Making History

by Stephen Fry

  Adi, lying facedown, seemed to be blindly feeling the wound in Rudi’s back.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps Rudi isn’t dead!”

  “Of course he’s dead, didn’t you see his eyes?”

  “Then what’s Adi doing?”

  Hans couldn’t see for his view of the body was obscured by Adi rising on all fours.

  “Jesus, get down, you maniac!” Hans whispered.

  As if he had heard, Adi suddenly dropped flat again and lay motionless beside Gloder’s corpse.

  “My God! Has he been hit?”

  “We would have heard.”

  “He’s frozen up, then!”

  Hans became aware of a gathering commotion in his own trench. He pulled back from the periscope and looked about him. Ernst’s alarm had alerted dozens of men. No, not men. Boys, most of them. A few had periscopes themselves and were relaying, in fatuous com­mentary, every detail of the scene. The others turned their big, fright­ened eyes on Hans.

  “Why isn’t he moving? He’s frozen. Has he lost his nerve?”

  The sight of a man freezing up in no-man’s-land was a common one. One minute you were running and dodging, the next you were stiff as a statue.

  “Not Adi,” said Hans as cheerfully as he could. “He’s recovering his strength for the homeward run, that’s all.” He turned back to the periscope. Still no movement. “Everyone with a smoke pistol, get ready,” he called.

  Half a dozen men crept to the top of ladders, their pistols cocked back over their shoulders, cowboy fashion.

  Hans wetted his finger and checked the wind before settling back to watch. Suddenly, with no warning, Adi was up, facing the enemy. He hooked his arms under Rudi’s and pulled him backwards towards the German lines, hopping backwards with bent knees like a Cossack dancer.

  “Now!” shouted Hans. “Fire! Fire high and five minutes to the left!”

  The smoke pistols clapped a polite round of applause. Hans watched Adi as the bombs fell beyond him and a dense curtain of smoke rose and thickened, drifting gently in the wind between him and the French forward trenches. Adi lurched on towards the home lines without a pause or backward glance. Perhaps he had been rely­ing on the smoke screen, Hans thought. He trusted that we would know what to do. Perhaps he would have risked it anyway. Hans always knew Adi had the courage, but he would never have credited him with such brute strength.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Major Eckert had stamped into the trench, mustache quivering. “Who gave orders to send up smoke?”

  A young Franconian saluted smartly. “It’s Gefreiter Hitler, sir.”

  “Hitler? Who authorized him to issue such an order?”

  “No, sir. He didn’t order it, sir. He’s out there, sir. In Niemands- land. Recovering Hauptmann Gloder’s body, sir.”

  “Gloder? Hauptmann Gloder dead? How? What?”

  “He went out last night to rescue Colonel Baligand’s helmet.”

  “Colonel Baligand’s helmet? Are you drunk, man?”

  “No, Herr Major. The French must have taken it during Thurs­day’s raid up the line, sir. Hauptmann Gloder went to rescue it. He did too, and what’s more he pinched a brigadier’s mess jacket as well. But then a sniper must have got him, sir.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “Sir, yes sir. And Gefreiter Hitler is out rescuing the body now, sir. Stabsgefreiter Mend ordered us to protect him with smoke.”

  “Is this true, Mend?”

  Mend stood to attention. “Quite true, sir. I believed it to be the best course.”

  “But damn it, the French might be led into the belief that we are attacking.”

  Mend was too dazed and horrified to think clearly, but he man­aged a reply. “Respectfully, Herr Major, that can do little harm. All that will happen is that Franzmann will waste a few thousand valu­able rounds.”

  “Well, it’s all very irregular.”

  Not as irregular as you, you shithead schoolmaster, thought Mend, before giving himself up to more miserable considerations.

  “And where’s Hitler now?”

  Schmidt bellowed the answer from behind his field glasses. “He’s at the wire, sir! Sir, he’s all right, sir! He’s found the doorway. He’s got the body. And the helmet, sir! He’s even got the helmet!”

  A great roar of delight went up from the men and even Major Eckert allowed himself a smile.

  Hans, in his puzzled dismay, repeated and repeated to himself, Eckert knew nothing about it until just now. Eckert knew nothing! Adi never told Eckert about the Colonel’s helmet yesterday. Adi never asked him permission to go on a raid. Yet he told me and Rudi that he had. Why had Adi lied?

  Hans walked slowly out of the trench just as Rudi’s corpse rolled into it. Adi followed, the Colonel’s helmet raised aloft in his right hand, the gold eagle stamped upon it flashing in the sun.

  As Hans moved away, the cheering of the men grew and swelled inside him until it burst from his eyes in a flood of hot, disgusted tears.

  MAKING AMENDS

  Axel Bauer’s story

  Leo wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. I sat quietly in the armchair, plucking horsehair and watching him ner­vously. I had never seen a grown man cry before. Outside a movie that is. In movies grown men cry all the time. But silently. Leo was crying with noisy sobs and great gulping catches of breath. I waited for this horrible tempest to blow itself out.

  After two or three minutes he had taken off his spectacles and was polishing them with the fat of his tie. He blinked his wet red eyes across at me.

  “Oh, I know. Why did I not tell you before? Why did I let you believe that I was a Jew?”

  `I made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a whine, intended to convey assent, open-mindedness, understanding . . . I don’t know, something like that. But the way the noise emerged I seemed to be suggesting that the ball was with Leo, that it was up to him to do the talking, that I was reserving judgment.

  He must have taken it that way too. “You must know that this is not something you talk about so easily. Indeed it is something I have never talked about before. Except to myself.”

  I cast around for a constructive observation. “Zuckermann . . .” I said. “It is a Jewish name, isn’t it? There’s a conductor, musician, something like that?”

  “Pinchas Zuckerman. He is a violinist and conductor. Viola player too. Every time I see his name on a record, in a newspaper, I wonder . . .”

  Leo replaced his glasses and sank down into the armchair oppo­site me. We sat facing each other as on the day we met. No coffee or hot chocolate this time. Just the space between us.

  “My father’s real name was Bauer,” said Leo. “Dietrich Josef Bauer. He was born in Hanover, July 1904. Throughout the 1920s he trained in histology and radiology and took a research post at the Anatomical Institute at the University of Münster, under Professor Johannes Paul Kremer, about whom you shall hear more. My father joined the National Socialist German Workers’ party in 1932, and was for two years Sturmarzt in Number 8. SS-Reiterstandart.”

  “Sturmarzt?”

  “Doctor. Almost everything in the SS begins with the word ‘storm.’ What else do you need to know about them, other than that they called their physicians Storm Doctors? Storm Doctors!” New tears were springing up in his eyes and he shook his head back and forth. “Nature cries out.”

  For the first time in my life, I really wished that I smoked. I noticed that my left leg was bouncing up and down uncontrollably on the ball of its foot, a habit I thought it had abandoned since I was a screwed-up sixteen-year-old.

  “Be that as it may,” said Leo, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes once more. “In 1941 my father was enlisted to the Reserve Waffen-SS with the rank of SS-Hauptscharführer, a kind of
senior sergeant, like a sergeant major I suppose, but without the duties of drill and so forth. A courtesy rank. This much I found out from my own research.”

  “You didn’t know him, then? Your father?”

  “We come to that. In September 1942 he was practicing at the SS Hospital in Prague and received a message from his old teacher Pro­fessor Kremer, who had first encouraged him into the SS and had since been promoted to the junior officer rank of Untersturmführer, working on temporary assignment in a small town in Poland no one had ever heard of, a town called Auschwitz. Kremer wanted to return to his post in academia and recommended my father as a suitable replacement. I was four years old. My mother and I were living still in Münster. My Christian name was Axel. I have no memory of that time. We were summoned to join Papa in Poland in October 1942 and there we remained for two and a half years.”

  “Actually inside Auschwitz?”

  “Good God, no! In the town. Yes, the town. Always the town.”

  I nodded.

  “You ask if I remember my father. I tell you what I remember now, memories that have come back to me after years of absence. This happens as one ages, as doubtless you know. I remember now a man who was forever injecting me. For diphtheria, typhus, cholera. Auschwitz town had many outbreaks of fever and he was determined that I should not succumb. I remember too a man who would come home in the evenings with packages. Bottles of Croatian plum wine, whole freshly killed rabbits and partridges, cakes of perfumed soap, jars of ground coffee and, for me, colored paper and crayons. These were all supreme luxuries, you must understand. Once he even brought home a pineapple. A pineapple! He never spoke of his work, except to say that he never spoke of his work. That is why I use the word ‘work.’ It was his word. He was kind and funny and at the time I believe I loved him with my whole heart.”

  “And what exactly . . . what was his work?”

  “His job was to treat the sick among the officers and men of the SS and to attend the Sonderaktionen as a medical observer.”

  “Sonder . . .”

  “Special Actions. The actions for which the death camps were built. The gassings. They called them Special Actions. Also . . .” Leo paused and looked beyond me towards the window for a moment. “Also, my father continued some medical experiments that had been initiated by Kremer. The removal of live organs for study. The two of them were interested in the rates of cellular atrophy among the mal­nourished and the physically weak. Particularly where this affected the young. Kremer wrote to my father from Münster in 1943 asking him to carry on with the work and to send him the data regularly.”

  I watched as Leo rose and went to the bookshelf. He took down a small black and white book and rifled through the pages.

  “Kremer kept a diary, you know. It was his downfall. He was at Auschwitz for three months only, but it was enough. The diary was confiscated by the British, who allowed him to be extradited to Poland. Extracts are included in this book which was published in Germany in 1988. I read to you. ‘Tenth October 1942. Extracted and fixed fresh live material from liver, spleen, and pancreas. Got prison­ers to make me a signature stamp. For first time heated the room. More cases of typhus fever and Typhus abdominalis. Camp quaran­tine continues.’ Next day. ‘Today, Sunday, there was roast hare for lunch—a real fat leg—with dumplings and red cabbage. Seventeenth October. Attended trial and eleven executions. Extracted fresh live material from liver, spleen and pancreas after injection of pilocarpin. Attended eleventh Sonderaktion in cold wet weather this morning, Sunday. Horrible scenes with three naked women who begged us for their lives.’ And so on and so on and so on. This was Kremer’s three months. His entire contribution to the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe. My father’s life there must have been very simi­lar, but he kept no diary. No diary and no letters remain from his two and a half years.” Leo placed a pause between each word. “Two. And. A. Half. Years.”

  I swallowed. “And was your father also captured? At the end of the war?”

  “Always my mind goes back, I can’t think why,” said Leo, ignor­ing me entirely, “to that one entry of Kremer’s: ‘Got prisoners to make me a signature stamp.’ Why is it, when one contemplates history, that one never considers things like this? You picture the gas chambers, the ovens, the dogs, the brutality of the guards, the disease, the terror of the children, the anguish of the mothers, the imponderable cruelty, the horror that cannot be described, but ‘Got prisoners to make me a signature stamp.’ A brilliant professor, head of an anatomy school, finds himself assigned to a concentration camp. After a week or so he gets tired of signing endless orders. Orders to do what, do we suppose? Orders for new supplies of phe­nol and aspirin? Orders to have these or those sick prisoners declared unfit for work and processed for Special Action? Orders to authorize the extraction of live organs? Who knows? Just orders. So, ‘Damn it,’ he says one morning to a colleague. ‘I can’t persuade the quarter­master to issue me with a signature stamp. He tells me that I am only a temporary and that it will take two months for a stamp to come through from Berlin.’

  “‘What’s the big deal?’ says his friend. ‘Get the prisoners to make you one.’

  “And how does he proceed, this brilliant professor with two PhDs, who has sent two generations of trained healers and surgeons into the world? How does he go about putting this simple, obvious idea into action? Does he send for a prisoner, a Jewish Kapo perhaps, and tell him to sort it out for him? Does he walk one day into a hut and say, as the prisoners stand to attention, ‘Look here, do any of you have skills in stationery? I need someone to make me a signa­ture stamp. Volunteers, please.’ Who knows? Somehow, whatever the procedure, it is conveniently arranged. Kremer signs his name, ‘Johannes Paul Kremer’ on a piece of paper and gives it to the cho­sen prisoner. What is the process, do we suppose? While the ink is still wet, the prisoner presses an uncut rubber stamp to the paper. The mirror-image of the signature is transferred onto the stamp. The prisoner carefully cuts away the rest of the rubber. He does this maybe in an office, in a workshop, someplace where he is allowed access to knives. Maybe it takes him an hour, maybe longer to be sure of doing a good job and pleasing Herr Professor Obersturmführer Kremer, who is a man worth pleasing. So now Professor Kre­mer is the proud owner of a stamp bearing the perfect simulacrum of his signature, the twentieth-century equivalent of a signet ring or Great Seal. He no longer has the arduous task of having to sign his own name to pieces of paper. All he has to do is stamp. Bang, bang!” Leo thumped the side of his right fist into the open palm of his left hand with a violence and volume that shocked me upright. “And what of the prisoner who made the stamp? Will one day his name be above the signature he so carefully cut out? Bang, bang! And what of my father? When he arrived did he too have a signature stamp made for him by a prisoner, or did he wait for Berlin to supply him with something more official, something a little classier? Bang, bang.” He paused for breath. “Here, I make myself some chocolate. Coffee for you. Maybe some cookies to nibble.”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “How sick to talk of chocolate and coffee and cookies after such a conversation, you are thinking,” Leo said when he had returned from setting the kettle. “You are right. The same disgusted thought strikes when one reads the writings of the men who ran the camps. ‘Pathetic attempt at a rebellion in the shower rooms this morning. A dozen or so naked Muslims—’ they called Jewish women Muslims, did you know that? ‘—a dozen or so naked Muslims tried to escape. Kretschmer shot each one in the leg and made them hop up and down for ten minutes before liquidating them. The most comical sight. Wonderful beer for lunch, sent up from Bohemia. Excellent veal and real ground coffee to follow. Weather still abominable.’ That kind of thing you read again and again and again. Or the letters home. ‘Darling Trudi, My God this is a dreadful place. The steadfast­ness of the men in their work is frankly heroic. More Jews arrive every day, always so much to be done. You would be
proud if you could see how little complaint the guards and officers make as they go about their tasks in the camp. With so much to provoke them from the apemen Jews and their stink. Give Mutti a kiss for me and tell Ehrich I want to hear a better report from school!’ This is the way of it.”

  “The banality of evil,” I murmured.

  Leo frowned. “Perhaps. I am never sure about this phrase. Ah, I hear the kettle.”

  Outside the window a lawnmower started up. A telephone was ringing unanswered in the room below. With the same rather femi­nine care as before, Leo set down the tray on the low table between us and poured out a coffee for me.

  “So. One day in 1945 my mother calls me to her. Papa is standing beside her in his uniform. The black uniform of, by this time, an SS-Sturmbannführer. The uniform that even today provokes terror in millions and sick admiration and lust in an insane few. The shaped black cap that bears the Death’s Head along its band, the collar flashes that spell out ‘SS’ in lightning strikes—this alone, such a masterstroke of design! What they would call today a ‘logo,’ no?—the puffed out jodhpurs, the shining boots, the hunting crop to strike manfully against the thigh, the cuffs, the tie, the crisp shirt. The genius of the Nazis. Such a uniform has the power to turn the most laughable oaf into a towering Übermensch. Even the names of the rank carry this power of totem. Sturmbannführer. Straighten the peak of your cap in front of a mirror, raise your right hand in salute, click your heels together and say, ‘Ich bin Sturmbannführer. Heil Hitler!’ Young children do it in play all over the world. The uniform, the language, the style. To the sane world they are the symbol of all that is strutting, arrogant, cruel, barbarian and bestial. All the things that shame us. To me they are the symbol of all that is Papa.”

  “But that’s not your fault.”

  “Michael, we will come to blame later, if you please.”

  I raised a hand in apology. Hey, this was his game. His ball. His rules.

  “So, my mother calls to me this one day and I come. Papa kneels down in front of me and smooths back my hair. As he does when he wants to feel my brow for fever.