3
The gas chambers were mostly set toward the north-east, in the area of Birkenau known as Auschwitz II.
The lethal Zyklon-B basically comprised cyanide acid, a gas concocted for the purpose of killing rats by its manufacturers, Degesch, a Frankfurt enterprise—Frankfurt yet again!—the diabolical city where I am now convalescing, the city I want to escape from but can’t.
It was Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss, who found a new use for that gas. He had discovered it had been tested out in the spring of 1942 as an agent for exterminating Jews. It was a highly successful experiment. That summer Höss began to order thousands of cans of Zyklon-B from its distributors, two Hamburg firms, Tesch and Stabenow. All these firms prospered throughout those years and continued to exist after the war and even contributed to the “German economic miracle.”
As many as 20,000 prisoners passed through the gas chambers daily. Two out of every three prisoners who got off the cattle trucks went straight to be gassed.
Men, women and children were stripped before they went in. They had no false expectations about where they were headed. Children consoled their parents.
Death from breathing in the gas wasn’t immediate, but was terribly drawn out, people could take a minimum of five minutes and a maximum of twenty, even thirty, to die. The bodies writhed, then lay twisted and tangled on top of each other. It was a good forty minutes before they were removed, the time required to re-fill the chambers with fresh air.
4
I have seen a photo of Dr. Eduard Wirths. He joined the Waffen SS on his thirtieth birthday in 1939. The day the photo was taken, Wirths is doctor-in-chief, the SS-Sturmbannführer commandant, responsible for the sanitary area in Auschwitz: he is a gynecologist and expert in racial liquidation and sterilization, a friend of Mengele’s and a special, close friend of Höss, the camp boss, with whom he shared a great fondness for horses. Wirths is smiling in that photo, is standing and looking at the photographer, posing with his hands clasped behind his back. It could be a perfectly innocent photo, taken in any field barracks anywhere on the front, if it weren’t for the presence behind him of Crematorium IV operating at full strength, on a November day in 1942. Black smoke is coming out of the two square chimneys that leave macabre particles of soot floating in the air. Wirths is looking south, close to the window of the Waffen SS’s messroom near the kitchen and toilets. Barely sixty-five feet further on, to the east of this building, you can see the skylights of the room where people took their clothes off (used soon after as the dumping ground for the very same individuals who had stripped off there, whose corpses were piled up like sacks to facilitate the extraction of teeth before they were placed in the ovens), and a little further away, in the most distant section of that building, you get a glimpse in the photo of the sealed doors of the chambers. A man in his striped prisoner garb and wearing a cap is looking at the thin, tall, elegant, uniformed, haughty Wirths. He has just arrived from Norway to take up his new duties. He is wearing riding boots. He has promised Höss’s mother, a childhood friend of Wirth’s mother in Würzburg, that they will go for a ride every morning in the area around the Birkenau camp as far as the camp in Budy, the other side of the Harmense ponds, to the south-west of Auschwitz. A three or four miles ride in all to help put worries aside, even though his greatest worry is ending the outbreak of typhus now spreading everywhere. They must gas more people, burn them more quickly, the two riders comment as their steeds’ hoofs ring out over the ground. Speed up, speed up, is the slogan. Fire destroys all evil. Höss’s stables are different to the prisoners’ barracks in that they are cleaner and well looked after, even bedecked with vases of flowers. Every morning Wirths himself changes the flowers. When he hung himself in September 1945 all they found in one of his pockets was a photo of him with Höss grooming his horse in one of the Auschwitz stables. He was held to be a good doctor. He killed two million Jews.
5
The ashes finally impregnate everything with their dark gray. They fall and settle like strange black snow. When an easterly wind blows, the inhabitants of houses in Auschwitz and Birkenau must shut their windows. The surface of brooks flowing from the Vistula and Sola slurp along under a thick, dirty-foam-like layer of ash. A lot of barbel and trout swallow this ash in the water. People sometimes eat this fish and think it’s tasty, and why shouldn’t they? The rain melds the ash into the soil on the farms. The porridge they feed to many of the prisoners, as well as the potato and cabbage soup with mutton eaten by the camp guards in the area of Auschwitz—that is Birkenau, Monowitz, Jawischowitz, Goleschau, Neu-Dachs, Budy and Blechhammer—the milk drunk by the inhabitants of the Bielitz region, from cows grazing on local pasture land, everything edible contains something of the ashes the Crematoria chimneys expel night and day. The region has descended into a new, unsuspected form of pandemic cannibalism.
Only the blind didn’t see the ashes; nobody and nothing else could escape them.
6
When I spoke to Fanny and the girls a while ago, I could hardly keep myself upright on the crutches the nurse left me. It is not easy to coast along on legs in plaster-casts. I’ll soon be leaving, I told them, one more week at most. Fanny offers to come and get me. I convinced her not to. What would be the point? Who went in search for Hurbinek, who went only to bring anyone back from Auschwitz? No one, and I don’t want anyone to fetch me from here. What am I saying? How can I even compare myself . . . ? I’m on the mend, even though I run the risk of going mad in this Universitäts-Kliniken on Theodor Sternstrasse. They brought me these crutches. I can walk now, I practice a few steps every day, I venture out of my room and wander down the hallway. Someone from the Spanish Consulate paid me a visit the other day. A short, chubby guy who turned out to be the consul; he spent the whole time telling me about the sober, brown furniture in the Consulate, “in the late-fascist style of the thirties,” he said, transported there in the days of Castiella. He insisted I should go and take a look before returning to Madrid. He assured me that almost all the furniture dates back to 1939, when Serrano Súñer was ambassador in Berlin on behalf of his brother-in-law Franco. The consul says Hitler always said how much he liked the furniture in the Spanish Embassy. Did he actually visit the place?
“Once, one July 18.”
When the consul was leaving, he said, “You know, things last longer than we do.”
The stones in Auschwitz came to mind.
7
At 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday in the autumn of 1944 Wirths landed in the aerodrome of Gleiwitz, some three hours away from Auschwitz. He was on his way back from Berlin, where he’d arrived the previous day, from the family estate in Baden-Baden. His mother had bought him a horse and he had gone to see it. Wirths called it Auschwitz. He also brought regards for Höss’s mother from her son. When they said goodbye, no one could imagine that both they and Germany would be dead in less than a year.
He had breakfast at a checkpoint in the station in Biala. As he was eating, three train loads of prisoners came through on their way to Auschwitz. They did not stop.
He left at noon for Auschwitz.
At 1:00 p.m. he reached the camp and went to see Höss. When he arrived, they were unloading the third trainload onto the ramps on the Auschwitz 1 platform. The convoy had come from Hungary. All of those on the train were immediately taken to the gas chambers.
At 4:00 p.m. he went to the infirmary to sterilize four gypsy women. Two bled to death on their bunks. He issued the usual, pertinent orders for such cases.
At 5:30 p.m. he went to Crematorium III to personally supervise the cremation of the two gypsy women. He was very conscientious about his work. However, he didn’t find them because their bodies had been mixed up with the 133 other bodies that were being gassed at the time.
At 6:10 p.m. he visited the camp stables and lingered for fifteen minutes feeding and grooming his horse.
At 7:00 p.m. he had dinner with other of
ficers. the Meistersingers in his bedroom.
At 8:30 p.m. he cleaned his pistol.
At 9:10 p.m. he fell asleep. By then they had already killed that day in the camp 185,302 prisoners. However, no one knew the precise number: the list of those eliminated wasn’t exhaustive.
A year later the citizens of Baden-Baden ended up eating Auschwitz, the horse that his mother gave him as a present.
8
The camps in the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau alone occupied an area of 489 hectares. They built on that terrain 640 units for barracks, crematoria, gas chambers, housing for the SS garrison responsible for guard duties, rooms for officers, central command, workshops, hospitals, stores, punishment cells, water purifiers, factories, as well as the stables and the barracks for prisoners. The average number of prisoners housed at any time was 250,000. When the Red Army entered the camp there were only some 65,000. There were six crematoria, each equipped with 12 ovens, each one divided in turn into 45 sections. Each section could take five adult corpses, and took twenty minutes to burn a corpse. As they gassed people quicker than they could incinerate them, they also began to burn bodies in mass open graves, by sprinkling gasoline over the bodies. The smell spread several miles around. They used every means to manufacture the dead at top speed.
Two of those they killed were Sofia and Yakov Pawlicka.
9
I have always been afraid of going crazy. And so was Yakov Pawlicka, the father of Hurbinek who could never know he was his son. From childhood losing one’s mind on the stage of history always seemed like an appalling fate. Like the man who went to Waterloo after becoming obsessed with reading La Chartreuse de Parme and wandered across the former battlefield thinking he was Fabrice del Dongo. Some people go to Waterloo as Stendhalian tourists, hunt for ghosts and mirages, and find them.
One cannot travel to Auschwitz in that frame of mind. It is neither right nor possible. But madness is never far away. I am thinking of the madness suffered by Yakov Pawlicka during those last weeks before he died, the mental fog where he lost himself before being taken to the gas chamber. He never discovered he had a son in Auschwitz. Better that way. His madness would have been compounded by the anguish caused by even greater suffering. Sofia never saw him again after they were separated on arrest. She was going to tell him that afternoon when they were arrested, she was going to tell him that she was pregnant, but she never had the slightest opportunity. When they got into the different trucks that were to take them to the concentration camps, their lives separated out for ever, and they would never meet again.
I sometimes think I will be better after this trip, but other times I think that when I reach Auschwitz I will be overwhelmed by the real madness of history, the madness of the horror, the madness of Yakov Pawlicka that hovers eternally over the camps of Auschwitz like air that is unbreathable. I even think that, when one doesn’t travel as a tourist, one travels in search of self-improvement. And yet many people return with a lesser or greater degree of madness. But I am also sure there is a moral quest in every journey. I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore. Perhaps the onset of my madness came prior to the journey and I should admit I was travelling in order to give Hurbinek’s short life a second birth, as if I were a demiurge, through my gaze, by seeing what he saw. I will go to Auschwitz for that alone. It is an act of justice, although it may very likely be an act of madness as well.
10
However, there is another kind of madness. For example, Eduard Wirths helping his friend Rudolf Höss to write a letter-cum-report for Arthur Liebehens, the new camp commandant, who came from Majdanek in November 1943 to take over from Höss. That letter-cum-report glossed over everything to do with the day-to-day running of the camp, including the economic angles, and only mentions in any detail the project Höss and Wirths intended to launch in January 1944 with the support of the officer class. The project they’d been nurturing was the creation of a horse-racing track in the Auschwitz Stammlager and stables for many more purebreds. Until then the camp had had few such horses, that is: four race horses, four for dressage, five for hunting and six pack horses. He wanted to emulate the great and renowned races that he used to see in Riem. Höss recommended his successor should continue flattening the ground in the area they had selected so no holes remained that might be lethal for horses’ hoofs, and should delineate the boundaries of the race track with grave stones taken from Jewish cemeteries. Höss believed that the inhabitants of the two local cities, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as the soldiers garrisoned there, would come to the races, and that they would “sportingly” enliven camp life that was “overly mechanical and absorbed by the annihilation tasks we are carrying out.” Obviously, there is another form of madness.
11
When the members of the Sonderkommando opened the gas chambers, the bodies were simply layers of limp flesh, with contorted rictus on every face, mouths gaping open and black tongues hanging out. It was a huge physical effort to extract the corpses from the pile one by one by pulling on an arm or a leg. Many children were locked tight in their mothers’ arms and were impossible to separate out. They went into the ovens like that, mother and child together. If they were separated from their parents, they would be heaped together so they could be placed in a different oven ten at a time. That saved on space.
In order to move the bodies from the gas chamber to the adjacent ovens, they used ropes they put round necks in order to drag the bodies opposite the oven doors and then other men picked them up and threw them into the flames. The people responsible for pulling out gold teeth and cutting hair would often clamber into the gas chambers, trampling on corpses and climbing over the mountain of bodies that tended to form by the door, which those gassed had been desperately knocking on and screaming at. When they were on top of the human pile, they’d begin to push them down, make them roll over each other. The surface gave easily, there were lots of gaps and they often slipped and fell among the bodies and got mixed up with them. One of those men fell on the naked body of Sofia Pawlicka; he didn’t know who she was—how could he?—but he did notice the astonishingly sweet composure on her face with its eyes closed, a trace of fleeting happiness, as if, at the moment of death, she had been courageous enough to remember something beautiful.
12
Rudolf Höss, the inventor of mass gassing techniques, ceased to be Auschwitz’s chief commandant in December 1943 and became Chief Inspector of Department I in the Central Office for Concentration Camps, and was thus responsible for the supervision of all the extermination camps. His mission up to 1945 was to implement the liquidation programme established by Heydrich, Eichmann and Himmler. In the spring of 1944 he returned to Auschwitz in order to implement personally the elimination of 450,000 Hungarian Jews. The Third Reich, that according to Hitler’s prophecy, was due to last a thousand years, capitulated in May, 1945. Summoned to the witness box, Höss proudly confessed, in a most matter-of-fact tone of voice, to the whole policy of extermination in the declaration he made at the Nuremberg trials. On March 11, 1947, two years after Hurbinek’s death, Höss was judged in Warsaw and sentenced to death. He was hung on April 16 opposite Crematorium I in the Stammlager, on the exact spot where he had planned to put his racetrack.
X
ATTEMPTS TO RECLAIM A DREAM
1
In mid-April 1941, Sofia Cèrmik and Yakov Pawlicka went to Krakow on their honeymoon. They ignored the advice of parents and relatives, alarmed by the news coming from the city’s ghetto, and fearful that, now that the whole of Poland belonged to the Reich, the invaders would prevent them from reaching their capricious destination, or even worse, would arrest and intern them in a camp, as it was rumored the SS was doing systematically. But Pavel Ramadian, Yakov’s ingenious friend, provided them with forged papers, and a Mr. and Mrs. Jankowski booked into the Hotel Merkur on Krakowska Street. They lived on love, lived the unreality of newlyweds, distanced from fear, unaware that their dream was
to shortly end in the most horrible of nightmares. When they left Rzeszów, waving their hands, more excited than they were happy, bidding farewell to friends and relatives, neither they nor anyone else present imagined that they would never return.
The Hotel Merkur was on the corner of the bustling, very commercial Józefa Street, which leads into the Kazimierz Jewish neighborhood, full of synagogues and small, shady gardens. But it is all abandoned now because the Jews have been forcefully enclosed within the southern ghetto, in Podgórze, a first step—although few know this as yet—to the extermination camp in Plaszów. Under their assumed names of Mr. and Mrs. Jankowski that aroused no suspicions on the part of the hotelier, a wary woman from the Carpathians, Sofia and Yakov rashly ignore the curfew in the ghetto, though it doesn’t in fact affect them, since they are pretending not to be Jews, and they come and go throughout the city, convinced of their role as two young Poles in love, untouched by the occupation, and determinedly mundane, even frivolous, like dolls wrapped and boxed as a present for children who are starving to death.
I can picture Sofia. She is alone, leaning on the frame of their bedroom window. From her vantage point she can see the entrance to the ghetto, at the end of a long street. There, on both sides of the roadway furrowed by tramrails, are wooden barriers with a large number at the top indicating each door, and a sign in Gothic lettering, reminding the Jews that they face the death penalty if they leave that precinct. A car filled with German soldiers is parked on each side of the checkpoint. They look at papers and push and shove people.
The Birthday Buyer Page 13