by Daša Drndic
The killings at Grafeneck last until mid-December 1941. Then they stop abruptly. There are no handicapped and retarded left; they have all been successfully executed: 10,654 people. Grafeneck and its surroundings are now cleansed, and so much the healthier. Grafeneck is dropped from the euthanasia programme. All traces are erased, the walls and the wire; the natural surroundings revert to green; the staff go on holiday. It is nearly Christmas, and so begins the season of goodwill and endowment. With the new year comes a new location: Hadamar. At Hadamar 10,824 patients are gassed. After the war, of the hundred or so staff members who run the Grafeneck euthanasia programme, eight are charged and three receive prison terms ranging from eighteen months to five years. Fifty years later, in 1990, a memorial is raised at Grafeneck listing the names of the patients who were killed, and the “patients” who killed them.
Yes, Kurt Franz. Kurt Franz still works as a cook at Buchenwald; then in 1942 he goes to Belzec for a time, then on to Treblinka. Treblinka becomes his kingdom. After the revolt in August 1943 Kurt Franz is made camp commander. He oversees the last “gas operations” and finally shuts down Treblinka.
That’s not true! I was not commander of the camp! I had the rank of Oberscharführer at Treblinka, and as a member of the Waffen-S.S. units I was responsible exclusively for the camp guards. The Oberscharführer is technically a sergeant, not an officer. My conscience is clean.
At Treblinka Kurt Franz struts about, rides, goes off for a morning jog, sings, sings a lot (Kurt Franz loves music, especially orchestral music), keeps himself in shape, keeps his beautiful body trim, and faithful Barry is always at his heels. At Treblinka Kurt Franz lets his imagination run wild, he comes up with little extravagances, he plants flowers.
We planted flowers in the end, when we were getting ready to leave. I ordered the excavators to level off the camp. We planted lupins. What? Lupins are perennials, lovely flowers, spectacular floral candles. Against an attractive leafy background they create a stunning floral landscape. Lupins are ideal for planting in colourful clusters in full sun. I love flowers. I have a well-tended garden.
Before closing down the camp, Kurt Franz kills time by killing people.
Lies, all lies. I heard with my own ears how Wirth, in quite a convincing voice, explained to the Jews that they would be deported further and before that, for reasons of hygiene, they must bathe, and their clothes would have to be disinfected. Inside the disinfection barrack was a long wooden counter for the deposit of valuables, jewellery, money and such—small things. It was made clear to the Jews that after the bath their valuables would be returned to them. Then the Jews applauded Wirth enthusiastically. Their applause is still ringing in my ears. So, the Jews believed Wirth.
In late 1943 Kurt Franz is transferred to Trieste and tasked with killing partisans and Jews. From Trieste he flees to Austria in April 1945, but American soldiers catch up with him and put him behind bars. Big and strong, Kurt Franz escapes from prison. He goes back to his native Düsseldorf and, using his own name, works first as a labourer at a building site, then returns to his old profession, cooking. For fourteen years Kurt Franz goes fishing, tells his children all sorts of fairy tales, plays football on Sundays, compiles new albums of colour photographs of nature, friends, animals, soon loses his hair and puts on weight. Still, it’s as if the happy days are here again. Then in 1959 Kurt Franz is arrested once more and on 3 September, 1965, at the first Düsseldorf trial for crimes committed at Treblinka, he is charged with murdering at least 139 camp inmates and participating in the killing of more than 300,000 Jews, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, as evidence, the police present a photographic album they find in Kurt Franz’s garage behind empty, dusty wine bottles and the muddy rubber boots Kurt Franz wears when he waters his garden flowers. On the album in large letters are the words Schöne Zeiten, which would be “The Good Old Days” or “Happy Days” or “The Joy of Life”, ah, the age of ignorance.
This much Haya is aware of in 1976. Only later, only now, in 2006, according to the surprises that life serves up to its drowsy consumers, only now does Haya learn that in 1993 Kurt Franz is released from prison and dies in an old people’s home in Wuppertal on 4 July, 1998, when the Red Cross send her a photograph of a fat bald man, a doddering old geezer, actually, sitting hunched over a wooden table, and next to him an elderly woman in a rumpled house dress, dishevelled, obese, sagging and slovenly. The wall behind Mr and Mrs Franz is covered in paisley wallpaper, and on it hang a number of small trophies, hunting trophies, and insignia that look like medals. This photograph does not hold Haya’s interest. By then, in 2006, she has a thick file on Kurt Franz, a file which lies like a memento at the bottom of her red basket, like a deep blue tattoo on her bosom, like a shroud under which her brain pulses more and more feebly, relegated to the past.
The Red Cross is always late or never gets there at all. The Red Cross is so busy everywhere in the world. The Red Cross is caught up in a broad range of activities, chiefly humanitarian, so it has trouble concentrating on individual activities, so its work is dispersed, aflutter and it never takes sides. The imperative of the Red Cross is to sustain a universal, global neutrality. In terms of history and people. The Red Cross has been reminding Haya for six decades, every 8 May, of its day, thanking her for the trust she has shown it, the Red Cross, of course, hoping that soon it, the Red Cross, will contribute to solving her “case”, regardless of the fact that, of course, Haya Tedeschi may no longer be alive by then. Haya, on the other hand, does not think of the case of the disappearance of her son Antonio Tedeschi on 13 April, 1945, as hers, because she did nothing to bring about the disappearance of her son Antonio Tedeschi, it was due to, let’s say, historical circumstances. The Red Cross has contacted Kurt Franz, in and out of prison, but Kurt Franz knows nothing of an Antonio Tedeschi, and the name Haya Tedeschi is completely foreign to me, Kurt Franz says, he holds and fiddles with a copy of the birth certificate that the Red Cross workers have given him to inspect. And besides, Kurt Franz says, Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name. You don’t think that I would risk my life for a Jewish woman, do you?
North-west of Kassel and east of Dortmund is the little town of Bad Arolsen. In a baroque palace in the middle of a dense forest—deliberately hidden, one might suppose, from the eyes of the public—at Grosse Allee 5–9, is housed the largest archive for World War Two. For fifty years now in this stately home an army of 430 people arranges, copies, digitalizes, registers, analyses and classifies the documents of the Third Reich in the forlorn hope that here, maybe now, sixty-plus years after the fact, they will contribute to picking apart and laying bare at least one little piece of the past. The International Tracing Service is in Bad Arolsen, and they still receive almost half a million enquiries annually regarding the missing and the dead, those torn violently from their families, the uprooted, robbed and murdered; enquiries pertaining to children and adults, as if people do not die, as if people do not give up, as if the past doesn’t wear thin (it seems not to) the nightmares of the dead times continue to circle the world.
Few people know of Bad Arolsen’s vast functional archive, which could bring succour to millions and disturb millions were it made available to the public. Every day through the fingers of the officials of the International Tracing Service slip human lives with names, both real and fabricated, with names added or erased, lives with identities or without them, lives with meaning and those bereft of meaning, regardless, lost lives. Mislaid lives. At the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen, on huge sliding shelves marked with the names of the camps, cities, battles, regions, in alphabetical registers, lurk unfinished stories, trapped fates, big and little personal histories, embodied histories, there are people huddled there who languish, ghost-like, and wait for the great Mass of Liberation, the eucharistic celebration after which they will finally lie down, fall asleep or depart, soaring heavenward. Bad Arolsen, this vast collection of documented horror, preserves the patches, the fragments, the detritus of sevent
een, yes, in digits, 17 million lives on 47 million pieces of paper collected from twenty-two concentration camps and their satellite organizations; from factories, from an array of institutions, from ghettos, from prisons, from these commands and those commands, from hospitals and hospital files (medical records), from the laboratories (experiments), from institutes, local archives, the police and police files; there is information here about executions, political, criminal and racial, about murders “for reasons of health”, everything is here that the Allied Forces collected when Germany surrendered, first to be warehoused in London, then in Frankfurt and, in 1952, finally, in Bad Arolsen.
In Bad Arolsen, in this “library” of horrors, in this alchemist’s kitchen of maniacs, little lives of little people have been foundering already for sixty years; they are waving their deportation I.D.s, their brittle, faded and cracked family photographs, their hastily penned letters, diaries, their birth certificates and marriage licences, their death certificates, sketches, poems, their coupons for food and clothing, anything that can supplant their cry, they are waving: Here we are, find us.
Information about missing children is collected and preserved in a special department in Bad Arolsen. Missing children from World War Two. The 250,000 children who went missing during World War Two. Fewer than 50,000 of them have found their families to date, what is left of their familes, their—roots. And so about 200,000 people (an entire medium-sized city) have no notion of who they are; some of them wonder, some of them wonder where they are from, while others live thinking they are someone they are not, and they do not ask themselves any questions, and they do not wonder if they might be someone other than who they are, but actually they are the very person they think they are not, a person who is altogether strange and foreign to them, until one day, sometimes after two, three, four, five, six decades, when these children are no longer children and are getting old, one day a warm breeze wafts the “happiness”, the “realization”, a white sheet of paper, a document, a stamped certificate (from Bad Arolsen) to one of these elderly children, which declares that they do not exist at all, because who they thought they were, they aren’t, they are someone else, someone who has, as far as they are concerned, never existed, and then overnight the person who has never existed for them becomes who they are. In Bad Arolsen, in that special department, they keep information about children (and infants) who were killed or taken from their non-Aryan parents to be given to “pure Aryans” to be looked after and raised. About children who are lost forever to their parents, most of whose parents no longer exist, just as these children are now non-existent for themselves.
The baroque palace in Bad Arolsen preserves, cleans, cleanses, fine-tunes in its belly a city of paper, a paper city, a papier-mâché model of Europe, of life, of compacted tragedies, gigantic tragedies squashed on to yellowed slips of paper.
But. The information kept in Bad Arolsen is accessible only to those who sit in the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen, and the staff of the International Red Cross, who have been permitted,—and only they, in the name of the victims and their children—to stroll through the renovated rooms of the International Tracing Service and nibble at warm cakes in the small cafés scattered here and there for atmosphere and increased staff productivity. The Red Cross is slow, just as the United Nations is slow, and not so very united. It takes the Red Cross between three and thirty years to find a concrete piece of information, confidential information that often leads nowhere. But they send out their cards wishing everyone a Happy 8 May, Red Cross Day, without fail, in perfect order, to those they know and those they do not, to the living and the dead, potential and genuine consumers of the services of the International Red Cross, like a little reminder, like a slogan—we are thinking of you, we are working for you. To all others, to historians, journalists, sociologists, writers, to everyone, and especially to those with a personal stake in this, whose wanderings through the historical twilight might lead them to an occasional lit path, to all of these, access to the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen is forbidden. Out of the question. The baroque palace in Bad Arolsen is fiercely guarded. With the excuse of protecting the privacy of the victims, Germany has been protecting its own reputation for fifty years. Italy’s as well. And countless other big and little, powerful and powerless countries scattered across all the continents of the planet.
Now and then a curious piece of information leaks from the palace in Bad Arolsen to the public. For example, while they were looking for the family of a Mr Weiss, workers at the International Red Cross stumbled upon the Mauthausen “Book of Death” in which it states that on 20 April, 1942, at a special celebration in honour of Hitler’s birthday, an additional 300 people were put to death at the camp, after which the guests enjoyed a festive meal.
Germany resists the opening of the Bad Arolsen archive for twenty years. The International Red Cross declares with pride that it opened its archives to the public ten years earlier, without mentioning the secrecy of the fifty years before that, during which there was time to “reorganize” the data, erase and destroy evidence that might compromise the war (in)activity of the International Red Cross. All parties protect their asses as much as they can, and so does the International Red Cross. And so does the Church, particularly the Catholic Church.
Then there is a change in April 2006. After years and years of negotiating, Germany, the United States, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Israel, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Luxembourg and Italy, the eleven countries which signed the agreement on establishing the protected archives of documents captured from the Third Reich in 1946, come much closer to reaching a consensus. Germany agrees that the Bad Arolsen doors should be opened, though not straight away. They call for additional meetings, more consideration, further assessment.
Haya comes across the news of the opening of Bad Arolsen in the newspapers L’Unità and Corriere della Sera. It is a small news item, appearing at the bottom of the fifth and sixth page, respectively, of the newspapers Haya regularly reads. Haya reads many papers. By this time she has experience with newspapers. Haya snips out the article about the opening of the German archives and places it on the desk by the window. Soon, she says. Soon it will be time to go to Bad Arolsen. There is no-one around to tell Haya, Take it slow, Haya. It is too soon to start packing. Bad Arolsen is not yet open, and you are old.
Anyway. After the news that the Bad Arolsen archive might soon be opening its doors, Haya decides: I am coming back among people. It is springtime. I will hold a little dinner party for my closest friends. Yes, Haya is old. The preparations for the dinner take a long time. For a week Haya brings home food supplies, bottles of Merlot and Picolit, fresh vegetables, strawberries are available, she gets prosciutto, prosciutto di San Daniele, she has no flour at home, no sugar, she buys asparagus, gli asparagi della Bassa friulana, she has no cooking oil, she buys spring beans and potatoes, i fagioli e le patate della Carnia, she buys cheeses, especially formaggio Montasio. Haya doesn’t eat much, mostly Zwieback, on the day of her dinner Giovanni the fisherman leaves at her door trout he has just caught, lovely, plump trout, le trote del Natisone, oh, it will be a feast, a real feast after so many years of fasting. Haya gets out her fine glasses, the ones with the gold rim. She washes them so they glisten. She takes out her special tableware. Carla comes over. Carla cleans the house. The windows gleam, the floor gleams, there is a sense of gaiety in the air, a long-since-vanished gaiety that now sticks to the sun’s rays, and prances with them, prances like flies driven mad by impending rain. And Freddy, Freddy comes over, to braid a black velvet ribbon into her heavy grey hair.
No-one comes.
Everyone is busy. They all apologize. We’re busy, they say. Fanny is busy, Igor is busy, Albina is busy, Frau Helga, nicknamed “Hitlerchen”, is also busy, Don Sebastian is busy, Olga is busy. Who else had she invited? she can’t remember just then. She invited Roberto. She invited Roberto, and Roberto is busy. All her guests, all twelve of her guests are busy. They have more press
ing things to see to. Haya can’t remember what these things are, pointless things, yes, she doesn’t remember what they are busy with, who they are busy with. No-one comes to her little party, to the last dinner of her fast, to her return to the living.
So what? That’s fine. Bad Arolsen will open and she will go there.
Arolsen will open and I will go to Arolsen, Haya says. And further she says, I would like my name to be Babette. Babette knows about feasts. Eating and celebrating are ordinary deceptions, she says. Waiting lasts, waiting endures.
What’s with Zion? Divine salvation? Ridiculous. What does he have in mind, this God, this god of the Jews, this god of the Christians, that a feast can bring salvation, that one little feast can overpower death, plough up the cemetery in her breast? Ha! Reconciliation? One big or little bash, either way, will that bring liberation? How, on a platter?