The Devil's Playground (38 page)

becomes reality. That is how it begins.’

The Doctor coughed, looked away from the camera.

‘You know, after a few days of acclimatization, I really understood that I had found my place.’

‘Your place? What about your people? How the hell can you say

that?’

‘As I told you, there was little choice and besides, I was a doctor before I was a Jew. That was how I saw myself.’

‘How long were you there?’

Jake sounded exasperated, or was Jon just reading that into

his tone because he wanted to?

‘Until the end. There was a lot of work, important work.’

‘What exactly did you do there?’

‘Each doctor had his own area, his own special field of research.

They were allowed to use whatever means were necessary and

there were a lot of means at their disposal. One thing you all have misunderstood about the Nazis was their quest for knowledge.

The Fuhrer was nothing but the shadow of your own enlightened,

rationalist selves. Only with complete freedom can breakthroughs

be made. That was something I could agree with them on, something

I had always believed.’

‘But their premises were all wrong.’

‘Not entirely, my dear Jakob. Maybe nowadays they seem politically suspect - you might say so - but that does not, in any way,

demean their value as tools for the gathering of knowledge. You see, they had ultimate freedom and only through that can you discover

new worlds and new things.’

‘And what was your particular line of research?’

‘I was helping with a series of experiments for the SS. With their usual dry humour they called them “terminal human experiments”!’

The Doctor stopped to laugh. Was he doing it just for the

camera, Jon wondered, not at all sure if he wanted to carry

on but compelled to do so.

‘I had been interested in the human reaction to pain ever since I’d first picked up one of my father’s dusty Victorian anatomy books.

The SS were interested in finding ways to make the extraction of

information more efficient. These were experiments in resistance to torture. Of course by then the Jews were all ghosts, not really worthy volunteers at all and we tended to use the Russians, who were a

stronger and fiercer race by far. They had captured three million

Russian soldiers in their first campaign on the eastern front and a great many of those ended up in Auschwitz, in fact, the gas chambers themselves were road-tested on Russian POWs.

‘We exposed them to varying levels of pain. We tried different

instruments, different techniques, and we noted down the results.

They were then typed in triplicate and one copy was always sent

straight to Himmler, this field being of particular interest to him.

‘I remember one day we were told that Himmler was coming to

visit us. Dr Werner was scared, he’d spent all morning shouting

at us prisoner-doctors - we’d heard that at Sobibor, the camp

commanders had organized a special show for Himmler. They had

selected the forty prettiest Jewesses in the camp and then stripped them and put them in the gas chamber. There was in all gas chambers a viewing slit; usually doctors would use it to ascertain whether the people inside were dead, but the viewing slit had other uses too.

When Himmler arrived, they took him to the gas chamber and let

him watch the Jewesses slowly die in there.

‘Werner didn’t know what we could do to top that but he needn’t

have worried for Himmler was fascinated by our work here and was

a gentleman to the end.’

‘And Mengele?’

‘Ah. That name. How many times have I heard it to describe evil?

Spoken by people who had never met the man. Let me tell you, he

was the most erudite, well-dressed and polite human being I ever

knew. Nothing like the monster you have invented to explain the

horror - you need that monster, no? But that was not him.

‘Some of the guards feared Josef almost as much as the prisoners

did, but when you saw him playing with his children, the ones he

was working on, and you saw him pass them chocolate and sweets,

there was such a warmth and empathy about the man. Not for

nothing did the prisoners call him the Angel of Death. He was death to them but he was also an angel, fallen down and still capable of a certain amount of grace.’

‘But you thought less of his experiments than you did of Werner’s?’

‘Yes, Josef was one of those men who become obsessed by an

idea, a set of words and theories, and then mould the world around those ideas, warping it and reducing any medical breakthrough that one might have stumbled upon. Of course in Auschwitz it worked,

the place itself was a tear in reality you see, so he could do what he wanted and he could always find the specimens to prove his theories.

‘He was obsessed by the genetic and eugenic theories of the time.

Werner and I worked on real people with real premises. He endlessly collected and gathered twins, freaks, anything that could go to prove his theories that genetic corruption will eventually out and manifest itself in physical features. Really, that was, I think, a slightly too literal take on the Fuhrer’s work, but you know Josef found many

hunchbacks and cripples and other proofs of his theorem among the

millions that passed through that railway spur, so who knows, huh?

‘I remember he became obsessed with eyes once and one day I

was sent to collect something from him. I went to his work area

which was right next to the crematorium. The other doctors worked

well away from that place but Josef seemed to like passing the raging ovens with their sickly sweet smell, the mounds of hair and teeth

and valuables, on the way to work each morning. I think the place

inspired him, he felt at the crux of the New Order right there in that crematorium. So, I go in to see him and he has this wall with eyes pinned up all over it. Maybe a hundred or more eyes, pinned like

butterflies to the wall. I asked him what it was in aid of and he said, “So that we can see, my dear Kaplan, so that we can see.” It was the only time I had known the man to make a joke. But I was too scared to laugh. There was always a sense of unimpeachable dignity about him that made you take his work seriously however much you

objected to his premises.’

‘What did other doctors do? Were they all involved in experiments?’

‘Pretty

much so. That was their role in the camp. It is why so many

of us prisoner-doctors survived. They needed us. There was a lot of work going on around the whole sterilization issue. They felt they were paving the way for the new civilization, for a better time.

Clauberg was in charge of that. What were the best and most efficient ways to sterilize masses of people? They tried everything, had prisoners come in, sit at a table and fill out an innocuous form. While

they did this we blasted their genitals with X-rays. There were

some horrible swellings and abnormalities from that. Other doctors believed in surgical castration as the only safe way to achieve total sterilization and would have contests to see who could perform the fastest castrations. Dering, another prisoner-doctor, a Pole, used to carry around this small wrinkled tobacco pouch that he had made

out of a scrotum, an off-cut from the day’s work. Mengele sterilized a lot of women, used barium and God knows what else. Many died

of course but that is a small price to pay, no? In this, I think, we all came together. Nazi and Jew. In those rooms all that mattered was science. Ideology and politics were left at the door. They even almost treated us as equals.

‘You have to understand that Auschwitz was a spasm, long

delayed, resulting from the Enlightenment. A reaction to that time and the way it had shaped our world. Human beings cannot stand

too much order. You look shocked when I mention scrotum sacs but

you would be very wrong to think that these people were psychotic, that’s just the easy answer, eh? So, you see none of them was

psychotic, whatever you may think - remember “National Socialism

is nothing but applied biology” - they didn’t see themselves as

outside of society; on the contrary they thought they were the very fabric of that society. And perhaps, to a point, they were right.’

‘Right about what?’

The words struggled from Jake’s mouth. The Doctor smiled.

‘We were so stupid. The majority of us walked ourselves right into our deaths, still smiling and hoping and believing in the Nazis. At the crest of their glory they could kill twenty thousand Jews in twenty four hours … which they did, of course.’

‘They walked themselves to their deaths? What about all the

soldiers pointing the guns?’

‘Yes, yes, but there were so few soldiers really compared to the

number of Jews processed, they could have fought back. They would

have suffered heavy casualties but they would have disrupted the

whole machinery - look at the Sonderkommando rebellion - but no,

they walked into the gas chambers and the cattlecars before that like obedient schoolchildren. You know when people say this and that

about the Holocaust, how its uniqueness lay in the skill and efficiency the Nazis brought to killing, the mechanization of death - they really don’t get it. What made the concentration camps unique was not so

much all the horror that occurred there but the fact that millions of people marched themselves to their own deaths with hardly a whisper.

That was what was so special about the place. You would see

them, silently trudgingtowards the spewing black chimneys, smelling their kinfolk in the air and yet they still didn’t believe it, just followed the orders and marched into the shower room.’

‘But you never fought back yourself. You were just like them.’

‘Perhaps so, Jakob, perhaps I am more of a Jew than I know. But I

understood what was going on. My decisions were based on fact.

The majority of the prisoners refused, until the very last moment, to see the reality. They died because of their refusal to face the horrible truths that were staring them right in the face, that they could smell.

Also, a foolish and suicidal belief in the inherent goodness of people - remember Anne Frank, still believing, writing that thing in her diary about the goodness of Man, even as they wrenched her out of her

hiding-place and sent her to Belsen. Right until the end they refused to believe that the Nazis would really just be killing them for the sake of it. To have accepted this would have been to have let go of all the assumptions and beliefs that their world-view rested upon, it was

too much to give up, even on the price of death.’

The camera moved and tracked the Doctor as he looked

towards Jake.

Jon’s heart jumped a gear.

There was another person in the room.

Someone doing the filming.

Someone else.

The sound of Jake’s voice brought him back.

‘So you think it was their fault?’

The camera tracked back towards the Doctor.

‘I don’t think blame comes into it, I don’t think that works at all. There are an infinite number of factors that make up any event and the

event is only such because of those factors, take away one, shift

emphasis and you have a different event. But I do think the Nazis

saw it as a confirmation of their beliefs. The fact that we did not fight back, that we accepted and believed, that just reconfirmed why they were doing it all in the first place.

‘I remember one morning I was on ramp duty, this was late in the

war. I was going through the line, most times you could tell, it was an easy decision, left or right. I asked this girl what she did, she answered in German that she was a draughtswoman, she also told

me she was pregnant and could she stay with her husband. I said,

“Of course”, and motioned her to the line for the showers. When I

had finished and the ones who’d survived the selection marched off to Auschwitz 1, I went back along the line and saw the strange

German girl again. She was motioning to me so I went over. She

took something out of her jacket, I thought she was going to try and bribe me with gold, they all did - but no, she took out a sketch book full of these dark and tormented drawings with texts overlaid on

them. Horrible, anguished stuff. She thought because I was a Jew

like her that I would somehow understand. She asked me if I could

give this to her husband, she told me his name, I think she had

guessed her fate by then. I said I would and took the sketch book.’

‘You ever find her husband?’

‘I never tried to. That wasn’t the point of the story.’

The Doctor lit another cigarette. Jon noticed how he seemed

to have lost years since he’d started speaking. He wanted to

leap into the TV set and strangle him. Couldn’t understand

why the fuck Jake didn’t. Jake’s voice echoed off-screen

again, calm and collected. There was a frightening lack of

critique in Jake’s comments. Jon couldn’t believe he was so

docile and calm. Could it be that he was in such awe of a

man who had actually survived that to criticize him seemed

a sort of betrayal? There was a certain reverence in Jake’s

voice when he spoke to the old man, almost as if he was

Jake’s father, his real father, finally found.

Jon leaned back, smoked a cigarette, watching the paused

image of the Doctor. Too many things clouded his mind,

too many questions that led to further questions. Too many

decisions, Suze, Jake and all the other ghosts that haunted

Amsterdam. He stubbed out the cigarette, set the film back