The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  ‘My grandfather, Theodore Broderick, has just passed away. I have some papers which concern a member of your family. My grandfather was a lawyer in Germany just after the war, and I believe that he knew some members of your family. He’s just died, and as I said, I was going through his papers and I came across mention of your family and some dealings which he had with them in 1946. I was wondering if I could discuss them with you for a few moments, so that you could just help me by filling in some of the details that are missing from his account …’

  Gottfried looked at her suspiciously. She’d seen the look before, when she’d questioned people about their involvement in war crimes in Yugoslavia … but that couldn’t be the case here.

  ‘How can I help you? My grandfather died before I was born. And I never knew your grandfather,’ he asked. ‘I’ve never heard of him …’

  ‘I know, but there are some aspects of your own family history in which my grandfather was involved, and it would help me enormously if you could give me about a half an hour, just to sort things out …’

  Chasca fell silent. They looked at each other. She knew immediately that he hadn’t believed her, but his face told her that there was enormous pain hidden within the family vaults, and he was terrified of revisiting that pain. But suddenly he moved, turning on his heels …

  ‘Very well,’ he snapped, ‘wait here.’ And he went back inside the house, shutting the door firmly in her face.

  Chasca stared at the closed door in amazement at his rudeness. Now she seriously considered walking away. Indeed, from the moment she saw him, she wondered whether to forget the whole thing, whether to walk away and get on with her life. This man was so ordinary, so unexceptional. Why should she waste any more time on ordinary people?

  She couldn’t get over how rude and utterly discourteous he’d been in the way he’d slammed the door in her face. What a way to treat someone! She couldn’t understand the hostility. First the younger sister, now the elder brother. Is this how Germans treat visitors? And why the hostility? After all, she’d said absolutely nothing about the real reason she was there, so they couldn’t have a clue about the document, or the benefits it might bring.

  A moment or two later, the door was suddenly pulled open, and Gottfried appeared in an overcoat. He slammed the door closed, making it obvious that she wouldn’t be considered for entry into his domain.

  ‘There’s a bar on the corner,’ he snapped aggressively. ‘We’ll go there.’

  Again Chasca was stunned. She was an attractive woman, well dressed. Why shouldn’t he just invite her into the house and get it over and done with? Why go to a bar? After all, she only wanted to hand over a copy of the testament written by Joachim Gutman so that Gottfried’s grandfather could rest in peace. Then she’d leave Germany and get on with her life.

  He walked in front of her, and she bridled at his patronising behaviour. Suddenly Chasca bitterly regretted doing what she was doing. After all, it was one thing trying to find Gutman (or if he was dead, then his children or grandchildren) and tell him that his story had finally been heard … It was altogether another to tell the family of a German war criminal that … and then she stopped herself.

  What was she thinking? The whole point of her quest was to resurrect the reputation of a man hanged for crimes he never committed. She bit her lip as she followed the grandson’s silent form down the stone steps and out into the street. Indeed, as they emerged on to the busy road, crowded with pedestrians returning to their homes after a day’s work, she had to walk faster than normal to catch him up.

  She was amazed. It was almost as though this was an interview he’d been expecting, and his reaction was a response condition by years of anticipation.

  ‘Herr Deutch, you’re walking too fast …’ she shouted, more in anger than reality.

  He slowed down and allowed her to catch up. ‘I’m sorry. The bar isn’t much farther.’

  ‘Are you angry with me for some reason?’ she asked.

  He turned and looked at her without slowing his pace. He said nothing.

  She was getting cross. ‘Would you rather I just went away? I mean, if this is causing you problems, which your behaviour indicates, then it would be easier for both of us if I returned home …’

  Again, he said nothing. But as the bar came into sight, illuminated by an advertisement for German beer, he slowed and snapped at her, ‘Every few years, I have this type of upset. I live in fear of this moment. Now it’s arrived again. Good God, after half a century …’

  But before she could ask him what he meant, he’d thrust open the door of the bar and stormed inside.

  They sat at a table in the far corner. It was too early for the bar to be crowded. It was that moment in modern cities, the median division of labour, a sort of global interregnum for workers in which the day divided itself into two parts, time between the office workers returning home and revellers beginning the night’s party. A waiter came over and took their orders.

  ‘Well?’ Gottfried Deutch asked testily, his avoidance of any pleasantries and formalities underpinning the contempt he already held for her mission.

  Chasca fought to restrain her anger. ‘Herr Deutch, what I told you just before was the truth. My grandfather was in Germany after the war, and he knew your grandfather.’

  Deutch listened to her with increasing scepticism. Suddenly he interrupted.

  ‘Tell me, why do you think I dragged you away from the house? Why do you think I didn’t invite you inside?’ It was a rhetorical question. ‘My mother is in there. She is the daughter of the man you’ve come here to find more about. She is the one most hurt by your sort of questions. When my grandfather was hanged as a Nazi war criminal, my mother was seven years old. Do you think she’s happy about this? Tell me, Miss American Woman, what do you know of the war? Have you any idea of how my mother has suffered for crimes which she didn’t commit? How do you think it makes you feel to be branded for all your youth as the daughter of a monster?’

  Chasca remained silent, suddenly worried about her own safety; this man was barely restraining his fury, and she was concerned that his anger might erupt at any moment and she’d get hurt.

  ‘What are you? Anti-Defamation League? Jews for Torturing the Families of Nazis? Simon Wiesenthal Organisation? The International Society for Putting Everything to Rights Again? Well, who do you represent? What do you want from me and my family?’

  ‘Herr Deutch. You’ve got it totally wrong. My grandfather, Theodore Broderick defended your grandfather Wilhelm Deutch. But there was no evidence which was presented in the trial which could have exonerated your grandfather. Some weeks ago, when my grandfather died, I went through his papers, and I found a testament, an incredible document written by a Jewish gentleman, a survivor of the concentration camps. It was too late to be presented as evidence in your grandfather’s trial. It was obviously written when your grandfather had been hanged, which is the tragedy I’ve come here to try to remedy. Because if the information had come out in court, I very much doubt that your grandfather would have been hanged as a war criminal. Indeed, from reading the testament of this Jewish gentleman, I’m almost sure that your grandfather would have been found not guilty, and would have been treated as something of a hero by the Americans and the other Allies. I’ve come here to give you the document. I’ve come here to help you …’

  But his response was totally different to what she expected. His anger didn’t ebb away with her explanation.

  ‘I don’t want your help. I want to forget. Every few fucking years, someone comes to see us because my grandfather was hanged as a war criminal. First it was the Christadelphians who wanted to pray for his soul; then the Mormons; then the Jews and Christians for Understanding; then the fucking Allied Nations for Reconciliation; then the crazy Churches, then the Israeli academics; then the American academics; and lately it’s been the fucking neo-Nazis who want to make the old bastard into some sort of hero of the new Fourth Reich …’


  Chasca took out the document written by Joachim Gutman. ‘Please calm down. This testament tells of how your grandfather tried to save those around him when he was a mechanic at Auschwitz. He was a good man, a fine member of humanity. Are you hearing me? I’m telling you that your grandfather wasn’t a war criminal, but was a good man …’

  But Gottfried suddenly stood, raising his voice so that everyone in the bar stopped talking and looked at the couple in surprise.

  ‘Keep your fucking testament. I don’t want to know anything about Auschwitz and humanity. Leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with it. Go away from us. Forget it. Put it all behind you, for God’s sake. And don’t come near my mother or my family. We’ve been through enough. Just leave us alone.’

  Allied Occupied Germany, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  Humanity—assuming that there is any humanity left in the world now that the true nature of this war is revealed—will never forget the name Auschwitz. No, they’ll never forget. But as time goes by, all that they’ll remember is the name, not the reality of what the name means. Who remembers the carnage, the cruelty, the evil of the Romans and the revolt of the slaves under Spartacus? Who remembers the agony of the crucifixion? We remember Spartacus and his heroism because of the ballet and the books, but do we remember the suffering of six thousand of his followers, crucified by Crassus along the Appian Way?

  Do we know the names of the countless Ottomans and Arabs who were killed by the English King, Richard? No, all we know are the glories of the Crusades and their remains, the castles and the chivalric Orders.

  Why is it not recorded? How can humanity be so uncaring of the memories of the millions upon millions who have died in the name of nationalism or some philosophy or ideology? Why are we so callous? Is cruelty and barbarism so common to us human beings that we find these things so easy to absorb … and having absorbed them, we neutralise them, these abortions of history which cause so much misery to so many?

  And will this apply to Auschwitz, to Birkenau, to Treblinka, to Belsen, and to the hundreds of other concentration and death camps which the Nazis set up to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth? Because one day … maybe tomorrow … maybe in a hundred years time, the realities of what happened here at Auschwitz will be called into question by those who need to deny, and then humankind will only remember the name. Because they’ll never remember the suffering, nor believe the realities of what happened at Auschwitz. Never.

  Nobody, in the fifty years that remain of this century, will be able to comprehend how human beings could behave with such a depth of hatred and barbarity. We remember the Crusades and the massacres of ancient peoples as stories, not as realities. Our mythologies and histories and folk-records are full of bloodthirsty, evil events which cause us no more concern than a momentary thought. Yet millions of people have died hideous deaths throughout history, and we have forgotten their pain.

  Even we Jews are guilty of collective forgetfulness. To this day, we remember events which happened three thousand, five hundred years ago when the Jews were slaves in Egypt. We remember the cruel taskmasters, the way our backs were broken, the sweat of our brows mixing with the mud to make bricks to build monuments to the pride of a pharaoh. But does the reality of the enslavement of our forefathers make us shudder and cry and wail into the night? No, we spend two nights a year retelling the tale and drinking wine and eating food and congratulating ourselves on our good fortune.

  Will some rabbi in the future, I wonder, consecrate the reality of Auschwitz into a prayer, and will future generations pray for the souls of the millions of innocents whom I saw being butchered in the world’s largest and most evil abattoir?

  We human beings will forget what happened at Auschwitz. We will allow time to pass by, and then some among us will say it never happened. They will say that we who suffered were mistaken.

  But they will be wrong. For I saw things at Auschwitz which must never be forgotten. And I heard things which my mind will never shut out.

  Music.

  Yes, I heard music in Auschwitz which was played by an orchestra. Do you believe me, you in the future who are reading this, my testimony.

  Everywhere in Auschwitz, there was music playing. The Jews or Gypsies who were able to play musical instruments were gathered together by the blockführers and given to the kapos who organised music. And these people made the musicians into an orchestra. One of the SS commandants at the camp had the idea that an orchestra would relax the inmates when they walked to their slavery, or when they were unloaded from the trains when they first came to the camp and were herded into Birkenau where they would be gassed and burned to ashes.

  Three trains a day, each train with fifty to sixty carriages, in each carriage a hundred human beings squashed like sardines. Fifteen, twenty thousand Jewish men, women, and children a day had been scooped up from around Europe and were deposited in the murderous factories of Auschwitz in order to be used for the war machine, and then, when they were starving and exhausted and incapable of any further work, when they were so desperately in need of help and comfort and rest, they were discarded, like refuse in Birkenau, first burned, then the leftover dust was scattered into the eternity of the ground. And each of these trains pulled into Auschwitz to the tune of an orchestra playing swing music or tangos or popular ballads. The musicians were also inmates, dressed in their prison pajamas, but there was no look of joy on their faces as the music filled the air and tried to compete with the screams of people begging for water or air as the carriage doors were opened.

  It happened to me when I was first brought to the camp, but I didn’t hear the music, for I was too starved and exhausted, and the ringing in my ears drowned out all else. Nor did I see the devil’s orchestra, for I collapsed on the ground as I fell out of the carriage. Had it not been for the mechanic … but you already know that.

  Of course, it was all a hideous shock from hell for the new inmates, those that hadn’t been conditioned by the experience of Sachsenhausen or the other concentration camps whose names were now becoming familiar to us old hands, names which were whispered between us, like primitive people used to whisper secret curses on their worst enemies. No, these virgins, these fresh fodder from Berlin and Hamburg and other cities looked around them, trying to comprehend the enormity of what they’d fallen into.

  First their hair was shorn from them as though they were sheep, then their clothing was taken until they were huddled and naked, then they were beaten for good measure, then their arms were tattooed with the latest sequential numbers, then they were given an identifying badge according to the barrel from which they’d been scraped … Jew, Communist, Criminal, Slav …

  I think it was the tattooing which horrified them most. And what they didn’t realise was that old hands like me would use the tattoos as a way of marking them out. The lower the number, the longer they’d been in camp, the less you could get away with … the higher the number, the more recently they’d come to the camp, which meant you could steal some of their clothing and rations, and they’d be too naïve to understand what was happening. Of course, it might lead to their death by starvation, or their death by beating if they had had some clothing stolen, but that was their lookout. And anyway, if they were beaten or starved to death, there were plenty more to take their place for the old hands. They soon got used to the routine, and new hands became old hands very quickly. If they didn’t, they died! Simple as that. Law of the jungle.

  By the time I’d been in Auschwitz for a week, I already knew the routine, but as it turned out, it was weeks before the mechanic was able to rescue me and requisition me for special hydraulic duty with him. So for the first month, this was my life. Four in the morning, the kapos, ordinary German criminals and utterly evil men, would enter the barracks, and bang drums or the sides of our bunks, and force us out of bed. ‘Get up, fucking dogs. Out of bed or I’ll kill you fucking Jew swine.’ ‘Got your fucking shoes and fucking caps, Jew
swine. I’ll beat you to death if you can’t find your shoes and caps’. Men who lost or had their caps and shoes stolen often stole these same things in the night from others, because it was certain death to arrive at roll call without a cap or shoes. Yes, it meant that you were effectively killing someone by taking his cap and shoes, but like I said, if you didn’t, you’d be killed … and anyway, someone had taken yours in the certain knowledge that you’d be killed. Life was so cheap, and yet most of us would do anything just to cling on. Even send one of our own to his certain death!

  Then we would have to make our beds properly. It was called ‘bettenbau.’ Somehow, we had to try to put a proper military shape into the shapeless straw mattress and fit the blanket over it in proper army style. The kapo would come over and beat us if it wasn’t perfect. Many of us died with the beatings.

  Then, we had to run to the sanitary unit to wash and piss (if there was anything inside you to piss out). It was always a race against the others to get to the sanitaries first, because there were only three or four, and there were hundreds and hundreds of inmates who wanted to wash.

  After washing, the bells would ring, and you’d have to race to the central compound for breakfast. Stragglers were always beaten by the kapos, often beaten to death.

  After we washed, we would go to breakfast, which was made up of beautifully salted fish and slices of cheeses and delicious meats and jams and honey, with lashings of buttered toast and eggs cooked in five different styles, and fresh fruit and treble cream. Yes! Of course I’m being sarcastic! Breakfast was horrible. It was always the same. Our stomachs revolted, but it kept us alive for the day. Well, most of us.

  For breakfast, the kapos would hand out a quarter of a kilogram of bread and the thin, black crushed acorn coffee, and if you were incredibly lucky, a slice of meat or sausage and maybe some margarine. Most often, they’d deliberately aim the bread for the ground so that it fell into the mud. And they’d laugh at your efforts to reclaim what a dog would refuse. Or they’d trip you as you walked away, and all your food and drink would spill on the filthy ground, and they’d be nothing to eat until a thin vegetable-flavoured water at lunch.