Chapter 20
I had said it often without thinking of it. Auschwitz and Birkenau almost a city combined, divided by a railway. I did not comprehend until I saw it for myself.
We did not know the scale. People must forever understand this. We did not know. This was Poland. Another country. A prison larger than Erfurt. And what I could not see Klein mapped out to me.
‘You will never see it all, Ernst. It would probably take two days to take it in. They demolished a town to build it. Right here by the river. They have water. A coal mine near. Just this month they have completed the railway spur from the mainline. Before that they had to use lorries. Wagons. Very inhumane so they built a railway spur instead. The deportations exchange at the main station. From the whole empire. Then here. They can now process much faster. From train to ramp and in they go.’
And in we went.
*
We were checked twice. Once outside the redbrick edifice, from Klein’s car window, as at Buchenwald, and then after we had parked the car at the Birkenau block supervisor’s office. None of this area looked like a prison. It was acres of office buildings just like the Topf factory. Street signs to direct. Our oven was destined for Birkenau, for Auschwitz II, as it was designated. That was where it was needed. I never saw a prisoner. Just the brick or wooden barracks. It was as silent as a prison should be imagined. The only noise came from the endless parade of secretaries and officers from building to building. I heard no howls or screams or the rattle of chains, if chains there were. It felt safe. Assured. I had not known what to expect after the mud and bleakness of Buchenwald. I left my coat and hat, my jacket also, in the car. You could not see any difference from myself and Klein in our shirtsleeves. Only my worn satchel and his smart black briefcase distinguishing.
We were walked to the Construction Board by a young secretary along toy-town paths. Birkenau had seven SS departments. An administration as complex as any city and probably as corrupt. Klein nodded to several faces. I do not think he would have known them given his reluctance for such a journey. It was just his way.
Our Party pins on our ties. Mine, not being a member, meaningless as a child’s tin sheriff badge. It was past three o’clock. My early lunch of small raw steak empty in me now and I eyed the beef sandwich on the major’s desk in the Construction Board with envy.
Klein put out his hand first. Introduced himself and I, but confused by the face behind the desk.
‘Major Bischoff is no longer here, Major …?’
‘Norin, Herr Klein. Major Norin. Major Bischoff left us just this month. He has been rewarded well for the creation of the second camp. He built it from nothing except the drains of the old town. I am pleased to assist Topf and Sons in our new endeavours. Please be seated, gentlemen.’
‘It would be better for us to get on, Major. We do not want to take up your valuable time. If you could just introduce us to the surveyor and where the oven is to be installed. We would not wish to impede on yourself or your staff.’
The major approved this attitude. I could have told him that Klein was only thinking of the room service and bath in his hotel.
‘You have the plan?’ he asked.
Klein snapped his fingers at me. I handed it over from my bag and the major held it in both hands. Ogled it.
‘How tall is this thing?’
‘Ernst?’ Klein to me.
‘It has four levels. But it will require only a two-storey building, Major.’
‘We do not have time to build another structure,’ this said to Klein. ‘It is to fit into the current oven area. Dig below if needed. But I would rather that the triple ovens are not taken out of operation.’
Klein did not hesitate. ‘We will not interfere unduly I am sure, Major.’
The major content with this.
‘I am told such an oven, based on our current rate, could consume over four thousand on a twenty-four-hour shift.’
‘That is paper figures, Major,’ Klein said. ‘I am afraid that Berlin’s estimations have always worked on the basis that an oven can work all day and night. That is why we have to repair them so often. They are overworked by inexperienced men. Accountants’ figures are always gleefully given. I am sure you have experienced the actuality, Major.’
The major laughed. ‘Quite so! Quite so! Every morning a man with a sooty face tells me so! Is there a way to overcome the repairs?’
‘Gas, Major. We should have always gone with gas. But that is accountants for you also. If we converted your ovens now it would cost one hundred and forty thousand marks, even with the other contractors of the SS’s help. So coke it is. Even so you are looking at sixty-five thousand marks. But this oven advantages that the consumption of coke will be reduced. It relies on the bodies themselves for fuel.’
‘I have heard this. It is true?’
Klein took back the plan with a bow.
‘I am the head of the Special Ovens Department, Major. If I present myself at Auschwitz that is even greater than my word.’
The major shook his hand again.
‘You will find Koller, the surveyor, at the railway. That is where the oven will be. Beyond the processing area. Straight off the train.’
‘My assistant will attend, Major.’ The plan passed back to my hands, passed from behind. Never looked at me. ‘I should take a seat. I have been travelling all day. Ernst?’ He sat opposite the major. ‘I am exhausted.’ He took out his cigarette case and offered it to the major. ‘Go back to the railway and main gate. See Koller. I will discuss with Major Norin. Meet me back here.’
I bowed and left, had only spoken once. I had drawn that plan. What went into the oven and what came out nothing to do with my pencil, should not be my concern. My work. But I had heard the figure of sixty-five thousand marks. And the other one. The other figure. The one that related to the fuel for the new oven. Over four thousand on a twenty-four-hour shift, the major had said. I did not want to calculate what I was being paid for by the hour. On such a figure. By the hour, by my pencilled lines. I walked to the railway.
*
‘Herr Koller?’ I asked. My hand out. But who else could it be? Every other body in grey with club or rifle or ragged cloth and cap with hoe or paintbrush.
‘Steven,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘Call me Steven.’
‘Ernst. Ernst Beck.’ We were between the train ‘station’ and the brick of the pediment and long wall of the main entrance. The smoking chimneys from the ovens beyond this wall above all. Plain as a bakery.
‘Are you new?’ Koller asked. ‘I usually only see Messing and Koch here.’
He was a short man, his hair wiry, untidy. Glasses like all surveyors. He held my hand as we stepped over the tracks. Leading me like a boy with a secret.
‘I have been with Topf for two months. We are installing new ovens. And a newly designed one.’
‘I know. Prüfer and Sander spent the weekend here. It must be important. Although I cannot see what a new oven here will accomplish.’ He breathed deep and looked about. ‘A bird has only enough feathers as it needs. You would think forty ovens would be enough. Maybe fifty. I do not know. I’ve not seen them all. Twenty percent of the whole camp is devoted to them. They have more of them than water tanks. Show me this plan. Inside.’
We moved to the processing antechamber, right inside the archway where the short walk from the train cars ended. No door was locked. There were chairs and desks for the invisible secretaries and a table large enough for us to use. Koller unfolded my paper and spread it on the table.
‘At present the train comes in and the processing is done here. Through the opposite door, in the arch, all the belongings go for searching and confiscation. A pile of suitcases to the left. The “relocated” to the right.’
I looked about the room. There were no inkwells, no typewriters on the desks. Shelves which should hold paperwork and box-folders empty. Empty water jugs. Cobwebs on them. Koller went on.
‘It is intended that this new
oven can be installed beside the current triple muffles. The ovens are beyond here. The new train tracks are designed so that three cars can come in and the prisoners are taken straight to the delousing chambers and the ovens are in the same place. This ensures that the infection is quarantined to this area only. Ovens inside the camp would be futile. To move the infected and dead through the camp futile. The SS have finally made efforts to contain.’ He stood back from the plan. ‘I am not seeing how this oven would not require a new building. But there is no time for that. So we are told.’
‘No time?’
He folded up the plan.
‘War, Ernst. The war is not about building now. Bischoff left this month. He built this place. Himmler imagines this city to become a true city. An actual place for people to live. For fine people. After the war. I have seen the plans.’ He looked around as if he could not see such a dream happening.
‘Come. I will show you where this is supposed to be constructed. I cannot take you into the actual building. Just the outside.’
‘Why not?’
‘It is in use. All the time. Until the brick fails. As it always does. Only the SS and the special commandos are permitted near.’ He pointed to my tie-pin. ‘You might get closer. If you wished. I forgot mine. No-one seems to care I find.’ He smiled. ‘But you never know.’
We walked to the crematoria. Four of them. The heat already felt from a hundred yards away. One of them closed and undergoing the reconstruction I had drawn previously. A workforce digging out the ground for the concrete steps. I had not mentioned to Prüfer that the plans had no chutes. Koller informed me that one by one all the crematoria would be adapted so. To delouse and to cremate in the same place. To keep the typhus and its lice from walking through the camp.
‘But there’s a new urgency now, Ernst.’ We walked on. To the last building. ‘You know Hoss? He was the commandant here three years ago. He came back last week. That is an SS you do not want to have look at you unfavourably.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He learnt his trade in the East.’ East. A word for Hell in wartime. ‘Your oven is part of his remit.’
‘Remit?’
He breathed deep, studied me.
‘I am only a surveyor, Ernst. And I talk too much.’ He indicated the brickwork of the last building in the block. ‘I think this building is appropriate for your oven.’
I saw the black seeping into the mortar.
‘Christ! The whole thing is burning!’
‘They all are. I do not think there is enough time to build an extension. But it will need another floor below. This one is the best grounded. But that should still take two weeks. And no-one will be happy about that. They pull their figures out of their arses. By the time they replace all the old ovens this thing must be operational. It must be working by July. Topf has fifty-six days I’m told.’
‘That is impossible,’ I said, and looked at the small area with my architect’s eye. From paper to brick. But no trees to be cleared. The ground good and level. You could toe into the foundations of the crematoria beside it. But still …
‘Impossible to not build another structure,’ I said.
Koller passed me his tape. ‘The SS do not understand that word. You should have gathered so in your two months. I have listened to them for years. They expect and deliver miracles. Infinite labour. No unions. Nothing has been impossible to them. They can think of a dam and it will be up next week. As long as they don’t have to pay for it.’
We set to work. No guard or officer questioned. Two men in white shirts and suit trousers with measure and notepads. Unquestioned. In a prison. There were two lorries waiting along the path. Covered and guarded at the sides, rifles all around them, their drivers watching us.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Waiting for us to leave,’ he said.
‘So am I.’
He laughed. Agreed.
‘Do not look at them. They wait for eyes to look at them.’
We were done. Nothing pegged into the ground. All on paper. The manual work would be for Prüfer and his men.
‘Do you smoke, Herr Koller? Steven?’
He did not, told me to go to the railway. The SS did not approve of smoking he reminded. Major Norin had smoked Klein’s Camels with him in his office. Lawmakers’ immunity.
‘I must wait here for an officer,’ he said. ‘Lucky me.’
He called me as I left.
‘Ask your boss about the fifty-six days, Ernst. Then you will understand what I said about pulling these figures out of their arses. Fifty-six days.’
He waved me away. Not in a friendly manner, dismissive, and I thought on that wave as I rolled my cigarette.
I was in braces and white rolled sleeves. A warm day. A wave of heat shimmering above the smoking chimneys. I followed the rail spur, smoking contemplatively as tobacco sometimes permits. My head light, thoughts like a poet’s. The best cigarettes. Those when you are alone and walking slow, looked to the sound of a train coming in to the camp. A diesel engine pulling cattle trucks not carriages. I could see the driver. Not a man in army uniform. Just a regular train driver. A man doing his job. Like all of us. I could feel the ground shake with the approach. Koller had said the station was made for three trucks. There were seven.
Guards were running from behind me, as if the train had caught them by surprise.
I could hear the jangle of the straps of their rifles in unison, so not running. A quick march. The train not a surprise. Scheduled.
I had not noticed the dogs until they barked. No rifles for the men restraining the dogs. They had clubs like table legs. I smoked and watched. I knew this was something rare. Again, Ernst Beck, experiencing something rare, as in Prüfer’s office when Voss had explained. Told me how important my work was to the SS. Rare sights now becoming common to a man who had never left Germany. Now standing in the field of a prison camp in Poland. No. In Germany.
The yelling of the guards and the barking of the dogs as the doors of the cars rolled open brought goose-flesh on my bare arms and I brushed them. Ash rose from my skin. Not from my cigarette.
I had come closer without noticing. All of the soldiers were moving. Not one of them guarding, rifles on shoulders. They were all pulling people from the trucks, from both sides, barking with the dogs. Headscarfed old women trying to get down gracefully. Children in coats and caps too big for them, their father’s clothes, the men in vests and braces and shirts like myself. The only sounds above the shouts and the dogs were the children’s cries until their mothers covered them into their coats.
They were marched down the platform or dragged and barged if they were too slow or weak. My poet’s smoking respite broken with the curses and the straining dogs leaping at children’s arms. Children that had once known dogs as pets.
I saw a girl fall, her mother or aunt pushed along away from her screams. Their hands reaching, mouths wide, and then the girl’s pleading arms crushed by bodies walking over, being pushed over her.
I threw my cigarette, left my bag, yelled as I ran. Was running without thinking. Was running at guns. I could not see her any more with the press of them. I ran at the image of her fall.
A young man with shorn hair picked her up at the same time I reached her. We checked her together. She beat at us, her face dirty and damp, her eyes closed. He spoke to her in their language and thanked me I thought, but he pushed me away gently, took her with him.
I was in the midst of them when I stood. I tried to push back, back to the side, but they were too close together. I looked behind for a guard, saw the suitcases being piled up from the train. I had got in the crowd without resistance but now only saw the helmets and the clubs all along the mass. The mass of us.
I yelled at the nearest helmet, clawed toward him, held up my tie with the pin. He heaved my chin back into them. I was carried. In the current. The current that would break only past the arch.
I fought but they pushed me along, the prisoners pushed me along. And I saw the arch
of the redbrick building loom. Looming like a cathedral door. I was going in. My identification back in my jacket, back in the car.
I kicked at the dirt, back-pedalling and knocking heads with my elbows but still the arch came on. I was a man in an ashen shirt and braces like hundreds of others. And there were hundreds of others. And me in the middle of them. The arched mouth yawned above me.
‘Wait!’ I yelled. ‘I am not a prisoner!’ I pushed myself up on an old man’s shoulders. ‘I am not a prisoner! My name is Ernst—’ My body dragged down. By the motion of them. My voice drowned by barking dogs and spittle-covered cursing, the clubs swinging at backs and heads and I ducked like all the rest. We moved each other. Impossible to stop the swell. Those at the back pressing us together by rifles pressing them until we were no longer even walking. We carried each other in.
I elbowed more, kicked more, and then I saw a group of peaked caps, of officers to our right nodding at clipboards. I saw a face I knew. Captain Schwarz. One of them was Captain Schwarz from Buchenwald I was sure. Hoped I was sure. The captain who had given me a lift. A lift home. Weeks ago. He may not know me at all.
I punched now. Struck out at eyes and faces without seeing them and hurled myself over the wave of bodies to reach his earshot. I would ignore the guards at the sides. Hoped my German would carry. No-one else was calling to an SS officer. I would be noticed. Or I would be shot. But I did not think of that. Panic was all I had. A bullet beyond concern.
‘Captain Schwarz!’ I bellowed. ‘Captain Schwarz! It is Ernst Beck! From Erfurt! From Topf! From Topf! Help me!’
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