The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  Dufy, bald and sweating and previously mild-mannered to the point of invisibility, lacked Wallenberg’s presence. Nonetheless he had been turned by Budapest’s tragedy into a tenacious and committed figure. The Red Cross safe houses were full to capacity. David’s false passes had seen to that. Dufy knew he would have to beg every favour going, and each dubious contact I had could make all the difference, so he and I formed an uneasy alliance. Once he asked me straight out if I was a Nazi agent. I had a growing sense of how few liked me.

  Dufy and Wallenberg held meetings with government appointees who were happy to be seen in their new authority and smart surroundings. Dufy, in his effort to save lives, was shameless in flaunting the possibility of full diplomatic status to the new regime. Karl-Heinz, still lacking a Swiss visa, wanted me to get a message to Dulles, warning him that unless his negotiations with the Americans took a different turn, the Russians would be in Berlin. I told him it was too late for messages to Dulles. I had to stay in Budapest. Karl-Heinz was dismissive: ‘I should have you shot.’

  ‘Join the queue,’ I said, and left thinking, let him hang.

  They were like ants scurrying through the streets, it was said afterwards. Less than a week after the coup, the Jews were rounded up in heavy rain. Even those issued protection papers weren’t safe. The Hungarian police dug out any fit Jewish male, regardless of permits, to work on the eastern wall ordered by Hitler to hold back the Russians. (‘More madness,’ grumbled Karl-Heinz.)

  Dufy wanted a movie camera and stock to record some of what was going on and get it back to Switzerland. I spent an evening with my Hungarian film producer, who was reluctant until threatened with counterintelligence, who would be keen to discuss his illegal services to the Third Reich. All he managed to come up with was a little home movie camera and a stack of three-minute spools of film. It was inconspicuous, if nothing else.

  Dufy drove me around in a marked Red Cross car, and we filmed the roundups through the window as the gendarmes went about their business with zealous officiousness, under light supervision from the SS. I learned to film in two- to three-second bursts to save stock. Once we were stopped by an SS patrol, and an officer asked what we were doing. Dufy said we were members of the Red Cross, and the officer replied: ‘I can see that. I asked what you were doing.’

  ‘Filming this street theatre.’ Dufy sounded in no mood for nonsense.

  When the officer asked for the camera, I thought he was going to confiscate or smash it, but he just inspected it and handed it back, with a shrug, as though to say nothing we did could make any difference.

  Karl-Heinz Strasse

  BUDAPEST, 1944

  TO SWITZERLAND—with a visa at last!—to meet an American representative at the Hotel Baur in Zurich. With hat, overcoat, and briefcase, a civilised man undertaking civilised discussion. Not all the news is good. I have cabled the Reichsführer to stop the marches and heard nothing back. It is possible that he isn’t the final authority in the matter, as they are technically a work deportation.

  The Arrow Cross is aware of its unpopularity and its probably limited tenure of government makes life unpleasant all around. Apart from Eichmann, everyone treads carefully. On a good day my own back-pedaling high-wire act is the most adroit in the Nazi Budapest circus, with Eichmann’s close behind as death’s humourless clown.

  Willi Schmidt, a surprise visitor to Zurich, quite the rich man these days, is booked into a suite in the Baur. He tells me how a whole gang of Arrow Cross men barged into the Red Cross offices after discovering the secret presses that had been producing forged protection papers.

  We made ironic discussion, our earlier differences, whatever they were, quite forgotten. Former friends, enemies for a while, now friends again, it would seem. Our peace broker was Magda, who had fetched up with Willi. ‘She still pines for you,’ he told me, with a trace of smugness.

  ‘The Arrow Cross are not delegators,’ said Willi, ruminative over a good wine. ‘Unlike you Germans. They want to see the effects of their work, close-up. They made Dufy inspect all the papers and decide which were false. There was a quota he had to meet, otherwise everyone got taken off.’ Willi grew speculative. ‘How do you select? It would be possible to overlook some false papers, but not many. The more attractive would stand a better chance, I suppose. A displacement must take over, a willed concentration on the irrelevant detail that makes it possible to get through the job—angles of light, the cautious negotiation between bodies, the double knots in a child’s shoelaces. What do you think?’

  It was, I remarked, almost as though Willi had been there.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I am interested in the psychological pressure involved in these decisions. How did you select?’ he asked, mischievously. ‘Or did you just, um, not select and mow them all down?’

  Willi laughed. I left it at a smile. Willi said he had heard the raid had been carried out because the Arrow Cross was annoyed that Dufy had managed to set up a Red Cross office in the Jewish ghetto. The ghetto, right to the centre, would be sealed off ‘Warsaw-style,’ according to Eichmann, Willi said.

  What he didn’t know was that it was Eichmann who had ordered those with false papers to be pulled from Dufy’s protection. Eichmann was finally displaying the fruits of his labour: no sealed trucks to obscure destinations but a forced march down the country’s main road, four abreast, two thousand a go because his precious train set was fucked. Eichmann’s grand gesture towards nihilism.

  Eichmann, who has invested all of himself for his masters, realises that the one job at which he excels will soon be taken away. Eichmann is running out of future. Eichmann, insofar as he is able, is in spiritual crisis.

  These are not days to be proud of. I am told that many of those left in the safe houses were grateful for Dufy’s expulsion of the false-paper holders as they believed it bettered their own chances. Even before the raid, a delegation from the safe houses had protested about the number of inmates with forged papers. What is the point when the imperative to survive undermines all chance of collective action? Eichmann and his stooges, myself included, have succeeded in reducing crowds to numbers, individuals to ciphers. The process of dehumanisation is complete long before the technicality of death.

  Everyone survives on Benzedrine and tobacco, with little pause to eat or sleep. Willi sells me American varieties of both, brought in from Istanbul.

  Hoover

  BUDAPEST, 1944

  MY NARROW-GAUGE CAMERA recorded what it could as everyone set off into the grey dawn, followed by a small convoy of relief trucks. Many valid exemption papers had been torn up by the Arrow Cross. People had turned up lugging suitcases too heavy to carry. Everyone was expected to keep up, women in high heels, children as well as the old. The hardest thing to reconcile was that many of the marchers would have once driven along that road on business or family outings. They still wore their own clothes. Their anguish was witnessed. We marched through villages and towns where shops and bars were open and people went about their business, stopping only to point and stare. (One mother, to frighten a disobedient child, threatened to have him put on the march.)

  Dufy said little. He smoked. We kept spare packets in the car because the cigarettes we carried were soon handed out.

  Some marchers tried to establish good relations with the older guards. ‘They can’t shoot us all,’ one woman said, though it was clear that she herself couldn’t last much longer, having abandoned her shoes. All but the most stubborn discarded their luggage. Any cases still being carried were seized by guards looking for valuables. Ransacked cases lay disembowelled by the road. A good coat turned into the price of death. One Arrow Cross boy took to wearing a stuffed pink silk brassiere over his jacket.

  My little camera recorded a body jolted sideways by the force of a bullet, its impact doubled by the surprise of the image being in colour. The film producer had given me the new Agfa colour stock: the Arrow Cross boy parading up and down in the flesh-coloured brassiere, the bri
ght shock of such intimate pink. I shot, 4,000 metres of narrow-gauge stock.

  At first the human crocodile looked like nothing more than a bizarre outing. The camera generalised and depersonalised. It couldn’t cope with detail, and those that it did record looked like inserts from something else—gutted suitcases; a close-up of a dead man’s face, swollen from beating; a hand floating in the river. Then the line again, its more or less orderly fashion in stark contrast to the previous images. Sometimes it was possible to prevent violence by letting a guard see he was being filmed; not always. One gendarme looked straight at the camera before clubbing a weak old man and driving him into the river. He laughed about it afterwards as I continued to film him.

  Then Willi Schmidt turned up.

  When I asked why he was there, he had no answer. But Willi always had a reason. He could have been spying for the Germans even as he handed out charity, or just come to sniff death and add to his wartime scrapbook.

  Deprive a person of basic human requirements, multiply that by two thousand, and you have a sobering lesson on the thinness of civilisation. Shit in your pants, the marchers were told. At some of the nightly stopovers, elaborate loudspeaker systems were set up so warnings could be broadcast that the guards would machine-gun the crowd if anyone tried to escape.

  While the marchers starved, their guards ate: an Arrow Cross man obscenely waggling a wiener at a woman, offering her a place on a truck back to Budapest if she ‘sucked his sausage’ in front of everyone. Another, his mouth so full of bread and beer he could hardly speak, being made to laugh by another guard, and spitting out a half-chewed wodge which people later fought over.

  Where Dufy and Wallenberg used a mixture of cajoling and threat in their dealings with the gendarmes and Arrow Cross, Willi became inspired by a newfound relish for confrontation. He took to pulling guards aside and telling them it was his duty to report cases of brutality to the SS, who would make sure that offenders joined the marchers on arrival at Hegyeshalom. Willi also put word around that the guards wouldn’t be making the trip back and were going to be set to work alongside the rest.

  At Göynu everyone was crammed into barges for the night. The guards forced marchers to run along rickety gangplanks slippery with ice. Fog and freezing drizzle made conditions all the more treacherous. Those who fell in the river froze and drowned. Two guards in particular were making the most of their sport, a big sadist and his protégé, who looked about twelve. The boy laughed as he smoked and watched, contemptuously flicking his butt at a drowning man.

  Willi waited until they took a break on a jetty, then begged a light off the older guard, leaning in to catch the cupped flame. The guard gave a high-pitched squeal of surprise as he realised that Willi had shot him in the groin.

  The report made no difference in a night full of gunfire. The guard stared in disbelief at the blood staining his overcoat while Willi studied the man’s face, teetering on the edge of eternity, and registered the terror of his last mortal moments, which ended as Willi delicately prodded his chest enough for the man to lose balance and topple back into the river. All the while the man’s cigarette remained stuck to his lower lip, even as he screamed: a comic detail, a memory for life. Willi’s honed curiosity left me in no doubt that he had wanted to do this for some time.

  Meanwhile, I had told the boy not to move. He started snivelling. Willi to him: ‘The shoe’s on the other foot now, son.’

  The boy’s fear liquefied. He tried calling Willi ‘mister’. He took on a shrunken appearance. His fingernails were chewed. Under normal circumstances he would have been whey-faced and pretty in a diluted sort of way. He tried to barter with his age. The whiff of shit was strong on the freezing air. Willi shot him in the jelly of the eye. The other popped in surprise. The spray of blood from the exit wound looked black in the dark. Willi was breathing hard as though after running a long race. Where the boy had been, a void between us. Willi bloodied.

  After that Willi became tireless in his efforts to pull people from the march. He seemed to have acquired an immunity through contamination. Willi ambiguous to the last, operating in the thinnest of margins on both sides of the fence.

  Karl-Heinz Strasse

  BUDAPEST, 1944

  11.11.44. An SS general tells me how he came across one of the marches while in his staff car. He considers it too late in the war for such non-humanitarian behaviour (correct) and that the Hungarians are exceeding their brief (correct). Three years earlier, the same man was much less circumspect. Many others like the general are busy revising their CVs. Matters previously boasted about are downplayed. A calculated moral ambiguity is the latest thing. What is called the getaway suit is becoming fashionable—a country bumpkin’s outfit suggestive of a wartime spent in a rural backwater, mowing lawns in an asylum for the insane; or perhaps not, given what went on in those asylums. Getting one’s story right is taxing even the sharpest brain. Russia? Never went there. Channel Isles posting passim, entertainment division.

  14.11.44. Every day the marches get worse because those who follow are made to camp in the refuse left by those who went before. A particularly virulent form of dysentery has broken out.

  I have nothing to offer the Reichsführer except bluff. No one is interested in negotiating with the SS. Eichmann has made a point of telling him that his will has prevailed. The marches continue.

  Last night he was celebrating the deportations with mare’s-milk alcohol, exclaiming that it was the first time he’d drunk it. (Fancy!) Veesenmayer and others were on hand for one of a series of intimate soirées, intimate because most have grown wise enough to refuse the invitation. Everyone was toasting each other and congratulating themselves on the lack of local resistance. Eichmann was sad, too, that his job was nearly done. He declared 1944 his annus mirabilis, the year he had come out of his shell. He was congratulated on ‘an elegant performance’ by Veesenmayer at his most smoothly diplomatic. Eichmann, with false modesty, replied that he could not have done it without the order from the chief of security police and the SD. Tome, Veesenmayer tut-tutted about Hungarian brutality and agreed the marches were lunacy.

  Eichmann on being asked by me if he didn’t think that the Hungarians had used excessive violence: ‘That is their problem.’

  Hoover

  BUDAPEST, 1944

  NO ONE KNEW WHY the marches suddenly stopped. Some said it was because Dufy had threatened the Arrow Cross with Allied reprisals. I believed that Karl-Heinz had persuaded Himmler that his peace negotiations would stand a better chance if they were ended. At any rate, the day after, he had a message for Dulles, which was that all gas chambers were to be destroyed on Himmler’s orders.

  But Dulles seemed preoccupied with his own moves. History was a private affair for him, a series of deals of more or less his own making. His overriding concern was to move Germany’s money. The rest was secondary. The peace negotiations were to keep Himmler sweet. Himmler was almost certainly no part of Dulles’s postwar plans. Dulles had to keep the Jewish rescue negotiations going because David had threatened to expose him—while protecting his own position with his Moscow intelligence. Being seen to be making the moves was something Dulles excelled at, the appearance of getting things done. Formality and cheer, the pipe smoker’s tricks. Give any man a pipe, and he will appear smart and a good listener.

  Dulles’s money convoys went about their business. Trucks from Budapest via Vienna into Switzerland. Red Cross markings. Trucks from Berlin. The same routes, the same border crossings; no hold-ups, no technical hitches. Always a night crossing into Switzerland and from there to a castle over the Italian border in the Brenner Pass. Turn round, go back, do it again. Dulles’s reward for my loyalty: U.S. citizenship and the prospect of a job in the United States when the war was done, doing Allen’s mon(k)ey business.

  In Budapest Eichmann had one move left, done to spite Karl-Heinz and all those who had toiled so tirelessly at their rescue work. He had the Arrow Cross round up seventeen hundred men, who had pr
otection papers and were employed in the city clearing bomb damage, and put them on trains to Germany. Eichmann: a man with an itch who couldn’t stop scratching.

  German newsreels were still labouring under the illusion of a glorious victory. Budapest grew full of importuning. A prostitute complained that the number of bourgeois women willing to sell themselves was causing a glut, and where were the men, anyway?

  Through the chaos walked Willi Schmidt, a handsome man come into his own. What was Willi doing besides getting rich and bringing relief to the ghetto? I still find it impossible to make up my mind. However, Willi was consistent in certain respects. He always had the most attractive female staff, and in the ghetto was no different. The Arrow Cross were afraid of him because of his SS connections. I had to wait until Saigon to encounter Willi’s equivalent again: men who thrived as everything fell apart, who were born to exist at those historical junctures where the general collapse is exploited by the few who operate outside any moral laws.

  I bought the notion of Willi as life-saver and his line that it was no longer possible to stand by and do nothing. Swiss Willi converted from a lifetime of neutrality. On the one hand, Willi was a series of shifting moral refractions, capable perhaps of redeeming himself while also cultivating a profound ambiguity in the face of a moral absolute: Thou shalt not kill. Experience had taught me that there was always more to men like Willi and Karl-Heinz. So what was in the ghetto for Willi and nobody else?

  The ghetto was the opposite of the dance of death of the marches. Stagnation prevailed. Cold ate at the marrow and the soul. You stepped over people, even in dark cellars. For most there would be no coming back, even for the survivors. They would remain eviscerated by the experience.