by Evans, Mike
Much more efficient than you. But they noticed things, too, and asked questions. Too many questions. And now they aren’t here anymore. So, unless you want to join them wherever they are, you’ll keep your eyes on your work and your mouth closed.”
“Why do they die?”
“You saw the reports. They all died of natural causes.” “In alphabetical order.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, if the report was wrong about when they died, maybe it’s wrong about how they died.”
She leaned her shoulder against the cabinet and folded her arms across her chest. “From what I hear, most of them,” she whispered, “are worked to death.”
“Worked to death? How?”
“In the quarries. In the mines. The munitions plants. Wherever labor is needed.”
“But how do they work them to death?”
“Work them too hard and feed them too little.” “Why would the Nazis do that?”
She gave me a startled look. “The Nazis? Are you not a German, too?”
“I am Austrian.”
She shook her head. “You are German now.” She turned to the next file cabinet, but I would not let the matter drop.
“Why are the workers treated that way?”
“They are Jews. They are animals. They have no soul. Why waste food on them when our own people are hungry?”
Her words stabbed me like a knife in the chest. I swallowed hard and struggled to maintain my composure. “I hear there are many old people in the ghetto.”
She jerked her head to one side to look at me. “Have you seen the ghetto?”
“Only from a distance,” I lied. “Well, I have seen it.”
“You’ve been there?” I asked with mock interest.
“Not inside it,” she said with disdain. “I looked into it from the top of a nearby building and I can tell you, anyone who would live in those conditions deserves what they get.”
Anger flared inside me. We didn’t live like that of our own decision. We were forced there at gunpoint, and now she suggested we lived that way because of our own choices. I wanted to rip her hair out, but I stifled the impulse and forced myself to remain calm.
“But what about the old people and the babies?” “What do you care?”
“Just curious.”
“Curiosity is a bad thing in this job.” She opened a file drawer for Gusen and pointed. “These reports go right here.” She put them in the folder and closed the door, then turned to face me. “The ones who can work are put to work. The ones who can’t are put away.”
“Put away?” “Eliminated.” “Killed?”
“That is what I am told.” “How?”
“I don’t know.” She turned away and started back to her desk. “We should get to work before someone notices. And stop asking all these questions,” she complained. “You’ll get us both in trouble.”
I followed her across the room and took a seat at my desk. My fingers worked the keys of the typewriter, but for the remainder of the morning I thought only of what she said. “They are Jews. They have no soul.” And the more I thought of it, the angrier I became with myself for being duped by a comfortable bed and the promise of three meals. I sold out cheaply. Sold myself and the memory of everyone I knew. Traded them for a few bits of bread and a soft blanket at night. The Germans hated us. They loathed us. It was their official government policy and it was the way they thought as individuals. They meant to kill us all—some immediately as a drain on their precious Aryan society, and some they would use as animals until we were broken and exhausted.
A few minutes later, Gerda rose from her desk and disappeared from the room. She returned with a glass of water and set it on my desk. “Drink this,” she ordered. “You look pale.”
“Why concern yourself with me?”
“Colonel Eichmann gave you this job. I don’t want you making him look bad.” Over the rim of the glass I saw her eyes staring down at me. “You cannot let them see this kind of reaction from you,” she insisted. “You must not show any emotion. This is simply the work they do. It’s the work we do. They don’t think about it this way. And you can’t either. It’s just a job.” I nodded in response, but in my heart I knew it would never be just a job for me. Not any longer.
At noon we left our desks and walked down the hall to a room with a table and four chairs. An icebox stood in the corner and there was a counter with a sink next to it. A cabinet over the sink held plates and cups. Gerda took two down, and I found forks and knives in a drawer at the far end of the counter.
For lunch we had sausages, roasted potatoes, and sauerkraut, which we consumed with a small glass of wine. On any other occasion I would have enjoyed it immensely, but right then all I could think about was Papa and Mama. They were physically incapable of heavy labor, which made them no good for work in a mine or quarry. They were most surely dead by now. Put away, as Gerda said it. David and Stephan could survive for a while, but Papa and Mama could not. The thought of their demise, together with the sight of the food, made me sick.
While we ate, Eva joined us. I took a few bites as if finishing the food on my plate while they talked about the wine and food. Eva mentioned the warehouse across the street and the many bottles it contained. Then I remembered the room where the man sat counting diamonds and the pouch of teeth with gold fillings. Suddenly I knew those gold-filled teeth weren’t the result of normal dental care. They were extracted from the bodies of dead inmates at the camps. Dead Jews. People I knew and loved. The thought of it roiled my stomach and I gagged. Eva gave me a worried look but I waved her off and took a sip of wine, saying, “I’m okay. Just a piece of sausage.”
After lunch, Eva walked back to our office with us and reviewed my work. She was pleased with how much I’d done and after she checked the completed reports against the list, she took the reports with her. “Shall I file them for you?” I asked, hoping for another opportunity to search the files in the cabinet.
“Not now,” she called.
That afternoon, I continued working through the pages on my desk until I came to Stephan’s name. Tears filled my eyes as I read it over and over. “Stephan Rovina,” I whispered.
Gerda glanced over her shoulder toward me. “Did you say something?”
“No,” I quickly wiped my eyes with my fingers. “Just wanted to spell the name correctly.”
“Some of the names are difficult to read.”
“Yes,” I tried to mask my despair. “The writing is not always clear.” According to information on the sheet, Stephan was sent to the camp at Gusen. Not to the East, as Adolf had said—although it was east of Linz. They had no plan to resettle us anywhere, only to work us until we died. We were their slaves. At least Stephan was alive when he left the ghetto, I consoled myself, and he lived long enough to be counted in the census at the camp, but there was no way to know what happened after that. He was young, healthy, and strong. Hopefully they would make good use of him in the quarry. It was an awful thought—praying that someone would be assigned to a life of agonizing misery—but at least he would be alive and now, more than ever, that seemed like the point of it all. Until that day, I had waxed and waned in my resolve to persevere, one minute determined to maintain my identity as a Jew and to survive, certain that the Nazis would come to a bitter end. Then the next, ready to give up and join them, to not merely “pass” as a German but to become one and forsake all I knew to be true, right, just, and holy. Now the duplicity was gone. Evaporated by the lies I heard from Adolf and read in the files, and by the hatred in Gerda’s voice.
At the end of the day, no one was around to approve our work, so I followed Gerda’s instruction and took the completed reports to Adolf ’s office and laid them on his desk. She said that was the way they should be handled. He was nowhere to be seen, but Eva came in while we were deciding what to do next. She took the reports from us. “I will look them over. You may go for the evening.”
I returned to
my desk and moved the stack of blank forms from the desktop to a drawer. Then I straightened up the typewriter and cleared away the pen and inkwell. A dozen handwritten sheets lay at the corner of my desk, the last ones I had completed that afternoon. Information from them was already entered on the forms we gave to Eva but the handwritten pages could not be destroyed until the completed forms were approved. So I opened a desk drawer to the left and placed the pages there until I returned the following day. As I laid them in place, my eyes scanned over the names once more. They were all fellow Jews from the ghetto. Once, they had homes and lives no one would ever know about and the notion struck me that the pages I prepared might be the last record of their existence. Files in the cabinets along the wall might be the only evidence of where and how they died. Documents like that, even the handwritten pages, weren’t merely records. They were sacred relics of the lives they represented. I couldn’t let them be destroyed. But what could I do? I thought about it a moment longer, then pushed the drawer closed and walked to the back of the room. There I took my coat from the hook and slipped it on. As I shoved my hands into the pockets I felt the envelope inside. Then a plan began to form in my mind. The pockets were deep. Perhaps I could simply put the pages in them and walk out.
Downstairs, a guard stopped me at the door. “Everyone must be searched before they leave the building,” he said. Then he slipped his hands beneath my coat and patted me down, touching me from my waist up to my shoulders. When he finished with that, he ran his palms over the front of my coat at the pockets. So much for simply walking out with the documents, I thought. But he stopped there, having gone no lower than my hips. I waited with my hands in the air while he leaned around me and ran his hands over my backside, taking much too long for my comfort. When he was finally through, he stepped back and gestured toward the door. I walked out to the sidewalk and started toward the boardinghouse.
That night after dinner, I went to my room and continued to think about how to get the handwritten lists out of the office. I was determined to preserve them as a record of what happened to the people from the ghetto and from our neighborhood in Linz. As I thought about it, I replayed in my mind the guard’s search when I left the building. He patted down the pockets of the coat on the outside, then slipped his hands beneath the coat and ran them over my sides, around my hips, and across my backside. If I could hide the documents inside the coat, below the pockets, he might never find them—especially if I only took one or two pages at a time.
I took the coat from the closet, laid it on the bed, and folded the front back to reveal the lining inside. It was well sewn along the hem at the bottom and around the edges. If I could slide the pages between the lining and the outer shell, they would be safe. They wouldn’t fall out. Then I noticed the coat had an inside pocket that opened in a location closer to my arm. Using a nail from the broken place on the wall, I turned that pocket inside out and sliced open the bottom, giving access to the space between the lining and the shell. I put on the coat, stepped to the chest, and picked up the copy of Life magazine. I folded it lengthwise so it would fit through the pocket and shoved it inside. The magazine passed through the opening and slid to the bottom hem where it lay flat.
“That will work,” I smiled.
The next day, I arrived at the office to find more handwritten lists on my desk. I spent the day typing the names into the spaces on the report forms. As I completed each list, I moved the handwritten sheets to the desk drawer, hoping no one would notice they weren’t in the trash can. I suppose I should have thrown some of them away, to ensure the safety of the ones I kept, but in my mind that was not an option. Every name was precious and deserving of preservation.
That evening, as I prepared to leave, I left the inkwell on the desktop on purpose. Then I walked to the back for my coat. Wearing my coat, I returned to my desk to put the inkwell in the drawer. While doing that, I leaned forward and slid three of the handwritten pages into the pocket of my coat. When I stood, I felt them slide all the way to the bottom hem. As I hoped, the guard downstairs never checked farther than my hips.
When I reached the boardinghouse, I went to my room and laid the coat on the bed. With no real effort, I fished the papers back through the pocket and hid them in the hatbox on the shelf inside the closet. Then I went downstairs for dinner.
Any doubt I might have harbored about what lay ahead for Jews in Austria vanished the following day. Adolf was in the office that morning when I arrived and he called me to his desk. “I want you to prepare a letter.”
“What shall it say?”
“I am about to tell you.” He tossed a notepad to my side of the desk and flipped a pencil after it. “Take down what I say.”
I took a seat in a chair near the desk, rested the notepad on my knee, and gripped the pencil, waiting for him to begin. This was my first attempt at dictation and, in spite of how I felt toward the Germans in general, and Adolf in particular, I wanted to do a good job. I preferred working there to the alternative of disappearing into what I now knew was a complex web of interconnected prison camps.
Adolf leaned back in the chair, propped his elbows on the armrests, and laced his fingers together. His eyes were fixed straight ahead but from the look in them I could tell he was lost in thought. Then he began:
“General Reinhard Heydrich. In accordance with our discussions at Wannsee, I have now completed my review of facilities in the outlying territories. To date, more than 400,000 units have been processed through these locations. The number yet to be transferred is at least twice that many, of which more than half will require the special treatment you outlined at our meeting. In an attempt to increase our processing rate, I have directed all facilities to pursue alternative means of effecting that treatment as rapidly as possible. However, ad hoc solutions to the situation will prove unworkable in the long term, as the skeletal waste produced from increased production will soon become unmanageable. Ash deposits and odor are also problematic in several locations and have generated complaints from nearby neighbors. I suggest we consider sending a team of architects and engineers to assess the facilities at Mauthausen with an eye toward developing a system that can be duplicated at other locations, which will achieve the desired daily capacity while reducing waste output to manageable quantities.”
Eichmann paused there and stared silently into space. Finally he looked over at me, “Type that up for my signature. I need it delivered to Berlin by overnight courier.”
At first I did not understand the point of what he was trying to say to Heydrich, but as I took notes, and later at my desk as I typed the letter, I realized he was talking about the disposal of humans who died at the camp. I was certain “special treatment” was an oblique reference to the execution of those found unfit for labor—what Gerda referred to as being “put away”—but the numbers to which he alluded seemed far beyond what one would expect from an operation designed to extract work from its victims and let them die of exhaustion. This sounded like the killing wasn’t occasioned by the system but now had become the point. Not merely to dispose of bodies dead from natural causes, but to effect wholesale executions. I felt ill as I returned to my desk and twice while I was typing I had to swallow my own vomit. Still I was resolved to contain my emotions and to work in every capacity to see that as much of what they did was chronicled, not only in their own official files but in mine as well. One day the world would know what happened and when that day came, their own files would rise up as a witness against them, one way or the other.
Because this was my first letter, I asked Gerda for help. “Letters are prepared in duplicate,” she told me. “One for delivery to the recipient and one for the file.” I did as she instructed, but instead of preparing it in duplicate I prepared this letter in triplicate. When I finished it, I took the original to Adolf for his signature and filed a copy in the general correspondence cabinet. The third copy I tucked safely out of sight in my desk drawer.
Throughout the remainder of the
morning, I continued working through the seemingly endless stack of prisoner census reports. Unlike previous lists, however, the ones on my desk that day contained only the names of women and children. At the top, in addition to the location, was the notation “people receiving special treatment.” There was no doubt in my mind what that meant.
Those reports and the letter I prepared earlier that morning from Adolf to Heydrich were the most explicit documents I saw of the German plan for dealing with the Jews. Most of what Adolf and his fellow officers did was never committed to writing but entrusted to Adolf ’s memory. Since childhood he had shown a penchant for remembering minute details of seemingly innocuous events. Now, as a Nazi officer, he put that memory to use and, for their purposes, it served him well. Later, when their plans began to fail and their dream of a glorious Third Reich was all but lost, no one wanted to know him, but right then—when they seemed to be in control of everyone’s destiny—he was the man with whom everyone wanted to be friends. He was their rising star.
* * *
In the months that followed, I collected the handwritten prisoner lists, made handwritten copies of documents that seemed important, and sometimes prepared an extra copy of the documents I typed. I also retained my notes and scooped up spoiled forms from the trash. All of these I hid in my desk and took them from the office in small batches using the pocket in my coat. At first I stashed them in the hatbox in the closet of my room, but one day as spring approached Hilda asked me why I was wearing a heavy coat on such a nice day. “It isn’t that cold outside,” she said, giving the lapel a tug. “Aren’t you hot with that on?”
“Not really,” I did my best to deflect her question.
Then, as I went upstairs, someone spoke to me from behind. “She should mind her own business,” the voice said. I glanced over my shoulder to see a fair-skinned blonde following me up the steps. “I heard what she said to you just now. She was coming from my room when I arrived from work yesterday.”