by Chris Petit
‘I could always arrest you for being in possession of stolen goods, earn myself big kudos.’
For a moment Schlegel thought Broad only had in mind to cheat him.
Broad laughed at his discomfort and said, ‘I started as a guard on the perimeter fence, so I know this. Follow the railway south to the outer fence. Count five watchtowers from the railway line. There is a mined strip in front of the fence, with warnings, but between the fifth and six towers isn’t mined. The fence is lit at night but you will see a dark corridor where the lights don’t reach and you can cross to the fence and crawl under. The strip on the other side isn’t mined either.’
‘Why not?’
‘The guard got drunk and shot up the mines and then it became a way of bunking off.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘It’ll still be there. Nothing down there gets checked and the guard’s asleep half the time.’
Schlegel asked, ‘And getting out of the garrison?’
‘That’s the difficult part. Your problem not mine. Head down and bonne chance.’ He pointed to the conflagration. ‘Plenty of distraction.’
He clapped Schlegel on the shoulder and skipped down the steps.
The fire had peaked. People were starting to drift away. Still no Sybil.
In terms of that night’s orchestration, Frau Hoess did not have in mind the sight of her husband in the company of her seamstress. She had been enjoying the fire in a way that thrilled her. It put an end to a lot of embarrassing problems. Pohl had swaggered around like a grandee, delighted with how things were turning out, and slipped off to be driven back to Kattowice to catch his aeroplane, pausing to kiss her hand and confirm her future was secure.
Her euphoria at Pohl’s news that she could stay – regardless of what was otherwise decided – lasted until she spotted her husband edging shiftily through the crowd, his face preternaturally pale. Then she saw it was some sort of mask, like actor’s pancake. What on earth did he think he was playing at? He would ruin everything.
She saw the seamstress being prodded ahead of him. She wasn’t being forced but she didn’t look willing either, which could only mean her husband was up to his old tricks. How furtive he looked, glancing around to check they weren’t followed. No danger of that. All eyes on the fire.
She was watching from an upstairs window of the administration block where a crowd of wives had gathered and fortifiers were being taken. Despite the drama outside, the mood was light-hearted, though Frau Hoess was aware of some stopping to stare as she swept out glaring. She was downstairs in time to see a basement light switched on in her husband’s block. His and the woman’s legs were visible through the angle of the window.
She didn’t blame the woman; she wouldn’t have any choice.
Frau Hoess stamped her foot, not liking what she was seeing after the beguiling diversion of Schlegel’s romantic alternative.
Her silly lovers’ dream was already spoiled because Pohl blamed Schlegel for the fire, which – as a possible provider of his alibi – she knew he had not started. Nevertheless, she would have to be careful to get her gemstones back before light fingers went to work.
She suspected Schlegel’s story was a pack of lies but so highly attractive because it was a version of her own; except she was Orfeo and her then husband-to-be the downcast, after all those years in prison. Toughened but spiritually broken; a virgin too. How many months of coaxing had it taken to make him upstanding? More than she cared to remember. She suspected while in prison he had succumbed to carnal acts with men, for want of choice. She had asked, being curious, and he denied. She told him it didn’t matter, she would forgive him anyway, and made it her secret mission to take him in hand and save him from himself. The truth was, he wasn’t much interested in the physical. Too highly strung, always rushing, couldn’t see how a woman needed time. He made excuses. He was busy. He had to work. He wasn’t in the mood. Excuses for his inability to perform. The crushes were a pathetic imitation of the way other men made free with garrison women.
There was no question of letting him make a fool of himself with the seamstress. Besides, he didn’t deserve the woman. He would turn it into something trite, and she would be cast in the role of the vindictive, jealous wife.
He would fling Böhner at her. Accusations would fly. Others would get to hear, and snigger. She was the one staying. A reputation to consider. First wife of the garrison. Queen of Nephrite.
There were good artists among those in the camp. The painter who came to make running repairs because the children scribbled on the walls was supposed to have been quite famous. What she had in mind was something like Klimt’s portrait of the Bloch-Bauer woman, so deliciously decadent, but not officially degenerate. Those brazen women, swimming in primeval ooze. Dare she have herself done in the nude? She was starved of love. It was out of the question she avail herself of another officer. She had wondered about Krick but decided to keep their relationship professional. She needed him as an ally. When it came to slumming, Böhner was adequate but there was nothing operatic about him, to be rated no higher than a swain.
In her romantic heart of hearts she wanted to be the one fleeing through the night, her lover’s hand in hers. But if the seamstress was her surrogate – released by her generosity, thereby thwarting her fool of a husband – she would become the enabler, helping to release the lovebirds into the sky.
Part of her cared nothing for their fate, and anyway, she reminded herself, the original had turned out badly; she didn’t believe that tacked-on happy ending for a minute. Her real motive was to spite her husband; the rest was dressing.
The show was over, the place strewn with rubbish and empty beer bottles. Already a litter patrol had been hauled out of the camp and put to work. Apart from the odd flare, the flames were reduced to an angry glow. There would be ash everywhere in the garden. They would have to brush every leaf. What she needed was someone to invent a vacuum cleaner for outdoors.
She found Schlegel wandering in a daze. She told him and he looked in disbelief towards the commandant’s office.
Ten minutes later they were all in her Opel, with Frau Hoess driving, Sybil in the boot, which was too small for two, leaving Schlegel folded up on the floor behind the front seats, covered with a blanket. The car was waved through the gate. She took them over the river. Broad’s plan was the only serviceable one Schlegel had. He was in no fit state to travel. A sickness of fear, he thought, as much as contamination.
They stood in the road and watched the car leave. The sky was still stained from the fire and away in the distance the chimneys blazed. A big moon cast spectral light. Schlegel said they must leave the road and make for the railway. He hoped to move them quickly south before daylight to the lakes where it would be easier to lose any pursuers.
VI
Morgen spent the day waiting at Breslau station for his brother. Theodore was a Tibetan scholar working for the Ahnenerbe, a cultural body of research and fellowship, so-called, staffed with frauds keen to sell their crackpot ideas to its gullible founder, Himmler. If jade was the Reichsführer’s latest craze, then the Ahnenerbe would be involved.
Morgen and his brother famously didn’t get along. Theodore considered himself the cleverer. Sometimes Morgen wondered if they in fact had the same mother.
When Theodore was willing it was done with mandarin condescension, such as agreeing to drive from Berlin to collect him.
Morgen was thankful to find himself back in a real world, however grim, surrounded by familiar sounds and smells. Cigarettes already tasted better and he felt relief at his deliverance and guilty about Sybil and Schlegel, who he hoped would pull himself together enough to work something out.
Theodore swept in late in the afternoon, with a septuagenarian driver wearing jodhpurs and a chauffeur’s cap.
The weather had finally broken. Sheeting rain drummed on the car’s canvas roof and the unreliable sweep of ancient wiper blades revealed a smeared, drowned landscape. Ba
d roads, empty villages, closed churches, their priests gone. Theodore was vague about their destination.
The road went into woods and they started to climb. At the top of the hill their destination, shrouded in mist, revealed a huge baroque castle. Servants came with umbrellas to usher them inside. Morgen wondered what such a palace had to do with Tibetan scholarship.
If the castle’s exterior was high baroque, the room they were shown into was as plain as a monastery, stripped of all historical artifice, leaving it uglily modified and austere. Outside, statues stood in the rain, presiding over drained ponds, idle fountains, long expanses of wet lawn and empty formal walkways.
Theodore finally revealed his hand, saying the place was being prepared as the leadership’s eastern bastion.
That made sense, Morgen supposed, and still wondered what it had to do with Tibet.
‘Is Adolf here?’ he asked irreverently, knowing it would irritate his formal brother. He realised he had no idea what Theodore thought about anything behind all the correctness and irritation.
As for the mine, which was about half an hour to the south, Theodore confirmed the project had been talked up to Himmler. Scholarly research on jade was being conducted and the usual opportunists were putting in for exotic Far East research trips, almost out of the question by then, but not entirely. That said, the project remained cloaked in mystery, with no paperwork from what Theodore could see.
‘How did you find out?’
Morgen said it came down to a woman and a dinner-party conversation. Theodore recoiled, having no time for women or social intercourse.
Theodore, sounding important, said, ‘There is someone you should meet.’
‘Here?’ asked Morgen, surprised.
Indicating that he should follow, Theodore led the way down long corridors, some formal, some back passages. They passed a gang working on the installation of an elevator. The men were prisoners and looked efficient and knowledgeable.
They emerged in another part of the castle yet to be renovated. Morgen had quite lost all sense of direction. At a set of huge double doors, three times their height, Theodore knocked. A man’s voice called for them to come.
Morgen’s first impression was of mirrors reflecting a riot of rococo. A man in a suit at the far end of the palatial room, behind an elaborate desk, stood to greet them while putting a telephone down with the confident air of a communications expert. Theodore hung back, bowed and retreated. Morgen was confused, never having reckoned his brother to be a broker in the power game.
Morgen was invited to a chair with carved woodwork and embroidered upholstery. In the tall mirror behind the desk he could see the back of the man’s head and his own reflection looking dishevelled and insignificant.
‘Dr Kammler,’ said Morgen.
Everything felt overexposed, with the night as clear as a photographic negative. Sybil saw Schlegel stagger and thought him ill.
She heard the lorry before he did, pulled him down into a shallow drainage ditch. Schlegel held on to his gun and berated himself for not having left the road sooner. Dry grass threatened to make him sneeze. The lorry stopped just ahead. Schlegel’s body convulsed twice as he held his nose. He supposed they must have been spotted. The engine continued to turn over. A door slammed. Schlegel waited for the guard to jump down. Every sound seemed magnified. Schlegel clenched his nose, waiting for the next convulsion. A coarse remark was met with sarcastic laughter. Only two men, by the sound of it, both drunk. The one who had stopped to relieve himself said as he got back in the cab that he was in no fit state to drive.
Schlegel didn’t know how much darkness they had left. They needed a resting place before daylight, preferably in shade as they had no water or food. It was not a landscape for hiding, being flat and open. Buildings would be searched. The labour gangs and their guards would come and there was no telling where they would work. And the posse would be out. Any sweep over exposed land would flush them out.
Ditches and rough terrain made the going harder. Schlegel grew unsure of their direction. He seemed to be walking off his illness although it left him terribly weak. He choked his cough with his sleeve, fearing the sound would carry.
Deep in the zone, they found their way blocked by a high bank and ditch whose channel gleamed dark and sullen. Forced to follow it, they found no crossing. Schlegel feared the detour was taking them off course.
When at last they came to a bridge they had to decide whether extra sentries had been posted. Schlegel told Sybil to wait and crawled forward using the bank for cover. He lay listening, on the verge of passing out from tiredness. Berating himself for wasting time, he got up, started to cross and froze at the smell of cigarette smoke. As he inched his way back two guards began chatting lazily.
They trudged disconsolately on. When Schlegel noticed Sybil starting to lag he felt obliged to keep turning to check and in the process put his foot in a hole and went over on his ankle, with a sharp cry.
He lay there, foot throbbing, waiting for the first sounds of alarm.
When nothing happened, he sat up feeling foolish, cursing the pain, aware of Sybil’s silence. The sprain reduced him to a hobble. He didn’t point out it considerably reduced their chances of getting away.
‘We find it more productive these days to lease camp labour to private companies,’ Kammler said. ‘Auschwitz was always too improvised but it was deemed the regional site most suited to expansion because of its transport links.’
‘Has the whole operation been a business takeover?’ asked Morgen, astonished. Everything the man was talking about suggested as much.
Kammler seemed pleased with Morgen’s analysis.
‘Slave labour per se is inefficient. About a quarter as productive as a regular workforce. However, if you specialise and break it down into technical units . . .’
Morgen pictured the man’s career as a traceless rise through a succession of offices, a master of the bureaucratic process, a new language of jargon and strategic alliances based on acute readings of any shift in the standing and influence of his patrons, moving up and on, making sure not to burn bridges.
‘Put thugs in charge as Pohl did, you know you are relatively secure. But huge concentrations of prisoners, as was the fashion, increases security problems. And anyway, business and industry were not keen to have us as competition, so they stood off. I have always favoured fruitful cooperation but you have to offer a proper service beyond making promises you can’t keep. Fortunately, we are now able to reverse that.’
Morgen felt like he was being hypnotised and it took all his will to resist. He was sure now the lot of them were in it up to their necks. The only hope he clung to was that the commandant – and Wirths – remained liable. It was infernally complex. Such was the command structure that it could be held they had exceeded orders. With nothing written down, those orders could always be turned into a deadly game of pass the parcel. Perhaps the commandant had been considered expendable from the start. Perhaps he and Schlegel had too.
Kammler was saying, ‘There is no profit to be made from human hair, which has to be laboriously collected, dried, packaged, and shipped, only to be sold off for next to nothing.’
Taking the plunge, Morgen asked about the crematoria.
It earned him an admonitory look. ‘You are straying.’
Morgen said while he understood certain areas were beyond the law others existed where he believed it had been broken.
Kammler said, ‘Problems of interpretation are always difficult. Order versus initiative.’
‘I believe the commandant took the law into his own hands.’
‘Are you so desperate to see the back of the man?’
Kammler smoothed the table as if clearing a path. ‘A decision was made to turn his into the premier camp. Because of the projected size it was decided by the doctors and the commandant to build more crematoria. One was planned from the beginning and it quickly went to four, on the insistence of the doctors.’
‘You had no say in this?’
‘I am not a local expert. I defer to those on the ground.’
‘Gas chambers?’
‘Cooked up between the doctors and the commandant.’
‘You knew nothing?’
‘We provided a service. We are technically contracted by the garrison.’
‘To build crematoria not gas chambers?’
‘Look at the plans. They show what we provided. Any subsequent adjustments were agreed between the commandant’s office and the civil engineer responsible for the furnaces.’
Kammler stared at him with unreadable eyes. He looked scrawnier, more under pressure, not getting enough sleep, as were they all. Morgen was slow to recognise the man’s amphetamine habit. Whatever he was on seemed very good.
Without sounding boastful Kammler said he had an empire to run and needed to be constantly on the move. While Auschwitz was an important component he had to delegate.
‘Our concern was deadlines and getting the job done over any purpose others had in mind. I am a technocrat.’
Morgen edged Kammler forward, asking about the commandant, who seemed to lie at the heart of everything.
Kammler took his time deciding. ‘It depends on whether someone advised him what was about to happen.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hoess demonstrated through tests what the garrison was capable of . . . You may say he was merely reacting to an already dire internal situation, or perhaps he was auditioning for the job, about which he had been tipped off. He is a total fanatic, of course. Others were competing for the post too.’
‘I am told he distanced himself from the process.’
‘He was bound to cover his tracks in such a radical area.’
Morgen asked instead, ‘What about the two temporary gas chambers?’
Kammler seemed surprised he knew. He shrugged, as if they were no concern, and said, ‘From what I recall, a deal was done to take in a large number of skilled Slovak Jewish workers. Unfortunately the Slovak government reneged at the last minute, unless it included the workers’ dependents. Do you see what I am saying?’