‘I know something you don’t know,’ I said with my chin going lazily from side to side. ‘I know something you don’t know I know. Ho ho. Ho ho ho. I know you don’t know I—’
‘You mean Herr Thomsen?’ she said brightly.
For a moment, I admit, I could think of nothing to say. ‘. . . Yes. Herr Thomsen. Come on, Hannah, whats your game? Listen. If you don’t—’
‘What are you talking about? I’ve got no reason to see him again. And I was sorry to impose in the 1st place. He was polite enough, but I could tell he rather resents anything that gets in the way of his mission.’
Again it was a while before I said, ‘Oh really? What “mission” is this?’
‘He’s obsessed by the Buna-Werke. He thinks it could decide the war.’
‘Well he’s not wrong there.’ I folded my arms. ‘No, hang on. Not so fast, my girl. The letter you had Humilia give him. Yes, oh yes, she told me all about it. Some people know what morality is, you see. That letter. Perhaps you’d care to satisfy me as to its contents?’
‘If you like. I asked for a meeting by the Summer Huts. At the playground. Where he reluctantly agreed to trace Dieter Kruger for me. I finally had a chance to apply to someone high up. Someone really important.’
I stood suddenly, giving my crown a glancing cuff on the mantelpiece.
‘You keep a civil tongue in your mouth when you talk to me young lady!’
After a moment her head gave a penitent bow. But I didn’t like the way this was going 1 bit. I said,
‘And the 2nd missive – the 1 he slipped you at the riding school?’
‘That was his reply, of course. His full report.’
3 minutes later Hannah said,
‘I’m not telling you. Do you understand? I’m not telling you. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep my promise to the girls.’
And with that she sashayed from the room . . . No. Our little exchange didn’t go at all as I’d planned. For a while I stared into the grate – at the punily lashing flamelets. Then I picked up a bottle of something or other and went off for some testing cogitations in my ‘lair’.
That night I woke up and my face was completely numb – my chin, my lips, my cheeks. As if drenched in novocaine. I rolled off the divan and dipped my head beneath my knees for an hour and a ½. It didn’t help. And I thought, If any girl or woman kissed my rubbery cheeks or my rubbery lips then I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
Like a dead leg or a dead arm. A dead face.
3. SZMUL: BREATHE DEEPLY
In addition we are being mocked, which is not very nice either, so to say. Mocked, and profaned. There is a Star of David on the ceiling of the airtight chamber. The foot rags they issue us with are scraps of prayer shawls. Transit Route IV, the slave-built highway from Przemsyl to Tarnopol, is laid out on the crushed rubble of synagogues and Jewish gravestones. Then there is the ‘Goebbels Calendar’: no holy day passes without an Aktion. The sharpest ‘measures’ are reserved for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana – our Days of Awe.
The eating. I believe I can explain the eating.
Of the five senses, taste is the only one that we, the Sonders, can partly control. The other senses are ruined and dead. It is strange about touch. I carry, drag, shove, seize – I do these things all night long. But the sense of connection is no longer there. I feel like a man with prosthetic hands – a man with false hands.
And when you consider what we see, what we hear, and what we smell, you won’t deny that we do badly need to control what we taste. What would it be, the taste in our mouths, in the absence of food? As soon as you swallow and the food is gone, it comes, it returns: the taste of our defeat, the taste of wormwood.
I mean the taste of our defeat in the war against the Jews. This war is in every conceivable sense one-sided. We did not expect it, and for far too long we gazed with real incredulity at the incredible anger of the Third Germany.
There is a transport from Theresienstadt which includes a number of Poles. During a three-hour delay caused by the non-appearance of the Disinfektoren, I fall into conversation with the family of a middle-aged industrial engineer (a one-time member of the Jewish Council in Lublin). I am reassuring his daughter and her children about the ample meals and snug lodgings, here at the KZ, and the man trustingly takes me aside and tells me a strange and terrible story about the recent events in Łódź. It turns out to be a story about the power of hunger.
September 4, and there is a thick crowd on Fireman’s Square. Rumkowski, weeping, reveals the latest German demand: the surrender, for deportation, of all adults over sixty-five and all children under ten. The next day the old will go, the young will go . . .
‘They’re probably all right,’ I manage to say. ‘You’ll be all right too. Look at me. Do I look half starved?’
But of course there is more. That same afternoon the people learn that a supply of potatoes is ready for distribution. And a wave of euphoria surges through the streets of the ghetto. Now the focus of talk and thought is not the disappearance of all adults over sixty-five and all children under ten, but the potatoes.
‘Don’t kill me, kill someone else,’ it increasingly amuses Doll to say. ‘I’m not a monster. I don’t torture people for the hell of it. Slay a monster, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Kill Palitzsch. Kill Brodniewitsch. Slay a monster.’
Sometimes he says (and I find, even in all this, that his diction still succeeds in offending me), ‘Kill someone powerful. I’m nothing. I’m not powerful. Me – powerful? No. I’m a cog in a vast machine. I’m rubbish. I’m just a cunt. I’m shit.
‘Why don’t you wait for the next visit of the Reichsfuhrer? If you don’t get him, try Mobius. His rank’s lower than mine but he’s far more weighty. Or Standartenfuhrer Blobel. Or Odilo Globocnik when he’s next here.
‘But don’t kill Paul Doll – though of course you’re welcome to try. Doll’s nothing. He’s shit. He’s just a cunt.’
*
The thought I find hardest to avoid is the thought of returning home to my wife. I can avoid the thought, more or less. But I can’t avoid the dream.
In the dream I enter the kitchen and she swivels in her chair and says, ‘You’re back. What happened?’ And when I begin my story she listens for a while and then turns away, shaking her head. And that is all. It’s not as if I tell her about my first thirty days in the Lager (spent in full-time exploration of the orifices of the recently dead, in collaboration with the German quest for valuables). It’s not as if I tell her about the time of the silent boys.
That is all, but the dream is unendurable, and the dream knows this, and humanely grants me the power to rouse myself from it. By now I am bolt upright the instant it starts. Then I climb from my bedding and pace the floor no matter how tired I am, because I’m afraid to go to sleep.
This morning, in another of our comradely debates, we return yet again to the matter of alleviation. Here are a few of the things that are said.
‘Every time, with every transport, we should sow panic. Every time. We should all move along the ramp whispering of murder.’
‘Futile? No, not futile. It would slow them down. And corrode their nerves. The Szwaby, the Zabójcy – they’re mortal.’
This speaker – like ninety per cent of all the Jews in the Sonderkommando – became an atheist about half an hour after starting work. But certain tenets linger. Judaism, unlike the other monotheisms, does not hold that the Devil takes human form. All are mortal. But this is another doctrine I am starting to doubt. The German is not something supernatural, but neither is he something human. He is not the Devil. He is Death.
‘They’re mortal. They tremble too. But when there’s panic. Nightmare!’
‘Good. So it should be.’
‘Why make it worse for our people? Why make their last minutes worse?’
‘They’re not their last minutes. Their last minutes are spent jammed solid and dying. And there are fifteen of them. Fifteen minutes.’
‘They
’re going to die anyway. We want it to cost the Szwaby.’
Another says, ‘The fact is we don’t sow panic. Do we. We smile and lie. Because we’re human beings.’
Another says, ‘We lie because when there’s panic we get killed quicker.’
Another says, ‘We lie because we fear the bloodlust and the rage.’
Another says, ‘We lie for our lousy selves.’
And I say, ‘Ihr seit achzen johr alt, und ihr hott a fach. That’s all there is. There’s nothing else.’
With his shirt off and gasmask on, Doll looks like a fat and hairy old housefly (a housefly that is nearing the end of its span). He sounds like a housefly too, as he repeats the number I have given him: a sizzling whine. He asks me something else.
‘I can’t make you out, sir.’
We are in the ‘ossuary’ – a broad concavity upwind of the pyre. I am counting charred hipbones before their transfer to the grinding teams.
‘Still can’t hear you, sir.’
He gives a jerk of his head, and I follow him up the slope.
On level ground he frees his mouth with a gasp and says, ‘So we must be nearly there, nicht?’
‘We’re definitely past half way, sir.’
‘Half way?’
The pyre is sixty metres from where we stand, and the heat, though still immense, is now seamed with autumn cold.
‘Well fucking get on with it . . . I know what’s worrying you. Fear not, hero. When we’re done here the whole squad’s for it. But you and your best fifty will proudly live on.’
‘Which fifty, sir?’
‘Oh, you choose.’
‘. . . I select, sir?’
‘Yes, you select. Go on, you’ve seen it done a thousand times. Select . . . You know, Sonder, I never nursed any particular hatred for the Jews. Something had to be done about them, obviously. But I’d’ve been content with the Madagascar solution. Or having you all neutered. Like with the Rhineland Bastards, nicht? The by-blows of the French Araber und Neger. Nicht? No killing. Just snipping. But you lot – you’re neutered already, ne? You’ve already lost what made you men.’
‘Sir.’
‘I didn’t decide all this.’
‘No, sir.’
‘I just said zu Befehl, zu Befehl. I just said ja, ja, yech, ja. Sie wissen doch, nicht? I didn’t decide. Berlin decided. Berlin.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘. . . You know that white-haired streak of piss who’s always in civvies? You must’ve heard talk of Thomsen, Sonder. Thomsen’s the nephew of Martin Bormann – the Reichsleiter, the Sekretar. Thomsen’s Berlin.’ Doll laughs and says, ‘So kill Berlin. Kill Berlin. Before Berlin kills you.’ He laughs again. ‘Kill Berlin.’
As he starts off back to the jeep Doll turns and says, ‘You live on, Sonder.’ Again he laughs. ‘I’m best of friends with the appropriate authority in Litzmannstadt. Maybe I can arrange a reunion. You and uh, “Shulamith”. She hasn’t got enough vitamin P, Sonder. Protektsye, nicht?
‘She’s still there, you know. In the attic above the bakery. She’s still there. But where’s her vitamin P?’
*
One morning I am in the lane passing the Kommandant’s garden, and I see Frau Doll setting off for school with her daughters. She looks in my direction and she says something quite extraordinary to me. And I recoil from it as if I have smoke in my eyes. Five minutes later, standing bent behind the main guardroom, I am able to shed tears for the first time since Chełmno.
‘Guten Tag,’ she says.
The urge to kill is like the bore of a river, a steepsided wave coming up against the flow. Against the flow of what I am or what I was. Part of me hopes the urge is there at the end.
But if it should happen that I go to the gas (in fact I am probably too conspicuous for that, and they’ll just take me aside for the shot to the nape – but imagine): if it should happen that I go to the gas, I will weave among them.
I will weave among them, saying, to the old man in the astrakhan coat, ‘Stand as close to the meshed shaft as you can, sir.’
Saying, to the boy in the sailor suit, ‘Breathe deeply, my child.’
CHAPTER IV. BROWN SNOW
1. THOMSEN: TOUCH THE OLD WOUND
THERE WAS A big sick bird, a kite I think it was – there was a big sick bird that hovered over the oak beyond the scaffold on the well-tended lawn (mown in stripes) facing the Appellplatz of the Farben Kat Zet.
It hovered there, in all weathers, brownish, yellowish, the colour of the healing eyes of the Commandant; and it never seemed to use its wings. It dangled – it just hung.
Now I knew a bird could do this, given a lucky confluence of currents, of rising thermals; but the sick bird did it all day long. Perhaps all night, too.
Would it like the upper air, you wondered? Sometimes the wind got in under its pinions, and they stirred, and you sensed effort, and you felt you could hear a distant groan of aspiration. Yet it failed to rise. The bird was aloft, merely; it couldn’t fly.
Sometimes it abruptly dropped three or four metres, it lurched downwards, as if tugged by a cord. It seemed inorganic, manmade – like a kite, in fact, directed by a boy’s inexperienced hand.
Perhaps it was mad, this ponderous predator of the air. Perhaps it was dying. You sometimes felt it was not a bird but a fish, a ray, floating, drowning, in the ocean of the sky.
I understood the bird, I absorbed it, I contained it within me.
This is what I passed to her at the riding school.
Dear Hannah:
Events oblige me to start with yet more bad news. Professor Szozeck’s Pikkolo, Dov Cohn, has also been ‘transferred’ (along with a Kapo called Stumpfegger, who took an interest in him and was possibly his confidant). And this six weeks after the event. It’s particularly hard to take, because I thought – didn’t you? – that Dov was very well equipped to survive.
After what you told me about the circumstances of your marriage, I no longer feel the need to pay your husband even the minimal respect due to the father of Paulette and Sybil. He is what he is, and he is getting worse. If he thought he had the right to eliminate three people, one of them a child, over a single instance of compromised prestige, which in truth was an act of kindness – well. I have a measure of protection, through my uncle. You have none.
It is urgently necessary, then, that we retroactively ‘normalise’ our past dealings, you and I. As a qualified Referendar, I have given the thing a good deal of plodding thought, and here is the version, and the sequence, I think we should stick to. It sounds complicated but it’s really very simple. The key is your certainty that Doll no longer knows the status or whereabouts of Dieter Kruger.
Now memorise this.
In the letter brought to me by Humilia, you asked me to do you a service, and said you could be found on Fridays at the Summer Huts. At our meeting there, I agreed to make inquiries about DK – reluctantly, because (of course) I resent anything that distracts me from my sacred mission at the Buna-Werke.
This second communication, the one you hold in your hand, is my report. Doll knows about the first letter, and it’s likely he knows about the second (again, we were observed). If he starts to question you – then be quick to open up, freely. And when he asks you what I discovered, you should simply announce that you’re not going to tell him. I will now inquire about DK (and so no doubt will your husband).
From here on we cannot meet, except communally – and no more letters. I have to say that I am deeply uneasy about what you propose for your side of it: your plan, so to speak, for the home front. As things stand, Doll will have no reason to strike out at you. But if your plan works, he won’t need a reason. Still, you seem resolved, and this decision is of course yours to make.
Let me now say something from the heart.
The letter continued for another two pages.
Her plan, it should be noted, was to do everything in her power to hasten the psychological collapse of the Commandant.
/> ‘Take that look off your face, Golo. It’s absolutely nauseating.’
‘. . . What?’
‘The meek smile. Like an altruistic schoolboy . . . I see. So there’s been some kind of breakthrough, has there. And that’s why you’ve clammed up on me.’
I was in the kitchen making breakfast. Boris had spent the night (under a heap of old curtains on the sitting-room floor) and was now crouched down rebuilding the fire, using crunched-up pages of The Racial Observer and The Stormer. Outside, the fourth week of uncompromising October weather, with low, heavy clouds, constant rain and wet mist, and, underfoot, a boundless latrine of purplish brown slime.
Referring to The Stormer (an illiterate hate-sheet run by Julius Streicher, the child-molesting Gauleiter of Franconia), Boris said, ‘Why do you take this wank mag? Old Yid Drugs Teen Blonde. Officers aren’t supposed to read The Stormer in camp. It’s the Old Boozer’s personal directive. He’s that refined. Well, Golo?’
‘. . . Don’t worry, I won’t be laying a finger on her here. Ruled out.’
‘The Hotel Zotar and all that?’
‘Ruled out.’ I asked him how many eggs he wanted and how he wanted them (six, fried). ‘Nothing clandestine. I’ll only be seeing her in company.’
‘You’ll be seeing her on the ninth of course.’
‘The ninth? Oh yeah, the ninth. Why do they go on about November the ninth?’
‘I know. You’d think they’d murder anyone who dared mention it.’
‘I know. But they go on about it . . . Doll and the Poles, Boris.’
‘Bunker 3?’ Boris laughed happily and said, ‘Oh, Golo, the state of old fat-arse. Christ. With his wall-eyed hangover. And his fluttering hands.’