“The boy, he must have been around six, smiled at him finally. That smile,” said Lebowic, “is branded in my memory.”
In answer to the question of why Marburg had acted so overzealously, Lebowic said: “He was afraid of Mengele, who was his direct superior.”
Second to take the witness stand was the former political prisoner Willi Gleitze. Gleitze’s family, like Marburg’s, resided in Luckenwalde. Therefore Marburg often came into the orderly room where Gleitze worked. Out of all the prisoners, Gleitze was the closest to him.
“I did not know Marburg in Luckenwalde. We moved in different circles. He is after all eight years my senior. When you are young, that counts. How can I describe his nature to you? I think most easily through a small, insignificant incident.
“He came once, it must have been after a selection that had really shaken him, into the orderly room and told me it would soon come to an end. Then we will be like two old friends sitting together over a glass of good wine, he said, and clapped me on the shoulder after telling me to be brave.
“He had not gathered what was happening then, or did not want to grasp it. That was the beginning of 1944, and he had still not got it.
“I do not believe that it was fan for him. However, he did carry out his work. I once asked him why he had joined the SS, but I got no clear answer.
“Marburg,” said Gleitze, “is a scatterbrain. I could not understand his motives. He could not understand them himself.”
The third and most important piece of testimony came from Barbara Feigenbaum, who had reported to him as secretary.
“He was most susceptible to the pleas of women. Every time he had to select from the women’s section he drank a lot of the brandy the authorities made available to the doctors to ease their work.
“Once he put a young fifteen-year-old girl to the side. She had typhus and should actually have been taken immediately to the gas chamber. When I asked him what I should write down he only said that she had such beautiful blond hair. He had her taken to the hospital building. I think she was gassed nevertheless, for in Auschwitz that was the usual way of dealing with the plague.
“I also saw him crying, although he tried to hide it from me. That was after a selection on the ramp. He had seen someone there, a woman he seemed to recognize.
“He told me much later that she had been the wife of his university friend Fuchs and kept repeating that it was a crime — I believe he used the word obscenity — because the woman was an Aryan. Of German extraction, as he put it. He tried to justify himself in front of me. I do not know why.”
She got down from the train with a boy. Marburg spotted her even though she was back at the end of the row. He was very agitated, stood up immediately, and called for a break. Then he went up to her and removed her from the row and led her to the table. He promised he would take care of her.
He then made a long phone call, followed by a detour to the office. When he came back he was perplexed. You could always tell with him. He then told her that he could save only her. Not the child. The woman had wanted to give him a sapphire ring, which she took from her finger. She knew already what it meant to be sent to the left and be disinfected.
Marburg told her the ring could not help either and that it was beyond his power. He took the woman to one side and softly coaxed her. I only overheard the word half-caste, could only guess what they were talking about. The woman shook her head and called her boy, whose name was David, over to her.
Marburg tried to restrain her. The woman spat in his face and walked to the left with her child.
Marburg got very drunk afterward, and while dispatching the others, sang a song about a monk. The local doctor came then and told him to pull himself together. Thereafter he always carried the ring with him. It was his “unlucky mascot.”
The Jewish Laborer
in memoriam
On June 10,1943, a fresh transport of ten closed cattle cars arrived at the concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transport, entered as Convoy Number 17 on the deportation list of the Council for Jewish Affairs, was seen as a particular success of the Gestapo in France.
All the deportees, with the exception of two prisoners, were Jews of German extraction who had thought to escape persecution by fleeing to a neighboring land, a plan that was to prove fruitless due to the minutely performed search operation of the Gestapo and to the cooperation of the French authorities. Thus the Jews who had fled were going to get what their flight alone meant they deserved, only a little postponed.
The transport came from Drancy, a small town near Paris, in which an assembly camp had been set up.
The Jews were interned there for the length of time required to organize their handover to the east that would render them harmless, once and for all, in a concentration camp such as the one they were now entering, with the broad range of possibilities available in the east. The assembly camps did not have such possibilities; they were simply to assemble what was to be later exterminated in the extermination camps.
The train that had made a lengthy stop at the new French-German border to attach two freight wagons with war equipment arrived as planned, in spite of a delay of almost an hour.
The reason for the delay was the side wall of the cars, which — before they could be used to safely deliver Jews to their final destination — had transported animals, lambs, beef cattle, and other four-legged creatures who, like the Jews, ended up dead but whose meat brought in more than the meat of Jews. An eye had to be kept on them, as opposed to Jews, because bruises, cuts, and scrapes reduced the profits.
The reason for the delay was the side wall. To let the air in better, it was made of slats of wood nailed together, through whose fine cracks the muffled cries of a mass of crushed-together Jews penetrated to the outside. They so shocked the railway man that he twice dropped his hammer for checking the wheels, although he was certainly used to yelling at home. What was more, the young helpers commissioned to hook up the cars did not complete their task with their usual speed.
Yet although the Jews knew how to make the most of the cracks between the slats and tried to sabotage the transport with their vocal chords, the train that had set off an hour later than planned arrived at the appointed hour, thanks to the initiative of the Polish engineer — he increased speed once on familiar home turf and made up the lost time — so that a considerable percentage of the passengers of the cattle cars, after their property was registered and their health condition checked, could be exterminated without delay
But what penetrated the inside from outside? From outside something altogether different penetrated inside, namely the morning air, relatively cool for this time of year, which smelled of linden and chamomile, which did not comfort even one of the Jews in the cars — because only the oral intake of these healing herbs has a soothing effect on the angry organism — but it did prevent them from simply suffocating before their removal, that is to say extermination.
That morning air that impartially also filled the Jewish nostrils gave rise to a longing in the Jews whose mouths and noses were pressed to the slats for something that they had lost along the way.
The air did not know the Nuremberg Racial Laws, which forbade any mixing of Jewish and non-Jewish. Freedom, on the other hand, that it knew.
Since, due to the engineer’s initiative, the transport problem played no important role, which is to say was almost completely solved (the way from the railway tracks into the camp could be covered on foot, at a steady trot; the whip was used to urge them on, as it was more reasonable and easier to use than the firearms), Transport Number 17, consisting of 1,006 Jewish men, women, and children, was met at four o’clock in the morning as planned.
The reception committee consisted of some kapos, several SS men, a couple of KZ internees wearing striped suits, three dogs — among them Hasso, who had to be addressed as Herr Human — some heavy leather boots, fifteen whips, and twenty guns, which were used only five times.
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No one played music. In spite of the preference of the SS doctor selecting that day for introductory and concluding words, no speech was held. Instead there was shouting.
For this the vocal chords of the kapos were used, who, in contrast to the SS men, were replaceable if not as superfluous as the KZ internees.
With a “faster, faster, make it snappy” or “make it quick,” the prisoners were driven out and sorted into groups of five. Oh, what quick progress.
He to whom it was not yet clear, now knows that he has reached the final destination of his life. And what that sickly-sweet-smelling smoke signifies, he will soon learn to understand, when he himself, or his mother, or his father, or his younger brother who is under fourteen — whether four or ten does not play any role for the statistics — wander up the chimney.
What cannot be used as a full-value labor Jew will be struck off the camp list. Who is no longer profitable will be burned. For the camp commander has received orders from Berlin. They read:
Maximum profit is the aim of every undertaking. The decrease in value or the demise of Jews is not to be viewed as loss, but rather as success. One has managed to collect a large store of this raw material. But one does not know what to do with it.
The Jews should be driven on to work and to wear themselves out working. They should be used until they are worn out morally and physically, and then away with them.
For guarding and looking after Jews is too costly. In these difficult times even bread and nettle soup are expensive foodstuffs and nothing must be wasted, especially not on a defective, that is to say, too young, or too old, labor Jew.
And when he cannot go on? Simply cannot get up anymore? Then he has a shower and swallows gas, to sing hallelujah with the angels that are black in Auschwitz because of the soot, or gray because of the human ashes.
The regular controls only serve the cream of the crop. Only the best are allowed to help build the Thousand Year Reich and its enrichment. That is a beautiful privilege. A reward that makes all the torment worthwhile.
The Jews are put into groups of five and selected. An SS man goes past and orders the old Jews, whose age is apparent, and the young men, whose youth one can see, to sit down in the truck, for they are to be sent sitting, not walking, to their hereafter. Auschwitz is a well-mannered place.
“Do not climb up,” a striped KZ internee whispers in the ear of a new arrival and makes a motion of the hand expressing the cutting of a throat and thereby death: a gesture that the green kapo sees and he whips the KZ internee immediately for betraying a secret of Reich business to the new arrival, who should come upon it himself as soon as possible. The new arrival does not register because he is seeing everything through a veil and understands nothing of what he sees.
For the new arrival is under confrontational shock, heightened further by the camp management by attacking the multitude without reason or letting a dog rush at them in the hope of a tasty morsel. Intimidated arrivals are particularly apathetic, and therefore easier to polish off.
“Thank you, thank you,” says the man over sixty who was once a professor, and sits down waving to his daughter, whom he will see soon again when the formalities have been straightened out, next to his wife, who is already sitting, or rather crouching, her legs wide apart: confrontational shock has made her forget her manners, quite unlike the SS man who helps a mother up with an infant in her arms, for the woman is certainly still weak from the birth.
On the plank serving as a desk, a man dictates his name: k like Karl, a like Adalbert, h like Holger, n like Norbert. Kahn, that is, Richard Kahn from Richard Kahn, Inc. Not Kohn. Herr Kahn is a Jew of German origin, as the a proves. Indeed, he is from Bukovina, but he lived in Berlin. Knows that beautiful city and even managed the former arts and crafts school once, now the Gestapo headquarters — such are the twists of life.
The Kahn family were all seized, that is to say Frau Kahn, Herr Kahn, and the two Kahn children, already seated. A one hundred percent success for the Gestapo.
A one hundred percent profit for the hotel proprietress, whose little pension was so small and cozy, even breakfast — baguette, café au lait, and jam — included in the nightly rate, and who was allowed to keep the suitcases for providing the information and the silver wristwatch that father Kahn had left on the bedside table by mistake.
He was a stupid idiot, the scribe retorted, and next to his name noted the number that the prisoner would wear from now on. A nice number, not too high, and not too low. A middle-class KZ internee, who went to the right.
His two boys, Dani and Benjamin, already had their numbers written on their chests with ink, for it makes no sense to tattoo in such cases. They are driven away with the first truck-load, and have the honor of being first to enter the bathing and inhaling rooms, in front of which they are now standing naked because, as everyone knows, one cannot be disinfected with clothes on.
Only they do not know that they are the lice that are to be exterminated.
Only they do not know that out of the showerheads in the twenty-five-square-meter large room that can hold between seven and eight hundred Jews, no water and no soapy water and also no rosewater, but pure expensive Zyklon I will come streaming out, which will slowly choke them, paid for by their parents through their labor and confiscated valuables, overlooked by the hotel proprietress, because here in Auschwitz one pays for everything, above all for the death of children.
Only the parents do not know that they will not see each other again, and that they will not see their children again, because that relatively slow choking to death, which can last between five and fifteen minutes, for children, however — because they are smaller than adults and therefore closer to the ground and closer to death, as the gas is so heavy it sinks — lasts nearer five minutes, which for Auschwitz is a really quick death.
Be glad, children Kahn. You had it easier with the thirty other children than the other 736 prisoners, the men and women who came with Transport 17 at four o’clock in the morning and at five-fifty were gassed with you. They took five minutes longer to choke to death. They stretched and strained to gulp the last remnant of air that was still fresh up there by the crumbling ceiling.
For at Wannsee they had found the final solution to the Jewish problem. They had opted after some consideration for the final extermination of the Jews. Because the Jew was misfortune. Because the Jew was the root of all evil. If Mother died, the Jew was to blame. If the girlfriend left, if the children had chickenpox, if the cake burned, if one had not got one’s raise, if a fingernail split: all the fault of the Jew. Penned up in the ghetto as plague carrier, running around free in the town as representative of illicit trade, in his home with others of his sort as conspirator, and in contact with others as seducer, the Jew posed a threat, so that an end had to be made of him, once and for all an end. And afterward there was beer and dancing, toasts were given, and swaying to music, because it was relaxed and there was even singing at Wannsee, but not “Rose on the Common”; coarser stuff, although Goethe belonged up there with the great Schiller in German culture, as the whip belonged in the German man’s hand.
Be glad, children Kahn. Your parents did not have it as good as you. Your mother, labor Jew number 468752, had to undress and run with the other ninety-nine female work animals naked through the gates and because she was shy and did not want to get undressed in front of the pair of guards, the kapos, the commanding officer of the preventative detention camp, the block prefect, and some of those from the political section who had positioned themselves to see the fresh supplies, she was whipped through to the hairdressing salon, where her brown locks fell to the floor. They would not stay there long since they could be used in the homeland.
“My children, hairdresser, sir, my children have certainly already been with you.”
“How old are they then?”
“The big one is eight and the small one is five. They look very much alike. They are both wearing blue pants and light-colored shir
ts. And have curly hair like me. You would not forget such beautiful waves.”
“Next one, quickly, quickly.”
“Hairdresser, sir, you have seen them, haven’t you?”
The barracks are in darkness. There is no light. One has to save where one can. Number 468752 has a bunk, a straw sack filled with wood shavings and a blanket. Those are her possessions.
She must take good care of them, for one can freeze in winter without a blanket.
If she had paced the room with a measuring stick, she would know that it is twenty-five meters long and ten meters wide. But number 468752 does not have any time for that because she is busy tearing out her remaining bristles of hair.
She does not even notice the blood that runs down her face and neck and turns to crust on her shirt, while number 468752 batters her head raw against the planks of her bunk because a fellow internee has explained the fate of her children to her.
Exit Kahn children. They have already perished, ashes beneath ashes in the crematorium oven, for as God himself said, dust to dust.
Welcome to Auschwitz, number 468752, if you do not stop your nonsense soon, you will not survive the week.
How many women fit into a barrack twenty-five meters long, ten meters wide, and three meters high?
If one rather than laying a floor — the bottom layer of concrete and the cement covering takes up twenty centimeters too much space, for stone flagging one also needs a bed of sand, therefore ten centimeters too much, not to mention an attic floor with beams, insulation boards, rafters, and mortar, because that adds on a good twenty-five precious centimeters — if one then stamps the earth flat instead of laying a floor, and covers it with bricks, remaining intact through the trampling of women, and if, to save space at the top, you forget about a ceiling and simply bang on a roof, you can easily have three levels. Then all you have to do is divide the length and breadth into bunks using wooden timbers, each one two meters wide and two meters long, and that on three tiers. It is well constructed and well planned, because it saves so much room.
The Inventory: A Novel Page 26