War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  “Let me live” is a practical heartfelt plea. What with the heavy beatings at any provocation or none, and the physical drills that go on till the weakest drop, and the starvation, and the long roll calls of nearly naked men, in subzero frost, and the hard work — digging drainage ditches, hauling lumber, dragging rocks, demolishing peasant houses in the evacuated villages, and carrying the materials, sometimes several kilometers, to the new blockhouse sites — and what with the guards shooting on the spot men who falter or fall, or finishing them off with the butt-ends of their rifles, the roster of Russians in the quarantine camp at Oswiecim is rapidly shrinking.

  The Soviet prisoners of war are in fact proving a major disappointment to the Commandant.

  Draft after draft they arrive sick, emaciated, all but prostrate with exhaustion, in half the promised numbers, the rest having died on the way. With this deteriorated rubbish as a labor force he is supposed to execute not one but several urgent construction projects: to double the size of the base camp, located in the tobacco monopoly buildings and the old Polish army barracks; to lay out and man the ambitious experimental farms and fisheries that Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler plans as the real showpieces of the Auschwitz establishment; to erect a whole new camp of unprecedented magnitude out at Birchwoods, three kilometers to the west, accommodating one hundred thousand prisoners of war for labor in armament factories; and to commence surveying and preparing the factory sites! No German concentration camp until now has held much more than ten thousand prisoners. It is a breathtaking job, an assignment to be proud of, a great chance for advancement. The Commandant realizes that well.

  But he is not being given the tools. The whole thing would be impossible, if he did not have a solid base of Polish and Czech political prisoners who can still put in a good day’s work, and a steady supply of fresh ones. Only the strongest Russians, maybe ten percent of each draft, are of any use in the labor gangs. Given any feeding at all, these can still revive and do a job. Hardy fellows! But right there is the big problem: confusion from the top down about the true mission of the Auschwitz Interest Area, these forty square kilometers of marshy farmland allotted to the Commandant’s rule. Conscious of the responsibility entrusted to a mere SS major, he is eager to do a job. For a year and a half he has put heart and soul into Oswiecim. It was just a dismal swamp with a straggle of buildings and a few scattered villages when he came here in 1940 to start the camp up. Now it is looking like something! But what is really wanted of him? Maximum production for war, or maximum elimination of the nation’s enemies? He is still not clear.

  The Commandant considers himself a soldier. He will do either job. He cannot do both at the same time! Yet contradictory orders come down in a steady stream. Take the very matter of these Russian POWs! In retaliation for the inhuman treatment of German prisoners in the Soviet Union, they are to be used “without pity.” For those with any trace of political responsibility, execution at once; for the rest, swift working to death, at slave labor on rations below what dogs need to survive.

  …Very fine, Reichsfiihrer Himmler; but how about the hundreds and hundreds of barracks, just by the way, that you’ve ordered me to build out in Birchwoods (Brzezinka, in the uncivilized Polish spelling adapted into smooth German as Birkenau). Oh yes, the barracks; and oh yes, the experimental farms; and oh yes, the factories! Well, well, let Sturmbannfuhrer Hoess worry about all that. Hoess is a chap who delivers. He complains, sends long pessimistic reports, declares assignments are impossible. But in the end Hoess carries out orders. There’s a chap you can rely on…

  The Commandant values this reputation of his. Even in these heartbreaking conditions he means to maintain it, or kill himself trying. Like the next fellow, he wants to rise in the service, do well by his family, and all that. But Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler is taking advantage of his outstanding conscientiousness, and this sinks him in depression. It just is not fair.

  In a cloudy noonday, shielded from the knifelike wind by a heavy greatcoat, the Commandant waits in the snow outside the crematorium for the arrival of the three hundred Russians. Combed out of several drafts as political officers or ratings, they have been sentenced to death by the military circuit court from Kattowitz. The Commandant has no quarrel with the sentence. The life-and-death struggle with Bolshevism is what this war is about. If European culture is to be saved, no mercy can be shown to the barbaric eastern foe. It is just too bad that some of the condemned appear so ablebodied.

  At least their deaths will not be a total waste. They will yield important information. Major Hoess accepts no optimistic reports of subordinates. He learned the hard way, as Rapportfuhrer in Sachsenhausen, to see things for himself. The tendency in a concentration camp chain of command is to lie, to cover up, to pretend that things are more efficient than they are. Reports on a previous gassing with the camp’s strongest insecticide of some condemned Russians in the cellar of Block 11, while the Commandant was off reporting to Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler in Berlin, have been contradictory. One subordinate, whose idea it was, claims they all died almost at once. Others say that it took forever for the Russians to croak; that they rushed one door of the cellar and almost broke it down, even as they were being gassed. What a hell of a mess, if they had actually forced their way out and released a cloud of that smelly poisonous blue stuff all over the main camp!

  Just the usual thing, inattention to detail. The door wasn’t reinforced enough, and the supposed airtight sealing of the cellar was done with clay; what stupidity! This experiment in the morgue room of the crematorium is being run under the Commandant’s personal supervision. Airtightness has been tested with chlorine under pressure; satisfactory, just a faint sort of swimming-pool odor near the door, which has since had its rubber gaskets doubled up. The crematorium is off in the grassy area beyond the camp, not smack in the middle of the main buildings like Block 11. Just a little common sense!

  The Russians approach — drawn, ghastly, with white-rimmed sunken eyes, in their ragged uniforms marked SU in huge black letters. They are flanked by guards with tommy guns. Their faces show awareness that they are going to their deaths. Yet their formation is good. Their wooden clogs squeak in the snow with a ghostly echo of military precision. Strange people! He has seen them in their work area, fighting like wolves over a dump of garbage from the SS kitchen, grasping each other by the throats for a rotten potato, snarling and cursing; he has seen them wandering like sleepwalkers, skin and bones, dead on their feet, impervious to the blows and threats of guards, crumpling and falling bloody to the ground without complaining. But put them in a formation, give them an order, a sense that they are in a group; and feeble and terrorized though they are, these Russians come to life and work and march like men.

  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 n
ot 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 Mutter
perl 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.

  12

  THIS 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.