by Daša Drndic
Transport PJ 1025: 50 wagons of Jews from Minsk Litewski were sent to Chelm, in fact to Sobibor, 17 September, 1943.
I don’t remember.
On 22 August, and on 2, 9, 13 and 21 September wagons departed from Treblinka loaded with the clothing of the murdered Jews. The liquidation of the camp begins. They cart away the boards, construction material and quicklime. They take away the dredger. Five bolted wagons take away the remaining “workers”, meaning prisoners, to Sobibor on 20 October and 4 September, 1943. On 31 October, the metal structures and liquidation equipment were taken away. Everything is recorded here, Mr Ganzenmüller. More than one hundred wagons of goods and material left Treblinka.
Mr Wolff, they call you Karel?
Yes, Your Honour. Karel is somehow softer than Karl.
Like Ganzenmüller, you too claim that you knew nothing, yet recently in a B.B.C. documentary, The World at War, you talked about how you were present in 1941 at the execution of Jewish prisoners in Minsk and described the splatter of brains on Himmler’s coat.
I remembered that later. They reminded me.
When did you first hear of Operation Reinhard?
From Himmler?
I had no idea there was an Operation Reinhard. This is the first time I hear of it. Here in Nuremberg.
And the camps in Lublin and Auschwitz, did you know of them?
I heard for the first time of those appalling places on 19 March, 1945, when I came to Switzerland. With horror my Swiss friends gave me newspapers that reported on the atrocities perpetrated in those camps.
When were you transferred to Trieste?
On 9 September, 1943.
Did you belong to the circle of Himmler’s close friends?
Yes.
Did you hear Himmler’s speech in Poznan in October 1943?
No, Your Honour. At that time I was already in Trieste.
And in Trieste that speech was never talked about?
No, it was distributed to officers who were at the front.
Did you ever hear about Russians and Poles, who were not Jews, being killed and exterminated, did you ever hear about that?
No, I have never heard anything about extermination. Your Honour is probably referring to systematic, planned extermination.
Exactly.
I know nothing about that.
So this is the first you have ever heard of it?
Please? I don’t hear well.
Is this is the first time you’ve heard about the mass extermination of people?
They asked me about it after capitulation. That was the first time.
Have you any idea of the extent of the exterminations?
Not precisely.
All the evidence points to several million victims.
I am very grateful, Your Honour, for the information you have just given me.
Did you ever visit the Warsaw Ghetto?
No.
Czerniakow in his diary provides the day and hour of your arrival in Reichsführer S. S. Heinrich Himmler’s company.
Ich bin ein alter Mann, Your Honour. I cannot remember everything.
Herr Wolff, I consider you responsible for the deportation of 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka concentration camp during the summer of 1942 and I sentence you to fifteen years in prison and ten years’ loss of civil liberties.
Too late, Your Honour. I was released for good behaviour.
The Tedeschi family go on living in the illusion of ignorance. Those who know what is happening do not speak. Those who don’t know ask no questions. Whoever asks gets no answers. Then, as now. Hence, since they don’t know, the Tedeschi family don’t ask, so there is nothing for them to find out, so there is no reason for their getting unduly upset.
In the 1970s Haya, for the second time in her life, enters the belly of Budapest by train, at that same station, at Keleti. The space is now completely changed yet it is the same; it pulses to the rhythm of the walkers lugging a burden different from that wartime cargo. The light in the station sways, trembles, grabs for the little bits of glass embedded on the ceiling, which gleam like a honeycomb, and then glides speedily off, as if saying, I’ll be back. The faces of the travellers are serene, nearly motionless, but their bodies sway mischievously, almost cheerfully. Not like back then, when a terrible paralysis reigned, with fear swaying in its lap. For, in the 1970s, Haya finally learns of (some) events she knew nothing about in the 1940s, although like cataclysmic floods and earthquakes, with a horrible noise, they were rumbling here, right beneath her window.
Ah, train stations, both a convergence point for and bisector of the clusters of cocooned little worlds that tumble headlong, smashing, nervous and angry at times, jovial at others, bursting apart like the volvox, spewing their contents over the rails, sliding off all over the world. Train stations, tombstones, borders between the living and the dead, between infinitude and the hermetic world of the city, city gates, cities unto themselves. When identities vanish, train stations sprout. If every border had a train station of its own, what marvellous confusion would ensue, what a crush, what mockery.
The Tedeschi family arrive in Venice as the city is coming under attack. Haya expects hands in the air, welcoming formations of waving hands; she expects flowers and hugs, tearful eyes, sad smiles and sighs of consolation, our poor ones, what terrible times you’ve been through, benvenuti a casa. Nothing of the sort. The train pulls into a vast empty station along whose tracks rolls only the huffing of time, as if an owl were sitting on the moon, glowering. The world has forgotten us, Haya says and stands in line with her family at the station for food and a free ticket to return to Gorizia, to return home.
Haya’s grandfather Bruno Baar is gone. He dies at the age of seventy-two in 1939, when the Tedeschi family are embarking on the ship for Valona from Naples, so Ada does not attend her father’s funeral. Haya’s grandfather Paolo Tedeschi is in the Republic of Salò with a fascist membership card in his pocket, which is becoming less adequate as a camouflage for his Jewish origins. Gorizia, along with Rijeka, Trieste, Udine, Pula and Ljubljana is part of the new German province Adriatisches Küstenland, Litorale Adriatico, and this is a part of the Reich that eagerly revisits the dream of Mitteleuropa. Haya gets to know her relatives. In a whisper Ada describes her life in Naples and Valona to her sister Letizia, and at night switches her plum brandy for grappa. Florian sells umbrellas retail and wholesale at the Delle Tre Venezie shop at Piazza della Vittoria 7 (telephone no. 8–17), and on Sundays, with his boss Francesco Poletti, he goes to the stadium on Via Baiamonti to cheer for the local second leaguers of Gorizia (Busani, Blason, Cumar, Auletta II, Sessa, Ciuffarin, Gimona, Beorchia, Bonansea, Auletta and Zanolla). Who else could he cheer for? Later, when he leaves for Milan in the autumn of 1944, he supports Milan.
Trieste becomes the centre of the O.Z.A.K. (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland). At about the same time as the Tedeschi family arrive in Gorizia, Christmas 1943, a whole crowd of old acquaintances is gathering in Trieste. They need to be sent somewhere after Operation Reinhard is shut down in Poland, so Himmler dispatches them urgently to Italy. There are about a hundred men and women from Einsatzkommando Reinhard in Trieste, as well as a number of S.S. troops from Ukraine. Einsatzkommando Reinhard opens offices designated by the abbreviation “R”. The Trieste group is R1, the Udine group R2, and the Rijeka group is R3.
Elegant old villas are refurbished, furniture is renovated, servants hired, banquets and balls are held, singers and dancers rehearse a repertoire of entertainments, new films arrive, operas and philharmonic orchestras tour, celebrated chefs prepare delicacies at the newly opened clubs. Trieste lives its schizophrenic moment again, in war, its parallel lives, real and unreal, contradictory.
The Nazi police and soldiers of the Nazi Army stroll around Trieste. On 1 October, 1943, the political and administrative authority of the Adriatisches Küstenland is in the hands of Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer.* Trieste is ailing and, much like a person, it does not want to die without a
fight. It struggles to survive as best it can. Abandoned by Italy in 1943, it flails and succumbs, distraught. The restaurants in the harbour gleam, they serve fish such as dentex and gilt-head bream; in return for coupons from the 209–201 series one can get a kilo of potatoes for three lire, or 500 grams per person; the theatres are packed: Wagner’s Lohengrin and Lehár’s Merry Widow are the hits of the 1943–44 season; the Istituto Enenkel at Via Battisti 22 (telephone no. 8800) offers accelerated courses in the German language for children and adults, courses in typing and stenography for young ladies, and, after strict security checks, the young ladies translate secret and public documents for the Nazi police; third-rate painter, “agreeable” Angelo Brombo at the Trieste gallery exhibits his picturesque oils with motifs of a joyous Venice, while his colleague Zoran Music, born in Gorizia, is off to Dachau shortly thereafter; the “new staff” at the Salone Villa on the Piazza Ponterosso styles and dyes hair in the latest fashion (blonde); football is played with euphoric zeal: Ponziana-Triestina (2:11); Giacomo Cipci, conductor of the full orchestra of Trieste Radio, goes off for a friendly visit to his Viennese counterpart Max Schönherr, after which Max Schönherr visits Trieste, a city in touch with the world; at the Fenice theatre they stage matinees for children, especially Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the movie Venus vor Gericht (The Trial of Venus) shows at the Nazionale cinema, produced by Bavaria Filmkunst of Munich, with Hansi Knoteck in the role of Venus, followed by the documentary Die Bauten Adolf Hitler (The Buildings of Adolf Hitler), all in German, of course; and Trieste again loses its mind, its compass, looks into itself, horrified, and asks, Who am I now? To whom do I go? Who is coming to me? The morass inside it is deep and dark and sick, so sick that no-one and nothing dares go there, so all-embracing that Trieste itself is engulfed.
The old companions from the administration of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka kick back in Trieste and the surroundings, have their last good times, their happy days, under the watchful eyes of Christian Wirth, the first man of the Trieste Einsatzkommandos, who is laying the foundations for their efficient work as early as September 1943. Christian Wirth comes to Trieste with a team of experts who were working with him on the operation known as Aktion Tiergarten 4, which means that since 1939 he has been exterminating the “terminally ill”, first in Germany, then at the camps.
Christian Wirth, S.S.-Sturmbannführer (major), was born on 24 November, 1885, in Oberbalzheim. He is a carpenter and construction worker and, after 1910, a policeman. During World War One he fights on the Western Front. In 1930 he becomes a member of the most vicious unit of the Stuttgart police, already known, even then, for their brutality towards prisoners. A member of the National Socialist Workers’ Party, 1931, and part of the S.S. by 1939, when he is given the rank of Kriminalkommissar in the Stuttgart Kriminalpolizei, a section of the Gestapo. Soon thereafter, as Kriminaloberkommissar and S.S.-Obersturmführer, he is transferred to the Grafeneck psychiatric clinic to head their euthanasia programme, which is already up and running. At Grafeneck, Wirth makes the acquaintance of Josef Oberhauser, who is in charge of supervising the work of the crematorium, and he becomes Wirth’s right-hand man in the death camps throughout Poland. At Grafeneck, Wirth also gets to know the head of the kitchen, Kurt Franz, later commander of the Treblinka concentration camp; then he meets Lorenz Hackenholt and Willi Mentz, with whom he will enjoy the Mediterranean climate of Trieste and its environs, along with Franz Stangl, the brutal commander of Sobibor and Treblinka, revelling in brothels and nightclubs.
Wirth is transferred in late 1939 to Brandenburg an der Havel to be chief administrator, where, in a former prison adapted to become a euthanasia centre, the first gassing experiments take place: a group of mentally ill patients is gassed to death using carbon monoxide. Philipp Bouhler, a member of Hitler’s Chancellery, comes up with a revolutionary suggestion: gas chambers camouflaged as showers. Shortly thereafter Wirth returns to Grafeneck to be promoted to supervisor of all euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria.
Before Christmas 1941, Wirth arrives in Belzec, a little place in the far south-east of occupied Poland, and is made its first camp commander, with the task and ambition of exterminating all the Jews there. They call him Christian the Terrible. Horrible stories circulate about his savagery.
There is not much information available about Belzec. The atrocities committed in Belzec are slipping into oblivion. Belzec is a forgotten camp today. One of the two men who survived Belzec, Rudolf Reder, testifies at a trial of war criminals in May 1945:
Wirth was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his middle forties with a vulgar face. Wirth was a beast.
Kurt Gerstein, an S.S.-Lieutenant, then head of the Technical Disinfection Services of the S.S.-Waffen, testifies:
I arrived in Belzec in late summer 1942. I was supposed to improve gassing methods and implement a way to disinfect clothing. A transport of Jews had just arrived from Lvov and all of them were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Wirth stood on a small platform and hurried the prisoners along with a whip, slashing them across the face.
Chaim Hirszmann also testifies:
Once, when a transport of children arrived in Belzec, Wirth ordered all the children thrown into a huge pit and buried alive.
I am Werner Dubois. At Belzec I drove a truck as an S.S. officer from April 1942 to April 1943 and supervised the work of the gas chambers. Wirth was brutal. He bellowed and threatened all the members of the German garrison and often struck them on the face. Only Oberhauser was not afraid of him.
In August 1942 Odilo Globočnik, leader of Aktion Reinhard, names Wirth as inspector of the S.S.-Sonderkommandos of Aktion Reinhard. Wirth’s first task is to reorganize the Treblinka camp, which, as a result of poor management, is not functioning well. Wirth brings his colleague Franz Stangl from Sobibor and puts him in charge of Treblinka. Globočnik orders a temporary hold on the transports from Warsaw. Treblinka is expanded, the killing methods are perfected, larger gas chambers are built. Lorenz Hackenholt comes over from Sobibor and brings his sketches, drawings and blueprints. Erwin Lambert of the S.S., an expert at building gas chambers, oversees the construction.
In late 1942 Wirth manages the work camps in the Lublin district and moves into a two-storey villa near Lublin military airfield, which was not working at the time. At the airfield Wirth sets up three hangars where all the confiscated property of the victims of Aktion Reinhard is sorted. It is then taken by train to Berlin.
In the summer of 1943 Wirth is promoted to S.S.- Sturmbannfuhrer and, after the Treblinka Revolt of 2 August, 1943, he is transferred to Trieste.
Near Kozina, on 26 May, 1944, on his way from Trieste to Rijeka by car, Wirth is killed by partisans of the 1st Battalion of the Istrian Division, led by Maks Zadnik. Another eleven S.S.-Sonderkommandos, members of Aktion Reinhard and Einsatz R, are killed in combat in northern Italy. All are buried first at the German military cemetery near Villa Opicina, but then between 1957 and 1961 they are exhumed and, with another 21,000 German soldiers, re-interred at the new German military cemetery near Costermano, on the eastern shore of Lake Garda. Although their names have been expunged from the list of war victims and from their headstones, once a year unknown visitors place flowers on their enumerated graves (Wirth’s is 716) and salute them with the Nazi salute. To this very day.
Continually obsessed by the “Jewish Question”, Wirth installs the infrastructure for proceeding with mass killings. He builds an efficient little crematorium. In and around Trieste he puts to use the methods developed in Poland, and sets up a new concentration camp at the San Sabba rice mill, an abandoned complex of buildings, a former rice-husking plant in the Trieste suburbs. An expert at building crematoria, Erwin Lambert, arrives in Trieste and successfully applies the experience he has gained in Poland to the rice mill. The ovens are inaugurated on 4 April, 1944, with a celebratory test run incinerating seventy bodies of hostages killed at the Villa Opicina shooting range the day before. Wirths staff is experienced not only in bur
ning prisoners, but in torturing them to death, beating them brutally, while children are ordered to collect firewood for the ovens in which they, too, will burn.
The German occupation makes Trieste a gift of fourteen legally registered brothels under the medical supervision of Italian doctors, and 200 registered streetwalkers. The registered brothels allow in only members of the military (and their previously screened guests), while the unregistered brothels are left to civilians. In the registered houses of passion, the passions are efficiently controlled. Upon entering the brothel the “consumer” would receive a form (in duplicate) in which a “secretary” would officially enter his name and unit, his rank, the date of the visit, the name of the “institution” and the name of the prostitute, after which the customer would be medically examined to make sure he had no pubic pests or gonorrhea or, heaven forbid, syphilis; then he’d undergo prophylactic treatment consisting of a wash with soap and water and mercury bichloride, followed by an intraurethral injection of 2 per cent protargol and an application of calomel powder. Finally, he would be handed a condom, after which, with an intrepid Heil!, off he would go to satisfy his sex drive. But managed prostitution is an activity the S.S.-command does not succeed in implementing successfully across the board, not in Trieste or Ljubljana or Rijeka or Gorizia or Pula or Udine. Pretty girls from decent families are strolling around, well dressed, spirited and free; and hunting for prey is what soldiers are trained to do. So syphilis and gonorrhoea flourish, children are born out of wedlock, and little psychiatric clinics sprout secretly in the suburbs of the cities and towns of the Adriatisches Küstenland, where S.S. men could be treated for their hysteria, and their war and sex traumas.