I will talk more about Poland later, but I can say now that I read a lot before going to Chełmno; once there, I paced the narrow road that runs through the village, the paths that lead down the Ner, below the banks of the river, which, though it looks idyllic, reeks; I saw the church, still intact, the same church that appears in the 15 August procession in the film; I saw the ‘castle’, now a coal depot; I paced the road that leads from the church to the mass graves in Rzuszow forest, walking at the speed of the gas vans, that is, slowly, anxiously wondering how to film these many sites of death. Then, though I had not come up with a solution, I returned to Israel to see Srebnik. Straightaway I told him that I had just come back from Chełmno, I had prudently brought paper and pencils so that we could both sketch our memories of those places. Just as Kim Kum-sun and I had done twenty years earlier in North Korea, Srebnik and I invented a common language. He corrected me, I corrected him. In some sense, I knew more than he did, since I had roamed these places as a free man, whereas he had been forced to march in shackles, suffering the hunger, the beatings, the humiliation and the constant fear of death, which might come at any moment. And yet there was a new and intense joy in the way that through these drawings, we shared, exchanged and compared what each of us knew; we began to talk, I knew now what to ask, he wanted to speak. It was during this conversation that I learned that he sang for his SS guard in a flat-bottomed boat on the river. I immediately asked him to sing what he used to sing back then and, beneath the arbour in his garden in Ness Ziona, his lyrical voice soared: ‘Mały biały domek w mej pamięci tkwi...’ [‘A little white house sticks in my memory...’] Then, at my request, he sang the chorus of the old Prussian military song that the elderly SS guard had taught him: ‘Wenn die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren, öffnen die Mädchen die Fenster und die Türen. Ei warum? Ei darum! Ei darum!’ [‘When the soldiers march through the town, the young girls open their windows and their doors...’] Such are the obscure and unforeseen paths to creation: in that garden in Ness Ziona, at that very minute, I knew for certain that this man singing would go back with me to Chełmno, that I would film him singing on the River Ner, that this would be the opening sequence of Shoah. There was no doubt about it, there were many obstacles still to be overcome before it could happen, not the least being to convince Srebnik and his wife, but my desire, it was dazzlingly clear, would prevail over everyone and everything.
Much later, in the years when I was editing the film, someone gave me a cassette of Marlene Dietrich, whose voice, whose life, whose songs I loved. Driving to Saint-Cloud, to the LTC editing studios, I put it into the cassette deck in the car and, to my shock and amazement, I heard Marlene sing the song that the SS man in Chełmno had taught Srebnik. Hearing it gave me a lift that lasted several days. Later still, only a few years ago, invited to a screening of Shoah followed by a discussion at the celebrated film school in Łódź, I fell into an astonishing trap. I had experienced every possible dirty trick from the Poles when it came to Shoah, but I could not possibly have imagined that a fat red-haired fishwife, dripping with make-up and accompanied by her lawyer, would stand up at the end of the session to scream at me, demanding that I pay her royalties for ‘Mały biały domek’ [‘Little White House’], the Polish song at the beginning of the film that Srebnik, in shackles, sang on the River Ner for his SS guard in 1944. Apparently, this monster’s father had written the lyrics!
It was while shooting on the Ner one rainy afternoon, listening to that singing child, now a forty-seven-year-old man, that I found the solution to the problem that had seemed to me insoluble: how to film Chełmno, this long peasant village of low houses stretched out on either side of a single street. I had the idea of travelling through it on a horse-drawn carriage, a tracking shot taking in the wet road, the houses, the church, the rump of the horse, its tail sweeping through space like the pendulum of a metronome, the regular clatter of its hooves making all the more terrible the words of Frau Michelson, the wife of the Nazi schoolteacher in Chełmno, the woman who had witnessed the ceaseless comings and going of the gas vans and who could no longer remember how many Jews had been asphyxiated, 4,000, 40,000 or 400,000. When I tell her it was 400,000, she says simply, ‘I knew it had a four in it.’
Chapter 19
Heart pounding, I arrived in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, to meet Adalbert Rückerl, director of the Zentralstelle für Landesjustizverwaltung, the German federal agency responsible for locating, pursuing, hunting down and, when possible, prosecuting Nazi war criminals and those responsible for crimes against humanity. The rendezvous with this courteous and highly cultured man had been arranged in Jerusalem. I had a list with me of 150 names, drawn up during the course of my reading, all of whom seemed to me essential to my project. Rückerl and his assistant had no legal obligation to help me, yet they agreed to do so, although they were rather taken aback when they found out how many people I was trying to trace. They began by saying that many of those on the list were now dead, others had disappeared without trace; for the rest, I would have to give them time to try to track down the addresses – by now probably out of date – of those with whom the agency had had dealings. When I met them again, the winnowing had been considerable – of the 150 names I had given them, they could only locate about thirty possible leads. And there was no guarantee that even these would prove useful, since the details they had on file dated from investigations or trials carried out during the 1940s and early 1950s, after the great Nuremberg trials – what were collectively known as the ‘subsequent trials’, like those of the Einsatzgruppen. As they gave me what information they had, they wished me luck but they were looking at me with that mixture of sympathy, astonishment and pity one might feel when faced with a naïveté bordering on idiocy. As he took his leave, Rückerl said, ‘Alas, I fear you won’t get very far.’ I did not know, as I left, that this first trip to Germany was to be followed by countless others; that it was the beginning of something that, during the long nights I spent in bars and hotel rooms in far-flung towns and cities, crushed and disheartened after countless setbacks, feeling ready to give up, I would come to think of as a senseless Calvary.
To begin with, not a single address proved useful. I was determined, for example, to track down a man named Wetzel from the Ostministerium, the Nazi Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territory, a high-ranking bureaucrat who, in an appalling letter, had suggested using gas to swiftly liquidate Jews in the Baltic countries. He had paid with only a few years in prison and, according to the information I had, was living in Augsburg in southern Germany. I arrived there one day with Irène, but the tenants at the address I had informed me that he had left Augsburg fifteen years previously and they did not know where he had gone. Fortunately, there exists a unique agency in Germany known as the Einwohnermeldeamt, where citizens are required to register any change of address. The Einwohnermeldeamt in Augsburg told me that Wetzel had moved to northern Germany, to a little town in Schleswig-Holstein whose name I’ve forgotten. From Augsburg to Lübeck, the principal city in Schleswig-Holstein, is a long and expensive trip and it began to dawn on me that organizing my schedule was going to be very difficult. When I arrived in the town where I expected to find Wetzel, I was met with suspicion and hostility – many former Nazis had chosen to live in northern Germany – but I was told that Wetzel had left this idyllic paradise some ten years earlier. My only resource was the Lübeck Einwohnermeldeamt. Wetzel clearly had itchy feet – he had headed south again, this time to Darmstadt in southern Germany. It was becoming clear that this switchbacking from one Einwohnermeldeamt to another could scupper the film before it had even begun. The other possibility was to write to the Einwohnermeldeamt, something that took considerable time, entailed much dispiriting bureaucratic wrangling and even then did not always result in an answer. I therefore decided that I would have to go in person or send one of my assistants, either Irène or, later, Corinna Coulmas, a brilliant and courageous young woman, daughter of a Greek father and a mother who
was a member of the Bundestag. Having decided to convert to Judaism, Corinna had an astonishing command of Hebrew and a broad knowledge of the Torah and the Talmud.
Occasionally I would track down a Nazi, only to arrive a day late, in time for the funeral. Fortunately, however, this was not generally the case. In the beginning, in the pitiful naïveté of my inexperience and transparency, I proceeded as follows: I telephoned, gave my name and the reason for my call – namely, that I was making a film about the extermination of the Jews. I rarely got the chance to say any more. Either the phone was slammed down or, in the rare cases where they spoke to me, despite my placid tone and my feeble German, which I deliberately pretended was worse than it actually was, the person I was speaking to stalled for time, telling me I had the wrong number or the wrong person – and all the while in the background I would hear some shrew screaming, ‘Don’t talk to him! Ruf die Polizei an!’ [‘Call the police!’] Former Nazis, those who had been up to their necks in it, were invariably as meek as lambs with their wives. Because it had been the wives who kept the families together while the husbands were on the run or in prison, they made the law and wore the trousers. If it happened that the wife, rather than the husband, answered the phone, I was rudely interrogated and, having explained the reason for my call, I was threatened and insulted. So, after a number of setbacks, I decided not to phone but to turn up unannounced, alone or with Corinna or Irène, on the doorstep of the person I was looking for. As you can easily imagine, this approach required not only considerable nerve but also meant that the old problem of having to resort to the local Einwohnermeldeamt increased. If no one answered the door when I arrived, I could not know whether my target was out shopping or on holiday for a month. I therefore had no choice but to wait and if I were ever to draw up a ‘stake-out’ table, enumerating the number of hours I spent watching and waiting during the making of the film, the total would be enormous. The random nature of these encounters and my inability to stick to a work schedule made these trips to Germany exhausting. But sometimes it happened that all obstacles were overcome, that the door was answered by the person I was looking for. Once I had introduced myself, the conversation often came to an abrupt end on the doorstep, without my ever having been asked to come inside. To Germans, my name was obviously Jewish, something that did little to help things along.
There were, however, two exceptions: Perry Broad and Franz Suchomel, whom I have already mentioned. Perry Broad, who had been an SS officer in Auschwitz, was extremely intelligent. Born in Brazil to an English father and a German mother who moved with him back to Berlin when he was five. In 1941 at the age of twenty he enlisted in the Waffen SS as a foreign volunteer. Later posted to Auschwitz, he became a member of the Politische Abteilung, the grim Political Department that ran Block 11 (the ‘death block’) that interrogated, tortured, almost always pronounced the death penalty and executed the prisoners with a Genickschuss (a bullet in the back of the neck) in the courtyard. Filip Müller, who had been a prisoner there in cell 13, gives an account of it in his first appearance in Shoah. Captured by the British army shortly before the end of the war, Perry Broad, on his own initiative, wrote an impressive report about his experiences in Auschwitz and the operation of the gas chambers, which he had witnessed. He was released in 1947 only to be arrested by the German authorities in 1959, and released again a year later on bail of 50,000 Deutschmarks; he was questioned again in 1964, during the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt where he was one of the defendants. He was found guilty of supervising the selections on the ramp at Birkenau and of having participated in the interrogation, torture and execution of prisoners in the Political Department. He was sentenced to four years’ hard labour, though he did not complete the sentence: he was forty-four years old. He himself opened the door when I arrived unannounced and rang the bell at his Dusseldorf apartment. He was polite, asked me to come in and sit down. I told him that I had read his 1945 report, and praised its honesty, its literary quality and its considerable historic importance. He was a tall, thin man, moderate in his language, who looked much younger than his years; he travelled a lot in Germany since he worked as a sales rep. I tried to persuade him to testify in my film, to appear as the author of the report and to repeat for the cameras what he had written of his own accord. He replied that writing the report, the existence and contents of which he did not contest, was the greatest regret of his life. In the eyes of his SS comrades, he was a traitor, he had been stigmatized when he came to trial and later in prison; there could be no question of him doing so again. His wife, much younger than he, extremely pretty and clearly very much in love with him, appeared at this point. I introduced myself and repeated my request in front of her, stressing that for him to accept would be proof of great courage, that times had changed and that all humanity would be forever in his debt. I added that I would make clear the great moral strength it had required for her husband to appear before the cameras and tell the truth. She was not impervious to my arguments and I sensed that she might be an ally. Because I had no intention of abandoning Perry Broad, I was not prepared to give up easily. In the months that followed, I phoned him and saw him several times. I invited them to dinner and twice, at about four o’clock in the morning, after much alcohol, I thought the goal was in sight. His wife took what I said very seriously: the truth would be redemptive, and the light of day was preferable to the clandestine lives they had been forced to endure. With tears in his eyes, he would say yes, but fifteen minutes later he was back to no. I tried so often, did everything I could, and I finally became convinced that Perry’s were just drunken tears; I was going to have to find another way.
Franz Suchomel was living in Altötting in Lower Bavaria, near the Austro-German border, on the German bank of the River Inn. I arrived one morning with Corinna, unannounced as was by now my rule. I told him I had read the evidence he had given at the Treblinka trial and what he had said to Gitta Sereny. I had not come, I added, out of psychological interest, nor was I a judge, a prosecutor or a Nazi-hunter; he had nothing to fear from me. But, I told him, I believed that we desperately needed his help – without explaining precisely what I meant by ‘we’. ‘We don’t know,’ I continued, ‘how to raise our children. The young generations of Jews do not understand how this immeasurable catastrophe could have happened, how six million of our people could have allowed themselves to be massacred without response. Did they really die like sheep in a slaughterhouse?’ This way, I was putting Suchomel in the position of teacher and myself in the position of student, impressing on him the historic role that would be his were he to explain the various stages of the process of mass extermination in Treblinka. I knew that Suchomel was a native of the Sudetenland, on the edges of Germany, on the border with Czechoslovakia; I also knew that he had participated in the ultra-secret Aktion-T4, a codename that referred to Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of the Berlin office where a man named Victor Brack secretly planned the euthanasia of mentally and physically handicapped German citizens in five castle-hospitals throughout the Reich: Schloss Hartheim, Schloss Sonnenstein, known as ‘Die Sonne’ [‘the Sun’], Schloss Grafeneck, Schloss Hadamar and Schloss Brandenburg. The elderly residents of Hartheim I spoke to still had fear in their eyes at the mere mention of the long black SS vans driving up to the castle. No one dared say anything, but the rumours that children were being put to death in bathrooms converted into ‘infirmaries’ were rife throughout Germany. They were entirely justified; the rumours were true. It was in these bathrooms that gassing was first experimented with, a prelude to the extermination of the Jewish vermin. Suchomel, who was a gifted liar (‘If you lie enough,’ he said to me in Shoah, ‘you end up believing your own lies’), claimed that his only role in Aktion-T4 was as a photographer. But the Catholic Germans were very attached to their citizens with goitre, with Down’s syndrome, with club-feet, their children with harelips. In August 1941, the Bishop of Münster, the Count von Galen, ascended the pulpit of his cathedral, where he forcefully and
courageously denounced the crimes being committed against the weak, the needy, the destitute. Hitler, who could not handle an internal front, immediately capitulated and gave orders that T4 was to be stopped. For a while Suchomel and his colleagues became inoperative, on half pay, but between the spring and the summer of 1942, they were again called up to active service and posted – with no apparent scruples on their part – to the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Majdanek, where they were able to make full use of their expertise. Suchomel was tempted by my offer of the role of lead witness; to make it more attractive, I offered him money, considering it appropriate, I told him, that he be reimbursed for his time and effort. Thus began between us, between Paris and Altötting, a long correspondence, as well as numerous trips by train, by plane. I visited him several times, spent long hours with him, tried to get his consent; twice I believed I had succeeded, just as I had with Perry Broad, the difference being that I had never offered Broad money, believing that this would not work with him. Suchomel, on the other hand, cared about money more than anything and the sum I was offering – although doing so felt like stabbing myself in the heart – was considerable, the equivalent of €2,000. Then, one night, having sat up with me until three in the morning, in spite of the angina he was constantly complaining of, he said, ‘Jawohl, ich werde es machen’ [‘All right, I’ll do it’]. I didn’t waste a second but left immediately, knowing that time, as Jankélévitch put it, ‘is the organ of denial’. Telling him I would be back as soon as I could get a camera crew together, I drove to Munich, took the first plane to Paris and, when I arrived, found a telegram already waiting for me: Suchomel had gone back on his word, his son-in-law was threatening to divorce his daughter if he went through with the filming. My heart skipped a beat; I took the first Lufthansa flight back to Munich, hired a Mercedes and raced back to Altötting. It was dusk when I rang the doorbell. He opened the door, clearly not expecting me. Terrified, he took a step back, and brought his finger to his lips. But it was too late. I heard furious footsteps on the stairs and then a Bavarian maniac, heavy-set and about thirty years old, hurled himself at me, roaring, ‘Raus! Weg! Leave us in peace! Enough of this old shit!’ He pushed me towards the door, but I shouted back, in French, pushed back at him and forced him to retreat. Suchomel’s wife and daughter stood screaming on the first-floor landing, calling back the son-in-law, while Suchomel, like a referee in a boxing ring, tried to separate us, forcing me into a rather despicable collusion by telling me, ‘Leave it, leave it, he can’t understand…’ I remained with him in the ground-floor room for some minutes, he begged me to leave, I told him I needed to think, that I was not about to give up on him, that I would phone. He said, ‘Not you, anyone but you! Get your assistant to call, tell her to say it’s Fraülein Diesler calling from Frankfurt.’
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