July 20, Barazini reported to his superior, future ambassador Asher Ben Nathan, who was in charge of assembling the Jews from the American zone of Austria. He told him of his hesitation.
"Something about this kid bothers me, and I can't figure out what it is."
"Is he intelligent?"
"Is he? I have the feeling when I speak with him that he is the adult and I am the child, with a mental age of three! He must think three or four times faster than I. I don't even get a
chance to finish my sentences. He answers my questions before I ask them."
"That's probably what's bothering you," answered Ben Nathan, laughing. "That would bother me too."
The two men decided that Barazini should trust his instinct. On July 30, he went back to see Yoыl Bainish and Reb Klimrod. He announced his decision: they were to leave, together, the night of August 6.
Actually, Barazini had found a solution, which, in his eyes, settled everything. For a time, Bainish was to keep an eye on Klimrod. That was a first precaution. To this he added a second, reassuring, one: he sent a message to Tel Aviv, in which he particularly called Dov Lazarus's attention to Reb Klimrod.

Reb held his hand out to Bainish, whose leg and hip were still stiff. He pulled him up into the truck, where there were already eleven men and five women, mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. There was total silence. Someone pulled up the tailgate and locked it and also fastened the khaki cover, which cut out any kind of light. There was some whispering outside; then the engine was started and the truck pulled away. It was one o'clock in the morning, August 7, 1945.
To reach the rendezvous point, Reb and Yoыl had left the hospital well before midnight. They had crossed Linz, avoiding the city's center, and reached the first rallying point, near a warehouse in the heart of the dock installations along the Danube. They had been joined there by two men and a young girl, but it was decided that they would not go on as a group. They had walked to the southern outskirts of the city. At no point was Reb aware of the rendezvous areas, of the time schedules, of the identity of his companions, of the conditions of the departure.

He made no effort to find out anything more during the next part of the trip. Out of Linz, they drove for over four hours, while one of the women occasionally sang softly, in Yiddish, her face hidden. There was a stop, a very short one, to satisfy natural needs. Day was breaking, and it lit mountains Reb couldn't identify-nor could Bainish, who didn't know Austria
at all. But one of the men spoke in Polish about the Klamm Pass, which is to the north of Badgastein.
Bainish said, laughing softly: "He also speaks Polish, don't bother
They rode for two more hours, the harsh early light of the Austrian summer filtering through the gaps in the canvas cover.
They spent the daytime hours of the seventh on an isolated farm not far from Igls. Back on the road at nightfall, they crossed Innsbruck around eleven o'clock, and Reb heard two men who must have been soldiers speaking French, one of whom had a melodious southern accent. After that, he knew the road they followed-the railroad tunnel of Mittenwald and the surging noises of the Inn, which he remembered perfectly. During the summer of 1938, his school (where he was two years ahead of his age group) had organized a trip to Saint-Anton.

He thought their final destination might be Switzerland, but at Landeck, the truck turned left. One hour later, it stopped. After discharging its human load, it turned around and began the descent.
They followed, on foot, a young boy who had appeared from the night and who, in German, told them to remain absolutely. quiet. After what was perhaps a three-hour climb through the forest, they reached a barely illuminated inn. They didn't enter through the front door, but used a ladder, leading them to the large Tyrolian balcony on the second floor. A group of twenty other emigrants was already there, so anxious to be silent that they had removed their shoes, in order not to alert the guests below...
guests who were also extraordinarily discreet. An hour after the arrival of his group, Reb, looking through a window, noticed a group of about fifteen men, some of them middleaged. The newcomers had something military in their manner and in the way they were organized, in spite of their luxurious civilian clothing and their expensive suitcases. They kept quiet until they were inside, but their arrival set off a wave of exclamations, in German, which were quickly checked.
The staff of the inn shuttled between the two floors with perfect ease.
Yoыl came up to Reb.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Reb nodded.
Through the floor, they could hear the men settling down for the night. Had they wanted to, the two young men could have followed the whispered conversations by lying on their stomachs. A grimace of hatred disfigured Yoыl's delicate features for a few seconds; he was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. "Nazis on the run!" He wept with rage.
The entire day of August 8 was spent in this strange unnatural cohabitation.
And it is not impossible to believe that in this inn, near the Reschen Pass, a few yards from each other, fed by the same innkeeper, and driven by the same smugglers, there were, Simultaneously, survivors of Mauthausen and other camps and the very ones who had been their torturers.
Not Erich Steyr. Even Settiniaz finds that impossible. The dates don't match.
The trip, yes, of course.

They crossed the Italian border the following night. Two hours apart. First, the SS men, who had priority.
In Italy, a convoy of trucks was obviously waiting for Reb Klimrod and his companions, whose number, enlarged by numerous groups who had crossed the Reschen Pass during the preceding nights and had found refuge on Italian farms, had passed the one hundred marks
YoыI Bainish had a natural cheerfulness and an almost amazing ability to make light of everything. At Mauthausen, he had risked immediate death twenty times by mimicking the gait or the tics of this or that guard. Coming down from the pass, he had hardly stopped singing, or, with a disrespect bordering on indecency, he had resurrected a certain Schloimele, the glory of his native village, near Lublin, who was a rabbi, or almost.
But when they discovered the trucks and the soldiers' uniforms, even Bainish was dumbstruck. The trucks and uniforms were unquestionably British. They belonged, they learned, to His Majesty's 412th Royal Transport Company. Thanks to
them, they were all, notwithstanding the relentless blockades of Great Britain, going to reach the south of Italy and sail to Eretz Israel.
The 412th Royal Transport Company did not exist. It was the product of the fertile imagination of a man named Yehouda Arazi, leader of Mossad Aliyah Beth in Italy. Mossad, created in 1937 by the Haganah, a self-defense force of the Jewish colonies in Palestine, worked to strengthen these colonies by immigration.
While the British were actively looking for him in Palestine, Arazi had landed in Italy, right behind the Allied armies. And in these very armies were British units scattered within which were Palestinian Jews.
Four sergeants were among them, one of whom was Eliahou Cohen, known as "Ben-Hur," who founded, in the kibbutzim, the Palmah, a defense unit of the Haganah and the core of the future Israeli Army.
Arazi and the four sergeants had established a plan discreetly to use the material resources and the various supplies and provisions of His Majesty's forces. Arazi had also set up a communications system, running from Antwerp to Naples, through Paris, Marseilles, and Athens. A broadcasting station had been installed in a town about nineteen miles outside Milan; it maintained contact with the leaders of the Haganah in Tel Aviv.
In this partially occupied country, Arazi had trucks, men who spoke perfect English, noncommissioned officers in correct uniforms. He actually created a fictitious military unit, with false regimental rolls and real quarters: a large garage in the center of Milan, a garage that had been officially requisitioned by the British Army. He completed all this with a workshop of forgers in charge of drafting orders that could fool the Military Police, and also false papers for refugees who were in transit.