by Martin Amis
‘Courier from Berlin, sir.’
‘Put it there, Humilia. Lean it on the toast rack. And more Darjeeling.’
Coolly I progressed with my yogurt, my cheese, my salami . . .
A void surrounded the incarcerationary career of Dieter Kruger. You look at the sun for an instant too long – and your point of focus, for a while, is a pulsing blur. Hannah’s lover had been hiding behind that glutinous throb. Until now.
I reached for the sharp white envelope: my name in Indian ink; the gilt crest of the Chancellery. With steady hands I lit a cheroot and reached for a knife; I cut the letter’s throat and readied myself to contemplate the status and whereabouts of friend Kruger. This is what it said:
Lieber SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Doll:
Dieter Kruger. Leipzig, 12 Januar 1934. Auf der Flucht erschossen.
Mit freundlichen Empfehlungen,
M.B.
. . . Shot whilst trying to escape!
Shot whilst trying to escape: a form of words, covering a large variety of destinies. Shot whilst trying to escape. Alternatively, to put it another way, shot. Alternatively, to put it yet another way, kicked or lashed or clubbed or strangled or starved or frozen or tortured to death. But dead.
There are only 2 possible explanations. Either Angelus Thomsen was himself misinformed, or else, for reasons of his own, he misinformed Hannah. And yet – why ever would he do that?
The last heroic fighters in Stalingrad, intoned my faithful Volksempfanger, raised their hands for perhaps the last time in their lives to sing the national anthems. What an example German warriors have set in this great age! The heroic sacrifice of our men in Stalingrad was not in vain. And the future will show us why . . .
Time: 07.43. Place: my somewhat cluttered study. I was listening to a recording of the Minister of Enlightenment’s seminal address, delivered at the Sportpalast on February 18. It was a long speech anyway, and considerably protracted by bursts of the stormiest applause. During one of the more extended ovations I had time to read and reread a fine editorial in a recent copy of the Volkischer Beobachter. Its conclusion? They died so that Germany might live. As for the minister, he ended his peroration with a call for total war: People, rise up! And storm, break loose!
When the whistling and stomping eventually died down I hurried to the Officers’ Clubroom, feeling the need for solidarity and comradeship in this testing hour. There I found a like-minded Mobius, who was enjoying a morning drink.
I filled my glass and searched for something to say – something that would answer to the seemly gravity of our mood.
‘Ah, Untersturmfuhrer,’ I said gently. ‘Greater love hath no man than him who . . .’
‘Than him who what?’
‘Who lays down his life for—’
‘Blutige Holle, Paul, where do you get your information? From the Volksempfanger? They didn’t lay down their lives. They surrendered.’
‘Kapitulation? Unmoglich!’
‘That’s 150,000 dead and 100,000 captive. Have you any idea what the enemy’s going to do with this?’
‘. . . Propaganda?’
‘Yes. Propaganda. For God’s sake, Paul, get a grip.’ He weightily exhaled. ‘In London they’re already smelting the so-called Sword of Stalingrad – “by order of the king”. Churchill will personally present it to “Stalin the Mighty” at their next summit. And that’s just for openers.’
‘Mm, might look a bit . . . Ah, but the Generalfeldmarschall, Untersturmfuhrer. Friedrich Paulus. Like the true warrior he was, like the Roman, he took the—’
‘Oh verpiss dich, like hell he did. He’s hobnobbing in Moscow.’
That night I returned to the villa with a heavy heart. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I had been deceived – betrayed, at least in thought, by she whom I believed would always remain at my side . . . It was Thomsen. It was Thomsen who made her Busen swell. It was Thomsen who made her Saften stir. But I’m not supposed to know about that, am I.
I gave the door a push. Hannah was lying athwart the bed, and on the enemy radio, in impeccable high German, a voice was saying, Now the civilised nations of the world are fully arrayed against the fascist beast. Its maniacal infamies can no longer skulk behind the fog and mist, the foul breath, of a murderous war. Soon the—
‘Who is this speaking?’
‘Paulus,’ said Hannah gaily.
I felt fiery whispers in my armpits. I said, ‘Kruger. He’s dead.’
‘Mm. So I was told.’
‘Then why, may I ask, are you so radiant?’
‘Because the war is lost.’
‘. . . Hannah, you have just committed a crime. A crime for which’, I said, examining my fingernails (and noticing they were in need of a scrub), ‘a crime for which we are entitled to exact the supreme penalty.’
‘Doubting victory. Tell me, Pilli. Do you doubt victory?’
I drew myself up to my full height, saying, ‘Whilst clear hegemony may elude us, there’s no possibility of defeat. It’s called an armistice, Hannah. A truce. We shall simply apply for terms.’
‘Oh no we won’t. You should listen to the enemy radio, Pilli. The Alliance will only accept unconditional surrender.’
‘Unerhort!’
She lay back, on her side, in the significant Unterrock. Her brown and glowing Uberschenkeln – like those of a giantess. ‘What’ll they do with you,’ she asked, turning over and presenting me with the cleft hillock of her Hinterteil, ‘when they see what you’ve done?’
‘Hah. War crimes?’
‘No. Crimes. Just crimes. I haven’t noticed any war.’ She turned and smiled over her shoulder. ‘I suppose they’ll just string you up. Nicht? Nicht? Nicht?’
I said, ‘And you’ll be free.’
‘Yes. You’ll be dead and I’ll be free.’
Of course, I didn’t deign to tender a riposte. My thoughts had turned to something more interesting – the kreative Vernichtung of Sonderkommandofuhrer Szmul.
3. SZMUL: THE TIME OF THE SILENT BOYS
I’ll be thirty-five in September. That declarative sentence attempts very little, I know – but it contains two errors of fact. In September I’ll still be thirty-four. And I’ll be dead.
At every sunrise I tell myself, ‘Well. Not tonight.’ At every sunset I tell myself, ‘Well. Not today.’
It transpires that there’s something childish about the contingent life. To exist hour by hour is childish, somehow.
How amazing it is to say it: I cannot defend myself against the charge of frivolity. It is frivolous, it is silly, to persist in a fool’s paradise, let alone a fool’s inferno.
A bewildered lull settles on the Lager after the German defeat in the east. It is like an attack – and again I admit to bathos – of mortal embarrassment. They see the size of their gamble on victory: the fantastic crimes legalised by the state, they finally understand, are still illegal elsewhere. This mood lasts for five or six days, and is now no more than a relatively pleasant memory.
There are selections everywhere – on the ramp, of course, and in the Ka Be, of course, but also in the blocks, also at roll call, and also at the gate. At the gate: the work Kommandos face selections sometimes twice a day, on the way out and on the way back in. Men the shape of gnawed wishbones – the shape of wishbones gnawed and sucked – swell out their chests and move at a jog.
The Germans cannot win the war against the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs. But there will probably be time for them to win the war against the Jews.
Doll is different, now, on the ramp. An effort has been made. He looks less slovenly, and he’s not nearly so obviously drunk or hungover (or both). His diction – this is strange – has become more confident and also more flowery. He is still very mad, in my view, and necessarily so. What can they do but turn up the dial of insanity? Doll is reconvinced; he has communed with his deepest self and discovered that, yes, murdering all the Jews is the right thing to do.
The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord �
�� death of the soul. But the Germans have suffered it too; I know this; it could not possibly be otherwise.
I am no longer afraid of death, though I am still afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying because it is going to hurt. That’s all there is attaching me to life: the fact that leaving it is going to hurt. It’ll hurt.
Experience tells me that dying never lasts less than about sixty seconds. Even when it’s the shot to the back of the neck, and you go down like a marionette whose strings have been snipped – the actual dying never lasts less than about sixty seconds.
And I am still afraid of that minute of murder.
When Doll next comes to see me I am in the morgue, supervising the barber Kommando and the oral Kommando. The men in the barber Kommando work with shears; the men in the oral Kommando work with a chisel or a small but heavy hammer in one hand and, to control the jaws, a blunt hook in the other. On a bench in the corner the SS dentist licks his lips in his sleep.
‘Sonderkommandofuhrer. Come here.’
‘Sir.’
With his Luger drawn but not raised (as if the weight of it keeps his right hand at his side), Doll has me precede him into the stockroom containing the hoses and the brooms, the brushes and the bleach.
‘I want you to put a date in your diary.’
*
There is a length of wurst in front of you, and you eat it, and then it’s behind you. There is a fifth of schnapps in front of you, and you drink it, and then it’s behind you. There is warm bedding in front of you, and you sleep in it, and then it’s behind you. There is a day or a night ahead of you, and then it’s behind you.
I used to have the greatest respect for nightmares – for their intelligence and artistry. Now I think nightmares are pathetic. They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day – and they’ve stopped trying. Now I just dream about cleanliness and food.
‘. . . April the thirtieth. Make a mental note of it, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Walpurgisnacht.’
It is now March 10. I feel as though I have been granted eternal life.
‘Where?’ he goes on. ‘The Little Brown Bower? The Wall of Tears? And what time? Ten hundred hours? Fourteen hundred? And by what means? . . . You look oppressed, Sonder, by all these choices.’
‘Sir.’
‘Why don’t you simply repose your trust in me?’
These men, the Death’s Head SS, were probably once very ordinary, ninety per cent of them. Ordinary, mundane, banal, commonplace – normal. They were once very ordinary. But they are ordinary no longer.
‘You’re not getting off that lightly, Sonder. You’ll have to do me a service before you say goodbye. Don’t worry. Leave everything to the Kommandant.’
That day in Chełmno it was deafeningly cold. And perhaps that’s all it is, that’s all it means – the time of the silent boys.
But no. The wind was rushing through the trees, and you could hear that. From five in the morning to five in the evening the German power used whips, and you could hear that. The three gassing vans kept coming down from the Schlosslager and unloading at the Waldlager, and then firing up again, and you could hear that.
On January 21, 1942, the numbers were so great that the SS and the Orpo selected another hundred Jews to help the Sonders drag the bodies to the mass grave. This supplementary Kommando consisted of teenage boys. They were given no food or water, and they worked for twelve hours under the lash, naked in the snow and the petrified mud.
When the light was thinning Major Lange led the boys to the pits and shot them one by one – and you could hear that. Towards the end he ran out of ammunition and used the butt of his pistol on their skulls. And you could hear that. But the boys, jockeying and jostling to be next in line, didn’t make a sound.
And after that, this.
‘She has black hair, your wife, with a white stripe down the middle. Like a skunk. Nicht?’
I shrug.
‘She is gainfully employed, your Shulamith. A skilled seamstress, she adorns Wehrmacht uniforms with swastikas. In Factory 104. At night she repairs to the attic above the bakery on Tlomackie Street. Not so, Sonder?’
I shrug.
‘She will be taken on May the first. A good date, that, Sonder – the third anniversary of the sealing’, he says, with his furry upper teeth on view, ‘of the Jewish slum. She will be taken on May the first and she will wend her way here. Are you impatient to see your Shulamith?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well I’ll spare you. Soppy old fool that I am. I’ll have her killed that day in Łódź. May one. It will happen unless I countermand my order that morning. Understood?’
I say, ‘Sir.’
‘Tell me. Were you happy with your Shulamith? Was it a love whose month was ever May?’
I shrug.
‘Mm, I suppose you’d have to explain why, in her absence, you’ve rather gone downhill. Let yourself go a bit. Ach, there’s nothing worse than the contempt of a woman. Your one, Shulamith, she’s a big girl, isn’t she. Did Shulamith like you fucking her, Sonder?’
August 31, 1939, was a Thursday.
I walked home from school with my sons, in flawless and not quite serious sunshine. Then the family had a supper of chicken soup and brown bread. Friends and relatives looked in briefly, and everyone was asking the question, Had we mobilised too late? There was an atmosphere of great anxiety and even dread, but also feelings of solidarity and resilience (after all, we were the nation that, nineteen years earlier, had defeated the Red Army). There was also a long game of chess and the usual small talk, the usual smiles and glances, and that night in bed I defiantly embraced my wife. Six days later the flattened city was full of rotting horses.
When I went on that first transport, to Deutschland supposedly, expecting to find paid work, I took my sons with me – Chaim, fifteen, Schol, sixteen, both of them tall and broad like their mother.
They were among the silent boys.
And after all that, all this.
‘Fret not, Sonder. I’ll tell you who to kill.’
CHAPTER V. DEAD AND ALIVE
1. THOMSEN: PRIORITIES IN THE REICH
‘NO, I LOVE it here, Tantchen – it’s like a holiday from reality.’
‘Just plain old family life.’
‘Quite.’
There was Adolf, twelve (named after his godfather), Rudi, nine (named after his godfather, ex-Deputy Leader Rudolf Hess), and Heinie, seven (named after his godfather, Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler). There were also three daughters, Ilse (eleven), Irmgard (four), and Eva (two), and another boy, Hartmut (one). And Frau Bormann, that Christmas, had special news to announce: she was pregnant.
‘Which will make eight, Tante,’ I said as I followed her into the kitchen – the bare pine, the dressers, the kaleidoscopic crockery. ‘Are you going to have any more?’
‘Well I need ten. Then they give you the best medal. Anyway it’ll make nine, not eight. I’ve already got eight. There was Ehrengard.’
‘Indeed there was.’ I went on boldly (Gerda being Gerda), ‘Sorry, old thing, but does Ehrengard count? Can I help with that?’
‘Oh yes.’ With gloved hands and quivering forearms Gerda hoisted a tureen the size of a bidet from oven to hob. ‘Oh yes, the dead ones count. They don’t have to be alive. When Hartmut was born and I applied for the gold Mutterkreuz – what were they going to say? No gold Mutterkreuz for you. One of them died so you’ve only got seven?’
I stretched in my chair and said, ‘Now I remember. When you moved from silver to gold, Tantchen. With Hartmut. It was a proud day. Here, can I do anything?’
‘Stop being ridiculous, Neffe. Stay where you are. A nice glass of – what’s this? – Trockenbeerenauslese. There. Have a rollmop. What are you giving them?’
‘The children? Cold cash as usual. Strictly calibrated by age.’
‘You always give them too much, Neffe. It goes to their heads.’
‘. . . I was thinking, dear, th
at there might be a slight difficulty if your tenth is a boy,’ I said (such babies were automatically called Adolf, and assigned the same godfather). ‘You’ll have two Adolfs.’
‘That’s all right. We’re already calling Adolf Kronzi. In case.’
‘Very wise. By the way I’m sorry I called Rudi Rudi. I mean I’m sorry I called Helmut Rudi.’
Rudi’s name was changed, by court order, after Rudolf Hess, the noted mesmerist and clairvoyant (and number three in the Reich), flew alone to Scotland in May 1941, hoping to negotiate a truce with somebody he’d vaguely heard of called the Duke of Hamilton.
‘Don’t apologise,’ said Gerda. ‘I call Rudi Rudi all the time. Call Helmut Rudi, I mean. Oh and remember. Don’t call Ilse Ilse. Ilse’s now called Eike. Named for Frau Hess, so Ilse’s now Eike.’
While she laid a table for seven and readied two highchairs Aunt Gerda told anecdotes about various members of her domestic staff – the (scatter-brained) governess, the (shifty) gardener, the (sluttish) housemaid, and the (thieving) nanny. Then she went still and grew thoughtful.
‘They don’t have to be alive,’ she said. ‘The dead ones count.’
Meanwhile, Gerda’s husband, the Director of the Party Chancellery, the mastermind of the Wilhelmstrasse, was on his way to join us here at the old family home at Pullach in southern Bavaria. And where was he coming from? From the mountain retreat at the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian alps – from the official residence known as Berchtesgaden, or the Berghof, or the Kehlsteinhaus. Bards and dreamers called it the Eagle’s Nest . . .
With sudden indignation Gerda said, ‘Of course they count. Especially these days. Nobody would ever get to ten if they didn’t.’ She laughed scoffingly. ‘Of course the dead ones count.’