War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  That’s the regulation number, more or less; but regulations in Auschwitz are elastic, and heavy overcrowding is the usual thing. Sammy Mutterperl rescued Jastrow from a block where over a thousand men, mostly newcomers sick in the bowels, turned and squirmed all night in every inch of space, in the tiers and on the mud floor, faces jammed to assholes in the dark; where every morning ten or twenty glassy-eyed open-mouthed corpses had to be dragged outside to the roll call, and piled up for the meat wagons. Skilled artisans and foremen like Mutterperl are in the less crowded blockhouses like this one. The mushrooming camp needs these surveyors, locksmiths, carpenters, tanners, cooks, bakers, doctors, draftsmen, linguist-clerks, and the like; so life in their huts may include fuel for the stoves, endurable food, and good water and latrine privileges. Some of those fellows may even survive the war, if the Germans will let anyone survive Auschwitz.

  The block of the Klinger kommando is bad enough. The lukewarm morning ersatz coffee, watery evening soup, and single slice of sawdusty bread are the usual Auschwitz ration: in itself, a sentence to slow death. But the kitchen has special orders about hard workers and skilled men: distribution twice a week of extra slices of bread, salami, or cheese to the privileged list. This enriched dole is still less than the “regulation” ration, for the SS consumes, or steals and sells, half the food consigned by Berlin for prisoners. Everybody knows that. They steal all food parcels for Jews from the outside, too; other prisoners, especially British inmates, can end up with part of their parcels. Still, the Klinger gang does well on the added calories, though some of them do gradually dwindle to Musselmen. These are a familiar Auschwitz type, the Musselmen; men starved down to dreamy emaciated moving mummies, doomed to be clubbed or kicked to death for slow work, when they don’t simply drop and die at random.

  Men like Mutterperl and Jastrow are not going to fade to Musselmen. A different fate awaits them. The sardonic word has long since leaked down from the Labor Section: when the work is done, the kommando will have the great honor of going up the chimney first. Auschwitz humor! Also probably the truth; a variation of the Sonderkommandos’ fate.

  With a practiced movement Jastrow slides feet first into the middle bunk that he shares with Mutterperl, who lies asleep in the blankets which he “organized” from Canada; and which, despite the prevailing thievery, nobody steals from him. The tier shakes. Mutterperl opens his eyes.

  Jastrow murmurs, “They just tested.”

  Mutterperl nods. They avoid words if they can. Above them are three old inmates, but below with two old-timers lies a recent arrival speaking a fine Galician Yiddish, who claims to be a lawyer from Lublin. His skin color is fresh, not the Auschwitz gray, and his shaved scalp is white and unweathered. He bears no scars of quarantine camp. There is an odd expression in his eyes. Chances are, an informer for the Political Section.

  The SS keeps searching out the feeble undergrounds that are stirring in Auschwitz; tiny secret groups germinating like weeds in some common ground — political, national, or religious. They endure and grow until the Political Section detects and squashes them. Some last awhile, make contact with the outside, and even smuggle out documents and photographs. Betrayal is their usual end. In this narrow world of disease-ridden famished slaves jammed in horse stalls in the snow, bounded by electrified barbed wire and guarded by machine gun towers and killer dogs, where life hangs by a hair and torture is as common as parking fines elsewhere on earth, informers of course exist. What is surprising is the number of straight fellows.

  Mutterperl murmurs, “Well, never mind. It’s set.”

  “When?”

  “Tell you later.” The words are barely breathed in Jastrow’s ear. Closing his eyes, the foreman turns over.

  Jastrow knows nothing about the escape scheme except what Mutterperl has so far told him. That is very little. The bakery is the goal, a structure outside the barbed wire, near the woods by the riverbank. Berel’s skill in baking will be important. He knows no more than that. Mutterperl will have the films, so if caught and hauled off to the barracks of the Gestapo’s Political Section, Berel will have almost nothing to betray; not when the cross-examiners threaten to cut off his penis and testicles; not as the hedge-clipper blades are pushed into his crotch and coldly closed on his scrotum, and they give him his last chance to talk.

  That’s the rumor: the instrument is a plain crude garden hedge-clipper, sharpened like razors. They threaten you with it, and then they really use it. Who can say if it’s true? Nobody would survive such a wound to tell the tale. Mutilated corpses are rushed straight to the old crematorium; nobody sees them but the Gestapo men and the Sonderkommandos. What is beyond German interrogators? If this isn’t true, something just as bad is true.

  One thing is sure: the flame in the night means death very soon for the Klinger kommando. Berel is prepared to try the escape; nothing to lose! So far Mutterperl has been his good angel. A Jew has to hope. Hungry, freezing, exhausted, he prays and falls asleep.

  The test has in fact not gone well.

  Chief Engineer Pruefer — from J. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, a fine company with international furnace patents — is embarrassed. The blowback has belched black smoke and scraps of burning flesh all over the damn place! Only by luck were the Commandant and Colonel Blobel standing clear. The disgusting stuff has spattered SS officers, civilian technicians, even Pruefer himself. Everybody has inhaled the nauseous greasy smoke. A real mess!

  Yet Pruefer’s conscience is clear. He knows he was right to fire off a mix of lumber, waste oil, and cadavers for the first test. In the new superheated retorts, the corpses will become fuel to accelerate the process; that’s the whole point of these big-volume installations. For a serious test he needed actual conditions. As to the blowback, whatever the defect that caused it, he’ll put it to rights. Tests show up problems, why else make tests? That Colonel Blobel was on hand is too bad. Topf and Sons did not invite him.

  The Commandant and Colonel Blobel leave, coughing rancid smoke from their lungs. The Commandant is beside himself with rage. Civilian swine! Two months behind in delivery; then three postponements of the test; and by the worst luck Colonel Blobel himself has to show up, just today, for this fiasco. Oh, that buggering Erfurt engineer! In his nice comfortable tweed overcoat, English shoes, and fedora, assuring the Commandant that the test would go off all right! What he needs is a few months in Auschwitz, to teach him what lackadaisical performance in wartime means. Straight to Block 11, the swine!

  Colonel Blobel says nothing. His disapproving smirk is enough.

  They drive in the Commandant’s car to the vicinity of the pits, flaring red and smoky over a broad area. Together they walk out on the fields, upwind, and — oh, hell, another foul-up. The Sonderkommandos are using flame-throwers. The Commandant gave strict orders: no flame-throwers while Colonel Blobel is in the camp! These old rotten bodies, some of them from pits dug in 1940 and 1941, just won’t burn away. That’s the plain fact. When the fire dies you’re left with big piles of charred slop and bones. Yet the order from Berlin is, Eradicate. What else is there to do but clean up the mess with flame-throwers? But it’s a waste of fuel, a confession of poor work. Does Blobel have to know that Auschwitz Establishment can’t solve a combustion problem? The Commandant has asked Berlin in vain, over and over, for some decent officer material. They just ignore him, they send him the dregs. He can’t do everything himself.

  In the crimson firelight, Blobel stares at the flame-throwers, a supercilious look on his face. Well, he is the expert. Now he knows, let him do his worst. Let him tell Muller. Let him tell Himmler! Better yet, let him make suggestions on how to improve things. The Commandant is only human. He has fifteen square miles of installations to worry about. Big munitions and rubber factories going full blast, and more under construction. Dairy farms, plant nurseries. New subcamps and factories springing up. More political prisoners dumped on him by the thousands all the time. Major shortages of lumber, cement, pipes, wiring, even nails. S
erious health and discipline problems, all over the area. And to top it all, Jews keep arriving by the trainload, in bigger and bigger batches. The special treatment facilities get overloaded, naturally. More mess! That tough guy Eichmann is no real planner. He runs a jerky hit-or-miss operation, always either no action or too much. Dirtiest part of the whole assignment. Has to be done, but not productive, except for the stuff in Canada.

  What a pyramid of responsibilities! How can a man do a decent job under these conditions?

  Fortunately, Blobel is an architect, an intellectual. He’s no Eichmann. As they drive back to the villa for dinner, he has the taste to avoid criticism. He senses the Commandant’s feelings. Once they’ve bathed and dressed and are having drinks in the library, he turns cordial. Colonel Blobel likes his drop, as the Commandant knows, and before the Polish maid curtseys to announce dinner, he has downed almost half a bottle of Haig and Haig. Fine, let him get mellow. One thing Blobel can have here is liquor, all he can guzzle. Surprising what the Jews manage to bring along in their suitcases. Even wine. At dinner the Colonel tells the Commandant’s wife that not since peacetime has he drunk such a succession of wines at table. She blushes with pleasure. Blobel praises the roast veal, the soup, the cream chocolate cake. Cook has done herself proud, in fact. Blobel makes little jokes with the boys about their studies, and about their appetite for cake. His forbidding manner is melting away. He’s a good fellow, after all, once he’s had a few! The Commandant is feeling more optimistic about the unpleasant business talk still to come, but then —

  AOW! AOW! AOW! The damned escape siren!

  Even here, way down by the river front, the wailing, screaming escape alarm of Auschwitz shakes the windows and the walls, and all but drowns out the distant spatters of machine gun fire. Of all times! Stiffening in his armchair, Colonel Blobel turns a hard face to the Commandant, who excuses himself and tramples upstairs to his private telephone, seething. The dinner ruined, too.

  A plane flying low over Auschwitz now — though no such thing is possible, the air space over these fifteen square miles of Polish backcountry is strictly off limits, even to the Luftwaffe — would come on a striking sight: thousands upon thousands of men and women ranked on the long parade grounds of the Birkenau camps under glaring floodlights in gently falling snow; a quasi-military sight, except for the unmilitary costumes of vertical-striped thin cotton rags.

  The scream of the sirens has really startled the inmates, who have come tumbling out under the clubbing and curses of the SS and the trusties. Escape roll calls have been discontinued for months. Why now, all of a sudden?

  Roll call is daily torture. One day the books will play up more gruesome aspects of Auschwitz: the medical experiments on women and children, the collecting of tons of female hair and the skeletons of twins, the mutilating tortures of the Gestapo, the casual sadistic murders of slave workers, and of course the covert asphyxiation of millions of Jews. All these things happen, but most working prisoners do not encounter them. Roll call is as bad as anything they endure. They stand motionless in ranks morning and evening for a couple of hours in all weathers. The hardest work is preferable. At least you warm yourself when you’re in the swing, and distract your mind. At roll call hunger gnaws, bowels and bladder agonize, cold eats into bones, and time stops. Roll call is when Musselmen tend to keel over. By the time roll call ends on a bitter winter morning, bodies litter the ground. The meat wagons collect the dead; the inmates carry the living into the blockhouses, or drag them off to work if clubbing revives them.

  But there are big rush jobs under way in Auschwitz, and killing off workers with roll calls is no help. The authorities therefore decided way back during the typhus epidemic to cut down on these extra roll calls at an escape alarm.

  So what now?

  What has happened is that the Commandant has telephoned his deputy and warned that if the swine who escaped isn’t promptly caught, there will be summary death sentences for negligence in the SS. Someone will pay! Heads will roll! As for the prisoners, call them out! Let them stand at attention until morning, the shitasses! Then let them march off to work.

  It’s ten below zero outside. The Commandant knows he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face, for these orders will kill a lot of marginal working hands. Never mind! Paul Blobel of Kommando 1005 is his guest. Stern measures are in order. Auschwitz Establishment cannot be disgraced. The roll call shows he means business. When the SS gets scared, it produces. They’ll catch the shitass.

  Are escapes then possible from Auschwitz?

  Yes. As concentration camps go, Auschwitz is a sieve.

  One day Auschwitz will acquire an awesome name in the world as an impenetrable fortress of macabre horrors. In actuality it is a sloppy industrial sprawl, always expanding, always anarchic. Something like seven hundred escapes will be recorded in its history. A third of those will succeed. The unrecorded ones may add up to twice as many. Nobody will ever know.

  There is no other German concentration camp like Auschwitz.

  The German camps early in the Nazi era simply imitated the gulags of Lenin’s Bolsheviks; they were isolation and terror dumps for political opponents. But in wartime these camps have swollen, proliferated into hundreds dotting all Europe, filled up with foreigners, and become slave pens for German-run factories; where, to be sure, prisoners die in droves from bad conditions. But in only six camps, all in Polish backcountry, does the SS murder Jews en masse upon arrival, with an elaborate hygienic hoax of disinfection.

  The German names for these six places are Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek — and Auschwitz.

  Auschwitz is in a class by itself, and not only because of its reliance on a cyanide pest-killer gas, while the other five massacre centers use exhaust fumes from truck engines. That is a minor distinction. The main thing is that the other camps serve no purpose but slaughter, though there may be some slave use of overflow Jews for a while. So from the others escape is very tough.

  Auschwitz stands alone: at once the biggest asphyxiation center, the biggest corpse-robbing center, and the biggest slave-factory center of German-ruled Europe. It is the colossus. Hence its laxness. It is too huge, too complex, too improvised, for proper control. The effect of the Jewish plunder is also very unsettling. There is too much of it. Most of the Jews are poor, and they bring only two suitcases apiece; but in such multitudes, the loot adds up. The gold from the teeth alone is mounting into the millions of reichsmarks. SS training and morale break down, more even than from the temptation of scared submissive Jewesses in the women’s work camp. Despite the fiercest penalties, the little gold ingots keep disappearing from the smelting laboratory and floating through Auschwitz, a strange secret currency for perilous deals.

  The fact is, the Commandant lacks the manpower to run his show. His complaints are just. The battle of Stalingrad is on, and the army is demanding more and more men. Himmler is forming SS battle divisions, too. Which Germans are left from the comb-out? The stupid, the feeble, the elderly, the disabled, the criminal —frankly, the scum. And even of those there’s not enough. The trusty system has to expand and take in foreign prisoners.

  There is the trouble. Certainly a lot of these bootlick the SS and brutalize other prisoners to save their own skins. Auschwitz is a machine for debasing human nature. Still, too many of these non-German trusties remain soft. Hence the Resistance. Hence the escapes. Poles, Czechs, Jews, Serbs, Ukrainians, they’re all alike. Not really trustworthy. They even soften up some confused Germans.

  Yes, there are plenty of escapes from Auschwitz.

  The Commandant hears from Himmler about them, time after time. The problem threatens his career. So he wants to impress Colonel Blobel with a recapture, at least. The man who heads Kommando 1005 has Himmler’s ear.

  An hour passes.

  An hour and a half.

  Two hours.

  In the library, the Commandant keeps glancing at his recently acquired antique clock, as Colonel Blobel talks o
n; or rather maunders on, for he is consuming an amazing quantity of brandy. At another time, the Commandant would be relaxed and happy, hearing such alcoholic confidences from such a high-placed insider. But he is on pins and needles. He really cannot enjoy the talk, nor the twenty-year-old Courvoisier. He has airily assured the colonel that his garrison will “catch the bugger straight off.” Risky thing to say! Now his head is on the chopping block.

  Out on the parade ground there are only crude ways to gauge the passage of time. Snow piling on shoulders, for instance; or the spread of frozen numbness in your limbs, your nose, your ears; or the count of prisoners falling to the ground. Otherwise how can you tell time? Motion measures time. There is no motion here but the tread of a passing trusty on guard, no sound but his boots squeaking in the snow. No stars move overhead. Light white snow falls randomly in white glare on striped-clad immobile shuddering ranks. By the feeling that he has no legs below the knees, Berel Jastrow guesses that about two hours must have passed. Klinger will be unhappy at morning roll call. Berel can see thirteen men down.

  The new fellow from Lublin, between Jastrow and Mutterperl, suddenly takes his life and theirs in his hands, exclaiming, “How long does this go on?”

  In the silence the strangled gasp is like a shout, like a pistol shot. And at this moment the block chief walks by! Berel can’t see him, but he hears the boots behind him, he knows the footfall, he smells the pipe. He waits for the club to crash on the fool’s thin cotton cap. But the trusty walks on, does nothing. German blockhead! He should have slammed him with the club. He didn’t have to hurt him. One good result of the roll call: the SS plant identified.