Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (20 page)

“We still had no idea what happened to all the people. The six of us – us four and the two sign-painters – were the only people in Camp I for several days. Wagner was responsible for us and we saw Stangl every day – he appeared to come just because he enjoyed watching me. Every time he came I’d ask him about my father, and he always said the same thing: not to worry, just to work and that I’d be all right. The Ukrainians were not allowed to enter the ‘gold-hut’, but other
SS
officers came, of course, as soon as they realized we were working there, and all of them ordered things.

“It was on the seventh day after we arrived that a Ukrainian guard came [presumably to the window of the hut] and said he had a message for me, which he would give to me if I gave him some gold. I said I’d give him the gold the next day. The note was from another cousin who was – he wrote – in Camp III [the gassing and burial camp]. He wrote that I was to say the
kaddish
for my father. ‘Here no one remains alive,’ he said. ‘Pray for them.’

“Then we knew. And we learned too that out of every transport they kept fifty strong men and boys and made them clean up after a transport had been killed. The corpses weren’t burnt then – they were buried in lime-pits. And when they had finished cleaning up, they too were killed. This happened every day in the beginning. It was only later that semi-permanent Kommandos were formed who did this work for weeks, months and – a few of them – throughout the whole existence of the camp. But from that moment on the awareness of the proximity of death never left me. Though – it is true – deep inside me I never believed that I –
I
– would die.

“I still saw Stangl every day. He seemed fascinated by my work. And he talked to me; you know – he chatted, almost as if we were normal people, I the craftsman, he the customer.

“For a long time after I had received the note from my cousin in Camp III I didn’t ask him any more about my father. But one day, just to see what he would say, I said again, ‘How is my father?’ This was weeks later, but he said again, ‘He is fine; don’t worry about him: just do your work.’

“I knew that work was the only security we had. I worked day and night. The trick was to make oneself indispensable. And they
all
wanted gold things. Oh yes, I am sure I made things for Stangl. I can’t remember what, but all of them ordered things; like decorations or monograms for handbags for their wives and girl friends. There was
so
much gold, so much money, so many things: we lacked nothing for our day-to-day life. As long as the rich transports arrived, we had all the food in the world, everything we could imagine.

“One day, fairly early on, we were told to stay in our barracks; if we showed ourselves outside, we’d be shot on sight. There was great commotion and from the window we could see a line of cars arrive. Later we found out that it was Himmler; and he came again some months afterwards. The very day after his visit, construction was stepped up and only too soon afterwards there were new buildings, new facilities, and the number of transports and people being killed increased tenfold.

“Soon we had company in our barrack: three young women, Eda, Esther and Bagle, who came to work as cooks. Then two shoemakers, two bakers, five tailors, one milliner – more and more arrived and finally they split us up into groups living in different barracks. I was made ‘block-eldest’ of my group, which included laundresses, cooks, bricklayers, bakers and us goldsmiths.”

In his book Stan tells of a short love-affair with the cook, Bagle. She had arrived at the camp with her husband, who was killed at once. “I had made love once before,” Stan wrote, “to a young girl of about fifteen in the ghetto at Wolwonice where we were all sleeping very cramped. But I felt terribly inexperienced. I liked Bagle. One day I went to the kitchen. She said Eda and Esther, who worked there with her, were out having a wash. I thought the opportunity right and kissed her face and told her I wanted her. She smiled and said I was too young for her. ‘Esther is nearer your age,’ she said. But I told her I didn’t like Esther – I liked
her.
And I told her I’d never had an apple, and didn’t like to experiment with a green one. And then I saw she was actually proud that I wanted her instead of the younger girl, and she came to me.”

One of the things on which I questioned Stan Szmajzner closely was a matter he had testified about to the Brazilian police and later at the trial: a great deal had been made of it in the press in Brazil. He said that Stangl was in the habit of bringing him sausages on Friday night and that he would call loudly, “Here’s some sausage for you to celebrate the Sabbath.” The implication was clearly that Stangl, in a particularly outrageous way, was tormenting this young boy from an orthodox Jewish background by tempting him, when he was presumably starving, to eat pork. In October 1970 I was present on the last day of Stangl’s trial when Stan testified to this effect, and certainly I – like the court, the newspapers and before this, the Brazilians – gained the impression that this was what he was intending to convey.

Stangl, in his conversations with me, was to refer repeatedly and bitterly to this part of Szmajzner’s testimony. “That business with the sausage,” he said, “was deliberately misinterpreted.… It’s true I used to bring him food and probably there was sausage. But it wasn’t to taunt him with pork; I brought him other things too. It was because we received our food allocations on Fridays and – there was a great deal of food in the camp much of the time – we had food left over. I
liked
the boy.… He testified in Brazil – and you should have seen how the papers there
ate
it up, what they made of it – that I used to stand in front of the window of the barrack where he worked and shout tauntingly, holding up the sausage. But I never did such a thing.…I don’t
know
what the sausages – if sausages there were – were made of. But you know, during the war pork sausage was a luxury; I honestly don’t think it could even have been pork; it was most probably a mixture of beef and breadcrumbs.”

In Brazil Stan told me that he hadn’t really meant to convey that Stangl had taunted him, and that he himself didn’t know what the sausages were made of. I asked him whether he realized the interpretation that had been given to what he had said – he had repeated the same thing three times and it was interpreted three times the same way.

“I don’t know that I did know,” he said. “I didn’t really mean it that way, though; I think he
was
perhaps just doing me a good turn; it’s perfectly true that he seemed to like me; that he made a sort of pet of me. Perhaps he really did want to help me. Still,” he added thoughtfully, “it was funny, wasn’t it, that he always brought it on a Friday evening?”

I am not absolutely convinced that Stangl was incapable of this sort of playful cruelty; it is just possible, in the context of the change that (as we will see later) came over him quite soon after his arrival in Sobibor. And it is equally possible that, if he did do it, he would deny it later not only to others but to himself. As our talks progressed, it became clear that what he was most concerned about (until the last two days) were what one might call the lesser manifestations of moral corruption in himself; once again, what he
did
rather than what he
was.
It was his “deeds” – his relatively mild deeds – he was at great pains to deny or rationalize rather than his total personality change.

Stan Szmajzner also said in court, and to me, that Stangl had ordered him to make a monogram for a handbag. On re-examination in court he had also said that whether for a whip, handbag or ring, he was sure that he had made
something
for Stangl. He explained that on Wagner’s and Stangl’s orders he made rings for all the
SS
men–silver ones with germanic symbols–
Runen
–inset in gold:
stood for life and
for death, both of which, as Wagner told him, the
SS
controlled.
*
Stangl, he said, had no need to make a secret of bringing him small quantities of gold to melt down. “All of them brought gold–later it was gold fillings with the flesh and blood still on them, the way they had been torn out of people’s mouths.…Stangl,” he testified, “was always cheerful and treated me with kindness. I didn’t have the impression from him – of being in a camp. [But] I certainly thought that the gold he brought was for his personal use. He had no need to send other people, or to hide.”

In court Stangl insisted that he had never told Szmajzner or anyone else to melt down gold. “I merely watched him work,” he said. “I told him once to cut the oakleaves out of a silver one – Mark coin and to insert my monogram in gold and silver – that’s all.”

“Szmajzner’s testimony,” Frau Stangl told me, “was obviously very important to us because he lives here [in Brazil] as we do. When he testified before the police in Brazilia, it was all over the papers – it did Paul a lot of harm. He was very hurt by it, he told me, because Szmajzner was just a boy in Sobibor and Paul really liked him.”

Szmajzner allowed press photographers to take pictures of him with Frau Stangl after the hearing ended in Düsseldorf. I remember being amazed at seeing this survivor of Sobibor pose with Stangl’s wife for smiling pictures, and I asked Stan about it in Goiania. “I agreed to it,” he said “because I had nothing against Stangl’s family and I was aware of how hard all this was on them. I thought if I showed my own goodwill towards them by posing for pictures with Frau Stangl for the Brazilian press, this might reflect on the public attitude here towards Stangl’s family.”

Throughout our long conversation Stan Szmajzner was fair and tolerant. Indeed, I felt, almost too anxious to give credit where he could, to a man whose family “who had nothing to do with all this”, was also living in
his
chosen country. This was in sharp contrast to his attitude on hearing from me that Gustav Wagner was still alive and was probably in Brazil, information which I had from Stangl. On hearing this, Stan cried. “It is the worst, the most terrible shock you could have given me,” he said. “That man. Here in Brazil. To think that I am now breathing the same air as he – it makes me feel terribly, terribly ill.…I would not know how to find words to describe to you what a terrible – a truly terrible man that is. Stangl – he is good by comparison, very good. But Wagner – he should be dead.…” He begged me to find out where Wagner was, because, he kept on repeating, “I must do something.” It took most of the day, off and on, to calm him and persuade him that vengeance ought not to be his.

I asked Stan Szmajzner how it was, in his own opinion, that he had managed to survive. What sort of person did you have to be, to survive these camps? What were the special qualities needed?

“I understand your question,” he said. “Yes, we too were corrupted, of course: life was everything. I remember how furious we used to be when the transports came from the East rather than the West. Those coming from Germany, Holland, Austria, Hungary–they brought clothes and above all, food; we could go and choose anything we liked. The ones from Poland and points east had nothing, and then we went comparatively hungry. It is true, you see, if there hadn’t been gold, we wouldn’t have lived. So, in a sense, their death meant our life.

“I never saw Stangl hurt anyone,” he said at the end. “What was special about him was his arrogance. And his obvious pleasure in his work and his situation. None of the others – although they were, in different ways, so much worse than he – showed this to such an extent. He had this perpetual smile on his face.…No, I don’t think it was a nervous smile; it was just that he was happy.”

*
Edition Bloch, Brazil, 1968.

*
These same symbols were used by
Lebensborn
, the Nazi breeding institutes for racial improvement, where thousands of “racially superior” young girls were mated with members of the SS and where their offspring – property of the state, without parents – were then brought up An indeterminate number of such small children were found in these institutes, or places connected with them, at the end of World War II, quietly removed and discreetly placed with fosterparents.