The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  The manuals were explicit about which kind of person was best suited to which job. The lowest Jews—the merchants, who would otherwise be sucking the economic blood of the German people—and the mentals—made the best diggers—ditches, latrines, graves. The mentals had to be controllable, no violent paranoids or Mongoloids who shit all the time. A large Jew mental with a strong, wide back—now there was one in great demand. You always found them in the holes. Jew lesbians made the best supervisors. Educated Jews who worked with figures could go two ways. If the figures had to do with the way the Earth moved around the sun or the grand design of God for the positions of the stars, the educated Jew worked on blueprints for barracks or showers and ramps. If the figures had to do with money, the educated Jew went into the holes. Young German recruits found the manuals—bound, printed on coarse paper, with no title or other marking on the cover—especially helpful for the black-and-white clarity of their instructions.

  “The Jew is the most versatile laborer,” began the untitled chapter on the ethnicity, sexuality, and psychology of work. “The lesbians—Jew dykes in particular—are tough and angry and not afraid to use a whip, while the smallest Jew child can play the violin like a master.” The chief value of a violin playing lovely music over a loudspeaker would “become apparent and obvious in due time,” the manual informed.

  This afternoon, waves of heat poured off the metal roofs of the barracks. Laborers with heavy gloves pounded nails and wrapped barbed wire around fence posts. The camp rose with prodded speed—“Schnell! Schnell! Los! Los!” The guards shot anyone who couldn’t keep up. They met those who had kept up, but were now exhausted, on a case-by-case basis. I argued with my girl today, so I shoot you; I got transferred to the front today, so I shoot you; Lieutenant von Kempt is watching, so I shoot you; the Commandant visits, so I let you live.

  After a week of rain, workers finished the Melinka Resettlement Facility (MRF) enlisted men’s club, a barracks with long tables and a rough pine floor. In a corner under dim lights one night, a sergeant was talking to a recruit who had lied about his age and enlisted at fifteen.

  “You look a little wide-eyed to be a veteran,” the sergeant said.

  The boy looked at him. “Herr Unterscharführer?”

  “No ‘Herr Unterscharführer’ here. Just call me ‘sir.’” The sergeant chuckled. “What’s your name?”

  “Johann Walkenburg.”

  “That sounds like a good name. Good family.” The sergeant sipped his beer. “How do you like it here?”

  “I haven’t thought about it,” the boy said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  The sergeant lit a cigar. “What’s not to understand?” He puffed. “We have a duty to perform. We perform it.” He blew out his smoke. “When the duty gets a little hard, I just look at myself in the mirror and ask, ‘What is better for the prisoner—whether he croaks in his own shit or goes to Heaven in a cloud of gas?’”

  The sergeant laughed. He slipped his hand over Walkenburg’s crotch and squeezed. The boy jerked away.

  “What are you doing?”

  The sergeant blew smoke. “Enjoying the evening.” He put his hand on the recruit’s leg and squeezed.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Walkenburg said. He stood and walked away.

  “I like to suck cock,” the sergeant yelled after him. “Nice and hard—get it nice and hard for me tonight.”

  Walkenburg went outside and stood. His face felt flushed. He looked at the men in the guard towers. Moist air kept the lights along the fence low and shrouded in haze.

  SS-STURMBANNFÜHRER (MAJOR) Heinrich Petersdorf, MRF’s second in command, crossed the grounds with a Wehrmacht Unterfeldwebel (Sergeant) Schmidt, who had grown old without promotion.

  “The trains arrive whether we’re on schedule or not,” Petersdorf said.

  “The Kommandant and Frau Strauss—when do we expect them?”

  “Don’t know—they’re in Austria on holiday.”

  “You served under the Kommandant before,” Schmidt said.

  “In Berlin.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He delegates,” Petersdorf said.

  Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) Klaus von Kempt, third in the camp’s command chain outside the medical corps, tailed a labor squad that passed Petersdorf and the sergeant. Von Kempt did not salute.

  “You let him walk by like that once and you’ve lost,” Schmidt said.

  “He limps,” Petersdorf said.

  “Yes, but he’s a good German,” Schmidt said.

  “Herr Oberleutnant,” Petersdorf yelled.

  Schmidt hurried to the lieutenant, stopped him, and pointed to the major. The two men walked back together.

  “Heil Hitler!” Von Kempt saluted. Petersdorf returned the courtesy.

  “I see you know how,” Petersdorf said. “You’re not SS.”

  Von Kempt looked at the major. “No,” he said.

  Von Kempt was Wehrmacht, regular German army.

  “Not out in the field?”

  “Injury,” von Kempt lied. The army had little use for a man born with a short leg who couldn’t march. “What unfortunate circumstance brings you here, Herr Sturmbannführer?”

  But Petersdorf and Schmidt walked away.

  THEY DISEMBARKED AND STOOD, CLEAN and well dressed—suits, hats, black shoes, ties, fashionable coats, gloves, purses, gold teeth and jewels. The new ramp smelled of fresh pine. The band on the platform played a polka. The man walking in front of them was a doctor. The man next to him wore a well-tailored suit. There were no soldiers, only uniformed kapos who resembled bellmen in the better hotels. Dr. Fiddler took a flask from the knee-deep pocket of his white coat and turned away.

  “You have to start so early?” said the man in the suit, the Arbeitsführer.

  “Try doing this shit sober.”

  The Arbeitsführer waved his hand. The band stopped playing. He stepped on the platform. He smiled and looked at the long line of railcars idling behind the crowd.

  “Everyone—everyone please should be smiling,” he said into a megaphone. “We are at the dawn of an important new era in Europe and it is my pleasure to welcome you to an important part of that era—the Melinka Resettlement Facility.”

  Three gray trucks marked with large red crosses crept up and parked.

  “We welcome you here with our warmest regards,” the Arbeitsführer said.

  Fiddler took another swig and scratched the side of his unshaven face with the flask. A hum of uncertainty drifted across the crowd.

  “Warmest regards—hah!” an older man said. “I’ve heard people are killed in places like this.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yes. Killed. Murdered! By poison.”

  “By accident?”

  “Shhh.” This from a tiny woman grasping a doll.

  “As many of you know, Melinka is a temporary relocation center,” the Arbeitsführer said. “A place for you and your families to live with warm food and a nice bed while our troops route the Communist forces, who are attacking under the orders of Stalin, a monster who has murdered thousands of his own people.”

  “Can you believe this?” Fiddler whispered to himself.

  “At this very moment, our Führer is deciding what best to do with you—where, that is, he would like to relocate you—so that you are out of the way of the Communist advance and the suffering it will inflict upon innocent people.”

  “If the Führer needs soldiers, why not us?” a man yelled from the crowd. “There are plenty of young men here.”

  The hum rose again.

  “Is it true what I’ve heard?” a woman spoke up. “That people are murdered in a place like this?”

  The Arbeitsführer motioned guards into the crowd. “Are there any questions?” he asked through the megaphone.

  “Is that true?” said another woman. “Is that true?”

  The hum intensified.

  “Is it true what sh
e said? That people die here?”

  The hum roared.

  “Sehr gut.” The Arbeitsführer passed Dr. Fiddler. “Begin.”

  “Shit.” Fiddler took a swig. The Arbeitsführer motioned to the band. A tuba bellowed and the doctor walked up the wooden stairs to the platform. The Arbeitsführer grabbed his arm. “Remember—save the best-looking ones for tonight.”

  “Who among you is sick?” Fiddler droned. Several stepped forward, some young, some old. “Is that all? We are offering treatment.” A few more stepped out. “Yes—that’s better. Step up.” He raised his finger. “You,” he pointed. “You by truck. You—you walk. You—by truck. You, you, you—walk. You,” he paused. “You stay.”

  “But my hand—my hand is infected,” said the one who would stay, holding it up for the doctor.

  “Hmm,” Fiddler said. He held out his hand to a kapo, who passed a syringe and needle. The doctor took a swig from his flask, stuck the needle in the bottle, and drew up a clear liquid.

  “An injection?” said the one who would stay.

  Fiddler squirted it through the needle. “Antibiotic,” he said. He thrust the needle into the woman’s heart and plunged the syringe. Her eyes widened. Fiddler pushed her off the needle into the arms of a soldier, who dragged her toward a van with a big red cross.

  RUDOLF HÖSS COMMANDED AUSCHWITZ FOR MOST of its existence.

  “The mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it,” he wrote in his autobiography. “With very few exceptions, nearly all those detailed to do this monstrous ‘work,’ and who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events.

  “Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them.

  “Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked: Is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler’s order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jews had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed forever from their relentless adversaries.

  “There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler’s order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless, we were all tormented by secret doubts.”

  Himmler also understood the difficult but essential task ahead, as he explained to the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment:

  “Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying and hysterical women.”

  Major Petersdorf was dealing with such issues in the Commandant’s office.

  “I can’t permit you to take leave from selections duty tonight,” he told Dr. Fiddler. “We don’t have the personnel.”

  “Three times last week and four times this week,” Fiddler said. “I’m drinking too much and having too many nightmares. Let Hehl do it.”

  “I don’t have time to reassign anyone,” Petersdorf said.

  “Problems?” The camp’s Commandant, Franz Strauss, walked in. Petersdorf stiffened. Fiddler slouched.

  “Heil Hitler,” Strauss said. He took Petersdorf’s hand. “Good to see you, Heinrich.”

  “Danke. Same, Kommandant.”

  “Franz. You know that.” Strauss picked up some papers on his desk. “But as I was asking, problems?” he said. –

  “One of our men—a corporal, apparently—at least, as best we can tell—”

  “He’s suffering from ramp-duty hysteria.” Fiddler jumped in. “Like I will be if I don’t get some leave.”

  “Ramp-duty hysteria.” Strauss didn’t look up from the papers. “What’s being done about it?”

  “The corporal is in the infirmary,” Petersdorf said.

  “The infirmary? Is he infirm?”

  “He tried to take his own life,” Petersdorf said.

  “We need more doctors, Herr Kommandant,” Fiddler said. “The Third Reich can’t expect men trained to heal to soil their hands killing more than a few times a month.”

  “Certainly not,” Strauss said.

  A group of prisoners carried in a large painting.

  “Franny?” Greta Strauss, his wife, called from the other room.

  “Here.”

  “Franny.”

  “Here,” Strauss called back. “For god’s sake—deaf at twenty six. Excuse me.” He walked past Fiddler and Petersdorf and pushed through the cluttered house, through the flowers—acres of flowers—and paintings, and furnishings heaped, and piles of boxes.

  He found his wife directing a piano.

  “Is this all right?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said.

  She smiled and motioned the men to set the piano down.

  Strauss kissed her cheek. “We are going out my dear—the major and I,” he said.

  “Don't step in any shit,” she said.

  STRAUSS WALKED WITH PETERSDORF AROUND THE Commandant’s greenhouse.

  “They are the hardest in the world, the cruelest, the most predatory, and the most attractive, and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened,” Strauss said.

  “I’ve read that somewhere,” Petersdorf said.

  “I always forget what Gretty can be like when we’ve been separated.”

  They looked up at three prisoners and two guards installing a large pane of glass near the angled top of the east wing of the greenhouse.

  “How is morale?” Strauss asked.

  “Morale?” Petersdorf said. He thought.

  “You have to think about it?” Strauss said.

  “Morale is—so-so. We can’t expect happiness.”

  “No,” Strauss said. “Sadness is a part of war.”

  “No one is particularly sad.”

  “You’re baiting me,” Strauss said. “Not happy, not sad. Which is it?”

  Petersdorf thought. But before he could answer, they heard yelling from the greenhouse. They looked up as the glass slipped and crashed.

  “IS HE THE ENEMY?” MAJOR PETERSDORF READ A LETTER that asked this question.

  The mail had arrived late in his office. A young private, Höfstaller, sorted it and opened anything not marked “personal” or “private.” He set the letter on the major’s desk and returned to his own desk in the front reception area.

  1943/6/22

  Forward Command

  Warsaw District

  Office of Logistics

  Division of Inquiry

  Kommandant

  Melinka Resettlement Facility

  Melinka, Poland

  We have forwarded to your charge a man who claims to go by the name Jakub Chelzak. He was discovered attempting to board a tram to the district of Praga with falsified papers and no identity card. We are uncertain as to the nature of his business in Warsaw or how long he was in the area.

  As you may be aware, resistance and treason here have cost the lives of many heroic German soldiers in recent months. For this reason, we ask that you investigate this man’s claims and any potential involvement he may have had with any resistance groups.

  You are under orders to forward any information you may learn to this office.

  Heil Hitler!

  Beruge Stain

  Chief

  “Schütze!” Petersdorf called.

  Hofstaller returned. “Ja, Herr Sturmbannführer?”

  “Why us?” Petersdorf flipped the letter around.

  “Herr Sturmbannführer?”

  “I don’t understand what they expect us to do. Ask them.”

  TALL PLANTS WITH BROAD LEA
VES BLOCKED all but a few rays of the morning light. Strauss leaned back in his office chair, a handsome leather piece Gretty brought from Vienna. He picked up a microphone on his desk. He pressed a switch on a voice recorder. A reel-to-reel tape turned.

  “Guten tag. Guten morgan. Auf wiedersehn.”

  He played back the recording. The voice he heard grated. He brought the microphone to his mouth. “Dearest Gretty: I am trying something diff—”

  The machine stopped. Strauss tapped it. Nothing. He switched it off and turned the reel. He switched it back on and watched the reel turn, then stop. He switched it off, threaded the tape, and switched it on again. He watched the reel turn and leaned back with the microphone.

  “I’m trying something different I hope you will like. This is a voice recorder used by the Luftwaffe. It’s called a magnetophone. It’s the very latest. Farben makes it and we swung it with a large order. You won’t believe how music sounds on it. You can take the reel to Ribaldi’s, the shop in the square. There’s a fat Italian man there who can play it for you.”

  Strauss heard a motor outside and stopped the tape. A road went past his house around an electrified fence that created a perimeter like a moat. He waited for the muffled noise to pass and clicked on the tape again.

  “I can’t talk long. I am sorry about our argument before you left for Vienna. I was wrong. You were right to be angry. It’s only that I didn’t choose this and I miss you terribly and I wish you could bring yourself to overlook these temporary circumstances and be at my side. But I do understand—Vienna is Heaven by comparison.”