War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  He observes the new system go into action. Excellent! Jewish body-searchers, Jewish loot-collectors, Jewish inventory-writers, Jews with pliers for the gold teeth, all under close SS supervision, go to work on the corpses as they are handed up and laid out on the snow in rows. Untersturmführer Greiser is in charge. From now on that young fellow will do nothing else but attend to the “economic processing,” as Blobel has termed it, so long as Kommando 1005 is obliterating the 1941 graves. Greiser is a good-looking idealistic rookie from Breslau, a fine SS type with whom Blobel enjoys philosophical discussions. Formerly an accountant with a university degree, he can be relied upon to handle this business. Kommando 1005 will be remitting plenty of stuff to the central bank depository in Berlin, and Blobel’s promotion file will duly record this.

  The search adds some time to the whole process, but less than he expected. It goes fast. Most of the people were poor and had nothing on them. The thing is, you never know when you’ll come on a loaded one. The Standartenfiihrer’s orders are, “Search them all, even the kids!” It’s an old Yid trick to hide valuables on the children.

  Well, something accomplished!

  It is finished. The rifled bodies are all piled up with the railroad ties and rails. As the Jews climb their ladders to pour waste oil and gasoline over the pyre, Blobel waves to his chauffeur. Gasoline for the pyre is getting to be a real problem. The Wehrmacht is becoming stingier all the time about this, just as it won’t ever provide enough soldiers to cordon off a work area. Without gasoline the blaze just doesn’t get going. You can have a terrible smoldering mess for days. But today there is plenty. In a moment, as it seems, the pile of more than a thousand long-dead Jews bursts into towering flame. Blobel has to recoil a bit from the blast of heat.

  He is driven back to his van. Downing many glasses of schnapps, he drafts a report to Berlin on his procedure. It pays to get these things on the record. Nobody else can claim credit for the frame; he wrote a long report on it, pointing out that the great problem in the combustion of corpses, especially old ones, was getting enough oxygen to the conflagration. Those open pits in Auschwitz — well, he has used open pits, too: slow, visible far and wide at night, soaking up four times as much oil and gasoline as the frame does because oxygen can’t get down in there. The pits at Chelmno burned cherry-red for three days, and there was still a big problem with bones. All he can say for a pit is it beats a crematorium.

  He has argued in vain against the Auschwitz crematoriums, and given up. He knows more about this business than anyone, but to hell with it. The gas-chamber concept is fine, it does a quiet smooth job with large numbers; but the damned fools who designed the installation gave it a gassing capacity four times the burning capacity. The overload in peak periods must end in a tremendous mess. Well, let those wiseacres in Berlin spend money and waste scarce material and machinery. Let them find out for themselves that no chimney linings will hold up against the heat of combustion of hundreds of thousands of human bodies, dead meat burning by the hundreds of metric tons on a twenty-four-hour basis. Those big complicated structures will give nothing but trouble. The height of foolishness; amateur architecture, amateur disposal techniques! Bureaucrats a thousand miles from the job dreaming up fancy installations when all they ever needed was plenty of God’s open air and Paul Blobel’s frame.

  Depending on the wind, the burning time on the frame can be two to ten hours. Some Jews tend the crackling pyre with iron forks. Others, including Jastrow and Mutterperl, are down in the long narrow pit, passing up more bodies. It is starting to snow again. Black smoke and red flames climb into the white snowfall, a beautiful sight if any eye here can see beauty. But the forty-odd SS men surrounding the job, guns in hand, are bored and numb, waiting for their reliefs; and the Jews — those who are sane enough to notice things — are all driven and busy.

  Many of these Jews are now quite harmless madmen. They work because they will be fed if they do, and starved and beaten if they don’t. Uncovering and descending into hideously foul mass graves; handling desiccated rotted corpses that can come apart in one’s leather-gloved hands, that drip fat worms; piling up one’s murdered fellow Jews and setting them afire, day in and day out; these things have been too great a strain. Minds and spirits have given way, fallen apart like old corpses. These docile lunatic automatons are no more trouble to their guards than cattle; which is how the SS men handle the squad, with shouts and with dogs.

  But not all minds and spirits are gone. There are tough-willed fellows among them who mean to survive. They too obey the SS, but with eyes and ears alert for self-protection. For Jastrow and Mutterperl, working down in the graves has advantages, once one is steeled to handling gap-mouthed limp skeletal bodies all day. The SS allows you to wear a cloth over nose and mouth, and the guards, having no great zest for the sight and smell of the bodies, stand well clear of the holes. Slave workers can be shot to death without warning for talking on the job, but Jastrow and Mutterperl carry on long free conversations behind their masks.

  Today they are rehashing an old argument. Berel Jastrow is against trying a getaway here. True, he knows the forests, he knows partisan pathways and hiding places, and he even recalls old passwords. That is Sammy Mutterperl’s argument; this is Jastrow’s territory, and it’s a good place to make the try.

  But Berel is thinking ahead. It is not a question of taking to the woods to save their skins. Their mission is to bring the photographs and documents of Auschwitz to Prague, where the organized Resistance can get the material to the outside world, above all to the Americans. But Kommando 1005 has been moving farther and farther from Prague. Escaping here, they will have to traverse all of Poland through the woods, behind German lines. Some of the Poles are all right, but many of their partisan bands in the forests are unfriendly enough to Jews to kill them, and the Polish villagers cannot be trusted not to turn Jews in. Berel has heard talk among the SS officers about an impending transfer of Kommando 1005 to the Ukraine. That is many hundreds of miles closer to Prague.

  Mutterperl doesn’t want to rely on SS gossip. The transfer may not happen. He wants to act. He does most of the talking as they work their way down the row, lifting each maggoty body with what reverence they can, and passing it up to waiting hands above; signalling, when the corpse is a loose disintegrating one, for a canvas sling to hold it together.

  While he does this work, Berel Jastrow recites psalms for the dead. He knows the psaltery by heart. Several times each day he goes through all hundred and fifty t’hilim. The dead hold no terrors for Berel. In the old days, as an officer of the burial society, the hevra kadisha, he washed and prepared for interment many bodies. Here the terrible odor, the disgusting condition of these long-buried corpses, cannot mar his deep affection for them. They cannot help the way they died, these pitiful Jews, many still streaked with black blood from visible bullet holes.

  For Berel Jastrow these rotten remains possess all the sad sacred sweetness of the dead: poor cold silent mechanisms, once warm happy creatures sparkling with life, now dumb and motionless without the spark of God in them, but destined one day in His good time to rise again. So the Jewish faith teaches. He goes about this gruesome task with love, murmuring psalms. He cannot give these dead the orthodox purification by water, but fire purifies too, and the psalms will comfort their souls. The Hebrew verses are so graven in his memory that he can listen to Mutterperl, or even break off to argue, without missing a word of a psalm.

  Mutterperl is beginning to alarm Berel Jastrow. Sammy’s health is good; the man is burly, and Kommando 1005 feeds its exhumers well, before (as they all realize) their turn comes to be shot and burned on the frame. Until recently Sammy has seemed to be retaining his hard sanity, but he is talking really wildly now. The idea of crossing Poland through the forests is not enough for him today. He wants to organize the strongest Jews in the kommando and make a break in a body; seize some guards’ guns, and kill as many SS men as they can before plunging into the forest.

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nbsp; Sammy is talking so vehemently that his breath makes risky telltale smoke through the cloth mask. This situation is nothing like Auschwitz, he argues. There are no electrified wire fences. The SS men are a stupid, lazy, drunken, altogether careless gang. The cordon of soldiers is far off, and alerted only to keep the peasants away from the grave. They could kill a dozen Germans before getting away — maybe twice as many — if they could seize two or three machine guns.

  Berel replies that if organizing an uprising and killing a dozen Germans will help a getaway, fine, but how can it? The chances of being informed on and caught will increase with every Jew they approach. A silent escape always has the best chance of succeeding. Killing Germans will raise a hue and cry and start the whole military police force in Byelorussia after the fugitives. Why do it?

  Sammy Mutterperl is handing up out of the grave a little girl in a lilac dress. Her face is a peering grinning skull patched with shreds of greenish skin, but her dark streaming hair is feminine and pretty. “For her,” he says, as a Jew above takes the girl. The wide-eyed glittery look he gives Berel Jastrow above his mask is more horrible than the dead girl’s face.

  Berel does not answer. He heaves up body after body — they are light, these long-dead Jews, one seizes a body by the waist and twitches it readily into the air, into the waiting hands above — and goes on murmuring psalms. This is how Berel Jastrow holds on to his sanity. He is doing hevra kadisha work; his religious structure can contain and support even this heavy horror. Why such strange death has befallen so many Jews he cannot fathom. God will have much to answer for! Yet God did not do this, the Germans did it. Why did God not pass a miracle and stop the Germans? It may be that the generation did not deserve a miracle. So things went naturally, and the Germans broke loose all over Europe, murdering Jews. In this narrow squirrel-cage of question and answer Jastrow’s mind runs when he allows himself such vain thoughts. He does his best to suppress them.

  Mutterperl says after a long silence, “I intend to talk to Goodkind and Finkelstein tonight, to start with.”

  He is serious, then!

  What can one say to him? Mutterperl knows as well as Jastrow that beyond this grave where living Jews in a long file are handing up dead Jews, beyond the pyre which is now burning down to glowing ash, the ring of SS men stands always with tommy guns at the ready, with leashed dogs that if released will kill any moving prisoner. There are different ways that this work changes men. There are the crazy ones: Berel understands them. There are the ones who have been robbing the bodies, and — usually the same ones — sucking up to the SS, informing on other Jews, doing anything to get more food, more comfort, more assurance of surviving. He even understands them. God did not make human nature strong enough to stand what the Germans are doing.

  The bullying Jewish kapos in Auschwitz, the Judenrat officials in Warsaw and the other cities who picked people to go on the trains, and protected their relatives and friends, are all a product of the German cruelty. He can understand them. The mysterious crazy ferocity of the Germans is too much to endure; it turns normal people into treacherous animals. The hundreds of thousands of Jews that now lie in these graves meekly marched out to the pits and stood on the brink to let themselves be shot, with their wives, children, old parents, and all. Why? Because the Germans were acting beyond human nature. The surprise was too numbing. It could not be happening. People didn’t do such things for no reason. On the brink of the hole, with the Germans or their Latvian or Ukrainian shooters pointing the guns at them, these Jews, clothed or naked, probably thought that it was all a mistake, or a hoax, or a dream.

  Now Mutterperl wants to fight. Good, maybe that is the way, but with sense, not crazily! When Berel was with the partisans they killed some Germans. But what Mutterperl is talking about is a suicide rush; the work has gotten to him, and he really wants to die, whether he knows it or not; and this is wrong. They do not have the right to the surcease of death. They have to get to Prague.

  “There he is,” Mutterperl says with hoarse hate. “Ut iz er.”

  An SS man with gun tucked under an arm has come to the edge of the hole. He looks down, yawning, then takes out a pale penis and urinates over the bodies. This same fellow does this every day, usually several times. It is either his idea of humor, or a special way he has to show contempt for Jews. He is not a bad-looking young German, with a long narrow face, thick blond hair, and bright blue eyes. They know nothing else about him; they call him the Pisser. Marching to and from the work sites he is like the other SS men, tough and harsh, but not one of the sadists who look for excuses to beat a Jew. It is just his fancy to piss on the dead.

  Mutterperl says, “Him, I want to kill.”

  Later, when both men are on the bone-disposal detail, raking warm fragments or whole collarbones, thighs, and skulls out of the smoking ash heap and feeding them into the bone-crushing mill, Mutterperl pokes Jastrow with an elbow.

  “Ut iz er.“

  At the pit, the SS man is urinating again, picking a spot where the bodies still lie.

  Mutterperl repeats, “Him, I want to kill.”

  The sun has gone down. It is almost dark, and bitter cold. The last fire of the day is flickering low all along the frame, lighting up the faces and arms of the Jews who are raking the fallen ashes for bones. The trucks have arrived. This grave is too far out from town to march the kommando there and back; not that one has to coddle Jews, but time is important. Blobel has even taken criticism for “taxiing” Jews with precious gasoline, as one critical SS inspector put it; but he has a tough hide and he runs his show as he pleases. Only he knows the true magnitude and urgency of the job. He knows more about it than the great Himmler, who assigned it to him, because he is the man on the spot, and he has all the maps and reports of the execution squads.

  So the Jews will ride back to the cow barns at an abandoned dairy in Minsk. There are of course no cattle or horses in occupied Russia. The Germans have long since taken them off. Blobel’s far-roaming Kommando 1005 has no trouble quartering its Jews in one animal stall or another, and its SS contingent merely turns out of their homes as many Russians as may be necessary. Food for the field kitchens is a chronic problem, because the Wehrmacht is so stingy about it, but Blobel’s officers are now old hands at smelling out and requisitioning victuals from the local people. Even in this scrubby and devastated part of the Soviet Union there is food. People must eat. One has to know how to lay hands on their stores, that is all.

  By the last light of the fire, Untersturmführer Greiser is himself locking up the valuables collected from the corpses, in heavy canvas bags used for transporting secret SS correspondence.

  More of this disagreeable work tomorrow; a pretty deep grave, after all, two layers of bodies left. Half a day’s work to clean them up, shovel in the ashes, level off the pit with dirt and scatter grass seed. By next spring it will be hard to find the place. In two years brush will cover it; in five years the woods will obliterate it with new growth, and that will be that.

  Standartenführer Blobel’s car drives up. In the dim firelight, the chauffeur gets out and salutes. Untersturmführer Greiser is to report to the Standartenführer at once, and the car has come for him. Greiser is surprised and concerned. The Standartenführer seems to like him, but any summons from a superior can be bad news. Probably the boss wants a report on the economic processing. Greiser puts his master sergeant in charge of the sacks, keeping the keys himself. The car drives off with him toward Minsk.

  How Greiser would love a bath before he makes his report! It’s no use keeping clear of the pit, the bodies, the smoke; the smell infects the air all around a work area. It haunts the nerves of your nose. You’re still smelling it even after a bath, when you sit down to try to enjoy your dinner. Rough duty!

  Untersturmführer Greiser reported to Kommando 1005 with a high rating for loyalty and intelligence. His father is an old National Socialist, a top official in the post office. Greiser was brought up in the Hitler movement. The s
pecial treatment of Jews was a hard concept to swallow when he first heard of it in a secret SS training program. But now he understands it. Still, he has had trouble with the Kommando 1005 mission. Why conceal and obliterate the graves? On the contrary, once the New Order triumphs these places should all have monumental markers to show where the enemies of mankind perished, at the hands of the German people, Western civilization’s rescuers. He once ventured to say this to the Standartenführer. Blobel explained that once the new day dawns for mankind, all these evildoers and the world wars they caused must simply be forgotten, so that innocent children can grow up in a happy Jew-free world, without even a memory of the bad past.

  But, Greiser objected, what will the world think happened to Europe’s eleven million Jews, that they just vanished into thin air? Blobel, with an indulgent smile, advised the young man to read Mein Kampf again, on the stupidity and short memory of the masses.

  Standartenführer Blobel, well along in his evening boozing, is poring over his SS maps of the Ukraine while he waits for Greiser to arrive. He finds the loyal naïveté of the young officer very engaging. Blobel could not tell him the truth about the 1005 operation, which he himself has surmised but has never breathed to a soul; and which is, that Heinrich Himmler now thinks Germany may lose the war, and is taking steps to preserve Germany’s reputation. Blobel thinks the Reichsführer is very wise. One can hope the Fiihrer will still pull it off, in spite of all the odds, and in spite of the hard Stalingrad blow. But now is the time to prepare for an unfavorable result of the war.