He drew himself up to his full height. Then – just as ten years before during the period of collectivization, just as during the political trials when the comrades of his youth had been condemned to the scaffold – he said:
‘I submit to this decision; I accept it as a member of the Party.’
He took his jacket from the bench and removed several scraps of paper from the lining. They were texts he had drawn up for leaflets.
Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, he saw Ikonnikov’s face and large cow-like eyes. If only he could listen once again to the preacher of senseless kindness.
‘I wanted to ask about Ikonnikov,’ he said. ‘Did the Czech slip his card in too?’
‘The holy fool? The man you used to call the blancmange? He was executed. He refused to work on the construction of an extermination camp. Keyze was ordered to shoot him.’
That night Mostovskoy’s leaflets about Stalingrad were stuck up on the walls of the barrack-huts.
40
Soon after the end of the war a dossier was found in the archives of the Munich Gestapo relating to the investigation into an underground organization in one of the concentration camps of Western Germany. The final document stated that the sentence passed on the members of the organization had been carried out and their bodies burnt in the crematorium. The first name on the list was Mostovskoy’s.
It was impossible to ascertain the name of the provocateur who had betrayed his comrades. Probably he was executed by the Gestapo together with the men he betrayed.
41
The hostel belonging to the special unit assigned to the gas chambers, crematorium and stores of poisonous substances was both warm and quiet.
The prisoners who worked permanently in number one complex enjoyed good living conditions. Beside each bed stood a small table with a carafe of boiled water. There was even a strip of carpet down the central passageway. The prisoners here were all trusties; they ate in a special building.
The Germans in the special unit were able to choose their own menus as though in a restaurant. They were paid almost three times as much as officers and soldiers of corresponding rank on active service. Their families were granted rent reductions, maximum discounts on groceries and the right to be the first evacuees from areas threatened by air-raids.
Private Roze’s job was to watch through the inspection-window; when the process was completed, he gave the order for the gas chamber to be emptied. He was also expected to check that the dentists worked efficiently and honestly. He had written several reports to the director of the complex, Sturmbannführer Kaltluft, about the difficulty of carrying out these two tasks at once. While Roze was up above watching the gassing, the workers down below were left unsupervised; the dentists and the men loading bodies onto the conveyor-belt could steal and loot to their hearts’ content.
Roze had grown accustomed to his work; looking through the inspection-window no longer disturbed or excited him as it had during the first few days. His predecessor had once been found engaged in a pastime more suitable for a twelve-year-old boy than an SS soldier entrusted with a special assignment. At first Roze hadn’t understood why his comrades kept hinting at certain improprieties; only later had he understood what they were talking about.
Roze did not, however, enjoy his work. He was unnerved by the esteem that now surrounded him. The waitresses in the canteen kept asking why he was so pale.
As far back as he could remember, Roze’s mother had always been in tears. And time and again his father had been fired from work; he seemed to have been sacked from more jobs than he had actually had. It was from his parents that Roze had learned his quiet, sidling walk – intended not to disturb anyone – and the anxious smile with which he greeted his neighbours, his landlord, his landlord’s cat, the headmaster and the policeman on the corner of the street. Gentleness and friendliness had seemed the fundamental traits of his character; even he was surprised how much hatred lay inside him and how long he had kept it hidden.
He had been seconded to the special unit; the commander, a man with a fine understanding of people, had at once sensed his gentle, effeminate nature.
There was nothing pleasant about watching the convulsions of the Jews in the gas chambers. The soldiers who enjoyed working in the complex filled Roze with disgust. He especially disliked Zhuchenko, the prisoner-of-war on duty by the door of the gas-chambers during the morning shift. He always had a childish and particularly unpleasant smile on his face. Roze didn’t like his work, but he was well aware of the many official and unofficial perks it brought him.
At the end of each day one of the dentists would hand Roze a small packet containing several gold crowns. Although this represented only an insignificant fraction of the precious metal taken every day to the camp authorities, Roze had twice handed over almost a kilo of gold to his wife. This was their bright future, their dream of a peaceful old age. As a young man, Roze had been weak and timid, unable to play an active part in life’s struggle. He had never doubted that the Party had set itself one aim only: the well-being of the small and weak. He had already experienced the benefits of Hitler’s policies; life had improved immeasurably for him and his family.
42
Sometimes, deep in his heart, Anton Khmelkov was appalled by his work. As he lay down in the evening and listened to Trofima Zhuchenko’s laughter, he would be overcome by a cold, heavy fear.
It was Zhuchenko’s job to close the hermetically sealed doors of the gas chamber. His large, strong hands and fingers always looked as though they hadn’t been washed; Khmelkov didn’t even like to take a piece of bread from the same basket as Zhuchenko.
Zhuchenko looked happy and excited as he went out to work in the morning and waited for the column of prisoners from the railway-line. But the slow progress of the column seemed to incense him; he would twitch his jaws and make a thin, complaining sound in his throat – like a cat watching sparrows from behind a pane of glass.
Khmelkov found Zhuchenko very disturbing. Not that he himself was above having a few drinks and then going off for a bit of fun with one of the women in the queue. There was a little door through which members of the special unit could go into the changing-room and pick out a woman. A man’s a man, after all. Khmelkov would choose a woman or a girl, take her off to an empty corner, and half an hour later hand her back to the guard. Neither he nor the woman would say anything. Still, he wasn’t in this job for the wine or the women, for gabardine riding-breeches or box-calf boots.
Khmelkov had been taken prisoner in July 1941. He had been beaten over the head and neck with a rifle-butt, he had suffered from dysentery, he had been forced to march through the snow in tattered boots, he had drunk yellow water tainted with fuel-oil, he had torn off hunks of black, stinking meat from the carcass of a horse, he had eaten potato peelings and rotten swedes. All he had asked for, all he had wanted, was life itself. He had fought off dozens of deaths – from cold, from hunger, from bloody flux . . . He didn’t want to fall to the ground with nine grams of metal in his skull. He didn’t want to swell up till his heart choked in the water rising from his legs. He wasn’t a criminal – just a hairdresser from the town of Kerchi. No one – neither his relatives, his neighbours, his fellow workers or the friends with whom he drank wine, ate smoked mullet and played dominoes – had ever thought badly of him. There was a time when he thought he had nothing whatever in common with Zhuchenko; now, though, he sometimes thought that the differences between them were insignificant and trifling. What did it matter what the two of them felt? If the job they did was the same, what did it matter if one felt happy and the other felt sad?
What Khmelkov didn’t understand was that it wasn’t Zhuchenko’s greater guilt that made him so disturbing. What was disturbing was that Zhuchenko’s behaviour could be explained by some terrible, innate depravity – whereas he himself was still a human being. And he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an easier option than survival – death
.
43
The director of the complex, Sturmbannführer Kaltluft, had arranged for the controller’s office to provide him each evening with a schedule of the next day’s arrivals. He was able to inform his workers in advance of the number of wagons and the quantity of people expected. Depending what country the train was from, the appropriate auxiliary units would be called up – barbers, escort-guards, porters . . .
Kaltluft disliked slovenliness of any kind. He never drank and was furious if he found any of his subordinates the worse for drink. Only once had anyone seen him bright and animated: sitting in his car, about to go and stay with his family over Easter, he had beckoned to Sturmführer Hahn and showed him photographs of his daughter – a little girl with large eyes and a large face like her father’s.
Kaltluft enjoyed work and disliked wasting his time; he never went to the club after supper, he never played cards and he never watched films. At Christmas the special unit had had their own tree and arranged for a performance by an amateur choir; a free bottle of French cognac had been given out to every two men. Kaltluft had dropped in for half an hour and everyone had seen the fresh ink-stains on his fingers – he had been working on Christmas Eve.
He had grown up in his parents’ old home in the country. He wasn’t afraid of hard work and he enjoyed the peace of the village; it had seemed he would live there for ever. He had dreamed of increasing the size of the holding, but – no matter what he earned from his wheat, swedes and pigs – he had expected to stay on in the quiet, comfortable house. His life, however, had followed a different course: at the end of the First World War he had been sent to the front. It seemed as though nothing less than fate itself had decreed his progression from the village to the army, from the trenches to HQ company, from clerk to adjutant, from the central apparatus of the RSHA to the administration of the camps – and finally to his appointment as commander of a Sonderkommando in an extermination camp.
If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces – the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father’s house. He hadn’t walked – he had been pushed. Fate had led him by the hand . . . And if they had been called upon, Kaltluft’s superiors and subordinates would have justified themselves in almost the same words.
But Kaltluft was not asked to justify himself before a heavenly court. Nor was God asked to reassure him that no one in the world is guilty.
There is divine judgment, there is the judgment of a State and the judgment of society, but there is one supreme judgment: the judgment of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian State and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man’s will. But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will. Every step Kaltluft had taken – from the village to the trenches, from being a man-in-the-street to being a member of the National Socialist Party – bore the imprint of his will. A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the individual may have different ends, but they share the same path.
The man who pronounces judgment will be neither a pure and merciful heavenly being, nor a wise justice who watches over the interests of society and the State, neither a saint nor a righteous man – but a miserable, dirty sinner who has been crushed by Fascism, who has himself experienced the terrible power of the State, who has himself bowed down, fallen, shrunk into timidity and submissiveness. And this judge will say:
‘Guilty! Yes, there are men in this terrible world who are guilty.’
44
It was the last day of the journey. There was a grinding of brakes and the wagons squealed to a halt. A moment of quiet was followed by the rattle of bolts and the order ‘Alle heraus!’
They began to make their way out onto the platform. It was still wet from the recent rain.
How strange people’s faces seemed in the light!
Their clothes had changed less than the people themselves. Coats, jackets and shawls called to mind the houses where they had been put on, the mirrors in front of which they had been measured.
The people emerging from the wagons clustered in groups. There was something familiar and reassuring in the closeness of the herd, in the smell and the warmth, in the exhausted eyes and faces, in the solidity of the vast crowd emerging from the forty-two goods wagons.
Two SS guards walked slowly up and down the platform, the nails of their boots ringing on the asphalt. They seemed haughty and thoughtful, looking neither at the young Jews carrying out the corpse of an old woman with streaks of white hair over her white face, nor at the curly-headed man on all fours drinking from a puddle, nor at the hunch-backed woman lifting up her skirt to adjust the torn elastic of her knickers.
Now and again the SS guards glanced at each other and exchanged a few words. Their passage along the platform was like the sun’s through the sky. The sun doesn’t need to watch over the wind and clouds, to listen to the sound of leaves or of a storm at sea; it knows as it follows its smooth path that everything in the world depends on it.
Men in caps with large peaks and blue overalls with white bands on the sleeves chivvied on the new arrivals, shouting at them in a strange mixture of Russian, Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian. They organized the crowd quickly and efficiently. They weeded out people who could no longer stand up and got the stronger men to load the dying into vans. Then they moulded the milling throng into a column, inspired it with the idea of movement and gave this movement direction and purpose.
As they were formed up into ranks of six, the news ran down the column: ‘The bath-house! First we’re going to the bath-house!’
No merciful God could have thought of anything kinder.
‘Very well, Jews, let’s be off!’ shouted the man in the cape who commanded the unit responsible for unloading the train.
The men and women were picking up their bags; the children were clinging to their mother’s skirts and the lapels of their fathers’ jackets. ‘The bath-house . . . ! The bath-house . . .’ The words were like a hypnotic charm that filled their consciousness.
There was something attractive about the tall man in the cape. It was as if he were one of them, closer to their unhappy world than to the men in helmets and grey greatcoats. Carefully, entreatingly, an old woman stroked the sleeves of his overalls with the tips of her fingers and asked: ‘Ir sind a yid, a litvak, mayn kind?’fn1
‘Da, da, mamen’ka, ikh bin a yid. Predko, predko, panowie!’
Suddenly, in a hoarse, resonant voice, bringing together words used by the two opposing armies, he shouted:
‘Die Kolonne marsch! Shagom marsh!’
The platform emptied. The men in overalls began sweeping up pieces of rag, scraps of bandages, a broken clog and a child’s brick that had been dropped on the ground. They slammed the doors of the wagons. A grinding wave ran down the train as it moved off to the disinfection point.
After they had finished work, the unit returned to the camp through the service gates. The trains from the East were the worst – you got covered in lice and there was a foul stench from the corpses and invalids. No, they weren’t like the wagons from Hungary, Holland or Belgium where you sometimes found a bottle of scent, a packet of cocoa or a tin of condensed milk.
Footnotes
fn1 The old woman asks, in Yiddish, ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you, my child?’ The man replies in a mixture of Russian, Yiddish and Polish, ‘Yes, Mother, I’m a Jew. Hurry up, hurry up, all of you
!’
45
A great city opened out before the travellers. Its western outskirts were lost in the mist. The dark smoke from the distant factory chimneys blended with the damp to form a low haze over the chequered pattern of the barrack-huts; there was something surprising in the contrast between the mist and the angular geometry of the streets of barracks.
To the north-east there was a dark red glow in the sky; it was as though the damp autumn sky had somehow become red-hot. Sometimes a slow, creeping flame escaped from this damp glow.
The travellers emerged into a spacious square. In the middle of this square were several dozen people on a wooden bandstand like in a public park. They were the members of a band, each of them as different from one another as their instruments. Some of them looked round at the approaching column. Then a grey-haired man in a colourful cloak called out and they reached for their instruments. There was a burst of something like cheeky, timid bird-song and the air – air that had been torn apart by the barbed wire and the howl of sirens, that stank of oily fumes and garbage – was filled with music. It was like a warm summer cloud-burst ignited by the sun, flashing as it crashed down to earth.
People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way.
What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented – home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself.
Life and Fate Page 65