However, judging from the treatment of the inmates employed, it didn’t seem that their ultimate fate was a major preoccupation for Schenke or his colleagues. In the midst of the immense, muddy construction site that was to become the factory, columns of scrawny Häftlinge in rags carried at a run, under the shouts and cudgel blows of the kapos, beams or bags of cement far too heavy for them. If a worker, in his big wooden clogs, stumbled and let his load fall, or collapsed himself, the blows redoubled, and blood, fresh and red, gushed onto the oily mud. Some never got up again. The din was infernal, everyone was yelling, the SS noncoms, the kapos; the beaten inmates screamed pitifully. Schenke guided me through this Gehenna without paying the slightest attention to it. Here and there, he paused and conversed with other engineers in well-pressed suits, holding yellow folding rulers and little fake-leather notebooks in which they jotted down figures. They commented on the progress of the construction of a wall, then one of them muttered a few words to a Rottenführer, who began to yell and viciously hit the kapo with his boot or rifle butt; the kapo, in turn, dove into the mass of inmates, distributing savage blows with full force, bellowing; and then the Häftlinge attempted a surge of activity, which died down on its own, since they could scarcely stand up. This system seemed to me extremely inefficient, and I said as much to Schenke; he shrugged his shoulders and looked around him as if he were seeing the scene for the first time: “In any case they don’t understand anything but blows. What else can you do with such a workforce?” I looked again at the undernourished Häftlinge, their rags coated in mud, black grease, diarrhea. A Polish ‘red’ stopped for an instant in front of me and I saw a brown stain appear on the back of his pants and the rear of his leg; then he resumed his frenetic run before a kapo could approach. Pointing him out, I said to Schenke: “Don’t you think it’s important to oversee their hygiene better? I’m not just talking about the stench, but it’s dangerous, that’s how epidemics break out.” Schenke replied somewhat haughtily: “All that is the responsibility of the SS. We pay the camp to have inmates fit for work. But it’s up to the camp to wash them, feed them, and take care of them. That’s included in the package.” Another engineer, a thickset Swabian sweating in his twill jacket, let out a coarse guffaw: “Anyway, Jews are like venison, they’re better when they’re a little gamy.” Schenke smiled thinly; I retorted curtly: “Your workers aren’t all Jews.”—“Oh! the others are hardly any better.” Schenke was beginning to grow annoyed: “Herr Sturmbannführer, if you think the condition of the Häftlinge is unsatisfactory, you should complain to the camp, not to us. The camp is responsible for their upkeep, I told you. All that is specified in our contract.”—“I understand very well, believe me.” Schenke was right; even the blows were administered by SS guards and their kapos. “But it seems to me that you could obtain better output by treating them a little better. Don’t you think so?” Schenke shrugged: “Ideally, maybe. And we often complain to the camp about the workers’ condition. But we have other priorities besides constantly splitting hairs.” Behind him, knocked down by a cudgel, an inmate was dying; his bloody head was buried in the thick mud; only the mechanical trembling of his legs showed that he was still alive. Schenke, as we left, stepped over him without looking at him. He was still thinking about my words with irritation: “We can’t have a sentimental attitude, Herr Sturmbannführer. We are at war. Production counts above all else.”—“I’m not saying otherwise. My objective is just to suggest ways to increase production. That should concern you. After all, it’s been, what? Two years now that you’ve been constructing, and you still haven’t produced a kilo of Buna.”—“Yes. But I should point out to you that the methanol factory has been functioning for a month.”
Despite his retort, my last remark must have annoyed Schenke; for the rest of the visit, he confined himself to dry, brief comments. I had myself shown around the KL attached to the factory, a rectangle surrounded by barbed wire, set up south of the complex in fallow fields, on the site of the razed village. I thought the conditions there were deplorable; the Lagerführer seemed to find it normal. “In any case, we send the ones the IG rejects to Birkenau, and they send us fresh ones.” On my way back to the Stammlager, I noticed on a wall in town this surprising inscription: KATYN = AUSCHWITZ. Ever since March, in fact, Goebbels’s press had kept harping about the discovery in Byelorussia of Polish corpses, thousands of officers assassinated by Bolsheviks after 1939. But who, here, could have written that? There weren’t any more Poles in Auschwitz, and no Jews, either, for a long time now. The town itself looked gray, glum, affluent, like all the old German towns in the East, with its market square, its Dominican church with sloping roofs, and, just at the entrance, dominating the bridge over the Sola, the old castle of the duke of the region. For many years, the Reichsführer had promoted plans to enlarge the town and make it a model community of the German East, but with the intensification of the war, these ambitious projects had been put aside, and it remained a sad, dull town, almost forgotten between the camp and the factory, a superfluous appendage.
As for the life of the camp, it was turning out to be full of unusual phenomena. Piontek had dropped me off in front of the Kommandantur and backed up to park the Opel; I was about to go in when my attention was drawn by some noise in the garden of the Hösses’ house. I lit a cigarette and discreetly approached: through the gate, I saw children playing Häftlinge. The biggest one, who had his back to me, wore an armband marked KAPO and was shrilly shouting the standardized commands: “Ach…tung! Mützen…auf! Mützen…ab! Zu fünf!” The other four, three little girls, one of them very young, and a boy, were standing in a row facing me and were clumsily trying to obey; each one wore a triangle, sewn on their chests, of a different color: green, red, black, purple. Höss’s voice resounded behind me: “Hello, Sturmbannführer! What are you watching?” I turned around: Höss was coming toward me, his hand outstretched; near the barrier, an orderly was holding his horse’s lead. I saluted him, shook his hand, and without a word pointed to the garden. Höss blushed suddenly, passed through the gate, and hurried toward the children. Without saying anything, without slapping them, he tore the triangles and the armband off and sent them inside. Then he came back to me, still red, holding the pieces of cloth. He looked at me, looked at the badges, looked at me again, and then, still silent, walked past me and into the Kommandantur, tossing the badges into a metal trash can near the door. I picked up my cigarette, which I had dropped to salute him and which was still smoking. An inmate gardener, in a clean, well-pressed striped uniform, holding a rake, came out, removing his cap as he passed me, went to get the trash-can, and emptied it into the basket he was carrying; then he went back into the garden.
During the day, I felt fresh, alert; at the Haus, I ate well, and in the evenings I thought with pleasure about my bed, with its clean sheets; but at night, ever since I had arrived, the dreams came in vast gusts, sometimes short and abrupt and soon forgotten, other times like a long worm uncoiling inside my head. One sequence in particular repeated itself and expanded nightly, an obscure, difficult-to-describe dream, without any narrative meaning, but that unfurled according to a spatial logic. In this dream I was traveling, at different altitudes, but always as if in the air, I was more like a pure gaze or even a camera than a living being, traveling through an immense city, without any visible end, its topography monotonous and repetitive, divided into geometric sectors, its way animated with an incessant flow. Thousands of beings came and went, entered and exited identical buildings, walked along long, straight avenues, plunged underground through subway entrances to emerge at some other place, constantly and without any apparent aim. If I, or rather the gaze I had become, went down toward these avenues to examine them close up, I noticed that these men and women weren’t distinguished from one another by any special characteristic; they all had white skin, light-colored hair, blue, pale, lost eyes, Höss’s eyes, the eyes of my old orderly Hanika, too, when he died in Kharkov, eyes the color of the sky. Railroad tracks crisscrossed the city, little trains came forward and made regular stops to spew out an instantly replaced wave of passengers, as far as the eye could see. During subsequent nights, I entered some of the buildings: lines of people moved between long communal tables and latrines, eating and defecating in a row; on bunk beds, others were fornicating, then children were born, played between the bedsteads, and, when they had grown big enough, went out to take their place in the human waves of this city of perfect happiness. Little by little, by dint of looking from different points of view, a tendency became apparent in the seemingly arbitrary swarm: imperceptibly, a certain number of people always ended up on the same side, and finally went into windowless buildings, where they lay down to die without a word. Specialists came and collected from them whatever could still contribute to the city’s economy; then their bodies were burned in ovens that served simultaneously to warm the water distributed by pipes throughout the sectors; the bones were ground up; the smoke, coming from the chimneys, rejoined, like tributaries, the smoke of neighboring chimneys to form one long, calm, solemn river. And when the dream’s point of view took on altitude again, I could make out an equilibrium in all this: the quantity of births, in the dormitories, equaled the number of deaths, and the society self-reproduced in perfect equilibrium, always in movement, producing no excess and suffering no diminution. When I woke up, it seemed obvious to me that these serene dreams, void of all anguish, represented the camp, but a perfect camp, having reached an impossible point of stasis, without violence, self-regulated, functioning perfectly and also perfectly useless since, despite all this movement, it produced nothing. But upon thinking more about it, as I tried to do while drinking my ersatz in the dining room of the Haus der Waffen-SS, wasn’t it a representation of social life as a whole? Stripped of its tawdry rags and its pointless agitation, human life was reduced to scarcely more than that; once one had reproduced, one had fulfilled the purpose of mankind; and as for one’s own purpose, that was just an illusion, a stimulus to encourage oneself to get up in the morning; but if you examined the thing objectively, as I thought I could do, the uselessness of all these efforts was obvious, as was the uselessness of reproduction itself, since it served only to produce more uselessness. So I came to think: Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?