He dreamed that he was digging in the earth, and turned up a golden skull with rubies for eyes—a death’s head both beautiful and terrifying, like the uniform he wore; as he awoke he had a dissolving vision of holding the skull up to the sunlight.
Prague called him once again on the telephone; he took the express. “Clever Hans” Günther was waiting at the office.
More secret business for you, Gerstein. Most secret.
By your order, Herr Captain.
Take this suitcase to Herr Lang at the Reichsbank and tell him that this is from me. You’re not to ask for a receipt. Do you understand?
It’s all clear, thank you, Herr Captain.
Gerstein, I’m very pleased with your work. You’re an outstanding young man. That’s all. Heil Hitler!
Heil Hitler!
What a heavy suitcase! He knew all too well what was in it; Clever Hans’s trust in him was now proven. He sat gazing out the window of the Berlin Express, watching the summer scenery. Hour upon hour the other passengers in his compartment sat in silence, too terrified to look at him. An old woman coughed. Flicking a fingernail across the death’s head on his cap, Gerstein turned slowly toward her, fixing a stony expression on his face. The woman lowered her head. Then the conductor came. Gerstein thrust out his ticket, staring the man down. He lit a cigarette. Now came the long tall facade of the Reichsbank, with its swastika banners and its five rows of rectangular window-pits which resembled the slits from which the defenders of medieval castles used to discharge their arrows. Herr Lang was expecting him. Together they weighed the gold: twenty-two kilos. To Gerstein there was something terribly unclean about that brownish-yellow mass: was it the fact that it came from dead peoples’ mouths, or did its Jewishness defile it? This is one of the most secret matters. He closed his eyes, turned out the gas chamber’s light.
Are you unwell, Herr Obersturmführer?
No, I was just trying to calculate how many Reichsmarks it comes to.
Quite so. Well, in round numbers…
A month later he was summoned back to Prague, to receive another suitcase. He had two hours before his train. (There went his colleagues, marching in a light as straight and grand as the Doric columns of Schinkel’s Neue Wache.) This time his footsteps guided him to an antique store’s ticking clock, bare-breasted porcelains, fake pearl necklaces and dead women’s black gowns. Something for his wife… He allowed himself to imagine how Christian’s face would have lit up had he dropped around his neck that eighteenth-century Cross of the Order of the White Eagle which Captain Wirth had forced on him; boys always love militaria, and this was an eight-pointed star of gold, garnished with silver and diamonds! Actually, what he should have done was to sell it and feed his family. Instead, he buried it in the Polish earth, praying softly for its former owner, the grey-green trees going ethereal beyond his tears as they would have done in any rain. Rain of blood, rain of steel, rain on the rich green grass of Auschwitz! Tears and prayers are both supposed to refresh one’s soul.
Like Himmler, he now secreted a cyanide capsule on his person; I believe he kept it beneath the signet stone of his ring. Just as in the beech forests of Lower Saxony, the shadows of converging autumn-bare trunks project like guns into the darkness they’re made of, so his own thoughts led him deeper and deeper into despairing confusion: Here comes Kurt Gerstein, who since his adolescence has always rejected the impurity of this earthly existence, inspecting another extermination camp! One is tempted to dismiss Gerstein as a romancer, writes the historian-ethicist Michael Balfour. He must have realized that his actions were having no result.
He compelled himself to witness everything now; maniacally he counted strands in the barbed wire of a transit ghetto: another footnote in his not yet written affidavit. He stood over the dark huddle of Polish Jews who sat in the marketplace of their town; they were waiting for the 
and police who ringed them round to escort them to death. While his colleagues guarded them, Gerstein counted them: seven hundred and twenty-four more crimes for his affidavit. And then—because his pass, stamped by Eichmann’s office, allowed him to come and go almost at will—he went with the trucks, to see where the mass graves were. He was present, trying to laugh with his comrades, when they stripped the Jews naked, beat them and shot them. An old man, needing to relieve himself, squatted down in the bushes and got overlooked by his murderers. Gerstein whispered in his ear, urging him to hide in the forest.— No, thank you, Herr Obersturmführer, the Jew said coldly, in perfect German. I prefer the company of my wife and children.—And then he pulled up his pants and joined the next batch of lean, yellow-faced Russian Jews with upraised hands, bearded, kneeling, while the Order Police stood smiling easily, posing for pictures beside their bagged quarry. They were so at ease that they could have been Sunday equestrians in the Tiergarten. In the town, the churchbell under its cross-roofed platform stayed silent, dangling between massive wooden legs.
Evening, and he strolled around the grounds of the old palace. By seven it began to grow cool, and the fountains were delightful. A mosquito bit his neck. Beneath the honeysuckled arch, the ticket girl chain-smoked cigarettes, launching quips at all the German officers. Then came Berthe, simultaneous with the pure, rather thin bell-tones of seven. He remembered a passage out of Tristan which he had helped explicate for Handsome Heini: Whoever gazes into Isolde’s eyes feels both heart and soul refined like gold in the white-hot flame— the flame of the crematorium, of course.
She took each of his fingers in turn into her hand, reminding him of his arrest back in ’36, when they’d made him “play the piano,” which means to be fingerprinted. The Storm Troopers had been gentle with him then, because he was no Jew and because he could sing.
He said: Do you remember how you told me to go down the dark way?
Of course. And I know what wrings your heart now. It’s long, isn’t it, this dark way? And you’re losing heart, aren’t you?
Never, he whispered.
Look at your hands, crooned the dead woman. They’re so soft and white. There’s no blood on them.
Thank you, Berthe. Thank you for saying that…
He kissed her Jewish-looking eyes. Then she led him into the church. The sacristan came trembling forward.
Open the crypt at once! ordered -Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein. Now leave me. Wait outside.
Shiny black marble steles, old white granite tombs, wooden crosses, a rusty iron box with a cross on it, that was the place where Berthe had led him. Do you want to know how to get through life? At the base of a wooden cross, burn a candle.
And now, a note for those of you who consider this a vulgarly supernatural tale: It may well be that ambitious people of any stripe find themselves compelled to schematize the subjects of their solicitude into, say, Jews to be liquidated, or Jews to be saved. There might not be time to learn the name of every Esther or Isaac who falls within Operation Reinhard’s purview. And the further those subjects (I mean objects) get altered in accordance with the purpose, the more problematic it becomes to perceive their irrelevantly human qualities. I quote the testimony of Michal Chilczuk, Polish People’s Army (he’d participated in the liberation of Sachsenhausen): But what I saw were people I call humans, but it was difficult to grasp that they were humans. What did Chilczuk mean by this? To put it aphoristically, a human skeleton is not human. It frightens us because it proves the truth of that gravestone epitaph so common in the age of Holbein: What I once was, so you are. What I am now, so you will be. The gaze of those dark, sharp-edged eye-sockets seems implacable, and the many teeth, which haunted Edgar Allan Poe, snarl much too nakedly, bereft of those festive pink ribbons of flesh we call “lips,” whose convolutions and involutions can express mirth, friendliness, even tenderness. A human skull’s smile is as menacing as a crocodile’s. Since death itself is nothing, the best our minds can do to represent it is through that expressionless face of bone which one day will be ours, and to which we cannot help imparting an expression. Under such circumstances, how can that expression be reassuring? This is why