Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  And because the women were concerned with propriety and the decent conduct of their children, they, too, did not look away from the task at hand, nor bestow a single glance on their dying men.

  Oh God, it’s true, there is no escaping from its truth. Those naked, fretting, dying Jewesses actually thought that if we saw how nicely their children behaved, how sweet and intelligent and loving and beautiful they truly were, we would not kill them! One child—may his soul be blasted from God’s memory—one child no more than five, it seemed—it was a boy, I think, although at such times no one can be sure—this one Satanic, Christ-abandoned child lifted his hand—his left hand, I remember it clearly—it was only a split-second before his face disintegrated—he lifted his left hand and smiled and waved farewell—at me!

  Why me? It wasn’t my bullet that struck him. The movement of his hand caught my eye and sent my bullet wide. The body slowly, reluctantly, lingeringly tumbled backward into the pit—tumbled like a stunned animal, like a squirrel, perhaps. But it was not my gun that did him in.

  The whole thing, of course, was an accident. That I freely admit to be the truth. Yet because it was an accident I neither killed the child nor disobeyed my orders. That was a good moment in my life. They do come sometimes, don’t they? More than a good moment, it was one of the best. Hail Mary! Gloria in excelsis!

  The boy, of course, looking straight at the barrel of the gun with my face behind it, had no way of knowing it was not I who blew the light from his eyes and the smile from his face and scattered his brains like sewage over the weedy grass and fresh-dug earth. No matter. When you have walked as far as I have across earth turned by fresh blood and warm brains into mire, into soft-sucking muck, into filth ankle-deep and almost (but not quite) as long as God’s gut—and when, walking thus, you have heard, as one hears a distant wind, the rushing of souls, thousands of souls, the anguish of their search, the murmur of their passage, now here, now there, it was all so sudden, we weren’t prepared, have we lost anyone, I didn’t think it would be like this, the grayness, the chill, infinity is too large, nothing should be without limits, our little house, my little room, the cow, the lock of hair from my grandfather’s beard, where shall we go, where shall we rest again, when shall we sleep, are we old, are we young, are we real, what is left of us to be healed, to be helped, to be cared for, to be wanted, is that about me which made you love me still with me?

  We must go now. Did they hurt you too much? I’m sorry. Never again will I let you be hurt. Never again will I let you be frightened. Take my hand. The mystery is here, and we must find it, but where is the light, where is the darkness, where is the Temple, the Torah, where is Jerusalem, where is God?

  Gone. All gone. There is nothing here but the wind. We have become eternity. No, no, that can’t be true, I just came from there. Forgive me, God, I had arrangements to make, I wasn’t ready, I didn’t finish, why must I go back so soon, why must I say goodbye?

  Because I, Ludwig Richard Johann Grieben, have said that you must. What other answer can I give them? And how can I give it without hating them?

  Because I do hate them. Their laments are an incitement, a provocation, a deliberately vengeful torment. No one who has watched them sink into their graves like slobbering animals can fail to recognize the calculated cruelty of their goodbyes, their farewells, their forever-and-ever-amens.

  3 November 1941

  Vitebsk. In the course of normal operations we trapped between 600 and 700 Jews at Saturday services in a ramshackle synagogue at the edge of the ghetto. Sealing all exits, we set the building afire on four sides and ringed the place with armed Ukrainian volunteers to make certain none could escape.

  As those inside realized the terrible fate their god had prepared for them in the very heart of his temple, a great sob seemed to arise from within the building, a muted confusion of prayers and shrieks, of moaning and crying and wailing, of curses howled and bodies crashing vainly against stout oak doors that had been designed to prevent invaders from breaking in rather than worshippers from breaking out.

  Listening to that remote and mindless cacophony, I found myself transported by memory once again to Forchheim as both it and I used to be in my youth. At the rear of my father’s property there stood a small storage house built, at his order, of rock and structural concrete, one section of which, consisting of four hollow concrete blocks, had been infested by a colony of Vespa wasps. Their point of ingress and egress was a tiny break in the concrete no more than three centimeters across, through which those hungry, carnivorous insects with their great dangling legs passed in summer-long, two-way processionals.

  There came a day when my father tired of his hymenopterous guests and, through me, arranged for their total destruction. At the end of a summer day, when twilight had brought the last wandering wasp to rest in some cell of his colony’s impregnable concrete fortress, I, executioner of wasps and other creatures, poured a small vial of prussic acid into the fortress’s sally port, sealed the hole with mud, pressed my ear to its still sun-warmed outer surface, and listened through an inch of solid concrete to the rising commotion from within, the muffled hum and buzz of a universe utterly consumed by the visible presence of death and its own terrible passion to live.

  Listening there in the twilight, I could imagine the twitching of cocooned larvae, the waving heads of newborn grubs, the panic of nurses scurrying wildly from charge to charge, the frustrated rush of the workers for egress, the disorder of the guards, and beyond everything else the fierce agony of the queen, sovereign by now of all the dead and mother of the dying.

  Such were my thoughts today in Vitebsk as the synagogue burned and the lamentations of those within it slowly ceased.

  7 November 1941

  Last night I dreamed that I stood face to face—no more than six inches between us—with a young woman, actually a girl, a girl I knew, a girl whom I seemed to have known years ago. Although I knew her in my dream and know her now, I can’t remember who she was or is. She looked up at me and said, very softly, “Are we falling in love again?”

  She couldn’t have been Beata, who has the devotion of a spaniel and no capacity at all to fall in love. She couldn’t have been Inge, whose sultry perfume I last inhaled in Forchheim seven years ago. And certainly she wasn’t Liesel, who does not love me, did not love me, could not love me, will not love me, heaven and earth without end.

  Did anyone ever truly fall in love with me? I think not. No one but her who came to me last night, her whom I cannot name but who is more real to me than life itself: “Are we falling in love again?”

  The answer is yes. Fall in love with me, I beg you; fall in love with me again and again and again, remembering that for him who has loved you always it cannot possibly be again.

  25 February 1942

  The whole world has been given a chance to evaluate the sincerity of England’s sympathy for Europe’s “persecuted” Jews. The story, as it came out today, is this: between 700 and 800 Balkan and Ukrainian Jews, including seventy children, chartered a dilapidated 180-ton steamer (the Struma) to transport the lot of them from Constanza on the Black Sea to Palestine. The ship broke down off Istanbul. Since not one Jew aboard had immigration papers, the British, who already have more Jews in Palestine than any country really needs, refused to issue navicerts for them to proceed, and the Turks, of course, couldn’t legally permit them to land.

  For weeks, with the whole world watching, the Struma lay crippled in the Bosporus, her cargo sustained by various Jewish organizations in Istanbul. After two and a half months of this, the Turks had no choice but to tow the vessel out to sea, which, in full regard for international law, they did. Yesterday, six miles from shore, it sank. Only two of its 769 Jews had the wits or ability or strength to save themselves by swimming ashore.

  Like any other man with human feelings I have had, and sometimes still do have, dark moments late at night while sleepless and alone, and particularly since the beginning of my work here with Eins
atzkommando 4, in which I have pondered and even agonized over the justice of what we are doing and the necessity of doing it. Then, like a flash of lightning, one incident such as the sinking of the Struma illuminates the moral problem with blinding clarity: no country on earth wants these Jews we’re risking our lives and souls to get rid of. No country on earth.

  6 March 1942

  Every time I haul my trousers up and look down into one of these filthy Russian toilets I see sausages stuffed with blood. Something inside me bleeds. I bleed in my belly. I bleed in my bowels. My asshole is like the cut throat of a Jew. Vodka, schnapps, brandy from France, hands full of aspirin, Seconal, Nembutal, codeine, opium. There are different flavors here. There is a new kind of death. My life is a scum.

  20 March 1942

  From London: After questions in the House of Commons three days ago about the sinking of the Jew ship Struma, the Undersecretary for the Colonies, a Mr. Harold Macmillan, referred to the Palestine White Paper of 1939 and said, “It is not in our power to take measures of a nature that may compromise the present policy regarding illegal immigration.”

  How can the same man who tells the world that he and his government prefer to see Europe’s rejected Jews rotting on the bottom of the sea rather than living in British-controlled Palestine turn around, as this man often has, and make propaganda speeches about “the inhuman racial policies of Nazi Germany?”

  I vomit.

  11 May 1942

  More and more frequently I have this dream, which is really a dream within a dream: I am young again. I seem to be sleeping. And then, in my sleep, I hear his voice. For a moment the dream tells me that I hear him singing. His voice is high and pure. It is the voice of a girl, as boys’ and young men’s voices often are; yet sweeter than a girl’s can ever be, more filled with yearning, more loving, far, far gentler.

  I stir in my dream but I do not wake. The sweetness of his song turns somber; it is filled with melancholy, with longing, it is dark with reproach. It has become the voice of a man, richer now in its timbre, yet still sweet—sweet as an oboe and sadder. The song, which began as pure melody, now searches for words and finds them. The song is a question: “Why?…Why?…why?”

  I start from my sleep. I am lying on a bed of pine needles deep in that same forest of perpetual midnight into which I was born—that dark and secret place toward which I have been stumbling all my life in order to die as secretly, as privately, as casually as a lizard when his belly shrivels and his trifocal eyes scum over and he summons his last strength to crawl back to the ancestral rock and the secret dust in which, safe at last, he can without shame cease reaching for air and stop being.

  “Gunther,” I cry, “where are you?” His voice replies, “I am dead.” “So am I! I am dead too, Gunther!” Then, after a moment’s silence, he responds. “Then come to me.”

  I jump to my feet in this dream within a dream. Although I am quite dry, I discover that the trees of the forest in which I have slept stand rooted in water. Beyond them, at the forest’s edge, stretches a tarn. From the steely face of the tarn rises a mist, and there, where the mist swirls thickest, shimmering like a pale column risen from its depths, dripping tarn water and rotted rose petals, stands Gunther.

  The water that stands beneath the trees parts for me as I run toward the tarn. I rush into its shallow s through rising water and whirling mists until at last I am swimming beneath its iron-cruel surface, swimming like an eel through the very heart of it, gliding toward the white tower of all that I love until at last I cling to the rock on which he stands. I embrace the nakedness of his slim white feet; his toes so slender, so cold; his unridged nails so smooth, so firm, so young. I press my lips against the delicate hollow of his arches. I warm his skin with my kisses.

  In that instant my dream becomes a memory. Midnight bonfires on the crest of Hoher Meissner blaze forth as midsummer greetings to the farms and vineyards below and the lights of Kassel blinking far to the north.

  Gunther and I stand side by side once again, his arm around my waist, mine around his. We stand side by side and we are singing, singing together, thousands of us singing in one voice, singing on Hoher Meissner not for me-thou but for thou-me-us; not for one but for all; not for cool heads but for hot hearts; not for the mass hut for the one, the godlike one, the leader, the secret emperor—for that and the rare blue flower, forever shy, forever secret, forever holy.

  Only six years before that fervid summer of 1913, in the course of which Gunther and I became closer than brothers can ever hope to be, Stefan George spoke for all of us when he cried that “Volk and high counsel yearn for The Man!—the Deed!…Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons will stand up and do the deed!”

  That is what we were singing about that night amidst the campfires on Hoher Meissner; that is what we were singing about and waiting for. The Man, the Leader, the Secret Emperor, and the holy blue flower.

  ’Twas once—methinks year one of our blessed Lord—

  Drink without wine, the Sybil thus deplored:—

  “How ill things go!

  Decline! Decline! Ne’er sank the world so low!

  Rome’s Caesar a beast, and God—hath turned Jew!”

  I slept last night (and dreamed this dream for the fourth or fifth time) in Mogilev, where I am on temporary assignment to Sonderkommando 8 of my own Einsatzgruppe B.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Almost immediately after the preceding entry Grieben suffers a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized.

  D.T.

  16 June 1942

  Today they gave back my diary and writing materials. I asked for them when I first realized that I was a patient here (Base Hospital 64). That was on June 12, but my request was rejected as premature. They tell me I was flown here on May 14, but I have no recollection of it. I’m in the psychiatric ward.

  Apparently I was found unconscious in Captain Golitzer’s office on May 13 while assigned to Sonderkommando 8 in Mogilev, which means that from May 13 to June 12—almost a full month—I was not aware of my own existence, although they assure me that through the whole time I have led an apparently active conscious life. By that I mean that I seem to have awakened each morning and slept each night, but have no memory of it whatever. Apparently I was paralyzed part of the time, mostly on my right side. The only sign of it now is my right arm and hand. They are swollen and covered with rash, and the hand shakes a good deal. I am on a liquid diet for ulcers. They tell me the paralysis will clear up entirely. They are going to tell me more as my condition improves.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  After his breakdown with the Einsatzgruppe and his application for transfer, have him interviewed on his moral and political condition (anatomy of SS state), with the result that he is assigned to Auschwitz. All but the last of the following diary entries were written in Auschwitz.

  D.T.

  27 October 1943

  Here is something to lighten the heart—a propaganda document called the Moscow Declaration just signed and published by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. In it the world is informed that “Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian, or Norwegian hostages, or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland, or in the territories of the Soviet Union which are now being swept clear of the enemy, will know that they will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the people whom they have outraged.”

  I have read this curious document with profound interest. I understand it perfectly. Indeed, I have memorized the whole statement. It speaks of Italians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, Cretans, Poles, and, apparently, Russians. But what of the Jews? For some reason they are not mentioned. Thus far “in the territories of the Soviet Union” we have exterminated over 500,000 Jews and—as all three signers of the Declaration perfectly well know—we still have three or four hundred thousand more to go. Not
to mention the fact that today in Auschwitz 9,326 South European Jews went to the ovens, and that approximately the same number went to them yesterday and will go to them tomorrow.

  There’s no mystery about it, no secret. Although we take care to see that it’s never mentioned in the Reich and the occupied territories, today’s world of double and triple intelligence agents makes it impossible to keep such massive operations secret from the enemy. Since no one in the world of intelligence is entirely faithful and no one is entirely treacherous, it follows that in general we know what the enemy knows, and that he, in general, knows what we know.

  We know, for example, that their own intelligence services have informed Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt exactly what our Jewish policy is, how it is effectuated, and (which is even more important) where. From this it follows that their Moscow Declaration is a signal to the world that large issues are not to be beclouded with gabble about the Jewish problem because in this game the Jews don’t count.

  17 August 1944

  The last transport from Greece arrived today at Birkenau. They comprised the entire Jewish population of the island of Rhodes. Counting the dead, there were slightly over twelve hundred unbelievable poor and semi-literate peasants, traders, and petty usurers. I looked Rhodes up on my map. It is over two thousand miles from the borders of the Reich, which shows how far, even now, the Fuehrer’s arm can reach. The consignees were transported from Rhodes to the Greek mainland by sea in caïques, and from there to Birkenau in sealed freight cars. This at a time when the Wehrmacht is preparing for the evacuation of the Greek archipelago; when partisans are openly raiding warehouses, supply dumps, and communication centers; and when, for lack of rail or motor transport, we are abandoning enormous stores of material. In other words, this last deportation train from Greece has taken precedence over the most pressing military necessities. Clearly the Fuehrer considers the Jew-cleansing of Europe to he of greater importance than victory itself.