And what, then, is there to say about Obersturmbannführer Eichmann? For as long as I had known him, he had never taken so readily to his role. When he received the Jews, he was the Übermensch from head to foot, he took off his glasses, spoke to them in a brittle, choppy, but polite voice, he had them sit down and called them “meine Herren,” he called Dr. Stern “Herr Hofrat,” and then he would burst into obscenities, deliberately, to shock them, before returning to that icy politeness that seemed to hypnotize them. He was also extremely gifted with the Hungarian authorities, at once friendly and polite, he impressed them and also he had formed solid friendships with some of them, especially Lászlo Endre, who showed him in Budapest a social life till then unknown to him and which ended up dazzling him, inviting him to castles, introducing him to countesses. All this, the fact that everybody merrily let themselves get caught up in the game, Jews and Hungarians, might explain why Eichmann too lapsed into hubris (but never with the stupidity of a Hunsche) and ended up believing he really was der Meister, the Master. He took himself in fact for a condottiere, a von dem Bach-Zelewski, he forgot his deepest nature, that of a bureaucrat of talent, even of great talent in his limited field. Yet as soon as you saw him one-on-one, in his office, or in the evening, if he had had a little to drink, he became the old Eichmann again, the one who scuttled about the offices of the Staatspolizei, respectful, busy, impressed by the slightest stripe superior to his own and at the same time devoured by envy and ambition, the Eichmann who had himself covered, in writing, for each action and each decision, by Müller or Heydrich or Kaltenbrunner, and who kept all these orders in a safe, carefully arranged, the Eichmann who would have been just as happy—and no less efficient—buying and transporting horses or trucks, if that had been his task, as concentrating and evacuating tens of thousands of human beings destined to die. When I came to talk with him about the Arbeitseinsatz, in private, he listened to me, sitting behind his fine desk, in his luxurious room in the Majestic Hotel, with a bored, irritated look, playing with his glasses or with a mechanical pencil he kept pressing, going click-clack, click-clack, compulsively, and before replying, he would rearrange his documents covered with notes and little doodles, blow the dust off his desk, then, scratching his already balding skull, launch into one of his long replies, so muddled that he himself would soon get lost in it. In the beginning, when the Einsatz was finally truly under way, after the Hungarians, around the end of April, had given their consent for the evacuations, he was almost euphoric, seething with energy; at the same time, and even more when the problems piled up, he became more and more difficult, intransigent, even with me, whom he rather liked, he began to see enemies everywhere. Winkelmann, who was his superior only on paper, didn’t like him at all, but in my opinion it was still this severe, gruff policeman, with the innate common sense of an Austrian peasant, who judged him the best. Eichmann’s haughty demeanor, verging on impertinence, drove him into a fury, but he saw right through him: “He has the mentality of a subaltern,” he explained to me when I came to see him once, to ask if he could intervene or at least use his influence to improve the very bad transport conditions of the Jews. “He uses his authority unreservedly, he doesn’t know any moral or mental restraints on the exercise of his power. Nor does he have the slightest scruple about exceeding the limits of his authority, if he believes he’s acting in the spirit of the person giving him his orders and protecting him, as Gruppenführer Müller and Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner do.” That is probably quite right, all the more so since Winkelmann didn’t deny Eichmann’s abilities. Eichmann, at the time, was no longer living at the hotel, but was occupying the beautiful villa of a Jew on Apostol Street, on the Rosenberg, a house with two stories and a tower overlooking the Danube, surrounded by a superb orchard unfortunately disfigured by the trenches dug for the air-raid shelter. He was living it up and spending most of his time with his new Hungarian friends. The evacuations were already well under way, zone by zone according to a very strict plan, and complaints were flowing in from everywhere, from the Jägerstab, from Speer’s offices, from Saur himself, they were flying every which way, at Himmler, Pohl, Kaltenbrunner, but in the end everything came back to me, and indeed, it was a catastrophe, a real scandal, the work-sites were receiving only skinny young girls or men already half dead, whereas they were hoping for an influx of healthy, solid, strapping fellows well used to work, they were outraged, no one understood what was happening. Part of the fault, I’ve already explained, was the Honvéd’s, which despite all our remonstrances jealously kept its labor battalions. But among those who remained there were still some men, who not long before had been living a normal life, eating their fill, they must have been in good health. But it turned out that the conditions of the concentration points, where the Jews sometimes had to wait for days or weeks, barely fed, before being transported, crammed into overloaded cattle cars, without water, without food, with one slop pail per car, these conditions were exhausting their strength, illnesses were spreading, many people died on the way, and those who arrived looked awful, few passed selection, and even these were turned down or else rapidly returned by the factories and work sites, especially the ones run by the Jägerstab, who howled that they were being sent girls incapable of lifting a pickaxe. When I transmitted these complaints to Eichmann, as I’ve said, he rejected them curtly, stating that it wasn’t his responsibility, that only the Hungarians could change anything in these conditions. So I went to see Major Baky, the Secretary of State in charge of the Gendarmerie; Baky swept aside my complaints with a single sentence, “Just take them more quickly,” and sent me to Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenczy, the officer in charge of the technical management of the evacuations, a bitter, closed man, who talked to me for more than an hour to explain that he would be delighted to feed the Jews better, if he were provided with food, and to pack the cars less, if he were sent more trains, but that his main mission consisted of evacuating them, not coddling them. With Wisliceny, I went to one of these “collection points,” I forget where, in the region of Kaschau maybe: it was a depressing sight, the Jews were parked by whole families into an open-air brickworks, under the spring rain, children in shorts were playing in the puddles of water, the adults, apathetic, sat on their suitcases or paced up and down. I was struck by the contrast between these Jews and the ones, the only ones I had really known till then, from Galicia and the Ukraine; these were well-educated people, often middle-class, and even the craftsmen and the farmers, quite numerous, had a proper and dignified bearing, the children were washed, combed, well dressed in spite of the conditions, sometimes wearing the green national costume, with black frogging and little caps. All that made the scene even more oppressive, despite their yellow stars, they could have been German or at least Czech villagers, and it gave me sinister thoughts, I imagined those neat, tidy boys or those young women with their discreet charm being gassed—thoughts that turned my stomach, but there was nothing to be done, I looked at the pregnant women and imagined them in the gas chambers, their hands on their rounded bellies, I wondered with horror what happened to the fetus of a gassed woman, if it died right away with its mother or else survived a little, imprisoned in its dead cocoon, its suffocating paradise, and from that thought memories of the Ukraine flowed in, and for the first time in a long time I wanted to vomit, vomit my powerlessness, my sadness, my useless life. By chance I ran into Dr. Grell there, a Legationsrat appointed by Feine to identify foreign Jews arrested by mistake by the Hungarian police, especially those from allied or neutral countries, and to remove them from the transit centers so that they could eventually be sent back to their own countries. This poor Grell, a wounded veteran of the Great War disfigured by a head wound and horrible burns that terrified the children, who ran away screaming when they saw him, waded through the mud from one group to the other, his hat dripping water, politely asking if there were any holders of foreign passports, examining their papers, ordering the Hungarian gendarmes to take some of them aside. Eichmann and his colleagues hated him, accused him of indulgence, of lack of discernment, and it was true, too, that many Hungarian Jews, for a few thousand pengö, bought foreign passports, Romanian ones especially, the easiest to get, but Grell was just doing his job, it wasn’t up to him to judge whether or not these passports had been obtained legally, and after all, if the Romanian attachés were corrupt, that was the problem of the authorities in Bucharest, not our own, if they wanted to accept or tolerate all these Jews, so much the worse for them. I knew Grell a little, for in Budapest, from time to time, I had a drink or went out to dinner with him; among the German officials, almost everyone avoided him or fled him, even his own colleagues, probably because of his atrocious appearance, but also because of his severe and extremely disconcerting fits of depression; as for me, that didn’t bother me so much, maybe because his wound was in the end rather similar to my own, he too had received a bullet in the head, but with much worse consequences than me, we didn’t talk, by tacit agreement, about the circumstances, but when he had had a little to drink he said I was lucky, and he was right, I was insanely lucky, to have an intact face and a pretty much intact head too, whereas he, if he drank too much, and he often drank too much, exploded into extraordinary fits of rage, almost epileptic attacks, he changed color, began screaming, once, with a café waiter, I even had to restrain him forcibly from breaking all the dishes, he came to apologize the next day, contrite, depressed, and I tried to reassure him, I understood him well. There, in that transit center, he came to see me, looked at Wisliceny, whom he also knew, and just said: “Filthy business, isn’t it?” He was right, but there was worse. To try to understand what happened during the selections, I went to Auschwitz. I arrived at night, by the Vienna-Cracow train; well before the station, to the left of the train, you could see a line of points of white light, the barbed-wire spotlights perched on whitewashed poles, and behind that line, more darkness, an abyss giving off that abominable stench of burned flesh, which wafted through the car. The passengers, mainly soldiers or functionaries returning to their posts, crowded around the windows, often with their wives. Comments flew: “It’s burning nicely,” a civilian said to his wife. At the station, I was welcomed by an Untersturmführer who quartered me in a room at the Haus der Waffen-SS. The next morning I saw Höss again. In the beginning of May, after Eichmann’s inspection, as I said, the WVHA had again drastically modified the organization of the Auschwitz complex. Liebehenschel, certainly the best Kommandant the camp had known, had been replaced by a useless idiot, Sturmbannführer Bär, a former pastry cook who had for a time been Pohl’s adjutant; Hartjenstein, in Birkenau, had swapped places with the Kommandant of Natzweiler, Hauptsturmführer Kramer; and Höss, finally, for the duration of the Hungarian Einsatz, supervised the others. It seemed obvious to me, speaking to him, that he thought his appointment concerned only extermination: while the Jews were arriving at the rate of sometimes four trains of three thousand units each every day, he hadn’t had any new barracks built to receive them, but on the contrary had put all his considerable energy into repairing the crematoriums and extending the tracks into the very midst of Birkenau, of which he was especially proud, so they were able to unload the cars at the foot of the gas chambers. With the first convoy of the day, he took me to watch the selection and the rest of the operations. The new ramp passed under the guard tower of the entrance building to Birkenau and went on, with three branches, to the crematoriums at the rear. A huge crowd was swarming on the dirt platform—noisy, poorer and more colorful than the people I had seen in the transit center, these Jews must have come from Transylvania, the women and girls wore multicolor scarves, the men, still in coats, had big, bushy moustaches and unshaven cheeks. There wasn’t too much disorder; for a long time I observed the doctors who carried out the selection (Wirths wasn’t there), they spent one or two seconds on each case, at the slightest doubt it was