I followed the tracks for the death train from the Jewish platform, the Judenrampe. In the distance, barring the horizon, is the building that appears in every book, a long, low, red-brick building with a red-tiled roof and a watchtower in the middle, straddling the tracks. This is Auschwitz II, Konzentrationslager Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Past the entrance arch, barracks stretch out endlessly in serried ranks. On one side is the women’s camp, on the other, the men’s, and everywhere you look, watchtowers, barbed wire, electric fences. There can be no mistake that hell was once built here, not long ago: everything is still as it was, everything is ashes and solitude just as it once was. Here, in Birkenau, evil reached its apogee. To the east is Auschwitz-I, the wrought iron gate crowned with the famous motto: Arbeit macht frei. Work shall set you free. Inside, in what was once a high-security area, is the Krupp armaments factory, the DAW, the Deutschen Ausrüstungswerke factories, the SS Werkstätten—workstations, the general pharmacy and a number of hospital blocks known as the HKB, the Häftlings-Krankenbau for soldiers and Arbeiter. Three kilometres to the north is Auschwitz-III Monowitz. The great, grey complex of buildings you can glimpse through the mist was occupied by IG Farbenindustrie, which specialised in making Zyklon B, fertilisers and detergents. You have to imagine all these things: the buildings are no longer there, they were bombed in 1944 and later razed. You can still see the foundations. In the Buna-Werke, another complex which was bombed, synthetic rubber, essential to the Third Reich, was made. Ten thousand prisoners worked in gruelling shifts. I don’t believe a single one emerged alive, they knew too much, the secrets of production, they had had contact with military secrets far ahead of their time. The last Arbeiter were massacred during the chaos after the Soviet army marched into Poland and its units advanced on the camps at breakneck speed, trying to get there before everything was destroyed or removed.
I went into Birkenau and let myself be guided by instinct. I tried to forget everything I knew, I wanted to know what it felt like to step into this camp for the first time, knowing only its monstrous reputation. It was difficult, it was impossible, I knew too much, I had spent so much time studying this place, I could have moved around it with my eyes closed, the map was burned onto my brain. I could have moved around like a diligent soldier, anxious to get from A to B to execute his orders promptly. I could retrace his footsteps, walk boldly as he did, wrapped up in a thick greatcoat against the blizzard: bringing a wounded worker from the infirmary to his workstation; dragging some human wreck to Bunkers I and II, where French Jews were gassed; picking up the daily productivity reports from one of the four ultra-modern complexes — the famous K II, III, IV and V, marvels of extermination designed, they say, by Himmler himself, to function both as gas chambers and crematoria — and dashing back with it to the SS Administrative Building, allowing myself a quick visit to the Kapos’ brothel to see the new arrivals or, out of morbid curiosity, peeking through the window of the experimental clinic run by Carl Clauberg, or the one run by the sinister doctor Josef Mengele, the Frankenstein of monozygotic twins, swing by the laboratory where chemical engineers like my father — who, given he was a SS-Hauptsturmführer by then, was probably in charge — worked on their magic potions, their treatments for “lice”; everywhere in fact, except the baleful area of Block 11, where lunatics unlike any on earth experimented with tortures and methods of execution that were bizarre even in Auschwitz. I could just as easily move from the parade ground to where the prisoners assembled at dawn and lead a group to wherever they were assigned to do forced labour.
I’ve learned to follow my father in my mind: I could have wandered around the Lager as though I had grown up here. There is not a single detail of his working day I have not imagined. Papa was a methodical man, regular as a metronome, he spent his whole life obsessed with timing things. Our life in Aïn Deb was regulated by his watch. While my childhood friends needed only a ray of sunshine, a sudden whim to go from place to place, there I was, champing at the bit, watching the big hand on the house clock, waiting for my fifteen minutes of freedom.
I found myself standing in front of the K Complexes, my father had probably worked on the development of K IV, he may even have inaugurated it. Why that one in particular? The dates fit. My father was posted to Auschwitz-Birkenau between January and July 1943, work on the complexes began early in 1942 and was completed in late 1943. By the time he arrived here my guess is that the first two were already operational and the third was in the testing phase, the foundations were probably still being dug on K V. In fact, I knew this was true, I had read so many books, so many survivor accounts, I knew all there was to know. This is why I know that papa was working under the orders of the first Kommandant of Auschwitz, the sinister SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höß, who would later be arrested by the Allies in Bavaria living under an assumed name; he would be tried and sentenced to death by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in 1947 and hanged in front of one of the Kremas of his beloved Auschwitz. In the summer of 1943, when my father was taking up his new post in Buchenwald, Höß would be replaced by Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer. The first would be arrested and executed in ’48 with the creepy Kommandante of the women’s Lager in Birkenau, Maria Mandl and her deputy, “The Beautiful Beast” Irma Grese, whom papa probably flirted with between shifts. Richard Baer died in prison awaiting trial in 1963. Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, escaped via the Franciscan ratline in Italy, and took off first for the clear air of Perón’s Argentina then to Paraguay and Brazil to invest his part of the immense Mengele family fortune, live it up and die a natural death in 1979 at the age of 68 somewhere in Brazil, leaving behind him the myth of an Übermensch whom even death could not touch. When asked, “Why does your father not turn himself in?” in an interview in New York, Mengele’s son replied, “That has nothing to do with me, that’s his business.” If I’d been his son, I would have turned him in and would have demanded to testify at the trail as one of his victims.