Children of Wrath by Paul Grossman Read Free Book Online Page A

lack of customers. Day three of the sausage ban and the stalls had been empty except for the scores of salesmen wringing their hands and the piles of Bierwurst, Blutwurst, Bockwurst, Bratwurst, Landjager, Leberkase, Knackwurst, Gelbwurst. Nearly two hundred kinds of sausages awaiting reprieve. The Ministry of Public Health had focused on two dealerships: Klingel Brothers, supplier for nine of thirteen butcher shops known to be connected with the contamination, and Zuckerhof, across the aisle, supplier of seven. Both had procured their merchandise directly from local producers, largely, though not exclusively, Strohmeyer Wurst A.G. Neither, however, believed Listeria could have originated there.
    In separate interviews both Klingel and Zuckerhof were almost vehement with Willi on this point. Strohmeyer’d been in business too long, they insisted, and was far too reputable a manufacturer. The contamination had to have begun with one of his suppliers. And not one of the big ones at the Viehof, either. No, the Central Stockyards were too strictly regulated. It had to have been a peddler. Those unscrupulous bastards sold on the cheap in alleys adjacent to the markets, free from rentals and regulatory demands. They were a real menace; Willi just had to look for himself. Legitimate dealers had been complaining about them for years, and what had it gotten them? A catastrophe. Who was going to compensate them for all these goods? If the sausage ban went on much longer, the honest brokers would be dragged under and all that’d be left’d be the cockroach peddlers.
    The pounding in Willi’s head had started around this time, growing worse by the day.
    *   *   *
    This endless tour of the sausage factory only added to it.
    “Of course we follow only the strictest safety guidelines published by the Ministry of Public Health itself.” Strohmeyer had turned strident by the time they reached the casing rooms. “No one understands better than we how bacteria can spread through a workplace. We keep our facility spick-and-span, as you can see. Any surface that comes in contact with meat receives generous applications of chlorine bleach. Our employees wash their hands before entering the workplace, or after they do anything that could contaminate them—such as sneezing.”
    Willi stared at the rows of big hoppers with their long funnels and adjustable nozzle heads. He could almost see the fatty red mixture pressing through, filling the intestinal casings, casing after casing stuffed, twisted, links spewing forth, carefully wound around each other. A quick glance at Strohmeyer convinced him the Wurst King genuinely believed his own words. But Willi’d spent enough time poring over the records by now to know the rhetoric did not precisely conform to the facts.
    A sausage, he’d been enlightened this week, was more than it appeared. In a single casing, a company such as Strohmeyer might combine not only different grades of meat, but meat from different kinds of animals and even from different slaughterhouses. They also used what were known as trimmings—fatty edges sliced from better cuts—as well as other hard-to-use animal parts, such as stomachs, throats, blood, in combination with higher-grade meat to compose their sausage innards. A fifty-fifty meat-to-filler ratio, according to the industry trade journal Meat and Meat By-Products, saved a company as much as 25 percent. What neither the journal nor Strohmeyer mentioned, but a 1927 Ministry of Public Health report had, was that these low-grade fillers came from animal parts more likely than others to have contact with bacteria’s main source: shit.
    After long, crowded train journeys across Europe, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, arrived in Berlin smeared with feces. The giant central stock and slaughter yards, the Central-Viehof, required all slaughterers to thoroughly hose down carcasses before sending them to cutting floors. But this, Willi’d learned, was hardly foolproof.