War and Remembrance (22 page)

The prisoners disappear single file into the gray flat-roofed building. Guards wait on the roof with canisters, by pipe apertures recently pierced. Three hundred men can be packed into the wide low cement room. That detail
has been tested. The aperture flaps seal tight; that too has been tested. The Commandant walks up and down in the snow, swinging his arms to keep warm, three aides at his heels, all in well-fitted green uniforms. He is a martinet about uniforms. Sloppy appearance in guards is the beginning of a breakdown in camp morale. He saw that in his early service at Dachau…

Activity on the roof!

In due course he enters the building with his aides. The gas-masked SS men on duty inside give the Commandant a momentary remembrance of his service in the last war. Accepting and donning a mask, he observes that the process in the mortuary is not a silent one. That is for sure. Muffled yells, screams, shouts sound through the door, although this noise did not carry outside. He glances at his wristwatch. Seven minutes since activity on the roof began. He steps up to the thick glass peephole in the door.

The harsh mortuary lights are blazing, but this damned glass will have to be replaced; poor quality, it makes everything yellow and wavering, distorts details. Most of the prisoners are already down, piled all over each other, some not moving, others rolling or writhing. Perhaps fifty or so are still on their feet, stumbling and jumping about. Several right here at the door are pounding and clawing, with open yelling mouths in crazy faces. An ugly sight! But even as he watches, they are one by one dropping away like flies in a spray of pyrethrum. The Commandant has seen many and many a flogging, hanging, and shooting, having been himself eight years an unjustly sentenced political prisoner under Weimar, and eight more years a concentration camp officer. One learns to take this sort of thing; one gets hard. Yet he feels rather sick to see this process. It is something different. Still, what can one do? One is carrying out orders.

The stuff works, no doubt of that. With decent airtightness it really seems to do the job. For an instant the Commandant lifts his mask. No odor out here in the corridor, none whatever. That is important; no danger to personnel. Perhaps masks can be dispensed with in time.

It is getting quiet in there now. The mass of bodies is quiescent but for a hump here and there still heaving and flopping. No reason to linger. He leaves, handing his mask to the guard at the door. Outside he fills his lungs with the cold air of snowy Auschwitz, sweet and delicious after the nasty, rubbery, chemical smell of air filtered through a mask.

He closely questions the lieutenant in charge of ventilating the chamber. Until it is safe, he wants no show-off personnel going in there, even with masks. The ventilation is poor, the lieutenant admits. Big portable fans will be used. They should do the job in an hour. The Commandant issues a flat order: for three hours after ventilation begins, nobody inside the mortuary! Safety factor of two hundred percent; that’s how to run a hazardous operation.

His personal aide drives him in his staff car to the Residence, where his wife and children await him for Christmas dinner. The Commandant is in no mood for festivity. He has kept a hard calm face all through this business. It is up to him to set the example! But he
is
human, though nobody in the Interest Area especially thinks
so.
That is how it must be, with the orders that he has to carry out. He takes a hot shower, scrubbing himself vigorously, and puts on a fresh uniform, though the other
is
fresh, too, and carries no smell. He cannot relax on the base, he
is
always in uniform when he is not asleep; and there is something unseemly in eating Christmas dinner in the same uniform he wore before.

As he showers and dresses, trying to be cold and businesslike in his thoughts, he has to be pleased with the results. Reichsfiihrer Himmler already told him back in July — honoring him with a long private interview in his inner office — about the big Jewish project. It is something so secret that he half-suppresses it, even in his thoughts. The orders come direct from the Führer, so there can be no argument. Several other camps will take some of the load, but Auschwitz is to be a main disposal center.

Hoping all the while that it may be an exaggerated scheme — a lot of Himmler’s ideas are mostly talk — the Commandant has nevertheless been compelled to look into the problem. Visits to camps where such actions on a small scale are already under way have convinced him that no existing means will serve to do what Himmler forecasts. The asphyxiation by carbon monoxide at Treblinka is a drawn-out, messy affair, very wasteful of fuel and of time, and not one hundred percent effective. Shooting on the projected scale is also out of the question. The psychological effect on the execution squads would be unendurable, setting aside the serious ammunition problem.

No, the poison gas in rooms of large capacity has always been an idea worth trying; but which gas? Today’s experiment shows that Zyklon B, the powerful insecticide they have been using right along at the camp to fumigate the barracks, may be the surprisingly simple solution. Seeing is believing. In a confined airtight space, with a plentiful dose of the blue-green crystals, those three hundred fellows didn’t last long! Much larger rooms, carefully built, with a humane and orderly procedure to pack large numbers in at a time, will give satisfactory results. The problem of disposing of the bodies remains. That tough one is just being dumped in his lap, as usual. No bright suggestions from above; leave it to Hoess. But the present small crematorium can barely handle the prisoners who die a natural death and the various offenders who are shot or hanged.

Well, time for Christmas dinner. The Commandant joins his family. But it is not a gay occasion, though the handsomely furnished Residence is full of fine decorations, and a nice tree twinkles its ornaments in the foyer. His wife keeps filling his wineglass with Moselle, an apprehensive look on her face.
The kids are all dressed up and shiny-faced, but they too have scared expressions. The Commandant would like to create a warm home atmosphere, but his burdens are too heavy. He can’t be the good German husband and father he’d like to be. He is morose. His brief conversation has a growling note. He can’t help it. The roast goose is excellent, the brisk services of the Polish girls can’t be faulted, but the Commandant has had a rotten day, Christmas or no Christmas, and that’s that.

He does feel sorry for the kids. When he goes off with the brandy bottle, to smoke a cigar and drink by himself, he ponders again about sending them back to Germany to school. His wife objects. Life is lonely enough on the base as it is, she keeps saying. Of course, she knows nothing about what goes on across the road, beyond the barbed wire. She can’t understand that the atmosphere of Oswiecim is just not the best for growing kids. He will have to look into it again. The private tutoring they are getting from young educated SS officers is no way for German children to grow up. They need friends their own age, merry games, athletics, a normal life.

As the Commandant methodically empties the brandy bottle, worrying despite the welcome numbing of alcohol about his kids and about a dozen pressing camp problems, and getting unpleasant intermittent mental pictures of the heaving flopping pile of Russians seen through the yellow peephole, dusk is falling over the long rows of blockhouses in the quarantine camp. The Russian POWs are marching in from their day’s work at the Birkenau site. Some stagger under the weight of limp bodies in striped ticking. All the corpses must be brought back from the work site for the evening roll call, since the count of living and dead has to match the number of men who left in the morning, to establish that nobody has escaped Auschwitz except by dying. The prisoners’ band is thumping out a march, for the workers always leave and return to merry, brassy music.

Berel Jastrow bows beneath a very light corpse. The head swings like a stone on a rope. It is a man unknown to him who, just before work stopped, fell and died before his eyes in the lumberyard. He lays the body down in the row of corpses on the parade ground, and hurries to his place in ranks. When roll call ends it is dark. Returning to his block, Berel finds it less crowded than before. Some of the gassed men came from this house.

“Yuri Gorachov!” the block captain yells. That is the false name Berel used to join the Red Army in Moscow. He stiffens, pulling off his striped cap and dropping his arms rigidly to his sides. The block captain, a Ukrainian kapo and a very ugly customer, approaches him in the gloom, holding a piece of paper.

“Get your belongings!”

Carrying his ragged little sack, Jastrow marches after him out on the snow, and far down the line of floodlit buildings. Berel is too weary, starved,
and numbed by cold and constant terror to be overconcerned about what may well be his imminent death. Let come what God wills.

They enter a block near the gate. The light is brighter in this block. The crowded prisoners look cleaner and better fed. Nor are they Russians, for Berel sees nowhere the big black
SU
that
is
painted on his own back.

The Ukrainian hands over the gray paper to a big man in a kapo armband, with a tremendous red beard and tiny wrinkled blue eyes; he gestures at Berel, mutters in garbled German, and goes. Taking the prisoner roughly by an elbow, the red-bearded man hustles him down the wooden tiers of bunks to the far end of the block. There, Jastrow sees Sammy Mutterperl, leaning his back on a tier, talking to another prisoner.

This is as stunning and gladsome a surprise as a reprieve from execution.

For, recognizing Mutterperl in the lumberyard that afternoon, just before picking up the light corpse, Berel took his life in his hands to whisper to him. Talking between prisoners
is
punishable with instant death by clubbing, whipping, or shooting. But Mutterperl was obviously a privileged prisoner — not a kapo, but some sort of foreman — for he was shouting orders at a squad of big Poles stacking lumber. There was no mistaking Mutterperl, an Oswiecim building contractor, formerly a fellow yeshiva student; a very pious, very burly man with a mashed nose from an accident on a construction job. So Berel risked brushing past him and whispering his name and his block number. Mutterperl, fat and powerful-looking as ever in the striped prison garb, his matted hair and whiskers still almost all brown, made no sign of recognition or even of hearing him.

The red-bearded kapo gestures to Berel that he will sleep in the topmost bunk of the tier Mutterperl leans against; and off he goes. Not looking at Jastrow, Mutterperl drops into his Polish chatter with the other prisoner a brief,
“Sholem aleichem, Reb Berel.
“

It is Jastrow’s first hint that God may let him live.

T
HIS
time the
Devilfish
caught a barrage. The thunderous clangs, the jolting shocks, the sharp pain in the ears, the blackout, the agonizing bouncing and grinding of the darkened submarine on the sea floor, the sounds of breakage, the panicky yells, the unseen things hitting Byron’s face — one of them felt jagged and cut his cheek — all seemed weirdly natural, all part of one simple experience, one sudden catastrophe, his death in the
Devilfish.
Even the previous depth charging had been nothing to this black bombinating ringing bedlam, this chaos of life bursting apart.

“
I’m taking her up. Blow tanks! Surface! Surface!”
He could barely hear the captain’s strained bellow in the voice tube, but before he could issue orders to the planesmen, there came another hoarse howl. “Belay that, Byron. I’m taking her up to fifty feet! Blow negative! Maximum up angle! All ahead full!”

The lights came on, showing the planesmen clinging for dear life to their control wheels. The other sailors clutched stanchions, valve heads, anything that would keep them from breaking their limbs or their skulls in this tossing quaking space with its hundreds of iron projections. The depth charges boomed and crashed in a hell without letup. Books, cups, measuring instruments, were clattering and flying about; cork fragments rained in the air. Nevertheless, the planesmen obeyed orders, frantically twisting their wheels, and the submarine with a grind and a bound went forward, wallowing, shuddering, bucking in the roiled water. It was proving a tough vessel. Whatever the havoc so far, the hull was holding, there was some charge left in the can, and the engines were turning; but the control room had a wrecked look, two of the sailors were bleeding — Byron too put his hand to a wet spot on his cheek, and brought it away red — and Chief Derringer was horribly gagging and vomiting behind the dead reckoning tracer. Death still seemed very close at hand.

However, the submarine had gained a shade of advantage from the attack. Even in the deep ocean, the heavy explosions would have created a screen of turbulence opaque to sonar, and therefore a new chance to sneak away. With the
Devilfish
on the bottom, the rain of depth charges had raised a broad cloud of mud. Through this cloud it moved off momentarily hidden from the enemy’s sonar. Astern the depth charges blasted and rumbled. Obviously
the destroyer captain, his charges set by fathometer, was plastering the area to bring up debris as proof of his victory.

But Byron’s awareness of this tactical situation was nil. Somehow they were under way again; that was all he knew. As he stanched the cut on his face with a handkerchief, Carter Aster’s voice on the loudspeaker startled him.
“Now pharmacist’s mate to the conning tower on the double.
“ The quartermaster came trampling down from conn to tell Byron in a low voice that the captain had been thrown off his feet by one of the explosions, fallen in the darkness, and struck his head. When the lights came on Aster had found him on the deck, eyes closed, bleeding from his forehead. So far he had not revived. The exec didn’t want to alarm the crew; he had sent the quartermaster to let Byron know why he would be giving the voice tube orders for a while.