One day he would write a poem about it, a composition such as the generations before him had not encountered.
He could not resist the temptation of describing the event to this young whore.
“It appeared before me out of the night,” he said, “with the first rays of light, and it was disgusting; not only disgusting, it was revolting; it would have made you sick, but it was magnificent at the same time, wonderful, different from anything I had ever experienced. That night I stepped into a new era. I crossed a border which every one of us has inside us. It was the brutality and the inevitability of nature, for which nothing is extraordinary. The dead and the army of rats. I can’t forget it. If ever I write a great poem about anything – one that endures, after me, after us – as the greatest thing witnessed by my generation, then it will be about those bullet-ridden corpses looking like slaughtered pigs, and among them the nation of rats. The living feeding on the dead, the eternal cycle of life upon which we imprint our will; what for us began the war which will never end.” He paused.
“Those rats signified life. They brought movement to the dead, the way waves rise out of the ocean, the way grain crops wave in the breeze, the way clouds are driven who knows whither by a strong wind. I ordered my men to fire into the pit again, so that nothing, literally nothing, should move, but it didn’t seem to frighten the rats. They appeared to be at home among the heaps of corpses, from the bottom up and from the top down. Now, whenever I see a rat, and I saw some here in the corridor and beyond the gates in the snow, I feel as if I had failed to fulfil my intention of burying in the pits anything that still moved.”
Skinny remained absolutely still.
“A stench rose up from the corpses. No-one who hasn’t experienced this smell can know what it’s like. The wind brought the resin fragrance of pinewood and deep within the forest was a silence that suggested eternity. Some things one doesn’t forget,” he said.
She would never forget his words.
“Are you afraid of me?” the Obersturmführer asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Would you kindly decide on yes or no?”
She did not know which way to move.
The Obersturmführer pinned her legs down so that she could not move. The ceiling seemed to her to have dropped lower. You are a whore, so act like a whore, an inner voice told her. Do what he wants. But what did he want? She would understand if he struck her or shot her. Why else had he picked up his pistol?
Her legs turned numb like blocks of wood. The Obersturmführer forced himself, now flaccid, between them, colliding with her protruding pelvic bones. She changed into clay kneaded by strange hands. She tried to receive the Obersturmführer, but he was incapable of achieving what he wanted. The world shrank for her to a pain in her belly, to smells and sounds, to the impacts of abdomen against abdomen. He was holding down both her shoulders with his left arm; in his right hand he still held his pistol. He had more strength in one arm than she had in her whole body. He must surely feel, if he was capable of feeling anything, that giving him what he wanted was not a matter of good will. She was gasping for air. In her mind she was withdrawing from him.
“I’m doing what you want,” she said.
“That’s what you think. To you it’s all scheissegal. Are you or are you not a whore? You’re useless.”
She no longer wanted to consider whether wanting to live was wrong. Nor why she was born. If somebody had asked her, she could now say what a human being was, and what one was not. What it meant to have been born a girl. A spiritual poverty seemed to envelop her like a foul smell. Within her she heard an echo that she could not silence. She did not want to make the excuse, not even in her mind, that her father’s God had sent her here when she had been due to die in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She knew she had volunteered.
The Obersturmführer would not let her move so she might lie more comfortably.
“Stomach ache?” he asked.
“No,” she lied.
“Why are you gripping your belly then?”
“I only put my hand there. I’ve nowhere else to put it.”
“Do I have to tell you where you should put your hand?”
The question remained hanging in the air. She did not say no, but her lips formed the word. “Lie closer to me.”
“How close?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
She felt as if she was on fire. She thought of Dr Krueger’s human guinea pigs, of his daughter Hannelore who had been serving in Alsace. The day the doctor got his promotion he received two telegrams. The first informed him that Hannelore’s legs had been torn off by a mine. The second was a congratulatory telegram from the head of the Kraft durch Freude organization.
Oil brought her some relief from his desperate efforts. Above her was the breathless depraved 26-year-old face scarred by sleepless nights, punitive actions, a hundred terrors associated with his massacres. And by the injuries he had sustained, wounds like the one to his head.
He wanted to know how she had come by the frostbite marks on her face.
She had to whisper. Her mouth was close to his.
“On the way from the train, when I was under escort.”
“Have you got good boots?”
“I have boots.”
“You should have taken better ones from somebody.”
“I didn’t take mine from anybody.”
“I doubt that you’re in the right place here.”
“This is my place.”
“Aren’t you a whore?”
“I am a whore,” she said.
“No-one goes to bed in the evening as a virgin and wakes up as a whore. Better not ask why I slapped Ginger’s face to make her remember me.”
He put the pistol down and lit a cigarette, then told her what he wanted her to do next.
She pressed her lips together tightly.
“Why don’t you take that plaster on your bottom off?”
“It wouldn’t look nice.”
“I’ve seen worse things.”
Then he became insistent.
“Don’t you think you should do it for me?”
“What you want is forbidden. It’s on the notice on the door.”
“You expect me to stick to notices?” In his squeaky voice she could hear the knowledge that he could get whatever he wanted.
He ran his fingertip down her nose.
A huge raven was sitting on the window ledge.
“Are you trembling?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No.”
The bird flew off.
Was it possible that he could tell by her nose that she was Jewish?
“Do you think you have an Aryan nose?”
“I hope so.”
“Almost,” he said.
His forefinger moved down her nose and stopped at the tip.
“We all have our secrets,” he said.
He had told her some of his secrets. He acknowledged his Aryan god and those who were next to him – Reich Marshals, Sturmmänner, Scharführers and Oberführers. He acknowledged brutality as the supreme virtue, as the call and command of nature. He had no consideration for anybody; he asked no-one for permission, he needed no witnesses. He lied, stole and cheated just as others breathed. He was not constrained by rules and broke them whenever it suited him. He did not allow himself a moment’s respite, not an hour, not a minute. He did not burden himself by respect for family, parents or children. He considered it his duty to denounce – just as throughout the Reich children denounced their teachers and teachers their students, parents denounced their children and children their parents. His honour and pride were of a special mould. Ahead of him he saw a victory such as had never been won before, and no price was too high for him to achieve it, even if it cost his life. He believed in his race which would prove its worth to the extent that he prevented its dilution by other races. He made darkness and shadows subject to himself. He saw himself a
s the light. To him the key to the secret of life was obedience.
“They won’t forget us,” he said.
“No,” she agreed.
Behind them they left a desert, a depopulated scorched earth. And indelible milestones of history. From the Kristallnacht, when throughout Germany synagogues and Jewish shops were going up in flames, Jewish business people disappeared in the darkness from the southern border of Bavaria to the North Sea, and the Germans exacted a fine of a billion marks for the damage – the burnt or destroyed property and the danger to human lives – though they themselves had caused it; all the way to their Blitzkrieg, their lightning war, which had already gone on for six years.
They appropriated a Czech town, Terezin, and turned it into a transit station. They established camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and their crematoria. Skinny did not have time to reflect on this at length. It came to her with him, as it did with every soldier before and after him. She saw the Obersturmführer’s world and she felt his finger on the base of her nose for what seemed like an eternity. She wished he would take it away.
“Würden sind Bürden,” he said softly. Honours are burdens. When he whispered his voice wasn’t so squeaky. “Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag” The sun reveals all. He would test her, in a while she would see how. They would discover who each other was.
“Don’t you confide in one another who each of you is?”
“No.”
“Can I believe you?”
“Yes.”
“No-one told you, before I got here, what I would want?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. We are forbidden to lie.”
“Do you remind all your visitors of what’s forbidden?”
She remained silent. She knew from Long-Legs what to do to prevent herself throwing up. She thought of her taste buds, which were at the tip of her tongue and not at the back of her throat. She had been feeling sick for a while.
He touched his scalp.
“I got this from an ambush, on the far side of the quarry, where you’ve probably never been.”
“No.”
“I’ll find a doctor in Germany who’ll glue me together again,” he said. He ran his finger along his scar.
He struggled free from the blankets, pulling them off her too. She had a little lipstick on, her arms and legs were weak, and in her face the kind of fear children have when they have done something wrong and are waiting for punishment. A whore’s failure was not exactly high treason, but it was close to it. To stand up, to overcome, were Aryan virtues. She had to meet three fundamental conditions -obedience, devotion and willingness to co-operate.
“You should be glad I chose you. Your turnaround time here must be faster than our fuel convoys.”
“I am glad,” she lied. She avoided his eyes.
“I started on a poem entitled “All Rivers Die in the Sea,” he confided. “It could even be a song.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Death interests me. It is like a cat that won’t come to anyone it doesn’t like. Death is also like a dog, a faithful fighting companion. You’ve got to pay for this realization. In the past it was enough for me to swear allegiance to my commanding officers and to the anthem of the unit; ‘May death be our companion in our black column’s fight’ Have you ever heard the men of an Einsatzkommando sing? The words, the tune, the sound of hobnailed boots are like a north wind. Our war cry is lively and sad, foreboding and joyful. We are like tempered steel. That is what the east has done to us. I’m not bragging.”
“Yes,” she agreed softly.
“We were born for death, that great bubble. Every one of us may proudly proclaim, T am an oak and an ash’.”
He should read to her what Nietzsche had written. Wild beasts with unclouded conscience, monsters filled with jubilation.
“He probably said this about us even before we were born.”
She should learn that too. It heralded the revolution which meant blood. An eye for an eye. Yesterday a peasant had cut off the foot together with the boot of the dead Scharführer Meinhofer. She should not be surprised if on a German foot she saw felt boots cut from prisoners of war. The girls were protected here as if they were in the Garden of Eden. They should lick the boots of all officers.
If he told her what their daily service had consisted of since 1941, she would appreciate everything. She would absorb their principle, that nothing that befalls an inferior race is terrible; it is necessary. It would be boring if it was not also exalted. Yes, brutality was exalted. For him it was enough to compare German towns and villages with those in Poland.
“In Russia I saw hovels with trampled earth for a floor. In the middle, tied to the post which supported the roof, was a goat or a calf. Villages without men, with swarms of black flies in the summer and worm-eaten corpses in the winter.”
In one village they had ordered wood to be piled up for the bodies to be burnt. Afterwards, women and children scrabbled about in the ashes looking for wedding rings on the charred fingers of corpses.
The Obersturmführer climbed into the tub; ordering her to wash him down with the water that had been heating on the stove. He drew up his knees, leaning his back against the slime-covered rotten wood. He got her to scrub him with a brush and then to rub him dry. Swarthy as his face was, his body was white.
He ordered her to rinse herself in the tub after him, and then get back into bed with him. He picked up his pistol. Now his scar reminded her of a thistle. Under the bed she saw his boots with the several rows of hobnails in their soles.
He got her to bring him his field flask from his tunic pocket. He unscrewed the little beaker, and filled it slowly, carefully, almost to the brim, and drank it quickly. Then he began to speak again.
The history of the Jews was a story of cunning, fraud and deceit. They were all liars. The worst crime of the circumcised was their assertion that all men were equal. There were only two solutions, converging in Entjudung, the liquidation of the Jews, in the Endlösung, the Final Solution.
There had been a lecture for the Einsatzkommando der Einsatzgruppen about their conflict with the Jews. Strength was more than truth, they had been told. Power is the bride of the bold. The clenched fist, ready to strike the enemy, was more convincing than the outpourings of all aesthetes or the books written by the hooknosed since the beginning of time.
He regarded it as good luck amid misfortune that he was not born to the circumcised. Race was his pillar.
He turned to look at the girl.
‘I’m going to test you in a different way from that which you’re accustomed to.”
He ordered her to sit facing him and to lean against the end of the bed. He leant against the head, the scar throbbing in his forehead.
“I savour each second three times. The poet utters what he hasn’t known before. Three times and twice. The dance of my numbers; the principal one is the three – birth, life, death. Intention, action and lesson.”
She would be happier if she could believe that the Obersturmführer had gone round the bend. She followed his strange gaze. Had he had a drink for Dutch courage? Unlike Captain Hentschel, he had not offered her any.
“You should know, before I leave, that I am my own man. Not like the majority, who are dead while still alive.”
The fire in the stove was drawing well. The flue roared as the flames leapt up. She could hardly pretend that she had to add more fuel.
“Imagine a mirror spattered with the blood of those I have killed. These three years, every day, every night. Moments of decision. I see myself in that mirror. I can look at myself in a blood-spattered mirror without soiling myself. In the western Ukraine we killed a whore who turned out to be a Jewess. I thrust a hand grenade between her legs.”
He paused.
“You haven’t answered me yet.”
“I don’t know what you want to know.”
“Are you afraid of death?”
He took
his watch off and put it on the chair by his empty beaker and the holster. He pulled the chair nearer. She imagined she heard the watch ticking.
“Do you know how to handle a pistol?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“No-one’s taught me.”
“No-one, not anywhere? Shooting is something we learn ourselves.
The sooner the better. It’s like riding a bike. You get on, you pedal and you’re riding. Know what kind of gun this is?”
“No.”
“A Steyer? A Bergmann? A Luger?”
“I don’t know.”
He was weighing the pistol in his palm as if acquainting himself with it, as if it were not his own weapon.
“Are you fond of money?”
She remained silent.
“Are you happy?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve no money, you don’t know how to fire a gun, you don’t know if you’re happy. You certainly have whims. I’ll remember that.”
“Why do you want to test me?”
“To discover what I don’t know,” he said. “What you perhaps don’t know yourself. What few people know about themselves, before they see themselves as others see them.”
He was still confusing her.
“Do you know how many parts my pistol has? How much it weighs?”
“No.”
Could he possibly know about the 30 marks Captain Hentschel had given her and which she had hidden under her mattress?
“What did I do to you?” she asked suddenly.
He looked into her eyes thoughtfully.
“Wrong question. What didn’t you do to me?”
“I did what you wanted.”
She was unable to read his expression.
“Weren’t you in a youth organization before they sent you here?”
“No.”
“Always no. No, no, no. Are you concealing your background? It won’t get you anywhere.”
“I wasn’t in an organization.”
Every word could have several meanings.
“Do you think they’d accept you into the Bund deutscher Mädel?
“I don’t know. No-one here got an application form.”
“You’re probably telling the truth now. You’re not German after all.”
Lovely Green Eyes Page 13