He experimented on some 3,000 children, mainly Jews and gypsies, of which barely 200 survived in a chronically sick or deformed state. On the basis of a cursory glance as soon as the trains reached Auschwitz, the tireless Mengele made his own selection of the children he deemed suitable for his research, and put to his left or his right those he chose for the infirmary barrack in Camp B or to send straight to the gas chambers.
Mengele’s great speciality was physical pain. More specifically, his experiments focused on physical pain as suffered by children. He wanted to know everything on the subject and experimented collaterally with thresholds of pain, inasmuch as he practised on twins in order to try out perverted, unlikely techniques of genetic engineering. To that end he carried out arbitrary castrations of twin girls without anaesthetics, and thus achieved two experiments in one: he studied their genitals, almost always without proper technical means or medical preparation, in order to analyze manifestations of pain, such as screams, contractions, exudations, despair, fainting, shaking and stiffness, among others.
One can conceive of no greater cruelty or sadism than the dissections that he, with the help of other camp doctors, carried out on children who died suffering the greatest pain. Or lunatic experiments in which he injected two or three-year-old children with huge quantities of petrol or phenol to ascertain how long and in what state blood clots in the human body under the impact of synthetic, embalming liquids. Or stomach operations carried out without anesthetics, simply to study why entrails occupy such and such a place in the body and not some other.
Mengele didn’t perform by himself. He undertook and completed his experiments with the connivance, praise and real assistance he received from the doctors and nurses of Auschwitz, some of whom were proud to be invited by Mengele to associate their names with the advances for the future of science, like Koenig, who was interested in experimenting sadistically on dwarves. But that future was neither grandiose nor glorious. Mengele had to flee from Auschwitz on January 17, 1945 and hide on his farm in Günzburg as an ordinary laborer. He then entered a monastery where he stayed under a false identity until 1949 when he made it to Argentina without too much difficulty. His death, whenever it happened, came as insufficient pay for the horror he left behind him. There is, or was, in the Erika Fisherkant Foundation a huge archive of hundreds of cases that are still open and it was labeled: JOSEF MENGELE, TORMENTOR.
8
I discovered that in a village in eastern Poland, Piasky put naked children in cages that he then buried while they were still alive.
I discovered that a child was thrown from a truck onto a street in Lublin by his mother so he could escape. A German soldier picked him up by the leg and threw him violently against the wheels of another oncoming truck. The child died, run over in full view of his mother.
I discovered they split open many children’s heads against rocks and tree trunks. It was common practice and saved on ammunition and unnecessary effort.
I discovered that in some towns in the Ukraine the Waffen SS—to which Mengele belonged—would organize a big spectacle by building a big bonfire into the flames of which they threw live children in front of their parents. A child ran out of one of these bonfires, screaming horribly, hair and hands on fire. They forced him back into the fire with a pitchfork.
I discovered that many children from Gorlice, in Galicia, had their heads smashed by blows from rifle butts, while those doing it tried to outdo one another seeing who could shout the loudest, in a soldierly sporting competition. They did it with such might that brains flew everywhere.
I discovered they beat children with their fists until they lost consciousness.
I discovered that they let some parents in Krakow choose between strangling their children themselves or allowing them to be skewered on bayonets. Most felt compelled to kill their children with their own hands.
I discovered that they made children in Treblinka walk in columns for hours until they were exhausted. They shot in the head any who dropped behind from exhaustion.
I discovered that in towns in Russia and Byelorussia, in the places they chose to carry out mass executions, they broke the children’s spines by beating them with wooden stakes. They took several hours to die.
I discovered that German mothers dressed their children in clothing that came from the dead bodies of Jewish children.
9
I wonder what state Hurbinek’s collarbone must have been in and how long Dr. Mengele examined it before he discarded him, that January morning when an SS medical officer, a Lagerarzt, walked into the Ka-Be—the initials used to refer to the camp infirmaries, that were called Krankenbau—with the two-and-a-half, perhaps even three-year-old baby, perhaps even on his birthday, the last birthday he would ever have. He must have found him in a double wall in one of the barracks or perhaps someone handed him over in exchange for a last-minute favor. Rather than kill him, the Lagerarzt thought of Mengele’s scientific work.
Perhaps it happened like that or perhaps it didn’t. At any rate, neither Primo Levi, nor Henek, nor Franz Patzold, nor anyone else, could ever have known since the prisoners didn’t know about Mengele’s experiments. But the number tattooed on his small arm could be explained by that visit to Mengele’s infirmary. That number on the arm of a three-year-old child was proof that he had passed through one of the Selektzie, selections made by the Angel of Death. Consequently, the answer to the question Levi asks about the pain Hurbinek suffered before reaching the barrack that brought them all together might be that the child was kept alive, like a guinea pig, in Mengele’s cages.
The injection of a small dose of petrol, depending where it is made, can lead to permanent paralysis, because the whole area of body affected is rendered useless. To ensure the remaining blood doesn’t clot, a rapid puncture or deep cut must be implemented in the section above the injected area, to prevent septicemia. When Mengele observed Hurbinek’s collarbone and that white gap, almost a membrane next to the skinny neck, he considered possibly injecting carbolic acid. He was sure the immediate clotting of the blood in the brain would trigger a muscular spasm throughout the body. He’d read in a book about neurology that was what happened to rats. Perhaps it also happened to men as well, and perhaps even to children?
However, he had a change of mind. Thus, Hurbinek’s paralysis wouldn’t derive from a limited injection of petrol, as it had gelled in Mengele’s mind for a few minutes. Hurbinek’s paralized legs, the uselessness of his organs from the waist down, would derive from one of Mengele’s stupid experiments that consisted in separating out vertebrae by inserting a wedge made of the bone from another child’s vertebra in the spine, the purpose being to see what would be the level of acceptance and what side effects might be produced by the contact between the two different bones. These most peculiar experiments on the backbone formed part of Mengele’s favorite operations. He believed—absurdly—that the key to purifying races resided in the backbone.
A few minutes after Mengele’s savage surgical operation, little Hurbinek was strapped on a bunk and placed under observation without food. His screams died down and gave way to the terror that silenced him and made him shake. They left him there to die; Mengele refused to waste bullets.
10
I discovered that when they were destroying the ghettos in cities, on a whim, they lifted children up by the neck and threw them violently down from windows and balconies of high flats, or down stairwells.
I discovered that sometimes, when the SS were in a hurry, they strangled children where they found them.
I discovered that in the city of Grodno, the Germans helped the children to strip, then shot them in the back of the neck, one by one.
I discovered that they snatched babies from their mothers’ arms, grabbing them by a leg, and threw them violently into the lorries, thus breaking their necks.
I discovered that two or three SS would violently pull apart one-year
-old babies.
I discovered that in the Chelmno camp they would hang children in front of their parents.
I discovered that in the village of Svisloc they threw the babies up in the air so that others, in the spirit of a clay pigeon shoot, could fire at them while they hurtled through the air. They then fell into the ditches where they had placed their wounded mothers to be buried once they had watched that macabre game of target practice.
11
Parents, whenever they could, said goodbye to their children, knowing that in a few hours they would never be together again, that they would shortly die, and die painfully. Today I wonder what that moment would be like, the goodbye to my children, if they gave me that opportunity, after informing me that they would be murdered, shot, beheaded or gassed in a few hours. I am incapable of conceiving such a farewell; it is impossible, I cannot conceive such a final farewell. Let alone imagine it.
VII
ACTORS IN A MINIATURE THEATER
1
The life of Pavel Farin
I felt under a responsibility to give Hurbinek a future and that occasionally led me to look for him concealed within the personality of a man called Pavel Farin. Or rather to believe—as Fanny later said—that if Hurbinek had lived on, he might be that Pavel Farin who appeared as such a happy find. Perhaps Hurbinek really lives on as that individual, Farin the Russian. A life that was inserted, decided by me, the creator of his future. Why not? Why couldn’t he have more lives? Other possible lives?
I came across him when he was some fifty-three years old. Fanny and I had gone to the theater, one autumnal night in 1995, to see a performance by a contemporary dance company named after its director and lead dancer, Claude Schlumberger. Our attention was riveted in every act by the dramatic, baroque, bubbly, explosively colorful stage sets. I searched the programme for the name of the set designer and costume designer. And yes, there it was: Pavel Farin, a name that at the time meant absolutely nothing to me, but was renowned in the world of dance. The performance was extremely polished and the final applause from the audience was never-ending. All the dancers came out and bowed, as did Schlumberger himself, sweating and clutching a bouquet of flowers, alongside a man on crutches who had a dreadful limp. He stood at one end of the stage. A spotlight focused on him. The director introduced him as Pavel Farin, the great costume designer. I then saw that he was supporting his whole body with the crutches and practically dragged his legs behind him. Why couldn’t he be Hurbinek?
When the Red Army arrived and liberated the camp in Auschwitz, Hurbinek survived. Quite miraculously, it must be said, since some of his key organs had begun to fail as a result of Mengele’s lunacy, and his paralysis hinted at the future decay of his lower limbs. On February 27, 1945 he was transferred by Russian nurses who took pity on that human remnant that was half child, half nothing. First they put him in an ambulance crammed with wounded and then in a hospital train that went to Moscow, where he became one of hundreds of thousands of orphaned children who were distributed between state bodies throughout the Soviet Union. In Hurbinek’s case, given his physical condition and moribund state of health, it was decided not to send him to a far-flung province, where he would be certain to die because he was so weak due to a lack of medical resources. Doctors in Moscow’s Central Hospital took him on and gave him a thorough examination, and he was considered to be a special case and was sent here and there, and in a few years, quite remarkably, he recovered part of his bodily functions, even his speech. But it was a long time before he was able to walk, after numerous operations that restored some feeling, though very little, to the lower part of his torso. The aftermath of those many operations on his hips and spine to find out why he was so immobile would be that he would always have to drag his feet and rely on crutches, as Fanny and I saw on that stage set in Madrid. It is most likely that Hurbinek would have lived with other children at the expense of the state in the Communist Colony no. 1 for Victims of the Patriotic War, based at 7 Ulitsa Engelskaya, which he would only leave when he had appointments for treatment on the Central Hospital at Kalinin Prospekt. He was brought up in the Colony, in the section for orphans, by Party bureaucrats who explained why that strange number was tattooed on his arm—those numbers that never faded however hard he rubbed—but they never told him he was Jewish, or that maybe his parents were, because they never mentioned his parents, and, indeed, what sense would it have made to do that, if they were only ashes, ashes that were unfortunately not simply ashes. They merely saw him as one more Russian child, abandoned and anonymous in a death camp, victim of the aggressive turn taken by History. Hurbinek, the name they gave him in that Auschwitz infirmary, in his most recent, but very distant past, was a word he found inscrutable, immediately rejected and literally erased from his mind. He would never utter the word again. They then gave him the name of Pavel Farin because one of those bureaucrats did supply him with a first name and surname (though nothing else; Hurbinek never saw him again), a mere administrative means of registering orphans found in the camps as legitimate citizens and avoiding difficulties for their adoptive families, since there wasn’t really an adoption process, only red tape so the state could look after them. The majority, especially the older children, were then conscripted into the Red Army. Now definitively converted into Pavel Farin, Hurbinek learned Russian, that he always considered to be his mother tongue, and it would be several years before he suspected his real origins. He had been saved. (Or rather, I rescued him.)
At the age of thirteen Pavel started to walk with the support of crutches, in 1955, when he started his apprenticeship in a theater scenery workshop, the Igor Landau Workshop for the Decorative Arts, at 26 Ulitsa Serafimovich in Moscow. He was immediately attracted by the half solemn, half ironic colors of the illuminated manuscripts and medieval paintings, in the great variety of reproductions held in Landau’s collections. They used them to inspire the craftsmen in the workshops who were making backcloths and costumes for the classical works performed on stage and in the cinema with popular actors like Cherkasov or Boliyedev or dancers at the Bolshoi, stars like Ermoleyev and Plisetskaya. By the age of twenty, Pavel had already drawn and painted at the Landau all the sets for the operas that he came to love over time: Boris Godunov, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and Carmen; or for famous ballets like Khrennikov’s Love for Love and Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, or for plays in vogue: Gorky’s Summerfolk, Alexei Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor, Chekov’s The Seagull, and hundreds of other works. New worlds, full of playfulness and whimsy, that he could create as he wished, and even create as works unique on the face of the world. For the first time in his life he felt happy. He learned the trade of poster art and studied Russian iconography from the twenties and thirties. He imitated his favorite, Gustav Klucis. He became expert and was much in demand in Moscow’s theaterland. He grew up drawing and painting nonstop. At twenty-five, he took a position at the prestigious Comedy and Drama Theater on Ulitsa Jalova, directed by Liubimov. This was a very famous theater popular with Moscovites, who began to call it by the name of the nearest subway station: the Taganskaya. Pavel began as third dressing room assistant and was not granted permission to travel with the company. He became familiar with the repertory that was sometimes considered too liberal for the mood of the times in the USSR: Mayakovsky, Pushkin, Brecht, Bulgakov and Sholokhov. Helped by his cruel physique, by the end of the year Pavel was using his dark sense of humor and acerbic critical spirit to shape his artistic personality. Many felt he liked to pose as a maudit, or was blinded by bitterness, though others considered him to be an artist blinded by the gods. He devoured the Russian classics. The Taganskaya gradually incorporated into its repertory as their own many of Pavel Farin’s creations, and by 1970 he was the company’s premier set-designer, had four assistants and all the iconography the theater produced was his: costumes, posters, curtains, stage sets, brochures, and make up. Liubimov drew up the season’s programme with him, and his opinions
were very present both in the official and clandestine press. The sight of that frail man standing only with the support of his crutches made him appear extremely fragile and soon became familiar in all theaters, and he became a prestigious, even mythical figure. People felt a mixture of pity and admiration for the backcloths, stage sets and costumes created by a man who was so deformed in the lower part of his body, with legs floating like loose sticks in trouser legs that seemed to contain nothing at all. Almost pathetically thin, grasping a sempiternal glass of vodka, Pavel, who spurned the sun, possessed a pallid, phantom aspect that well suited the persona of a saturnine artist. Inevitably, as if predestined, though he was completely unaware of the process, old traces began to appear on his face of Hurbinek, that strange child he once was and would never recognize.
2
The life of Jozsef Kolunga
Or else Hurbinek metamorphosed into an employee of the Budapest Tram System, one Jozsef Kolunga, who was promoted at twenty-eight to the rank of inspector for repairs at the terminal in Zsigmont Móricz Square, where line 61 started. His promotion had been hotly contested, his rivals being two companions considered to be “healthy” and who, unlike Jozsef, didn’t move around on bothersome crutches. However, a lot was owed to the influence of Ferenc Kolunga, his adoptive father, a tram driver who entered the System in the thirties and ended up being a legend, a point of reference for workers since he personified both class and patriotic pride. Many brave feats of his were recounted, the greatest of which was perhaps when he saved 230 Jewish children in 1944, at the end of the war, when the Nazis began to transport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where they were thrown into the crematoria upon arrival, with no intermediate stages at all. Ferenc Kolunga risked his life when he moved those children across the city, crouching on the floor of his tram as they passed through German checkpoints, until he could hide them in one of the terminals, perhaps the very same terminal where on his birthday in 1970 his son is now celebrating his promotion. He isn’t his son exactly, or is, depending on how you look at it. What happened was that, at the end of the war someone in the Soviet Red Cross told him about a tiny three-year-old boy, who couldn’t walk, and who had appeared in an infirmary in the Polish camp in Auschwitz. Nobody knew where he came from; maybe he was Hungarian or Bohemian. The memory of how he had saved those children only a year ago was still fresh in his mind, and he took the boy, whom he brought up as his own son, although he was a bachelor. Father and son always lived alone like that: Ferenc cared for Jozsef, Ferenc’s inevitable heir. The legs of little Jozsef (since he was baptized with that name as a Catholic in the Central Parish Church) strengthened and when he could walk, his father started to take him to the Tram System’s canteen, and later on to the workshops, and even later, to the offices where he sat an examination and started working in the supplies department. He dealt with paperwork, administration and spent his days filling in forms to apply for spare parts. Every day on his walk to work from the family house in Belváros Jozsef would cross the Szabadság bridge early, stop opposite Béla Bartók Avenue (whose music he adored, especially his string quartets, practically the official music of the Kolunga household) and watch the trams pass by, with their chrome-plating, sluggish speed and the bewitching mechanical hum of their condensors. He sometimes jumped on one and, as he was wearing his uniform, the drivers let him share the driver’s seat. He knew he could never drive one of those beautiful vehicles, but he came that close, very close to doing so. Traveling there was most like what he longed to do—to drive a tram. He often jumped aboard an empty tram in the terminal, when it was standing empty in its shed, and sat behind the handle, dreaming he was driving across the city, as his father had so often done. Ferenc was the leader of the Budapest tram drivers, and that made his son very proud. From his office desk, Jozsef could also see that the post of workshop inspector, essential for keeping a check on the departures and arrivals of trams, was not beyond his reach. It only required patience and a good temper. He wouldn’t even have to move much around the sheds, as it sufficed to spend the whole shift in his office, morning or night; the drivers had to come to his office and leave the ignition key and their daily report sheet. His father got him his promotion and he stayed there for a long time. Ferenc Kolunga’s son was happy among the trams. He came to love them. When Fanny and I were in Prague in the mid-eighties, we walked down Béla Bartók Avenue (whose string quartets are my favorite pieces of music) and passed a man in a tram driver’s uniform who walked with the help of sticks in Zsigmont Móricz Square tram station) I don’t remember his face, because I only saw him from the back, and for a few seconds at that, as he was disappearing through a door into an area that was off limits to non-authorized personnel. It was then that I began to imagine Hurbinek had survived.
The Birthday Buyer Page 9