The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  ‘Three died in the night,’ he would shout.

  ‘I killed two this morning for being late. Beat the fuckers to death,’ he would boast.

  ‘One man short. Starved to death. Never mind, more food for the rest of us.’

  And always there’d be that grin of superiority in his voice, audible and visible, despite his back being turned from us.

  The Adjutant would tick off the figures, nod, and move on to the next barracks. Death was merely a statistic to him, an accountant from hell doing the rounds of a factory where human beings were both the machinery and the product.

  After five thirty, we walked across the compound to the food truck, where large vats of what passed for food had been prepared by other prisoners. We always carried our tin mugs with us, our tin plates and our tin spoons. We would line up, our stomachs complaining bitterly. There was rarely any smell from the food in the cold morning air. It was all so squalid. Eventually, I would find myself at the front of the queue, and would be handed two slices of what they called bread (it actually was a type of bread but the flour had been mixed with sawdust to save cost), some margarine if we were lucky, some marmalade, and what the cooks called coffee. I never became used to the taste of the coffee in Sachsenhausen. It was only later that I was told it wasn’t coffee at all, but ground up toasted acorns mixed with chicory.

  We wandered back to our barracks, ate this muck hungrily and then paraded outside for collection by the work detail to be sent to the factories. Every day we looked for familiar faces. Sadness no longer overcame us when someone with whom we’d been working for two or three months suddenly wasn’t there any more. At first, in the beginning, we were distressed beyond belief. But as death became the routine rather than the exception amongst us, we viewed a friend’s death as a blessed way out, a holiday from further work. A Sabbath.

  The work I did in the DEMAG factory was for a mechanic, a maintenance man. No, that’s not a fair description. He was an expert at hydraulics. He was doing something on pressure levels in boilers or something, and he needed a couple of strong men to help him lift and carry and push things from one side of the boiler to another.

  At first, when I was assigned to him and when we began working together, he was cold and distant. He commanded me to do things. ‘Pick this up. Put it there. Don’t do that.’ I just obeyed. He was the master, I the slave. I viewed him as a typical Nazi, a Christian German who hated me and viewed me as the others in the camp hierarchy viewed me, a piece of filth, mere vermin.

  And that’s what I thought for the first week or two. He worked me hard in difficult circumstances. Every night, I would cry in my bed as my muscles and bones ached from the exhaustion of work I wasn’t used to doing. But my exhaustion was different from the other poor souls who worked in the factories. They came back to our barracks as though the very life force had been drained out of them. I saw them working from my vantage points, walking around the boilers with Deutch—that was his name—or going outside to examine the pressure levels at various points in the pipes.

  I had led a lazy and indulgent life before being sent to the camp. Most of my exercise had been in sport. So doing this mechanical work, carrying heavy and unwieldy loads, working without a break, was exhausting. I thought I’d drop down dead every night. But compared to the others in my barracks … well, they suffered from true, real exhaustion. They returned grey with tiredness. They stripped off their clothes supporting themselves on their bunks, and their legs were blue with numbness. They had been standing all day without a break. Working at their machines, or fetching and carrying loads which in another life would have been the job of mules or oxen. Their hands were red raw and bloodied; their faces sweat-stained; their hair matted to their scalps. And when they’d managed to pull off their stripped uniforms with that last reserve of energy before falling on to their beds, they sank to their knees and clambered into their bunks, just for the joy of lying instead of standing.

  As I need to point out, my work was completely different from the way the others worked. They were at lathes or machinery from six in the morning till six at night, with only the shortest break imaginable for a thin soup of potatoes and beets. Guards with whips and German shepherds walked amongst them, and if they weren’t working at top speed, they would be beaten.

  But the work I did was paced according to the routine of this man, Deutch, and while certainly not lazy, he didn’t exactly work himself into a frenzy. Indeed, he took frequent breaks in order to sit on top of a boiler where the pressure monitors and dials had been placed, and work out what was going wrong. It required a lot of thinking, and there was little we could do while he was pondering the problem. So we would sit at his feet and watch him think. In the beginning, he made us stand to attention while he was pondering some aspect of what was going wrong with the machinery. And he tried to keep that up for some weeks. ‘Do this …’ ‘Do that …’

  But he wasn’t the type. So after the first couple of weeks, he’d ignore us while he was fiddling and turning dials and putting in new pressure monitoring equipment. And we would hang around underneath the boilers out of his sight.

  That only lasted as long as it took for one of the Work Group Commanders to make an inspection and find me and my co-slave, Henny, sitting underneath the boiler, talking. The Work Group Commander yelled at Deutch to come down from on top of the boiler immediately. The commander was furious and shouted at Deutch that slaves had to be worked day in, day out, and if Deutch didn’t have sufficient work for us, then we would be taken from him and redeployed. Deutch screamed at us to fetch the pails of water he told us to fetch ten minutes ago and apologised to the Commander for not keeping a better eye on these Jew scum. Deutch promised that we would be beaten severely for our laziness. But the Work Group Commander obliged and beat us horribly with a truncheon.

  When we returned with pails of water, we could tell immediately that Deutch felt guilty that his lies had got us battered. From then on, he kept me close to him all the while and would somehow sense when he was being viewed by a guard, or when one was on the prowl, making an inspection. He couldn’t keep his eyes on both of us, so he reassigned poor Henny to another job. That left just the German mechanic, Deutch, and me working on the huge boilers.

  When I was working with him he would make me lay down on top of the boiler so I wasn’t visible to the guards on the ground down below. Sometimes, I would see a twinkle in his eye as a guard walked passed and gave him a friendly wave. He would respond, and then would look at me as though I were a naughty schoolboy who had tricked a teacher.

  But best of all was the lunchtime. He obviously didn’t like the commander, and so used me to get back at him. He always demanded that I sit with him on the top of a boiler (I would lie flat and out of sight, while he sat up), and he would open his leather attaché case. Then he would take out his lunch, which he’d had the kitchen staff make up for him in the morning. After the first month of working together, we would regularly play a game, he and I. He would first take out the bread, then the pickles, then the slices of ham and sausage and cheeses, then the pickled herrings, then the pickled cabbage and onions. And finally, joy of joys, he’d take out a bottle of milk and a single cup. And as my eyes grew wider, he would reach in to the very bottom of the attache case, and he would dig around, and then … miracle of miracles … he would find another cup which he would pass across the top of the boiler towards me. Never had food tasted so divine. Never, ever, had I properly understood the joy of not feeling hungry.

  Did I feel guilty? Of course. How could I not feel guilty when I returned to the barracks with a still-glowing feeling of all those tastes and flavours coursing through my body, with a full stomach and the delicious afterglow of cheese and milk and pickles still clinging to my mouth? How could I look my fellow prisoners in their hollow eyes and emaciated faces when I was so hale and full?

  And then I reached a compromise, with myself and with those who were around me. Instead of eating everything, I ‘s
tole’ from myself, secreting slices of cheese and sausage into my pocket, which I then shared out with those with whom I shared my bunk. I was like a god to them, and the food I gave them was Manna from heaven. Where had I come across such nectar, they asked. I stole it from the guards, I told them. Be careful, they pleaded, though I knew that they were less concerned for my life than for their continuing supply.

  And so it was for three months, until Wilhelm Deutch was finished. He found the source of the problem. The DEMAG factory had been built on level land, but the inside of one of the boilers had been built slightly sloping, and no allowance for this had been made when siting the boilers. But after months of painstaking measurements, the mechanic made the exact and proper allowance by putting the feet of the front boiler on slightly elevated leggings. What this did was to correct the problem of the unequal pressure which built up in the interior tubings of the boiler, which meant that although the outside was level with the floor, the insides were not level with each other … hence the pressure difference when some of the water condensed. The differential was only a matter of a couple of centimetres over the ten metres of the two boilers, but sufficient to make the steam vapour ebb backwards, condense on the colder part of the top of the boiler, and create a partial vacuum.

  There was a consequential runoff of water, which migrated into the tubes which linked the two boilers and hence back pressure from the front boiler to the back caused the back boiler to become dangerously overstressed. Had they not shut it down each time, it would eventually have blown. A simple equalising exhaust tube was placed in the top of the second boiler, attached to a one-way pressure valve, and the problem was fixed.

  Even though he deliberately delayed many days, eventually he had to bow to the pressure of the DEMAG management and fix the problem. Yes, he actually delayed unveiling the solution because he knew that when the thing was fixed, I’d have to return to the old job, the old rations, and my life would quickly end. We had built a rapport, a friendship, perhaps even a mutual respect. I will never forget the feeling as he said good-bye to me. To him, I was a new and valued colleague, albeit a Jew and a subhuman; to me, he was my Messiah, my saviour, my health, and my welfare.

  He walked off quite jauntily, handing me back to a guard. But I knew that his jauntiness was bravura, a performance to show that he, like every good German, couldn’t give a damn about the life of a subhuman Jew. But in his heart, I knew that he was upset, maybe even concerned for me.

  The guard’s German shepherd snarled and salivated. I was put on to a lathe and told to work quicker than I had ever worked before. My days of Paradise had ended; now I entered the halls of hell. Above the portal leading into Dante’s hell were the words, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ No such words needed to be written above the door of our factory … We were told that work makes us free.

  Within a day, I had abandoned all hope of living beyond the next week.

  Interrogation Room, The Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  ‘Tell me about the slave labourers that worked for you.’

  Broderick suddenly realised with a flush of shame that he’d used the impersonal pronoun ‘that’ instead of ‘who.’ Odd, not something he would have done in an article he might have written for a learned journal, or allowed to pass in an essay from one of his students. Yet because he was dealing with a man who valued human life as of lesser worth than that of the machinery he maintained, Broderick found himself caught up in the language of impurity; he himself was now objectifying men and women.

  Wilhelm, by now garrulous in his definition of his role in the war machine, was reflective. As the days of gathering evidence mounted and the trial date neared, he was painting a portrait of himself as a man caught up in a massive machine, a minuscule object squashed by an irresistible force. The American lawyer was waiting patiently for the next phase of his client’s justification. Deutch had yet to claim to have used slave labour unwillingly, and neither did he pretend that he had attempted to resist the organisation which spawned it. But the moment when he claimed innocence was drawing closer, and Broderick anticipated the self-justification in a state of perplexity, wondering how he would deal with the plea.

  ‘I dealt with them as I had to,’ Deutch said softly.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that the work had to be done; the hours were set by the camp commandant; the working conditions were laid down; the food rations already determined; the living conditions in place. What more can I say? What employer today would go into an employee’s home and judge the way in which he was living, or the size of his bank account, or the exhaustion he felt after a day’s work? I was an employer. It was my job to fix a problem. I used what resources were given to me.’

  Broderick felt the frisson of anger. Resources! Was this a way to refer to human beings? But then the defense lawyer in him took over and he felt relief. So far, his client hadn’t claimed to be an innocent. ‘But didn’t you feel any need to ease the burden of those who worked for you? Just in order to prolong their lives … or at least make their lives somehow more bearable?’

  Wilhelm breathed deeply for a moment and stared at the ceiling of the interview room. Broderick noticed a sudden change, as though the German was remembering back to times when he was the master of his world, not a prisoner of the victorious Americans, living in an alien environment. Was it sadness in his eyes that this had come to pass?

  ‘What do you want to hear?’ asked Deutch.

  ‘The truth.’

  A wry smile. ‘Truth is an odd word from the mouth of a lawyer.’

  Broderick let the insult pass and remained silent.

  ‘What is truth? A child is drowning in a river, and I am standing by the bank, doing nothing. An observer far away accuses me of total indifference, of participating in the child’s death. That, for him, is the truth. Yet I cannot swim. If I plunge into the water, we will both drown. That for me is the truth. Which truth is the real truth?’

  Broderick made some doodles on the page in front of him. It was a simple exercise in philosophy. A naïve conundrum. A first year ethics student could have worked out the parameters. Should he introduce Deutch to the thoughts of Saint Augustine or tell him that Aristotle held that we use reason to determine the best way to achieve the highest moral good? No, this was not the place, and certainly not the time. He remained silent. Yet in his silence, the opening words of Augustine’s City of God echoed in his mind …

  ‘I have undertaken its defense against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of this city—a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for, expecting until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment,’ and it obtain, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace. A great work this, and an arduous; but God is my helper …’

  For a moment, Broderick found it hard to breathe. His whole life had been spent in the pursuit of justice and understanding. Now he was in the presence of true and unalloyed evil, and he found it in such conflict with anything he had previously understood of life, that logic and reason were nowhere to be found. And neither was truth …

  ‘Truth!’ the German repeated contemptuously. ‘If I told you the truth, you would never believe me. Oh, you and your fellow Americans would believe the truth of the barbarity; you’ve seen the concentration camps for yourself; you’ve seen the films they took. No, I’m talking about the islands of sanity in the years of war, the food I shared with starving prisoners, the extended rest periods from work which I allowed them at my own risk, the privileges I ensured they enjoyed, despite the dangers to myself. If I told you about these things, you’d just assume I was lying to save my own skin. And who would be there to support me? We Germans got rid of most of the evidence. As the
Allies and the Russians were closing in, we burnt and buried and killed all who could testify against us. And that’s why I’m going to hang, like those I was being tried with last month. Because in our collective guilt, in our mania to hide what we’d done, we inadvertently killed those few who could testify on our behalf. Do you think we were all monsters? We were a nation of tens of millions. Were we all barbarians? It’s convenient for you to label us all as evil. But in every society there is good and bad. By lumping us all together and pointing your finger and screaming ‘guilty,’ you’re just as bad as us. As we accused all Jews of being evil, so now you’re accusing all Germans of being evil. Are you any better than us?’

  Theodore Broderick pondered the reality of Deutch’s defense, now exposed and bare, as raw as the damning evidence against him. He closed his notebook slowly. Wordlessly, he stood and left the room.

  Allied Occupied Germany, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  ‘I remember very little about that year which I spent in Sachsenhausen. All I remember is the numbness which overcame me. From being fed and protected, a special person, I became one of the gray and dying trees I had first noticed when I entered the camp, dead trunks which shuffled around the parade ground, men and women just hobbling along in an effort to keep warm. And in days, I joined them going from one side of the compound to the other, aimlessly. Sometimes a man would slowly amble over and begin a conversation, but talking was hard. Any effort given to that which didn’t immediately keep us alive was effort wasted. And conversation was of little value. Why say anything when the only thing of importance was keeping alive?