There is another register, much more voluminous than the first; it’s an old book on whose title page, above the single red Cyrillic word, hangs an immense bar of darkness with white gratings, then spiderwebs surrounded by a cross. This book is as tall as a gravestone; its covers are cast out of lead; it takes six strong men to carry it. At Nuremberg the prosecution caused it to be brought into the courtroom as evidence against each of the major war criminals; the appearance of the defendant’s name on any one of its pages sufficed to ensure conviction, unless he was a rocket scientist. Once West Germany became a crucial Anglo-American ally in the Cold War, this volume was deposited in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and subsequently misshelved. This is why most of its inmates lived out prosperous postwar lives. In its pages have been been written forever the names of Captain Günther, Dr. Pfannenstiel (whose indictment got dismissed), Captain Wirth, Brigade Chief Globocnik, and ever so many others—my random gaze uncovers 
-Personalakte Hellmuth Becker, commander of the Death’s Head Division, who liked to rape Russian women in the streets.—But Gerstein’s name is not here, either.
What then is Gerstein? Wherein should he be inscribed?—
.
His story is as rare, and hence as shocking, as full-figure reliefs of the saints on otherwise featureless walls.
Now that story started to run in earnest, like rope hissing out from greased coils as the gallows-trap drops. He was falling; he was free to make something of himself between beginning and end. On the train from Warsaw to Berlin he met a Swedish attaché and told him what he had seen at Belzec, whispering in his ear all that hot and ghastly night. Soon he’d lapsed into the present tense: The people stand together on each other’s feet. Seven hundred, eight hundred people in an area of twenty-five square meters! At his side, Baron von Otter stood rigidly there in the corridor of the sleeping car, turning his face away from the blond man’s breath. It was pitch-dark in the General Government. Soon, thank God, they’d have passed through Radom Station, and then the Reich frontier would come; not long after that he could get away. He lit another cigarette. When he couldn’t bear to listen anymore, he kept politely nodding, his lips moving in what Gerstein must have assumed was a prayer for the dead Jews but which was actually nothing more than a list of all the names he remembered from a recent visit to a Romanian cemetery: Ecaterina, Eufrosina, Maria, Gelu, Andrei, Gheorghe, Nicu, Leni, Ionifia, Elena, Eleffenie, Melinte. Languages were his hobby. He meant to learn Romanian someday. For a Latinist, it surely wouldn’t be difficult. Elena, Eleffenie, Melinte. Then the light came on, glaring on all the naked blue bodies, and one of them was still moving; she stretched out her hands toward the window, so they turned the light back out and Eleffenie, Melinte. He wished to know how accurately Gerstein had counted these alleged victims. The blond man choked out: My stopwatch has registered everything faithfully. Fifty minutes seventy seconds—the engine still has not started! The people are waiting in their gas chamber. You can hear them crying, sobbing…—In short, he’d fallen prey to the dangerous capability of the Untermensch to mask itself behind a human face (his sister-in-law’s, for instance), and thereby excite pity.
Baron von Otter sent a report to his government, but this report must have been stamped 
, for it remained unpublished until three months after the war’s end.
As for Gerstein, he opened the New Testament and read: Leave the dead to bury the dead. Then horror came upon him like a sickness.
It’s natural to believe, or want to believe, since inertia is self-preservation, that once we have opened the vault, the dark grey file, and read some stupefying secret, we’ve learned the secret, in which all others, if in fact there are any others, must be contained; hence we need not go to the dangerous trouble of digging anything else up. The allurements of ease, which kept most Germans from doing what Gerstein tried to do, encourage us to say: In any event, I’ve done my duty now. The rest is up to others.
Ever since he was a child, he’d been afflicted by what his father called evil thoughts, meaning an introspection of the melancholy, isolating sort. If only he had not had those thoughts! Then he would not have been obliged to cause himself and others so much pain…
The working capacity of Belzec was fifteen thousand murders per day. That meant (he made the calculation on a sheet of stationery of the Deutsche Gesandtschaft Budapest, with the Nazi eagle on it; then he tore the page into pieces and burned it) four hundred and fifty thousand Jews gassed every month, or five and a half million Jews per year, under ideal conditions of course. This was shocking enough that on that first time at Belzec when the bright light came on in the chamber, he thought that he knew the worst. But the next day, after parting from Captain Günther at Lemberg with a loud Heil Hitler! (Captain Günther was required on secret business, in a place called Chelmno), the blond man found himself riding in a French-made lorry beside his intimate friend Dr. Pfannenstiel, Captain Wirth at the wheel, to a second extermination camp, called Treblinka, whose eight gas chambers could kill twenty-five thousand Jews per day; and in due course Gerstein’s various liaison and inspection duties would bring him to the virgin facility of Maidanek, whose greenish barracks could devour only two thousand Jews per day, but the place produced luscious cabbages which were manured with the snow-white ashes of Jews; and Captain Günther had mentioned Chelmno, while Captain Wirth with a wink admitted to him knowledge of Sobibor (capacity: twenty thousand per day), where German engineers had invented a special mill for grinding Jews’ bones to powder. As the Scripture says, my house has many mansions.
The joke at Sobibor (Gerstein was really going to split his sides at this one, Captain Wirth promised) was that our very first gassing there—forty-odd screaming naked Jewesses; you should have seen how they…—was accomplished by means of a two-hundred-horsepower petrol engine of Russian manufacture! If only those Bolshevist kikes could see how we used their technology!—Dr. Pfannenstiel was the one who laughed; Dr. Pfannenstiel was the one who remarked that Captain Wirth’s point, namely, the ironic justice of our appropriation of captured matériel, would make for an excellent column in Signal magazine. Too bad that it was !
Gerstein, mechanically smiling, a smile which hid the missing three teeth, had just worked out the total for these facilities: more than twenty-two million Jews per year, excluding Chelmno and ignoring human or mechanical failures—how many Jews were there in Europe? Did he dare ask Dr. Pfannenstiel? How many Jews remained above the ground in Europe? How many were there in the entire world? What if his estimates were faulty? Suppose that in fact no more than, for example, two million Jews per year were put to death? And how many other camps might there be? Two million, five million or twenty-two million—he was a mining engineer. He could comprehend large figures.
At Treblinka the held a banquet for them, and after a Sieg Heil! for our Führer and a hearty if not entirely tuneful singing of “Deutschland über Alles,” Dr. Pfannenstiel, flushed with Polish wine, rose to give an impromptu speech which concluded: When one sees the bodies of these Jews, one understands the greatness of the work you’re doing!—Gerstein laughed in a great shout, raising his goblet for the toast. Dr. Pfannenstiel sat down. It was late afternoon. From outside came women’s screams in a quick-ceasing chorus; was that an action, a general action, or a total action? Dr. Pfannenstiel refilled Gerstein’s glass with a little bow. Gerstein thanked him.—I like you, you blue-eyed Goth! chuckled his colleague; so wide a chuckle it was that Gerstein could see down his throat.—Then Captain Wirth beckoned.