The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  ‘How do you know? Is it my breath?’

  I love it when she looks so sweetly affronted and confused!

  ‘Vati knows everything, Sybil. You’ve also been trying to style your hair. I’m not cross! I’m glad someone’s taking a bit of care with their appearance. And not lounging around all day in a grubby housecoat.’

  ‘Can I go now, Vati?’

  ‘So you’re wearing pink panties this morning.’

  ‘No I’m not. They’re blue!’

  A shrewd tactic – to get something wrong every now and then.

  ‘Prove it,’ I said. ‘Ahah! Homer nods.’

  Now here’s a common fallacy I want to knock on the head without further ado: the notion that the Schutzstaffel, the Praetorian Guard of the Reich, is predominantly made up of men from the Proletariat and the Kleinburgertum. Granted, that might have been true of the SA, in the early years, but it has never been true of the SS – whose membership rolls read like an extract from the Almanach de Gotha. Oh, jawohl: the Archduke of Mecklenburg; the Princes Waldeck, von Hassen, and von Hohenzollern-Emden; the Counts Bassewitz-Behr, Stachwitz, and von Rodden. Why, here in the Zone of Interest, for a short time, we even had our own Baron!

  The bluebloods and also the intelligent, professors, lawyers, entrepreneurs.

  I just wanted to knock that 1 on the head without additional fuss.

  ‘Reveille is at 3,’ said Suitbert Seedig, ‘and Buna’s a 90-minute march. They’re exhausted before they begin. They knock off at 6 and get back at 8. Carrying their casualties. And tell me, Major. How can we get any work out of them?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. Also present, in my large and well-appointed office in the Main Administrative Building (the MAB), were Frithuric Burckl and Angelus Thomsen. ‘But who’s going to pay for it may I ask?’

  ‘Farben,’ said Burckl. ‘The Vorstand has agreed.’

  At this I perked up somewhat.

  Seedig said, ‘You, my Kommandant, are asked only to provide inmates and guards. And overall security will of course remain in your hands. Farben will defray construction and running costs.’

  ‘Well now,’ I said. ‘A world-renowned concern with its own Konzentrationslager. Unerhort!’

  Burckl said, ‘We’ll also provide the food – independently. There’ll be no back-and-forth with KL1. And therefore no typhus. So we hope.’

  ‘Ah. Typhus. That’s the crux, nicht? Though the situation was eased, I rather fancy, by the substantial selection of August 29th.’

  ‘They’re still dying’, said Seedig, ‘at a rate of 1,000 a week.’

  ‘Mm. Look here. Are you planning to increase the rations?’

  Seedig and Burckl glanced sharply at one another. It was clear to me that they were in disagreement on this question. Burckl twisted in his chair and said,

  ‘Yes I would argue for a modest increase. Of, say, 20 per cent.’

  ‘20 per cent!’

  ‘Yes, sir, 20 per cent. They’ll have that much more strength and they’ll last a bit longer. Obviously.’

  Now Thomsen spoke. ‘With respect, Mr Burckl – your sphere is that of commerce, and Dr Seedig is an industrial chemist. The Kommandant and I can’t afford to be so purely practical. We dare not lose sight of our complementary objective. Our political objective.’

  ‘My thought exactly,’ I said. ‘And by the way. On this matter the Reichsfuhrer-SS and myself are of 1 accord.’ I smacked my palm down on the desktop. ‘We’ll not stand for any pampering!’

  ‘Amen, my Kommandant,’ said Thomsen. ‘This is not a sanatorium.’

  ‘No mollycoddling! What do they think this is? Some sort of rest home?’

  In the washroom of the Officers’ Club what do I find but a copy of Der Sturmer. Now this publication has for some time been banned in the KL, and on my orders. With its disgusting and hysterical emphasis on the carnal predations of the Jewish male, Der Sturmer, I believe, has done serious anti-Semitism a great deal of harm. The people need to see charts, diagrams, statistics, the scientific evidence – and not a full-page cartoon of Shylock (as it might be) slavering over Rapunzel. I am far from alone in this view. It is the policy championed by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt itself.

  In Dachau, where I launched my meteoric rise through the custodial hierarchy, a display case of Der Sturmers was erected in the prisoners’ canteen. It had a galvanising effect on the criminal element, and violence frequently ensued. Our Jewish brethren wormed their way out of it in typical fashion, with bribes – as they all had plenty of money. Besides, they were mainly persecuted by their co-religionists, notably Eschen, their Block Senior.

  The Jews were of course aware that over the long term this foul rag actually helped their cause rather than hindered it. I offer the following as a footnote: it is well known that the editor of Der Sturmer is himself a Jew; and he also writes the worst of the incendiary articles it features. I rest my case.

  Hannah smokes, you know. Oh, ja. Ah, yech. I found an empty packet of Davidoffs in the drawer where she keeps her underwear. If the servants talk it will soon get about that I can’t discipline my wife. Angelus Thomsen is an odd bird. He’s sound enough, I dare say, but there’s something impudent and embarrassing about his manner. I wonder if he is perhaps a homosexualist (albeit deeply repressed). Does he have even an honorary rank, or is everything reliant on his ‘connection’? Curious, because no one is more widely and thoroughly loathed than the Brown Eminence. (Reminder: the lorry, from now on, to follow the more roundabout route north of the Summer Huts.) It calms you down and it numbs the gums, but brandy also boasts a third property: that of an aphrodisiac.

  Ach, there’s nothing wrong with Hannah that the good old 15 centimetres won’t cure. When, after a final glass or 2 of Martell, I wend my way to the bedroom, she should be suitably prompt in the performance of her spousal duty. If I do encounter any nonsense, I will simply invoke that magic name: Dieter Kruger!

  For I am a normal man with normal needs.

  . . . I was halfway to the door when I was struck by an unpleasant thought. It so happens that I’ve not yet seen the balance sheet for Special Train 105. And I left the Little Brown Bower, that evening, without specifically telling Wolfram Prufer to bury the pieces in the Spring Meadow. Was he stupid enough to fire up a Topf & Sons 3-retorter to deal with a smattering of brats and dodderers? Surely not. No. No. Wiser heads would have prevailed. Prufer would have listened to 1 of the old hands. For example, Szmul.

  Oh, Christ, what am I going on about? If Horst Blobel meant what he said, then the whole bloody lot of them’ll all have to come up anyway.

  I see I’d better have a brood about this. I’ll sleep in the dressing room, as usual, and tackle Hannah in the morning. 1 of those 1s where you slip in beside them whilst they’re all warm and somnolent, and ease up against them and into them. I won’t stand for any hogwash. And then we’ll both be in excellent spirits for our little gathering here at the villa!

  For I am a normal man with normal needs. I am completely normal. This is what nobody seems to understand.

  Paul Doll is completely normal.

  3. SZMUL: SONDER

  Ihr seit achzen johr, we whisper, und ihr hott a fach.

  Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul – it showed you who you really were.

  The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to any citizen in this peaceful land who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.

  I find that the KZ is that mirror. The KZ is that mirror, but with one difference. You can’t turn away.

  We are of the Sonderkommando, the SK, the Special Squad, and we are the saddest men in the Lager. We are in fact the saddest men in the history of the world. And of all these very sad men I am the saddest. Which is demon
strably, even measurably true. I am by some distance the earliest number, the lowest number – the oldest number.

  As well as being the saddest men who ever lived, we are also the most disgusting. And yet our situation is paradoxical.

  It is difficult to see how we can be as disgusting as we unquestionably are when we do no harm.

  The case could be made that on balance we do a little good. Still, we are infinitely disgusting, and also infinitely sad.

  Nearly all our work is done among the dead, with the heavy scissors, the pliers and mallets, the buckets of petrol refuse, the ladles, the grinders.

  Yet we also move among the living. So we say, ‘Viens donc, petit marin. Accroches ton costume. Rappelles-toi le numéro. Tu as quatre-vingt-trois!’ And we say, ‘Faites un nœud avec les lacets, Monsieur. Je vais essayer de trouver un cintre pour votre manteau. Astrakhan! C’est toison d’agneau, n’est-ce pas?’

  After a major Aktion we typically receive a fifth of vodka or schnapps, five cigarettes, and a hundred grams of sausage made from bacon, veal, and pork suet. While we are not always sober, we are never hungry and we are never cold, at least not at night. We sleep in the room above the disused crematory (hard by the Monopoly Building), where the sacks of hair are cured.

  When he was still with us, my philosophical friend Adam used to say, We don’t even have the comfort of innocence. I didn’t and I don’t agree. I would still plead not guilty.

  A hero, of course, would escape and tell the world. But it is my feeling that the world has known for quite some time. How could it not, given the scale?

  There persist three reasons, or excuses, for going on living: first, to bear witness, and, second, to exact mortal vengeance. I am bearing witness; but the magic looking glass does not show me a killer. Or not yet.

  Third, and most crucially, we save a life (or prolong a life) at the rate of one per transport. Sometimes none, sometimes two – an average of one. And 0.01 per cent is not 0.00. They are invariably male youths.

  It has to be effected while they’re leaving the train; by the time the lines form for the selection – it’s already too late.

  *

  Ihr seit achzen johr alt, we whisper, und ihr hott a fach.

  Sie sind achtzehn Jahre alt, und Sie haben einen Handel.

  Vous avez dix-huit ans, et vous avez un commerce.

  You are eighteen years old, and you have a trade.

  CHAPTER II. TO BUSINESS

  1. THOMSEN: PROTECTORS

  BORIS ELTZ WAS going to tell me the story of Special Train 105, and I wanted to hear it, but first I asked him,

  ‘Who’ve you got on at the moment? Remind me.’

  ‘Uh, that cook in Bunatown and that barmaid in Katowitz. And I’m hoping to get somewhere with Alisz Seisser. The sergeant’s widow. He’s only been dead a week but she seems quite keen.’ Boris gave some background. ‘The trouble is she’s off home to Hamburg in a day or two. Golo, I’ve asked you this before. I like all kinds of women, so why do I only fancy the lower classes?’

  ‘I don’t know, brother. It’s not an unendearing trait. Now please. Sonderzug 105.’

  He folded his hands behind his nape and his lips slowly parted. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, with the French. Don’t you find, Golo? You can’t quite rid yourself of the idea that they lead the world. In refinement, in urbanity. A nation of proven funkers and toadies – but they’re still supposed to be better than anyone else. Better than us gross Germans. Better even than the English. And a part of you consents to it. The French – even now, when they’re completely crushed and squirming, you still can’t help yourself.’

  Boris shook his head, as if in ingenuous wonderment at humanity – at humanity and its crooked timber.

  ‘These things run deep,’ I said. ‘Continue, Boris, if you would.’

  ‘Well I found I was relieved, no, happy and proud that the ramp was looking its best. All swept and hosed. Nobody very drunk – it was too early. And such a pretty sunset. Even the smell had dropped. The passenger train pulls in, all festive. It could’ve come from Cannes or Biarritz. The people disembark unassisted. No whips, no truncheons. No cattle cars awash with God knows what. The Old Boozer gives his speech, I translate, and off we go. All so very civilised. Then along comes that fucking lorry. And the jig was up.’

  ‘Why? What was in it?’

  ‘Corpses. The daily berm of corpses. On its way from the Stammlager to the Spring Meadow.’

  He said that about a dozen of them half flopped out over the tailboard; he said that it made him imagine a crew of ghosts being sick over a ship’s side.

  ‘With their arms swinging. Not just any old corpses either. Starveling corpses. Covered in shit, and filth, and rags, and gore, and wounds, and boils. Smashed-up, forty-kilo corpses.’

  ‘Mm. Untoward.’

  ‘Hardly the height of sophistication,’ said Boris.

  ‘Is that when they wailed? We heard the wail.’

  ‘It was a sight to see.’

  ‘Mm. And a lot to uh, construe.’ I meant that it was not just a spectacle but also a narrative: it told a long story. ‘A fair bit to take in.’

  ‘Drogo Uhl thinks they never did. Take it in. But I think they just blushed for us – mortally blushed for us. For our . . . cochonneries. I mean, a lorry full of starved corpses. All a bit gauche and provincial, don’t you think?’

  ‘Possibly. Arguably.’

  ‘So insortable. You can’t take us anywhere.’

  Misleadingly undersized and misleadingly slight, Boris was a senior colonel in the Waffen-SS: the armed, the fighting, the battle SS. The Waffen-SS was supposed to be less straitened by hierarchy – more quixotic and spontaneous – than the Wehrmacht, with lively disagreements running up and down the chain of command. One of Boris’s disagreements with his superior, over tactics (this was in Voronezh), turned into a fistfight, from which the young major general emerged without a tooth in his head. That was why Boris was here – among the Austrians, as he often put it (and demoted to captain). He had nine more months to go.

  ‘What about the selection?’ I asked.

  ‘There was no selection. They were all certainties for the gas.’

  ‘. . . I’m thinking, What don’t we do to them? I suppose we don’t rape them.’

  ‘Much. Instead we do something much nastier than that. You ought to learn some respect for your new colleagues, Golo. Much, much nastier. We get the pretty ones and we do medical experiments on them. On their reproductive organs. We turn them into little old ladies. Then hunger turns them into little old men.’

  I said, ‘Would you agree that we couldn’t treat them any worse?’

  ‘Oh, come on. We don’t eat them.’

  For a moment I thought about this. ‘Yes, but they wouldn’t mind being eaten. Unless we ate them alive.’

  ‘No, what we do is make them eat each other. They mind that . . . Golo, who in Germany didn’t think the Jews needed taking down a peg? But this is fucking ridiculous, this is. And you know the worst thing about it? You know what really rots in my craw?’

  ‘I suspect I do, Boris.’

  ‘Yeah. How many divisions are we tying up? There are thousands of camps. Thousands. Man hours, train hours, police hours, fuel hours. And we’re killing our labour! What about the war?’

  ‘Exactly. What about the war.’

  ‘How does all this connect to that? . . . Oh, look at her, Golo. Her with the dark crewcut in the corner. That’s Esther. Have you ever seen anything a tenth as sweet in all your life?’

  *

  We were in Boris’s little ground-floor office, which commanded a wide and level view of Kalifornia. This Esther belonged to the Aufraumungskommando, the Clearance Detail, one of a rotating pool of two or three hundred girls who busied themselves in a shed-cluttered yard – a yard the size of a soccer field.

  Boris rose to his feet and stretched. ‘I came to her rescue. She was clawing up rubble in Monowitz. Then a cousin of hers sneaked her in here
. She got found out, of course – because she didn’t have any hair. They marked her down for the Scheissekommando. But I stepped in. It’s not that difficult. Here, you just rob Peter to bribe Paul.’

  ‘And for this she hates you.’

  ‘She hates me.’ Bitterly he shook his head. ‘Well I’ll give her something to hate me for.’

  He tapped with his fountain pen on the glass, and went on tapping till Esther looked up. She gave a great roll of the eyes and returned to her task (she was curiously engaged – squeezing out tubes of toothpaste into a cracked pitcher). Boris got up and opened the door and beckoned.

  ‘Miss Kubis. Take a postcard, if you would.’

  Fifteen years old, and Sephardic, I thought (the Levantine colouring), and finely and tautly made, and athletic, she somehow managed to trudge, to clump into the room; it was almost satirical, her leadenness of gait. Boris said,

  ‘Please be seated. I need your Czech and your girlish hand.’ He smiled and said, ‘Esther, why do you loathe me so?’

  She plucked at the sleeve of her shirt.

  ‘My uniform?’ He handed her the fine-pointed pencil. ‘Ready? Dear Mama colon. My friend Esther’s writing this for me . . . because I hurt my hand. So, Golo, a report if you please. While out gathering roses full stop. How’s the Valkyrie?’

  ‘I’ll be seeing her tonight. Or I certainly hope and trust I will. The Old Boozer is having a dinner for the Farben people.’

  ‘You know, she tends to cry off, I’ve heard. And it’ll be deadly if she isn’t there. How to describe life in the agricultural station question mark. You’re pleased, though, so far.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Thrilled. I even made a kind of verbal pass, and I gave her my address. I wish I hadn’t in a way, because I’m always thinking she’s about to knock on my door. You couldn’t say she leapt at it, no, but she heard me out.’