The Resurrectionist

DESPERATE MISSION (310 pp.)--Joel Brand's story, as told by Alex Weissberg--Criterion ($4.95).

Up the close and down the stair, But and ben wi' Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the boy that buys the beef.

This macabre little song chilled many bones in Edinburgh when the "resurrectionists," i.e., men who stole fresh bodies for surgical research, flourished a century or so ago. A true resurrectionist, who dealt in live bodies while practicing a trade in mercy on the bloody landscape of the Europe of the 19403, is a man named Joel Brand. He told his story to a German journalist, Alex Weissberg, who put it down baldly and brutally. Fine writing would be an offense against the appalling facts of this bitter memoir.

During the war Joel Brand, now 52, was a leader of a Jewish underground group in Hungary whose purpose was quite simply to help Jews to stay alive. There were other such groups; Brand's was called the Waada Ezra we Hazalah, a Zionist group to whom the age-old dream of return to Palestine had been converted by the Hitler terror into life-or-death urgency.

The Nazis had "decided on a 'total' solution of the Jewish question." The operation, says Brand, "was given the official title of 'Night and Fog,' and the German genius for organization now celebrated its most gruesome triumph." Against this, Brand's only weapons were bravery and bribery. The Nazis had discovered that Jews could not only be killed but bought and sold. Thus, by a cruel twist, Brand found himself a specialist in the traffic in human flesh.

Monstrous Proposition. The time came when the most monstrous proposition in history was offered to Joel Brand. On April 25, 1944, Brand was taken before an SS lieutenant general called Adolf Eichmann. who told him: "I am prepared to sell you one million Jews. Blood for money: money for blood. You can take them from any country you like, where-ever you can find them. Whom do you want to save? Men who beget children? Women who can bear them? Old people? Children? Sit down and tell me." Brand sat down.

Eichmann's scheme for shoring Nazi military bankruptcy by drawing on the live blood bank of still-surviving Jews called for Jewish groups abroad--in London, Cairo, Istanbul and Washington--to get up the pengos, and arrange for the Nazis to turn them into 10,000 trucks full of chocolate, coffee, tea and soap.

Appalling Reason. Some of the Hungarian Jews protested any deal that would give the Germans material helpful in fighting the war. Brand agreed with them. But the Germans promised a down payment of 100,000 living Jews, and he hoped he could keep negotiations dragging along until the approaching Allied victory closed all accounts. Thus, while the Nazis held his own family hostage, he made a desperate journey to neutral Turkey and the Middle East to get the negotiations started with Allied agents.

Though the U.S. was willing to support his stalling strategy, it was the British who balked even at discussing the grim bargain between Brand and his mortal enemies, and tried to hamstring his efforts to reach others. One appalling reason given by Brand: the British did not know where to put the Jews without increasing their quota for admission to Palestine. They also acted on the principle that blackmail is never paid off, that simply nothing can be gained by negotiating with monsters. First the war must be won, argued the British; then others must sweep up the bits. It fell to Brand, as the master moneychanger in the temple of evil that Hitler had made of Europe, to deal with the bits as he could. When the unconscionable deal collapsed, the Nazis liquidated most of the 1,000,000 Jews up for sale.

Brand's story, documented to the hilt of an SS dagger, should be required reading for those who cling to the notion that the human race is essentially a friendly society. One of the incidental ironies of the book is that when a government is totally corrupt and evil, as was that of the Nazi regime in Europe, financial venality is a mitigating virtue.

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