TWENTY-SEVEN
Auschwitz, 1945
Himmler’s order to destroy the crematories and start preparations for evacuating Auschwitz in January was not unexpected. The rumors were too pervasive throughout the death camp to be otherwise. No one really knew why, except perhaps the war was near its end, and Germany had lost, a stark truth that could no longer be hidden by the worried faces of Dr. Wirth and his medical staff of Nazi doctors. The steady flow of refugees ahead of the advancing Russian army did not pass unseen. For some, among those still waiting to die in the gas chambers, it was as if God had seen enough killing of His people to last another hundred years and had finally decided to stop it. Whatever the reason, to Erich it was an early Christmas gift that brought a warm glow to his face that had been all but extinguished the past two years.
That evening he returned to the officers’ club for the first time since he passed Julia’s mother and father through the selection to their deaths. It was the right time to celebrate, though it would stay silent within him. A few, like Franz, still believed in the cause, and any expression of joy over its demise would be met with swift punishment by the Gestapo.
Franz was sitting alone at a small corner table away from a mixed group of boisterous camp doctors and SS officers, all quite drunk. Since the moment the order came from Himmler, Franz had struggled throughout the day, as he was now, to understand what went wrong. Any suggestion at the war’s birth of a possible defeat would have been as unbelievable to him as any idea that the earth really was flat. However, with the reality of a lost war staring him in the face, he wouldn’t crawl away to hide like some mangled and beaten beast. Wirth and Mengele and the others would, he knew, for what they had done. But he would fall with the rest of the German warriors, if that is what the gods wanted his ending to be.
Seeing Franz brooding alone, Erich went to the table and sat down. Ignoring him for the moment, Franz signaled the serving orderly to bring two more steins to go with the four he had already consumed. He had aligned the empty steins upside down in a tight row across one side of the table.
“That is what’s left of the great Wehrmacht, empty glasses. We are fighting the fucking Russians with glass soldiers,” Franz said, gesturing with a sweeping wave of his hand and knocking over the row of steins.
Erich remained silent, looking nervously around the room for the face of any Gestapo who might be sitting unnoticed in the room. Franz’s words were enough to have them both arrested.
“Things will change, I’m sure,” he said in a loud reassuring voice for those in the room who might want to hear his words.
Erich knew that rampant rumors and paranoia would be on the menu every day until Auschwitz was finally closed, a classic study of where the reality of what has been done is suddenly seen for what it is, shaking everyone loose from the unreal world they had been living in. Though the terrible gas ovens were to be immediately destroyed, the lingering smell from thousands of cremated bodies had become a part of everything its tentacles touched. Mingling with the rising smoke from the bodies still smoldering in the open ditches, it covered the camp in a blanket of human memories woven together as one so they would never become unreal and forgotten.
After a long moment of silence, Franz took a last swallow of the warm beer he loved and stared glassy-eyed in a hypnotic way at Erich.
“We have no more Jews, or anyone else to kill, do we, my timid friend,” he said with the familiar smirk across his twisted lips.
“Not here, but they will find others for us, I’m sure.”
“Perhaps, but why wait. I am to accompany Dr. Wirth to Berlin tomorrow, and when I return, you and I can go together to fight the Russians by the waters of the Elbe. It will be a glorious ending for both of us.”
Erich turned away; he was in no mood for such insane dialogue with Franz. Not at this moment, when everything was disintegrating around them. Madness and failure go hand in hand at times, and it was happening with Franz, he believed. All that Franz had planned for and worked for and killed for was crumbling before his eyes. Nothing in the darkening shadows of his tomorrows would be the same, and he knew it, and he was lost. But he was not afraid to die, and in his mind that set him apart and above all men that were, like Erich. It was a power he long believed in, that belonged to only a chosen few. For when one holds no fear of death one becomes like Nietzsche’s ubermensch, he had argued many times with those who would listen, unloosed to be free from all reality. That is why Jesus meant nothing to him, nor what he proclaimed. He was very much afraid of dying, and turned his back on an endless glory that should have been his, had he not been.
“We should not be talking of fighting and dying, when there are many cards yet to be played,” Erich said, trying to sound as dramatic as he could. Doing so always impressed Franz, because the role of evil always requires a lot of acting, and Franz was the master thespian in playing it.
Surprised by Erich’s sudden theatrical flair, Franz crossed his arms for a second studying him, then leaned back, roaring with laughter, causing many in the room to look at him.
“You are right, there is more to come, and then we will face the Russians and die with great honor as we should. We must have more beer and talk of the days to come and what they will bring.”
So Erich and the man he detested more than his own self drank away the last hours of a long night until neither could stand, nor cared that he couldn’t. Erich had never been this drunk before, and found little enjoyment in it, especially when a swirling nausea blurred his eyes, seizing his mind and twisting his stomach into a thousand tiny knots before heaving into his throat and mouth all that he had eaten for the day. The vile vomit spewed forth from his mouth like one might expect to happen from a holy exorcism, covering Franz, who was fast asleep in his own world with its own evil spirit. In the morning, Erich could remember little of the night except that he had showered Franz with vomit and felt good in doing so.
They had been together over two years at Auschwitz, and he hated Franz every second of those days. To him, Franz came into this world corrupted; there was no other way to explain it. No one could grow into all the evil that possessed him. The problem was, as Erich saw it, the kind of diseased corruption that owned Franz was contagious in some strange way. How else could he explain his own corruption? He had been pure until the day he met Franz. His life and dreams with Julia at the time were locked in another beautiful world, clean and full of hope. Franz never had to choose between good and evil like he did to stay alive. That’s the best way to explain all the terrible things that had happened. But the moments, he knew, were near now when all this would be over, everything he had done here and at Görden would pass into history. And the thought gladdened his heart and gave him hope.
On the second night after his drunken binge with Franz, the news came to Erich that Franz had been arrested by the Gestapo, then summarily tried and executed. Stunned beyond belief, Erich was afraid to ask why. He had sat and drank with him the night before when he had loudly berated the weakness of the Wehrmacht soldiers, a moment of treason. No reason for Franz’s sudden downfall and death would ever be known, except through the passing whispered rumors in the camp. In the early hours of the morning, he had awakened at the table, still quite drunk and covered with Erich’s vomit. Staggering into the club’s kitchen to clean himself, he encountered a young Jewish girl of fifteen, quite small and emaciated, whose duties were those of a kitchen maid. Ordering her to strip off his filthy uniform and underclothes and clean them, he became aroused by her presence. Knocking her to the floor, he bared her body, too, and repeatedly beat and raped her until he was spent. When the morning shift arrived, they found him asleep, lying naked across the nude battered body of the small girl, who was semi-conscious and whimpering like a beaten dog. Without moving either one, the kitchen staff summoned the camp police who quickly marched a naked and still groggy Franz to headquarters for questioning. No excuse was there for him to plead. Being a favorite within the Health Ministry was of little
help. With the war lost, those who had been important, or perceived themselves so, were scattering like straws blowing in the wind, hoping no one would find where they would come to rest.
Ending up in the hands of the Gestapo, Franz was executed not because he had beaten and raped a young girl, but because he had sexual intercourse with a Jew, an unpardonable crime. Only treason to the Führer and desertion of duty were higher crimes. The young girl did not escape either, though she was innocent. Taken to one of the open ditches, she was thrown in while still alive and burned with the other bodies already smoldering there.
For Erich, Franz’s ignominious ending, if it were true, was another sign that God was changing sides. All would be over, the terrible things he was a part of, when Auschwitz closed in a few weeks. Then he could begin to nourish again the humanity that had long stayed crouched deep within him, cowering in fear. As a doctor, he would not have to stay behind when the camp was evacuated but would go with the thousands of prisoners to be moved deeper into Germany away from the advancing Russian army. He would leave one day, when they drew near to Dresden, by simply walking away. That was his plan.
No one, if they listened long enough, could fail to hear the distant rumbling sounds coming from the east. There were too many to miss, as the crisp cold days of January carried the faint booming of a thousand mortars and cannons echoing through the woods and across the wide expanse east of the camp. A phrase would soon begin that would be repeated again and again until they were actually there: “They are coming, the Russians,” spread through the camp. Coming not as liberators, but to defeat the hated Germans, they would bring their own particular version of hell with them, which like the Nazi’s was the stuff of fiction, being too unimaginable to be true. No female body was too young, or too old, to escape being penetrated by the conquering soldiers, who had been set loose on the towns like wild animals chasing down prey. Freeing Auschwitz’s prisoners meant little to them, unless they were Russians. Saving what few Jews remained in the camp after the Germans evacuated it would be an added burden they didn’t want.
As the thunder of the big guns grew louder, worry among the prisoners grew, too. Their task had become as one, to demonstrate to Erich and the other doctors they would be able to endure the long march ahead of them the day the camp was to be evacuated. No other choice was open for them to live. They would either march or be shot, or be left to die in their rotting skins for the Russians to find them.
The day before Erich was to leave Auschwitz, along with over sixty thousand prisoners, he noticed among a sickly group of Jews who would be left behind what seemed to be a familiar face. As the day progressed, the man’s face haunted him, and in the late afternoon he went to find him. But the man, called Abram, hid from Erich when he saw him approaching the barracks where he slept. In time, Erich quit the search, but the man’s face, especially his eyes, would not go away, following him wherever he went. He had never seen the man before, which was understandable to Erich, considering the thousands of prisoners that had come to Auschwitz during the past two years. It did seem strange to him though, that this one face he appeared to know but didn’t was squeezing his mind for an answer from the past that wasn’t there.
It was the worst of January’s winter days when Erich boarded the army truck that would take him and others of the medical staff away from Auschwitz. A cold wind mixed with sleet blew through the camp, making it impossible to stay warm. Those that were left behind would be shot where they were found or left to freeze to death in the unheated barracks. When the Russians would arrive nine days later, large mounds of rotting bodies would be there to greet their eyes. For Erich, though, there was little he cared to remember as the camp faded from view and into a history that was yet to be written. Only the mysterious face that came before him filled his mind, crowding out all other thoughts, had he tried or cared to think of what had happened behind the closing gates. It was as if he had never been there before. Auschwitz, and the man’s face when it came to him, was of another time and place. Hours later, when they were far into Germany, he would rest and sleep and know that Dresden was near and he would be home soon.
***