War and Remembrance (50 page)

The Commandant has watched the process many times —
“the eye of the master”
— but he has never gotten quite used to it. He is tough. He knows that the Reichsführer is tough. He knows about Himmler’s visit to a Special Action Unit in Russia during the dispatch of a lot of Jews. Crude stuff, that, from what he has heard: making them dig their own mass grave, then mowing them down and burying them, clothes and all. The Auschwitz process is far more humane, practical,
German.
Still, in its own way it is sad. The Commandant knows how hard it is on his own officers. He is intensely curious to see how Heinrich Himmler will take it. After all, it is a damn sticky proceeding. What if Germany loses the war? The Commandant never voices such doubts, naturally. He squelches the faintest hint from his subordinates. Still, these thoughts do trouble him every now and then.

The train stops. The Jews begin to descend. SS guards along the edge of the siding stand back, avoiding any bullying or menacing appearance. These are Jews from a big town, and they look prosperous. They blink in the sunlight as they clumsily tumble out of the cattle cars, helping down the old people, the cripples, and the youngsters. They peer around anxiously, the women holding their children close. But they show no great alarm, and listen intently to Untersturmführer Hossler’s smooth announcement about where they will be housed, what skills are most in demand, and so on and so forth. It is convincing stuff at that. Hõssler and his sidekick Aumaier keep polishing and improving the spiel.

Next, the Jews line up for the selection without difficulty. Soon the few men picked for the labor camp march off on foot through the thick trees toward Birkenau. The rest climb quietly into the waiting trucks. The abandoned platform is piled high with their baggage; handsome goods, a lot of real leather there. It will be quite a haul when the cleanup squad sorts it out. The Jews really seem to believe everything Hõssler has said, down to the detail
that the luggage will all be delivered to their living quarters. Living quarters! There is something very human in their credulity. Nobody wants to believe he is about to die, especially on such a pretty June day, with the sun shining and birds chirping in the trees. Some of the Jews cast apprehensive looks at the clump of SS officers watching the process; but it does not seem to the Commandant that any of them recognize the great Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler. Maybe they are too preoccupied.

The loaded trucks wait while the SS party drives ahead to the bunker site for a quick look around. The Commandant is proud of its innocuous appearance.
DISINFECTION,
reads the large wooden sign by the roadside. One sees only a large thatched peasant cottage like thousands in Polish villages, set in an apple orchard. On the cottage door, a neat arrow sign says,
This Way to Disinfection.
The undressing huts, new structures of raw wood a few meters away, are not in the least scary. The inspection party enters the hut labelled
Women and Children.
Benches line the walls under numbered hooks where the Jews will hang and fold their clothes. A sign on the wall reads in several languages:

Remember your hook number, to recover your

belongings after the disinfection!

Fold clothes neatly!

Be tidy!

No unnecessary talking!

The hot sun makes for a strong smell of fresh lumber in the hut, which mingles with the sweet scent of the apple blossoms drifting through the open door. Himmler offers no comments. His short, characteristically sharp and jerky nod shows he has seen enough: on to the next thing!

The SS officers cross the orchard and enter the cottage. Here the very heavy wooden doors on the four big empty whitewashed rooms, and the back door with a large sign reading
This Way to Bathroom,
look somewhat odd. An SS man in a white coat stands in the corridor beside a table piled with towels and bars of soap. The odor here is of some powerful disinfectant. The room doors are hooked open. The Commandant unhooks one, and shows Himmler the heavy bars that will screw the doors airtight. Wordlessly, he indicates the wall apertures where the gas crystals will tumble in. The Reichsfiihrer SS nods. He makes an inquiring gesture at the sign about the bathroom. “Leads outside,” says the Commandant. “Disposal.”

Short jerky nod.

The trucks rumble up. The inspection party leaves the bunker and gathers under some apple trees, at a discreet distance, to watch the operation.

In the leading truck, as usual, are about a dozen of the Sonderkommandos,
the squad of Jewish prisoners required to take part in the process. This small subsquad consists of Sonderkommandos who know several languages. They jump from their truck and run to assist their fellow Jews out of the other trucks. They are dressed respectably in civilian clothing: in this warm weather, good shirts, trousers, and leather shoes. No striped suits for these Sonderkommandos, and no wooden clogs, of course, only the obligatory striped camp cap. They help down the women and kids, talking in Yiddish or Polish about the disinfection procedure, the camp accommodations, the working conditions. By now the transport Jews have only a few minutes to live, so no chances are taken. The SS guards line up in a double cordon from the trucks to the undressing hut, with dogs, guns, and clubs. The Jews have no choice but to march straight on to the hut, accompanied by the Sonderkommandos, who are describing the food, the mail service, and the visiting privileges. These fellows will go all the way into the bunker with them, maintaining the humane hoax to the very last second, as the Commandant explains to the silent Himmler. They will dart outside only when the SS guards actually march in to bolt the gas-tight doors.

In his explanation the Commandant does not give credit to Aumaier and Hõssler, the two SS officers who have worked up this really clever arrangement of the Sonderkommandos. After all, not they, but he himself will get the blame if something goes wrong! But these officers did create the whole concept. They train the Sonderkommandos in groups. Periodically they gas them and train more. Sonderkommandos are recruited from the new arrivals in the quarantine camp; the weak, the easily terrified, the ratty ones who tend to collapse under the shock of Auschwitz conditions, are the ones to look for. Hõssler and Aumaier select them, isolate them in a special blockhouse, and confront them with this assignment in no uncertain terms. They can do as they are told and live, or they can be shot at once. That is their choice. There are always enough Sonderkommandos, though many prefer the
Kugel,
the bullet in the neck, terrorized though they are. They get their request. But even afterward there are those who break down on the job; try to warn the new arrivals, or even to undress and commit suicide with them. The SS keeps a sharp eye out for these, and usually catches them. They get a punishment designed to discourage the others; they are burned alive. Sound practice.

As the Commandant watches these wretches urging women and children along to their doom, he wonders at them, as always. How can they be so absolutely dead to all natural feelings, particularly toward their coreligionists? Jews are a riddle, that’s all. He steals a look at Heinrich Himmler, and gets a nasty shock. Himmler is looking glassily and fixedly at him. The Commandant realizes with a cold shudder that this may be the decisive moment of the whole inspection, the only real point of it. The Reischsführer
has come to see with his own eyes —
“the eye of the master”
— whether the Commandant of Auschwitz has what it takes. If he flinches now, shows the slightest nervousness or compunction, it is his career, possibly his neck. How long can he be allowed to live, knowing what he knows, if he can’t cut the mustard? He has seen SS men — high-placed ones, too — get a
Kugel.

The Jews are hurrying now in a drove toward the undressing hut. He sees a sight that unexpectedly tries his taut nerves. A dog lunges and barks at a child, no more than four or five years old, a little girl in a short blue dress who looks a lot like his own youngest daughter: fair hair, blue eyes, round German face, nothing “Jewish” about her. The pretty little thing shrinks against her mother and screams. The mother catches her up in her arms and to distract her, she breaks off a small branch of apple blossoms and holds it to the little girl’s nose. So they disappear into the hut among the crowding Jews. The Commandant has seen dozens of pathetic incidents here; but something about the look of that little girl, the mother’s impulsive seizing of the flowering branch — the mother, too, didn’t look Jewish. The propaganda caricatures are stuff and nonsense; these mortal enemies of the Reich look like any other Europeans, most of them. He has found that out long ago. The Commandant feels a pain in his gut; the cramps are starting up again. He puts on his stoniest face.

Now at least it will go fast.

The SS double cordon lines up again in a tight path from the hut to the cottage. The naked men come out first, as always a sorry crowd — tubby ones, scrawny ones, cripples, gray or bald ones — their sorry circumcised cocks shrunken up with fright, no doubt. He seldom sees a Jew with a really big cock here. Maybe the ablebodied ones are more virile. The fully dressed Sonderkommandos among them are still talking, trying to cheer them up. But now these Jews are too close to death not to show it on their faces. The Sonderkommandos, too, have sick expressions. The Commandant is tough, but he never likes to look at the faces of the Jews walking to the bunker, especially the men.

Somehow the women have more courage. Or maybe the shock to their modesty distracts them; that, and concern for their kids. They do not look so ghastly as they come out next and troop naked through the two rows of young German uniformed men. These SS men are under strict orders to keep silent and serious, but nevertheless they can’t help smirking at some of the lovely ones. There are always pretty ones among them, and after all, there is nothing in the world more charming than a naked woman; and when she is carrying or leading a nude child, in a strange way it adds to her beauty.

This, for the Commandant, has always been the supreme moment of the process, in its beauty, sadness, and terror — the walk of the naked women
with their children to the bunker. He wants to look at Himmler, but he is afraid to. He keeps his face rigid, yet he almost loses his composure when, among the last of the women coming out of the cottage, he sees the mother who broke the branch. She has a sweet figure, poor creature. Like so many of the others, she has uncovered her tits so as to hold the child in one arm and protect her cunt with the other. Invariably they will let the tits go, if they carry a baby, to cover their bushes; it is a strange fact of feminine nature. But what shakes the Commandant is the sight of the naked little girl. She is still holding the branch of apple blossoms.

The last woman’s pink backside disappears into the cottage. The SS men dash in, and out come the Sonderkommandos, with the white-coated man who stood by the soap and towels. The inspection party can hear the loud slamming of the doors, and the screeching of the bolts that fasten them tight. The Red Cross ambulance, which has driven up during the undressing time, now disgorges the SS men from the sanitary squad in their gas masks, carrying the cans of cyanide crystals. After the naked women, not a very handsome sight! But it’s nasty stuff they handle. The precautionary rules are strict. They do their job in a few moments, opening the cans and dumping them into the wall slots. They pile back into the ambulance, and off it goes.

The Commandant, keeping his voice absolutely steady, asks the Reichsführer SS if he would like to listen at the bunker door and look in. Himmler goes with the Commandant, listens and looks. A transport of Jews sounds different inside; mournful, resigned, almost prayerful wails and groans, not the animal screeches and bellows of Russian prisoners or Polacks. As Himmler puts his eye to the peephole, his face contorts: a grimace of disgust or a smile of amusement, the Commandant cannot be sure.

Himmler does a surprising thing. He asks an aide for a cigarette. Like the Führer, Himmler does not smoke, or is reputed not to. But now he lights up and puffs calmly, as the Commandant takes him around to the back of the bunker, while they wait for the gas to do its work. He shows Himmler the enormous and ever-expanding area of the mass graves, and explains the mounting problems. For hundreds of meters in every direction, there are vast mounds of earth here and there in the grassy field. A rail track runs through them, ending near a large hole with earth piled high beside it, where the special kommandos are still digging. The expression on Himmler’s face sharpens. His lips disappear as he puffs the skin around them in his curious fashion; a sure signal that he is intensely interested.

For the first time since their arrival at the bunker, he speaks; in a low calm voice, not to the Commandant, but to an aide, a tall good-looking colonel, who pulls off his black glove and makes rapid notes on a pad.

The gate in the back fence swings open. From the open back door of the bunker comes a cart heaped high with naked bodies rolling toward the
inspection party on the rails, hauled and pushed by different Sonderkom-mandos, the burial detail. As the cart passes the SS officers, there is a whiff of the disinfectant, rather like carbolic acid. The naked people look not much different than they did less than half an hour ago, except that they are absolutely still now, streaked with excrement, and all jumbled together, some with jaws hanging open and wide eyes fixed and staring — old men, little children, pretty women, in an inert heap. One can still admire the looks of the women and the charm of the kids.

These Jew kommandos couldn’t be more businesslike about the whole thing. Where the rails end, they crank the cart up so that the bodies slide to the ground in a tangle. A few of them push the cart back toward the bunker. The rest, together with the diggers who come climbing out of the pit, haul the bodies to the edge of the hole by an arm or a leg — some of them use big meat hooks, which the Commandant finds personally distasteful — and toss the dead down out of sight. Reichsführer Himmler is interested. He walks to the rim of the pit, and observes the kommandos laying out the warm naked bodies in rows, and sprinkling white powder on them. This, the Commandant explains, is quicklime. Something must be done, because the water table of the whole area is being contaminated. The bacteria count even of the drinking water at the SS barracks has gone up to the danger level. In the long run, as he has repeatedly complained to Berlin, burial is no answer; certainly it won’t be once the actions that Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann has projected, on a scale of hundreds of thousands of Jews every few weeks, start to materialize.