The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  But if you were lucky, you’d eat your breakfast, and some of the hunger in the pit of your stomach would be relieved for a while, at least. Of course, some people would save their bread until the evening because that was the last solid food they’d see for the whole of that day. The consequences of leaving your bread meant that you lived during the day on hope. Hunger was always there, but at least you had in your mind the joy of eating a hunk of bread at night, so that you’d be able to sleep four or five hours without waking from your bones creaking with starvation. So these people left their breakfast bread for the evening meal, but most were too hungry in the morning to think of anything but satisfying immediate needs. They didn’t even care if they made it to the evening meal, so long as they staved off the starvation, the hunger in the very pit of the body.

  And then, before we had the chance to finish our breakfast, we would hear another bell which would summon us for roll call. Everybody stands in line for the roll call. Even the dead. Even those who have been beaten to death by the kapos, or who have died in the night, or have been shot. Their bodies are carried out by men who had been their friends, and placed in the rows in which we, the still living, were standing as a reminder to us that ‘Arbeit Macht Frei.’

  Roll call in the mornings didn’t take all that long. The guards and the commandant were keen to get us off so that we would start work by six. Then, when the numbers had been counted, we could look forward to a day of murderous work. Of course, if the numbers, including the dead, didn’t add up, then the whole process had to begin again, and that made the kapos very nervous and angry and particularly brutal, for if the numbers weren’t precise, and the Germans insisted on precision, the kapos would be blamed and even punished. When the numbers of living and dead didn’t tally, everyone was frightened, but usually the numbers were correct, and we’d be raced to the lines which were already forming and then on to our work duties.

  Some days, especially when it was very cold and snowing or raining, we’d be forced to stand to attention for long periods. The striped pyjamas which we wore were made of the roughest material I’d ever known, and when they got wet, they weighed your already-weakened body down so that you could hardly stand. And the guards loved any poor Jew who didn’t have the strength to stand to attention. If our bodies sagged for even a moment, a guard would come over and scream in our ears to, ‘Stand to attention!’ God help us if we didn’t, because it would be yet another excuse for the guard to beat us. But by strength of will, and hatred for the guards and the kapos, most of us somehow found the strength, and we ran off to our work details in our sodden uniforms. Some who were lucky developed colds and chills during the day, and died peacefully in their sleep at night.

  Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  The routine had become something of a game between guard and prisoner. Every morning, when the young American guard came to collect him for his court appearance, he would throw open the door and shout, ‘Stand to attention’.

  But Wilhelm Deutch was used to the Americans attempt to impose command on him and played along in the charade by ignoring the order. Instead, he finished writing, turned, and looked at the young man in his clean grey uniform, and stood, wishing him a cheery good morning.

  These days, the guard who came for Deutch after breakfast and ablutions often found the prisoner sitting at his desk in his cell, writing. The desk had been placed in a corner at the request of his defense counsel, Theodore Broderick. As had a pad of paper and a pen. Deutch had requested these items after the trial began, saying that he needed them to write notes for himself to assist in his defense.

  ‘You really think that this is a hanging court, don’t you?’ said Broderick.

  The interpreter looked at him in concern. ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t know how to translate hanging court into German.’

  Broderick gave an alternative to the expression.

  ‘In a way, yes. I honestly believe that this show of justice is there to pacify the Western mind, to swell the breasts of the victors, to show the world and the future generations that every assistance was given to the Nazis before they were hanged. But it is, nonetheless, a court set up not to determine justice, but to punish the guilty.’

  Broderick shook his head in disagreement. ‘How can you say that? When the major war criminals were tried, the proceedings lasted for ten whole months. The judges heard masses of evidence. If the Allies had merely wanted vengeance, we’d have found them guilty within the first couple of days and hanged the lot of them. Don’t forget that Schacht, Papen, and Fritzsche were acquitted.’ As an afterthought, Broderick added, ‘And remember that Dönitz, von Schirach, Speer, and Neurath were given prison sentences, and weren’t hanged. No matter what you might think, these are not the actions of a judicial body set up for the sake of retribution, but in order to hand out proper justice and to avenge crimes committed by criminals.’

  Deutch shrugged. ‘Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, and nine others were sentenced to hang.’

  ‘Of course they were,’ Broderick shouted. These days, his philosophical mind and judicial temperament were sorely strained. The evidence being cross-examined was so horrific it was making him hate his client, and that caused him problems. An advocate had to be totally impartial, he used to warn his law graduate students; an advocate must suspend his own beliefs, his doubts, his prejudices, and think only of one thing … the story that his client had told him, and his responsibility to represent that story and his client properly and fairly. And what was he doing now, this great expert in jurisprudence and philosophy? He was losing his temper, that’s what! And in front of his client, who was relying on him to save him from the gallows. But he couldn’t restrain his temper. He was stretched to the limit.

  Calming down, he said softly, ‘These men who were hanged were mass murderers. They committed crimes against humanity. Crimes against peace …’

  ‘How can any German have committed crimes against peace,’ Deutch asked, ‘when no such crime existed at the time? You’ve merely invented a crime, looked at what we’ve done, and said, ‘All right, now let’s find them guilty of that …’ Is backdating an action and making it a crime the justice of fair-minded men?’

  To the surprise of the translator, and to his client, the dam holding back Broderick’s reservoir of patience broke, and he shouted, ‘There are some crimes which are so evil that society hasn’t even been able to give them a name; crimes which no lawmaker could have conceived possible in the repertoire of humankind. That’s why we had to invent a name.’

  The two men looked at each other in disgust and outright hostility.

  Then, Broderick sighed and said softly, ‘I’m here to defend you against charges which could see you hang. Now isn’t the time to examine the right of the court to try you, nor to discuss the morality of the judicial system under which you’ve been arraigned. This court is legally constituted. Its decisions carry the full weight of the proper laws. Your concern is to determine how best to avoid the hangman’s noose. And frankly, from the evidence which the prosecution has presented in the last two days, you’d better be more forthcoming, or the situation is grim.’

  ‘What do you want me to say? That I didn’t do the things which the witnesses say I did. I’ve told you until I’m blue in the face that I never committed crimes against humanity. I was a fucking mechanic,’ Deutch shouted at his lawyer. ‘I made the fucking place run. I was doing a job. No more, no less. I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t torture anybody. Why am I here? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a German and you’re an American. And you won the war, and now I’m your victim.’

  ‘You were a Nazi. You were a vital part of the machinery of death. You did nothing to stop it,’ Broderick shouted, his emotions carried downstream on a wave of hatred. He bit his lip immediately after he’d said it for forgetting that his job was to defend his client.

  ‘When I was a Nazi, being a Nazi was an honour, it was a
duty, it wasn’t a crime. What are you and those like you doing to me? Backdating guilt? When you were at university in America, Mr. Defending Lawyer, were you a member of any clubs or societies? A rowing club, a political club? Something like that. Now, Mr. Defender, how would you feel if ten years later some court in another country told you that you’d committed a crime by being a member of that political club? Eh? How would you feel?’

  ‘Rowing and political clubs in American universities weren’t constituted to kill an entire race of people.’

  Breathing heavily from the tensions of the past month, Deutch slowly calmed down. He nodded. ‘Of course they weren’t. And it might surprise you, but neither was the Nazi Party. Oh, I know what Göbbels’ propaganda said. I know about the Führer’s speeches. But that was the top layer. The cream. I was an ordinary German. Not to join the Nazi Party was a sign that you weren’t a proper German. But nobody in Germany really believed what Hitler and the Nazi leaders were saying about the Jews and about the international conspiracies. We just wanted to feel proud of ourselves again. Okay, so there might or might not have been a Jewish conspiracy, but we were interested in effect, not cause. We wanted things to be better. So we listened to Hitler. We attended the rallies. Our hearts filled with pride as we saw the phalanxes of men shoulder to shoulder with their flags, and the spotlights forming cathedral spires in the night sky. Just a few years earlier, we’d been the joke of Europe; on our knees, our Deutschmark in ruins, family savings destroyed, the economy wrecked, millions of unemployed on the streets fed by soup kitchens, old, proud people suddenly destitute, their entire belongings in prams being pushed nowhere, children begging on street corners, young girls not twelve or thirteen selling their bodies so their parents could afford to buy food.

  ‘And then Hitler came along with the Nazis and the SA and the SS and told us that it wasn’t our fault; that other people were manipulating Germany and that we had to fight back. Who wouldn’t have fought back? Who wouldn’t have followed Hitler? And it worked. By God, it worked. 1934, ’35, ’36 … the Olympic Games … life was wonderful. We all had plenty of food and beer. The restaurants were overflowing. The theatres were full, the cabarets were mocking Adolf and the Nazis, and everyone thought it was fun. We all laughed. Nobody took things seriously until it was too late to do anything. I remember those years as though they were yesterday. Laughter. It was all fun and laughter.’

  It was the first time that Deutch had opened up. In all their interviews, Deutch had done nothing other than answer questions, rarely, if ever, volunteering information. Now there was a chink in his armour. Broderick was keen for him to continue. It had happened before in Broderick’s experience. When he had been a trial lawyer with a difficult and recalcitrant client, silent and uncooperative during the gathering of evidence, things suddenly changed the moment the trial started. The defendant would listen to the evidence, and suddenly get angry at the way he was presented by the prosecution at the start of the trial when the initial evidence was being presented. Then the defendant would rant and rave about how unfair were the allegations, and his side of the facts would flow like a river.

  ‘And when did it go wrong for the Nazis?’ asked Broderick gently.

  ‘When the war started. We didn’t invade Czechoslovakia. We weren’t hostile. We were invited into the country by the Sudeten Germans. They needed to be freed from the oppression of the Czech government. Millions of Germans in the Czech lands were living in oppression. They had to be freed.

  ‘So Hitler marched over the border. The same in Poland. Straight across the border, as though there was no opposition. But then his successes went to his head, and he took on the West and Russia. Shall I tell you something? If he had just done what he said he was going to do, and taken those two countries, Czechoslovakia and Poland, we would have had all the living space we needed. We could have expanded Germany to the east and had land and resources and factories and everything. Today, we’d rival America as the powerhouse of the world. And if we’d just stopped there, we wouldn’t have gone to war. Why, when we would have been probably the most powerful country in Europe; then in a few years, the most powerful in the world. Do you think England or America care about those Eastern Europeans? They viewed them the same as we did … subhumans. Slavs.’

  Broderick started to take notes, but it didn’t seem to bother Deutch. ‘But why did you join the Nazi Party? You were a mechanic. You weren’t needed in the Army. Not until much later in the war. Yet you joined in 1935.’

  ‘I was swept up with pride. I wanted to be part of the movement. I loved Hitler with all my heart.’

  ‘And now? Do you still love him now?’

  ‘How can you love your executioner?’ Deutch asked simply.

  Allied Occupied Germany, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  It’s remarkable how quickly the human body can recover. The body, mark you, not the human mind. No! The human mind can be scarred for life.

  My body recovered within weeks. Not on its own, of course. Only with the assistance of the mechanic. Had I been forced to try to survive on my own, after nine months in Sachsenhausen, and especially the first few weeks at Auschwitz, I would not be alive to write these words.

  When I had been through the delousing process, when I had had what remained of my hair again shorn off, once more depriving me of my dignity and my humanity, when I was pushed and shoved and threatened by the guards, I was sent through the fences to the barracks compounds. I didn’t see the mechanic for a couple of weeks. Four or five, I think. I later learned that despite the fact that he had requisitioned me from Sachsenhausen, the commandant of Auschwitz thought I should become familiarised with the routine of his concentration camp before I started to work in the special area of hydraulics. So for the first three or four weeks, I struggled to live in a state of uncertainty. But I was far better off than the other wretches with whom I was now living. For I had a modicum of hope. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the feeling that all this was for a purpose, that the mechanic had some sort of plan or policy in his mind and that somewhere I was to be a part of it. I was different from the other pathetic, lost souls with whom I shared the barracks. They perpetually looked numbed, as though they were sleepwalkers by the shores of Hades’ River Lethe, all their hopes stripped away from them as their hair was shorn, and as the smell of burning Jews wafted into the camp from the chimneys of Birkenau, three kilometres down the railway line.

  Although I had life-sustaining hope, I was still forced to live in the barracks with hundreds of others, and I suffered the evils which befell my brothers-in-hell. The rats, the lice, the overcrowding, the airlessness in the barracks at night, the eternal cold. A couple of blankets to protect the four or five men I slept with from the rawness of a Polish winter; it was in the depth of evening, with the wind howling through the slats and rattling the windows, with the guards patrolling and the dogs baying like wolves, with the searchlights sweeping the compound and blinding our eyes, used only to the heavy blackness of the night, that I truly appreciated human warmth.

  If you’d told me as a twenty-year old whose hormones raced at the sheen of nylon stockings and the erotic aroma of perfumed breasts, that I’d ever welcome the warmth of a man lying pressed up next to me, I’d have hit you. But in the icy reaches of our lives in Auschwitz, any human warmth was comfort, and any comfort gave the spirit the power to live through the next day.

  In the mornings, when it was still grey-black dawn, we’d endure hours-long roll calls. Just as we did in Sachsenhausen. The same monsters controlling our lives, just different faces in the uniforms and different places in the landscape of Nazism. But here in Auschwitz, certain things were different. Here they were far stricter. The commandant, Hoss, enjoyed keeping us standing around in the freezing wind far longer than my previous commandant. He enjoyed seeing the misery on our faces as we suffered the pain of cold rising from the lifeless and numbing ground into our feet and legs.

  On this
particular morning, the morning in which my life began to change, I was laying in my bunk, fast asleep, when suddenly there was a voice in the Barracks. A kapo? The blockführer? My name was called. ‘Gutman? The Jew Gutman. Come here. Attention Gutman. Come here immediately.’

  Others thought the voice was a death sentence and looked at me in sorrow as I woke with a start and struggled down from my bunk. But I knew that my fortune was about to change. I knew that it was a life sentence, not a death sentence. The mechanic had finally got his way, and now I was to work for him, and not with the other slaves. Did I feel guilty that I had been selected for special privileges? Not for a moment. The thought that I might have food and rest and the others in my barracks would still be slaving away didn’t enter my mind for even a second.

  In Sachsenhausen, in the beginning, I’d shared my good fortune with my co-sufferers because I felt guilt at feeling satisfyingly full while they were starving. But nine months of brutality in Sachsenhausen when the mechanic left, and then this latest month of savagery in Auschwitz, had knocked all the conscience out of me. To hell with my fellow men. They’d kill me if they could eat my flesh. So nothing would have made me share even a crust of stale bread with a starving man in my barracks. I was looking out for me. Only me. I had to survive, and if it meant that I had to steal a cap or shoes, or a sharp tool to save digging with bare hands, then I would do so willingly and without conscience. Even knowing absolutely that some other poor bastard would die for my selfishness. I rationalised that I was probably doing him a favour. He’d die quicker than the lingering life/death of slavery and savagery.

  Are you disgusted with me? Does it horrify you to think that I, a Jew, would allow another Jew to die just so that I could live? Well, before you start saying what you would have done in my place, having noble thoughts about how you would have sacrificed your life for another, then understand one thing. The only thought which kept any of us going was the thought of revenge. Yes, revenge against our slave masters, against the guards, against the kapos and the dogs and the blockführers, and the Nazis and Hitler and all the rest of them. That’s all we thought of. Living for the purpose of being witnesses. Of telling the world our stories. Of making people in other countries believe that this had happened to us, to living, breathing people. To husbands and wives and children and parents and grandparents. And the revenge we wanted was to strangle the kapos and the guards with our bare hands, to somehow have the strength to kill and maim those who were our tormentors. All I dreamed about was grasping a kapo by his windpipe with my strong, well-fed bare hands, and pulling it out. To see the look of horror in his face as his life ebbed away from him; to ensure that the last thing on this earth that he saw was my face, my eyes tearing into his soul, and saying to him, ‘There’s no heaven, but you’re going down to the lowest reaches of hell, and you’ll suffer for all eternity for what you did to me.’