by Herman Wouk
The peasants who dwelled in the villages within the enclave are gone. A few of their evacuated thatched houses still stand. Most have been razed and their rubble used in camp blockhouses. Near the mucky holes where the houses once stood, fruit orchards in bloom perfume the warm June winds. The sweet odors die in the rows of prison blocks with their terrible latrine huts. But out in the fields where Berel is working, the orchards still sweetly scent the air. In the past six months Berel has been gaining back some of his old gnarled strength. As an assistant foreman to Sammy Mutterperl, with the armband of a Vorarbeiter, a leading worker, he eats and sleeps better than most Auschwitz inmates, though wretchedly enough.
Mutterperl wears the armband of an Unterkapo. But he is something more. The Arbeitskommando, work gang, of SS Sergeant Major Ernst Klinger, is actually a construction crew managed by Mutterperl; six hundred inmates of two blockhouses in Camp B-I. The job here is the rush construction of Camp B-II-d Birkenau, one of six subcamps of thirty-two blockhouses each. Completed, the whole sector will have one hundred fifty blockhouses in all, planned by the Central Building Board for erection north of the main roadway. With a twin sector, B-III, not yet begun, and B-I, already standing, Birkenau is projected by the Central Building Board as the largest detention center on earth. More than a hundred thousand working prisoners will be housed in Birkenau as slave labor for SS factories.
Sammy Mutterperl is doing in the Oswiecim prison camp what he did when he was a free man in Oswiecim town. He was a contractor there; in a peculiar way he is a contractor here. His client now is the Commandant of Auschwitz, and Sergeant Major Klinger is the Commandant’s deputy on the spot. In theory Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler is the high ultimate Client, but Himmler is an unseen god in Auschwitz. Even the SS men speak his name seldom, and with awe. The Commandant’s chauffeured black Mercedes, however, is a familiar intimidating sight in the area, fluttering the double lightning-flash insignia flags of the SS. Berel glimpses it often. The Commandant believes in personal supervision from the top — “the eye of the master” is his word.
The Klinger gang has been turning out good work for many months, laboring in all weather, in haste, silence, and submissiveness. The crew routinely endures curses and beatings from SS men and the kapos. Prisoners who weaken, faint, and fall get beaten bloody by the kapos for malingering. If they really look done for, the kapos finish them off with shovels or sticks, and other workers drag back their bodies for evening roll call. Fresh prisoners, of which the supply is endless, replace them on the next shift.
As Auschwitz goes, Mutterperl considers Klinger’s a good kommando to serve in. He has been in Auschwitz for a year and a half. In 1941 the Commandant, desperate at the crazy expansion orders from Berlin, combed the countryside for builders and mechanics and put them to work at once —Jew, Pole, Czech, Croat, Rumanian, it made little difference, Mutterperl among them — in conditions of housing, nourishment, and discipline that were by outside standards unspeakable, but in Auschwitz something like luxury.
Sammy has come to know Auschwitz well. In on the ground floor, so to speak, he is surviving handily. Because of the rush to start construction he was spared quarantine camp, those fearsome isolation weeks of maltreatment and hunger which reduce many prisoners to bony automata, blank to any thought but self-preservation. Klinger as SS overseer and Mutterperl as Jew foreman have worked together since they did the SS barracks job a year ago. Both are wily burly fellows in their late fifties, anxious to produce results: Klinger to please his superiors, Mutterperl to stay alive. For his own benefit, Klinger has gradually pushed the Jew into an informal protected status as a construction foreman. As such, Sammy can recruit prisoners for the kommando. That is how he has rescued Berel. Pulling in a Russian prisoner is nonregulation procedure, but Auschwitz regulations have no consistency or coherence. SS noncoms and officers constantly trade off favors and loot, and bend the rules to suit themselves. Nobody is a better hand at such maneuvering than Hauptscharfiihrer Ernst Klinger.
Klinger is an old file of the camps, a stout blond Bavarian going gray. Like the Commandant, he is a veteran of Dachau and Sachsenhausen; in fact, the Commandant requisitioned him for Oswiecim. Once a policeman in Munich, turned Nazi when he lost his job in the depression, Klinger found in the SS a haven. Since toughness was a requirement, this once easygoing family man became tough. In the line of duty Klinger has flogged the skin off prisoners’ backs, wiping the blood-dripping whip with a casual grin as the victim sagged raw and unconscious. He has lined up with execution squads and shot condemned men. His normal tone of communication with prisoners is a menacing bellow. With a blow of a club he can collapse a man like a scarecrow of sticks. Nevertheless, Sammy Mutterperl considers him “all right.” Klinger does not, like so many SS men and kapos, get his lacks from inflicting fear, pain, and death on terrified living skeletons. Moreover, he is very corrupt, which is a big help. You can do business with Klinger.
Klinger considers the Jew “all right,” too, for a Jew. When getting drunk with his SS buddies, he can even boast about “my smart clipcock Sammy.” For in the Central Building Board office back at the base camp, where several hundred German architects, engineers, and draftsmen work in comfort on Auschwitz’s never-ending expansion plans, the word is “Give it to Klinger,” when a job requires quick, visible results. Klinger’s efficiency ratings have shot up since he left Sachsenhausen. Promotion to Untersturm-fïihrer, second lieutenant, is in the wind; a big leap at his age, from the noncom ranks to a commission, with big dividends in prestige and pay. How pleased his wife and kids will be, if it really comes off! He knows that he owes all this to his Sammy. So strictly in self-interest, he watches out for the Jew.
Klinger now has a big rush job going: to throw up all thirty-two blockhouse frames of Birkenau Camp B-II-d in a hurry. Never mind the walls and roofs, is the word from the board — just frames, frames, frames, as far as the eye can see. A big shot is coming to inspect. Klinger’s gang is at the outer edge of new Birkenau construction. Farther west a horde of shaven-headed prisoners in striped ticking, knee-deep in marshy grass, are clearing rocks, pulling stumps, and levelling the ground with spades and hoes for still more camps, but those are only on the drawing-board. B-II-d is under construction, and the more actual structures in sight, the better for the Commandant.
Every day in Auschwitz can bring surprises; and on this day at the Klinger work site comes a frightening surprise. Seven covered gray trucks pull up on the road. Klinger orders Berel’s subsection of seventy men — SS guards, kapos, and all — into the trucks, to load up studs and rafters at the timber yard. This is a very strange business. Human time and muscle are in infinite supply at Auschwitz, zero cost items. Prisoners carry lumber to building sites, if necessary several miles. The Germans do not waste gasoline and tires on such errands. So what is going on? Fear distorts their faces as the prisoners enter the trucks; some drag their feet, and the cursing kapos club them aboard.
But the trucks do go to the timber yard. Under the yells and the blows of the kapos, the prisoners rush about to load up, then jam aboard again pell-mell, and rumble back to B-II-d. Berel guesses that the deadline is drawing close, and for once, fast action matters. Ordinarily, Auschwitz is a slow machine-free world, paced by the human body. Over-slaves beat under-slaves, government taskmasters beat them both, and it is all — so he has thought often — a throwback to Pharaoh’s Egypt, as the Torah pictures it. Only in this Egypt, twentieth-century trucks grind by sometimes, and the taskmasters have twentieth-century machine guns; and death is not for Jewish male babies only.
When the trucks arrive, another surprise. The Commandant himself stands there with a couple of green-uniformed aides, frowning in the sunlight at the strange sight of slaves riding. His Mercedes is parked by the roadside. Klinger is shuffling and scraping before him. The kapos and the guards pile on abuse and blows in the unloading. The prisoners run frantically with lumber several hundred yards to the northernmost framing sites, then scamper back
for more. An old frog-faced kapo who has long had it in for Berel, a former Viennese bank robber who wears the high-status green triangle patch of a professional criminal, suddenly and blindingly clubs Berel’s skull. “Who do you think you are, you lazy old pile of shit, just because you’ve got a shitty armband? Grab a plank and shake your ass!” Berel staggers, almost goes down, but seizes a brace and runs with it, dizzily thinking that the kapo has picked his time well. With the Commandant looking on, there is no protection in Auschwitz. But the Commandant never stays long.
The Commandant for his part is in bad shape, though his square-hewn calm face shows no sign of it. Not since his own solitary confinement for a political murder in Brandenburg prison, under the Weimar regime, has he suffered such wrenching griping stomach pains. The agony is impervious to whiskey, sedatives, or any medicines he has tried. He simply must endure and go on.
He is busily muttering to an aide. After a while the aide takes Klinger aside. Fresh orders: work straight through the night, under floodlights! The Commandant is waiving the air defense rules. Halt work on framing. Switch to covering walls and putting on roofs. Put up wallboards only on the side facing the road, and only on every other blockhouse.
The Commandant gets in his Mercedes. Back to the Residence for lunch, he tells the chauffeur. Lunch! He will be lucky to hold anything on his stomach. All morning he has been driving over the route they will traverse tomorrow. He has been seeing every site for himself, anticipating questions, throwing questions at the SS overseers to get them on their toes. The dam site is the worst problem. Berlin hasn’t come up with the labor, materials, and supervision. I. G. Farben has been swallowing up everything for its Buna Werke at the Monowice subcamp. One can’t flog starving unskilled Poles and Jews into building a dam. Flog them to death, yes, but the Vistula will still flow merrily on its way! If Reichsführer SS Himmler really wants to dam the Vistula, then let him see how far behind the project really is, and come up with the wherewithal. Dr. Kammler, chief architect of Auschwitz, is an SS major general, not a lowly major like the Commandant. Berlin can issue these impossible orders, but Kammler’s deputies in Auschwitz have to implement them. Himmler will listen to Kammler. The Commandant feels fairly safe about the dam.
His one worry about the whole inspection visit is the damned Jewish transport. Himmler wants to see an action from the beginning to the end. The Commandant has tried to anticipate all the things that can go wrong, and that have gone wrong in the early months: the troublemakers who scream and cause panics, the sanitary squad idiots who fail to drop in enough stuff, so the people don’t die, and the like. By now the process has been smoothed out and usually goes off all right. But if things get gummed up, nobody will be blamed but himself!.
Then there is the disposal problem. This mass-grave burial technique is not going to work much longer; not in Auschwitz. This is no small cleanup of Jews like Chelmno or Sobibor. Those pen-pushers in Berlin don’t picture what a disposal problem thousands and thousands of bodies can be. They don’t care. All they want is impressive figures to show the boss. But these tons — many, many tons — of organic material, piling up week by week in Auschwitz soil, are a hell of a headache and a health hazard. And it’s only the beginning! Let the Reichsführer see for himself.
And those Berlin pantywaists are plenty jittery about the big boss’s visit. They’ve been giving him glowing reports, sidetracking the Commandant’s desperate pleas for personnel and material and his complaints about impossible schedules. Now they have to pray that the Commandant will protect their asses. They wouldn’t dream of soiling their own shiny boots with Auschwitz mud; not them, those desk-bound Standartenführer and Ober-sturmbannfiihrer, leading the soft life back home! And he is just a major, running an establishment bigger than any army camp, bigger probably than any military installation in the world, and still growing! Berlin keeps telling him to go easy on the complaints, emphasize the positive things. The hell with them.
The Commandant is writhing in pain as the Mercedes drives up before the prettily flowering front garden of the Residence, where his wife is working in a sunbonnet. He knows very well what is causing these cramps. His career hangs on the next seventy-two hours. He can be relieved in disgrace and expelled from the SS; he can be promoted on the spot to Obersturm-bannführer — lieutenant colonel — a recognition scandalously overdue; those are the extremes, and in between are a lot of possibilities. A visit from Reichsführer SS Himmler doesn’t happen every day.
His wife wants to show him how the roses are coming along, but he brusquely passes her by. His adjutant is standing in the bay window. She sees them talking inside. Her husband glances eagerly at a document the adjutant hands him. He looks happy, then suddenly he begins to glare. He lets out such a roar, throwing the document in the adjutant’s face and waving both fists, that she hears him through the closed windows. He makes that old infuriated gesture: Upstairs! That means top-secret talk, in the den off the bedroom. She hurries inside to warn the cook not to dry out the roast.
The Commandant has in fact been pleased by his first glimpse of the fine paper and the good printing job. The schedule started off well:
REICHSFÜHRER VISIT
KONZENTRATIONSLACER AUSCHWITZ
First Day
0800-0830. Arrival and reception. Motorcade to Base Camp.
0830-0845. Trooping of colors. Band serenade. Honor review of troops.
0845-0930. Breakfast, with map demonstration of camp layout.
0930-1000. Reichsfuhrer SS views models: Vistula dam, new drainage canal system, animal husbandry center, Birkenau Camp.
1000-1100. Monowice, Raisko, Budy. General view: I. G. Farben construction, dam site, agricultural areas, reclaimed lands, botanical laboratories, tree nurseries, stock breeding sector.
1100-1330. SPECIAL.
1330-1500. Lunch.
It was on seeing these last two items that the Commandant has thrown the schedule in his adjutant’s face and ordered him upstairs.
Screaming so that the whole household hears him through closed doors, and his children quake in their rooms, and his wife and cook in the kitchen exchange scared looks, the Commandant demands an explanation. The trembling adjutant stammers that the railway directorate at Oppeln has scheduled the transport arrival before lunch, with instructions to expedite the return of the emptied train. If the Commandant will telephone Oppeln to see if the cars can be retained in the Auschwitz yards for a few more hours, then perhaps the Jews can just wait in the cars and get off after lunch.
The explosion that follows is the worst the Commandant’s wife has ever heard. The Himmler visit, she thinks, is making nervous wrecks of everybody. How glad she will be when it is over! He has gotten dead drunk every night for a week, taken strong sedatives, and yet he has not slept. This job is too much. As for the children and herself, the sooner they get out, the better. The flood of new toys and picture books day by day for the young ones, the fine clothes for the big boy, the excellent servants, expert gardeners, the stacks of lovely expensive underwear and negligees for herself are all very well, but a decent home life would be better than any of that.
Upstairs the Commandant is roaring that the whole schedule will be printed again at once. The SPECIAL item will come after lunch as ordered. He, the Commandant, personally orders this. The train will remain in the freight yard as long as necessary! If the Oppeln railway directors have doubts, they can take a few months in the Auschwitz quarantine camp to think it over. This is REICHSFüHRER ss BUSINESS! Understood? Nothing, nothing can interfere. What idiotic asshole could think of showing a special operation to the Reichsführer before lunch? What land of appetite will he have to eat after that?
This is the gist of a ten-minute chewing-out that has the adjutant, himself a hardened SS captain with a Sachsenhausen background, whey-faced and shaking as a Jew before a quarantine camp flogging. Never has the Commandant thrown a fit like this. He himself is trembling all over when he dismisses the adjutant, who hurries ou
t and barely makes it to the garden before throwing up everything in his stomach, with blood streaks in the vomited mess.
The Commandant gulps half a tumbler of brandy. It calms him. When he goes down to lunch the gnawing at his gut is gone. He eats well, and is pleasanter to his wife and children than he has been in a month. The rest of the schedule, after all, looks good. But God in heaven, if he had not insisted on seeing that printed schedule! His old rule never fails — “the eye of the master!”
The train has been waiting out of sight around the bend. Now its mournful whistle blows at five minutes to three.
The Reichsführer SS and his high-brass aides stand with the Commandant on the long wooden platform, waiting. Happily, it is another beautiful day. The leafy trees around the siding give pleasant shade from the hot afternoon sun. They have all lunched heartily at the senior officers’ mess, and so far the whole inspection tour has been going smoothly. Himmler has been very gracious about the stalled dam. He has obviously been impressed by the camp’s explosive growth. He has shown real delight in the agricultural installations, always his pet Auschwitz undertaking, farmer that he is. The impressive unfinished I. G. Farben structure at Monowice has won his approval, too. The Commandant is on pins and needles. If this business goes off without a hitch, positive results from the visit may well impend.
The smoke of the locomotive shows over the trees. The train pulls into sight. It is a small transport, deliberately planned that way by the Commandant; ten freight cars, about eight hundred people. The Kattowitz police have held them rounded up for several days. The bunker can take just about eight hundred, tightly packed. Himmler’s personal letter to the Commandant was specific: “a whole action, from the beginning to the end. “. Two shifts would have dragged the thing out and depressed the Reichsführer SS. It will be bad enough as it is!