The song came to its end, the men accustomed to timing themselves to assemble in the square before the finish, packed in the square, not an inch between them, and then a prisoner stepped from the band, came to the front. The conductor.
I was watching a conductor at eight in the morning in a prison. A captive audience of hundreds, a choir of hundreds. I began to smile myself, with Klein, to smile as at elephants or bears performing for handfuls of nuts. In absurdity. To not think how the elephants or bears are trained. It was if this were for us, for Klein and myself. But no. This happened every day. Twice a day. Their roll call. They did not even know we were here.
The band began. A martial tune, not like the record, a rousing powerful song, the type used as food for starving soldiers to forget their holed boots and damp socks. But the voices were not rousing, they were dulled and low like a warped record winding down, exactly as Zarah Leander’s wasn’t. The counter of her voice.
‘Here,’ Klein said. ‘They like this bit. Watch them stand straighter.’
It was the chorus. One line in it that came stronger than a mumble. Something on once being free from prison walls.
‘They wrote the song themselves,’ Klein tapped the roof of his car. ‘Ten marks to the composer. A competition. That is quite impressive, no? Every camp has a song. And they beat those who do not sing well enough – which is bad, but it is their song. They should sing it proud. They voted for it. Come.’
We walked away from the car and I remembered to look at the gate with the backwards writing, for those facing it on the inside.
‘TO EACH HIS OWN’.
Klein watched me read it. Saw everything. Always.
‘It means, “You get what you deserve.” And don’t we all, Ernst? At the end. And at the beginning, if you are lucky enough. And work well.’ He waved me to the stairs, to the wooden building above the gatehouse. Guards and their machine-guns walking around the balcony.
‘This is the main guard tower. We passed the commandant’s quarters along the road but Pister likes to breakfast with his men. Likes to hear the song. Walk smarter, Ernst. You are to meet a colonel!’
The marching tune ended. The roll call begun. Zarah Leander again, quieter this time for the guards to hear the names.
This like my first day at school. Bewildering, fearful. I could only think of telling Etta of it, as telling my mother of my first day with my teacher and the strange new children. The strangeness, my clothes even out of place against the stripes of prison suits, stripes of barbed wire and the gates. No walls, electric wired fences. Green freedom just beyond, in sight all around. Bears tumbling each other in a zoo. My first day.
Chapter 7
Senior-Colonel Pister opened the chalet door himself. I did not know what I expected but not the portly, white-haired man in red sweater and red braces above his SS trousers. If it were not April, if not for his lack of beard, I might have just met St Nick.
A wood stove, the smell of coffee and bacon warming the room. I was jarred for a moment, almost hiding behind Klein as Pister welcomed us against the sound of names being barked in the square below.
Pister’s arms opened wide as if to embrace.
‘How are you, Hans?’
‘Very well, Colonel.’
Klein negated, defeated, Pister’s open arms with a handshake, his left hand on Pister’s arm, drawing Pister’s hand into the shake. ‘I am so glad we managed to catch the song.’
The ‘we’ directed to me and that was how I was introduced and how I realised Klein controlled rooms. He did not wait for Pister to ask who he had brought, he did not reciprocate Pister’s embrace but initiated his own and I tried to recall if he had done the same to me, and then I saw that his hand was on Pister’s back, gently, and this I recalled, and the pace up the stairs on my first day. Keep up, keep up.
Keep up. Klein’s way. Keep up with me. Or I will leave you all behind. A trick. You could not keep up. He would not let you, and he did it so naturally you would never notice. My only insight. Seeing him do it to someone else.
Pister took my hand. ‘Welcome to Buchenwald, Herr Beck.’
Klein spoke for me.
‘Herr Beck is new to Topf. Our new draughtsman. He has never seen a prison before. I am pleased he can see it under your command, Colonel. Rather than before.’
Pister’s face saddened.
‘Ah, yes, Herr Beck. I inherited a sorry place I can tell you. Now, to business, gentlemen.’ He bid us to sit, offered the percolated coffee. Klein had told me in his office that he did not drink coffee, and, in truth, he did not touch it other than to dip a biscuit Pister had given as the names still came loudly from outside and men with guns walked past the windows.
Pister bemoaned the ovens.
He wanted a six-muffle oven, six doors, to increase capacity. The reduction of matter too much for the old set. A new oven. The old three-door model broke down too often. Was never meant to work so hard. It would have to be replaced.
‘I will not return to using just pits like my predecessor. That is animal work.’
I was taking the notes. Needed clarification. Klein’s jaw clenched when I spoke.
‘Why do the ovens break, Colonel?’
Pister sat back in his red leather armchair. With his black boots and red sweater his Christmas look almost completed. I waited for him to pat his knee for me to sit upon.
‘We have a high death rate here. The other camps send only their sick and old to us. We are more morgue than prison. The healthy stock comes from the Sinti and Roma, and the POWs. When I can get them.’
Klein snapped his biscuit.
‘Building a new oven, Colonel, will take a month. Herr Prüfer will have to build it and Herr Sander would have to sign it off. And I can tell you, Colonel, that Prüfer will not build a new oven for less than sixty thousand marks.’
‘That is preposterous,’ Pister said. ‘Nonsense.’ Christmas no more.
‘Nevertheless. We could replace some of the bricks in the existing oven, add one more three-muffle, which would only take two weeks, and provide you with mobile ovens in the meantime to maintain your conversion rates. That we could do for forty thousand marks.’
‘Bah!’ Pister shooed his arm at Klein. ‘I have had these mobile ovens before. They are too slow in the open. I am not burning pigs.’ He leaned forward. ‘I do not think any of you ever understand. There are more than sixty thousand prisoners here. A third of them are sick.’ He raised a finger.
‘And do not forget this is a prison. We have thousands of criminals here. Real criminals. This is where the murderers come. They are controlled by the ovens.’
‘How are they controlled by the ovens?’ I spoke without thinking. Idiot. Fool. Pretended not to see Klein’s glare.
Pister tapped his temple.
‘In the head, Herr Beck. You control them in the head. When you have broken ovens they know they cannot be shot. They see no smoke. Or even if only one is working they know you are not going to add to the pile of dead you already have with a couple more. So, murders and thefts increase. Every day the ovens are broken there is more crime, more disorder. And when they rob, they kill, because again that will add to the pile that they know you will not add them to. It is exasperating.’ He looked hard at Klein.
‘That is why I need a six-door oven. But, reluctantly, I will take the mobile units. To suffice. They have good presence. In the fields. The prisoners can see them.’
‘Excellent.’ Klein gave his grin, kept it going. ‘We can install three mobile units tomorrow. I will take your concerns to Herr Sander personally, Colonel. He will telephone you direct. We will measure for the six-muffle and I will inspect the others. See if they can be repaired quickly. As I said, the difference between building new or adding two more will be twenty thousand marks and two more weeks. By what you have said I understand that is unacceptable. I will advise Herr Sander that we need a better price and I will send out a repair team today. So as you may reduce your crimes.’ He
smiled broader, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘By reducing your criminals, eh?’
He stood, his hand out, and I followed. ‘Thank you so much for the coffee, Colonel, and for your valuable time.’ He declined an escort and, as we stepped the stairs, handed me a surgical mask from his pocket.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You will need this.’ He stopped on the last step, blocking me. ‘And I would think it better if you did not speak directly to men like the colonel again. You are new. You could make unintentional mistakes. You understand, Ernst?’
‘Yes, Herr Klein. I am sorry.’
‘No, no. No need to apologise. It is my fault for not helping you. Come now.’
We passed the gatehouse again to reach the crematoria, the trucks being loaded with the prisoner work details behind us. Some of them for our factory, for Topf. To work to make the muffles that would find their way back here.
*
We smoked outside the crematoria beside a wooden fenced area taller than us. A cigarette for the work finished. The smell. The mask not helping, but I had expected it, readied for it.
‘It must be full,’ Klein said. ‘That stench. The morgue is below the ovens. They used to use pits.’ He waved towards the forest. ‘They still do. But the land is too marshy. The bodies rot into the water table. They discovered that early. It is the same problem at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The ground is like a swamp half the year. But good for us, eh? Less pits means more ovens, no?’
All this a revelation to me. Perhaps bringing me here my induction.
‘How will he react to speaking about bodies as commodities?’
‘He must understand we furnish ovens for the camps. Must have the aptitude. The attitude.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘Plenty of unemployed men.’
I consoled that my friend Paul’s work was harder. In his crematoriums. He actually worked with the dead, worked the ovens. I only drew them. Someone else designed them, someone else installed them. Prisons need ovens. Cities need sewers. Unpleasant, but the way of things. Every hospital has a tall chimney somewhere along its skyline. Children will be born in the happier wards but far away from them will be a tall chimney. Make it as efficient as they could. The camps rife with disease, with sickness and the damned. A necessary service. This surely my induction to such.
*
I had taken down Klein’s instruction and measurements. He had taken photographs. We had finished for the day, passed lunch.
‘Two o’clock, Ernst. We should go. What do you say? Home early. I can develop my film at home. I have my own darkroom.’
‘Are we not going back to the factory? To send a repair team for tomorrow, sir?’
‘I organised that this morning. Before we left. I knew he would have to go for the repair. Senior-Colonel? Ha! You know he came from Himmler’s motor-pool?’
Keep up. Keep up.
He threw away his cigarette in an arc and I watched it fall and saw an officer in a peaked cap approaching. Klein did not wait for him. He strode toward, away from me, and I watched him put out his hand and intercept, converse out of my earshot.
I stood on my cigarette and watched them go back and forth, happily back and forth, and Klein turned his back to me. I shifted nervously, waved when the officer looked to me as Klein spoke. He did not wave back. I flushed at the glance, bent and pretended to fumble through Klein’s briefcase. Their shadows came over me.
‘Ernst,’ Klein said, and I stood up clumsily in the mud. ‘This is Captain Schwarz.’ We shook hands, his in leather. He bowed and I did the same, not as naturally. ‘I want you to do me a favour, Ernst,’ Klein said. ‘My house is only a few miles from here. It seems pointless for me to travel back to town only to come out again, no? I wondered if you would mind riding back to Erfurt with the captain?’
A gratified look from the SS captain.
‘I am going to Erfurt. To pick a gift for my wife, Herr Beck. At the Anger. It is her birthday. It is no trouble for me to take you home. I would welcome the companionship.’
Klein took his briefcase from me. ‘Would you mind, Ernst? I would appreciate it.’
‘Of course. Yes. Of course. But, Herr Klein? I think you still have my worker’s pass?’
The captain snapped out his gloved hand. My pass between his fingers like the reveal of a magician with my chosen card.
‘Here it is, Herr Beck. We will leave by the east gate.’
‘I’ll get your hat and coat from the car,’ Klein said.
Chapter 8
The Daimler-Benz was not as grand as Klein’s Opel. Klein’s car for pleasure. This was austere, quieter, more noble. The first mile in silence and then as the farmhouses became manse houses the captain’s fingers became looser on the wheel. Removed his cap to my lap.
‘Too warm. Hold that for me would you, Herr Beck. I do not like to put it on the floor.’
I looked at the grinning silver skull.
‘Klein tells me that you have only been at Topf for a few days now?’
‘Yes, Captain. Since Thursday.’
‘What did you do before?’
‘I was at the university. Studying to be a draughtsman. Then no work until this.’
‘So you got the work you studied for? That is good. Well done.’
He was maybe ten years older than me but seemed ancient in comparison as if he had already lived one life and come back and remembered it all. I was the boy next to him. His uniform pristine like a wedding table, my clothes hanging around me with the wet morning. I could smell them above the car’s leather.
‘I never went to university. I envy you that. I could have. But I valued my duty more I suppose. But your duty is just as important. Your education will be a great asset to your country. We value that.’ He looked at me kindly. ‘When did you graduate?’
‘41.’ I added nothing else but he was ready to go on.
‘And you have only just found work?’
‘There was not a lot of work about.’
‘Ah. That is true. Did you not think of joining the war? For the time being? That is duty too, no?’
‘I married that year. I thought I would get a job sooner. I thought I would be helping the country by planning fighter craft by now.’
‘As did your wife I’ll bet? Women, eh? Look at me. I am going to the Anger and using up a day’s relief to buy something I do not want. And when I have to work Sunday to make up for it she will complain, eh? Women.’
‘I have only just started work and she has already spent my wage.’
He slapped the wheel and I jumped at his laugh.
‘That is it! That is just so, Ernst! We married men only understand! Look at Klein. No wife, no children. What does he know? Something we do not for sure.’
I did not know Klein was not married. I had assumed so. It bothered me. Unsure why. I thought everyone wanted to be married. Fool. Poor fool in a damp suit again. Riding in a car with an SS captain while Klein was at home fixing himself a bath and a Martini.
‘So, when did you join the Party, Ernst?’
I had forgotten the pin, the proud pin still stuck to my lapel. I looked at it as if a scorpion had appeared there.
I could say that Klein had given it to me. Given it to me for the reason he had said. To make the right impression. But that might get him into trouble. And myself. I had thought of Klein first. I was sure I should not treat a small tin badge with such flippancy. But if I said a year, a time, committed to it, there would be a paper somewhere to confirm. Everything, even my subsistence chits, were stamped with an eagle.
‘Oh. That would have been ’42. I think. To be honest, Captain, I am not political I must confess.’ I tried to say it the way Klein had done. ‘My wife insisted. Thought it would help with my career. They always know what is best for us.’ Now I was being more than the fool. I was playing it. I did not believe such sentiments about Etta. It is just what you say when you ride with an SS officer in his car. Your opinion his opinion.
; He laughed again.
‘That is the way! That is the way! Do you have children, Ernst?’
‘No, Captain. But when we have won the war we should think of it.’
‘Exactly. Just so. I have a son. My proudest gift. I envy him the country he will inherit. What is your wife’s name?’
‘Etta.’
‘A good name. My wife’s name is Emma.’ He grimaced. ‘I think it is too English.’
‘Not at all. Where are you shopping in the Anger, Captain?’
He leaned his ear to me. ‘Hmm?’
‘The Anger. For your wife’s birthday.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I have not thought on it. I have a few hours to waste.’
‘We do not see many SS officers in town. You will be stared at no doubt, Captain.’
He nudged me with his elbow. Like a friend.
‘But I bet I get good service, eh? Now, where do you live for me to drop you?’
I had not thought on this. An SS car to my door. The black and silver pennants flying, the runes on the licence plate, the twitch of curtains along the street. Etta watching from the window.
‘If you drive to the Anger I can walk from there. I do not want to trouble you, Captain.’
‘Nonsense. It is no trouble. None.’ Turned his face to me, eyes off the road. ‘Where do you live, Ernst?’
*
I did not mean to slam closed the door of the apartment. Etta, alarmed, staring at me from the sink as I stood with the door braced at my back.
‘Ernst? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’ I went to the window, threw my hat and coat to the chair.
‘You are home early? Was there a problem at the camp?’
‘No. No problem.’ I looked through the net curtain. The black car still there. ‘But I missed the cafeteria lunch.’
‘That is why you look so pale. I will make a sandwich. What are you looking at?’
The car sat there. No blue smoke from the back. Just sat there. Its flat roof looking up at me.
‘Frau Klein. Landlady patrol again. I had to run in. She was hovering around the door.’ This was partly true. Frau Klein had seen the captain open the car door for me from her ground-floor window. He bowed to me as I passed back his cap.
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