A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (13 page)

I have no intention of denying anything; the pictorial evidence is incontrovertible, but I do react slightly to the German legal terminology for my crime, where
widrig
in my language (
vidrig
) means “repulsive.” This is not proportionate to the crime, in my view. Particularly not to a crime committed on this road, which is the road from Auschwitz to the town of Ludwigslust, in which the park between the palace and the city church is filled with the victims of Wöbbelin.

And particularly not in a language like this, with its documented capacity for concealing the most repulsive acts behind the most formal and correct terms.

Slave labor in the German camp archipelago goes under the formal designation of “prisoners’ work contribution,”
Arbeitseinsatz der Häftlinge
, and is administered by the SS Central Office for Financial and Administrative Affairs,
Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt
,
called the WVHA for short, and superintended by SS-Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl. Formal applications from German industrialists for allocations of labor from Auschwitz are handled by SS-Sturmbannführer Gerhard Maurer, head of WVHA Department DII, responsible for prisoners’ work contributions, but less formal approaches can be addressed to his superior, SS-Brigadeführer Richard Glücks, and on occasion highly informal requests go direct to Oswald Pohl himself. In the end, it’s only the language that’s formal. Repulsive acts know no formality.

In early September 1944—the exact date is unknown—two representatives of the Büssing truck company, Otto Pfänder (engineer) and Otto Scholmeyer (finance director) turn up at Auschwitz in person to select slave workers for the company’s operations in Braunschweig. This is presumably not the formally correct procedure, since it is the SS that makes formal decisions about life and death in Auschwitz, but the links between the SS and German industry have grown more informal, as the production of goods has become increasingly dependent on the delivery of slaves. By autumn 1944, most large German companies are implicated in repulsive acts, demanding that the SS build them a slave camp at their factory gate.

The SS provides not just one slave camp but two for Firma Büssingwerke in Braunschweig. One is on Schillstrasse, in the center of Braunschweig, the other in the village of Vechelde, ten kilometers west of the town. The slave camp in Vechelde is an
Unterkommando
of the camp in Schillstrasse, which is an
Aussenlager
, or satellite, of KZ Neuengamme, which is the command center of the SS machinery for the swiftly expanding slave labor archipelago in the area between Hamburg, Hannover, and Braunschweig. In Schillstrasse, the slaves live in hastily built barracks, and every morning and evening they’re marched a good kilometer
under SS supervision through central Braunschweig to a big factory complex with the name H. Büssing in white letters on the curved facade of the brick-red main building. Most of the slaves wear the striped concentration camp garb, which is never changed and over time turns black with soot and stiff with dirt. All the slave laborers, including those who must drag themselves along, are marched through the streets of the town for all to see. No one in Braunschweig can be unaware of the formally correct atrocities that are committed in the truck factory in the midst of their city.

In Vechelde, Firma Büssing has set up a separate factory for the production of back axles. Since the past summer, it’s housed in a disused jute mill in the middle of the village, a stone’s throw from houses and gardens. There are no daily slave marches to disturb the idyll here, as the SS camp has been set up in one of the factory halls and the slaves sleep by their machines. One thing that may possibly disturb the residents of Vechelde is the weekly transport of corpses from the camp in Schillstrasse, as these are loaded onto the same vehicles that transport raw materials for the back axles from the factory in Braunschweig. In Vechelde, the back-axle materials are unloaded and any additional corpses are loaded, after which the combined corpses from Schillstrasse and Vechelde are transported another twenty kilometers to
Aussenlager
Watenstedt, where they are unloaded and buried. Emptied of corpses, the truck is then loaded with food for the slave laborers in Vechelde. Emptied of both corpses and food, the truck is then finally loaded with the completed back axles for the factory in Braunschweig. A most efficiently used truck, undoubtedly, but the Büssing factory is short on trucks for its own use, since all the trucks it manufactures must be delivered to the German state.

The death rate in the Schillstrasse camp is high; in late 1944, between eight and ten corpses a day are stripped naked, relieved of their gold teeth, allocated numbers, and packed in paper bags to await the transport of back-axle parts to Vechelde. The transport of back-axle parts is on Mondays. In the meantime the corpses are stored in a hut, where the corpses often make the bags wet, so they tear easily when they’re being loaded onto the truck. Eventually, the bags are replaced by wooden boxes, each accommodating ten corpses. By January 1945, between four hundred and five hundred corpses have been transported from
Aussenlager
Schillstrasse to
Aussenlager
Watenstedt via
Unterkommando
Vechelde. I haven’t been able to find any statistics for the number of corpses added each week in Vechelde, but that camp is smaller and conditions are better and the death rate is, for now, significantly lower.

I will thus dare to say that you’re lucky, since
Unterkommando
Vechelde happens to be your first place on the road from Auschwitz. Of course, there’s no need to keep repeating how lucky you are, so I shall say it only once. Luck, chance, and freak are the stones with which every road from Auschwitz is paved. There are no other roads from Auschwitz but those of improbability. You’re loaded onto a train in Auschwitz and find yourself, utterly improbably, unloaded onto a freight depot platform in central Braunschweig for further delivery to
Unterkommando
Vechelde. You’re part of a group of 350 Jewish men who were recently on their way from the ghetto in Łódź to the gas chambers and crematoriums in Auschwitz, and who by some blind fate have been nudged onto a route leading to a freight depot platform in the heart of Germany. You can’t believe your eyes. “Some Sturmführer” asks if you’re all hungry! You get your own plates to eat from! The Sturmführer personally (!) ladles out
the soup, and asks if it tastes all right (!) and whether you’d like some more! You think you’re dreaming. “After Auschwitz, this is Paradise,” you write a year later, while the memory is still fresh, to the woman who is to be my mother.

In February and March 1945, Büssing’s factories in Braunschweig are being bombed, and the slave labor camps are evacuated, and yet another circuitous journey through the camp archipelago begins, and hell makes its presence felt again.

It’s on the trail of this journey, not far from its end, on the winding and solitary road to the pretty town of Ludwigslust, with my eyes staring vaguely ahead and my thoughts somewhere else, that I’m caught on camera, contravening the law against repulsive acts.

In Vechelde, all that remains of the Büssing factory for making truck axles is a Romanesque-style gateway of red brick and white marble. It takes a while to understand what it’s doing there among the detached brick houses and box hedges that have sprung up all around, a lost factory gateway connected to nothing and leading to nowhere, until you come closer and
discover the two memorial plaques on each side of it, one commemorating the jute mill and the other the slave labor camp. I’m not surprised. Anyone who knows at which points along your road from Auschwitz there ought to be a memorial plaque will most likely find one, and perhaps even a small monument if you search for it, and occasionally even a memorial museum. You have to hand it to the Germans, even in commemorating repulsive acts, they’re conscientious. Touchingly conscientious, you might say. On the right-hand plaque, put up in October 1989 by
Gemeinde
Vechelde (the community of Vechelde), it says:

On the site of the slave labor camp in Schillstrasse there’s a memorial monument too, in fact a whole memorial area. A rabbinical saying (
rabbinische Weisheit
)
—
“The future has a long past” (
Die Zukunft hat eine lange Vergangenheit
)
—
is written in large white letters on the wall of a modern factory building that happens to overlook the small walled enclosure where testimonies to the repulsive acts in Braunschweig have been put on permanent display for all to see. At my side is Dr. Karl Liedke, without whose help I would have found neither the road that leads here nor the memorials lining it. Dr. Liedke is my cicerone. He has drawn the map I’m following. It’s useless as a driving map, but it’s the only map in existence that shows your road from Auschwitz. It has dates and places and arrows showing directions
and a green line showing the route absentmindedly crossing its own tracks among the red dots of the camp archipelago.

Perhaps you find it strange that anyone should devote several years of his or her life to mapping your particular road from Auschwitz, but no one who wishes to study the industrial history of the town of Braunschweig can avoid it.

Not all roads from Auschwitz have a Karl Liedke following their trail.

Karl Liedke is born in 1941 in Warsaw as the youngest son of an ethnic German father and an ethnic Polish mother and grows up in postwar Poland, where for understandable reasons, ethnic Germans are not in favor. When Germany invaded Poland, the father was recruited by the Polish army as a Polish citizen, and after the German victory, by the German army as an ethnic German, which turns out to be reason enough for vengeful Poles to have him killed in the wake of the war. In Karl Liedke’s earliest childhood memory, his father is wearing a uniform and his mother won’t answer the boy’s question about which uniform it is. Later in life he’s trained as an industrial economist.