no, they seemed also to refuse many women who looked perfectly able-bodied to me; when I pointed this out to him, Höss told me they were following his instructions, the barracks were overcrowded, there wasn’t any more room to put people in, the factories were making a fuss, weren’t taking these Jews fast enough, and the Jews were piling up, epidemics were beginning again, and since Hungary kept sending them every day, he was forced to make room, he had already carried out several selections among the inmates, he had also tried to liquidate the Gypsy camp, but there had been problems and it had been put off till later, he had asked for permission to empty the Theresienstadt “family camp” and hadn’t yet received it, so in the meantime he could really only select the best, in any case if he took any more they would soon die of disease. He explained all this to me calmly, his empty blue eyes aimed at the crowd and the ramp, absent. I felt hopeless, it was even more difficult to talk sense to this man than to Eichmann. He insisted on showing me the killing installations and explaining everything to me: he had increased the Sonderkommandos from 220 to 860 men, but they had overestimated the capacity of the Kremas; it wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded, and to remedy that he had had to have incineration trenches dug, and by driving the Sonderkommandos on, that did the trick, he had reached an average of six thousand units per day, which meant that some had to wait sometimes till the next day, if they were especially overwhelmed. It was appalling, the smoke and the flames in the trenches, fed by gasoline and the fat from the bodies, must have been visible for miles all around, I asked him if he didn’t think it might make trouble: “Oh, the authorities of the Kreis are worried, but that’s not my problem.” To listen to him, nothing of what should have been was his problem. Exasperated, I asked to see the barracks. The new sector, planned originally as a transit camp for Hungarian Jews, was still incomplete; thousands of women, already haggard and thin although they hadn’t been there long, were herded into long, stinking stables; many couldn’t find a place and slept outside, in the mud; even though they didn’t have enough striped uniforms to clothe them, they still didn’t let them keep their own clothes, but dressed them in rags taken from the Kanada; and I saw some women completely naked, or dressed just in a shirt from which two yellow, flabby legs stuck out, sometimes covered in excrement. Hardly surprising that the Jägerstab was complaining! Höss vaguely shifted the blame to the other camps, which according to him were refusing to accept the transports, out of lack of room. All day I surveyed the camp, section by section, barrack after barrack; the men were hardly in better shape than the women. I inspected the registers: no one, of course, had thought to respect the basic rule of warehousing, first in, first out; whereas some arrivals didn’t even spend twenty-four hours in the camp before being sent on, others stagnated there for three weeks, broke down, and often died, which increased the losses even more. But for each problem I pointed out to him, Höss unfailingly found someone else to blame. His mentality, formed by the prewar years, was completely unsuited to the job, that was plain as day; but he wasn’t the only one to blame, it was also the fault of the people who had sent him to replace Liebehenschel, who, from the little I knew of him, would have gone about it completely differently. I continued on till evening. It rained several times during the day, brief and refreshing spring rains, which made the dust die down but also increased the misery of the inmates who stayed out in the open, even if most of them thought above all of collecting a few drops to drink. The entire rear of the camp was dominated by fire and smoke, even beyond the quiet expanse of the Birkenwald. At night, endless columns of women, children, and old people kept coming up from the ramp along a long barbed-wire corridor, toward Kremas III and IV, where they would wait their turn patiently under the birch trees, and the beautiful light of the setting sun skimmed the treetops of the Birkenwald, stretched to infinity the shadows of the rows of barracks, made the dark gray of the smoke gleam with the opalescent yellow of Dutch paintings, cast gentle reflections on the puddles and pools of water, tinted the bricks of the Kommandantur a bright, cheerful orange, and suddenly I had had enough and I ditched Höss there and went back to the Haus, where I spent the night writing a virulent report on the deficiencies of the camp. While I was at it, I wrote another one on the Hungarian part of the operation and, in my anger, didn’t hesitate to describe Eichmann’s attitude as obstructionism. (The negotiations with the Hungarian Jews had already been under way for two months, the offer for the trucks must have taken place a month earlier, for my visit to Auschwitz happened a few days before the Normandy landings; Becher had been complaining for a long time about the uncooperative attitude of Eichmann, who seemed to both of us to be conducting the negotiations only for the sake of form.) Eichmann is clouded by his logistician’s mentality, I wrote. He is incapable of understanding or integrating complex aims into his approach. And I know on good authority that after these reports, which I sent to Brandt for the Reichsführer and directly to Pohl, Pohl summoned Eichmann to the WVHA and reprimanded him in direct and blunt terms about the condition of the consignments and the unacceptable number of dead and sick people; but Eichmann, in his stubbornness, contented himself with replying that that was the jurisdiction of the Hungarians. Against such inertia, there was nothing to be done. I was sinking into depression, and my body felt its effect: I slept badly, a sleep troubled by unpleasant dreams and interrupted three or four times a night by thirst, or else a desire to urinate that turned into insomnia; in the morning, I woke up with splitting headaches, which ruined my concentration for the day, sometimes forcing me to interrupt work and stretch out on a sofa for an hour with a cold compress on my forehead. But no matter how tired I was, I feared the return of night: periods of insomnia during which I vainly went over my problems, or my increasingly anguished dreams, I don’t know what tormented me the most. Here is one of these dreams, which struck me especially: the Rabbi of Bremen had emigrated to Palestine. But when he heard that the Germans were killing the Jews, he refused to believe it. He went to the German consulate and asked for a visa for the Reich, to see for himself if the rumors were justified. Of course, he came to a bad end. In the meantime, the scene changed: I found myself, a specialist in Jewish affairs, waiting for an audience with the Reichsführer, who wants to learn certain things from me. I am quite nervous, for it is obvious that if he is not satisfied with my replies, I am a dead man. This scene takes place in a large, dark castle. I meet Himmler in one room; he shakes my hand, a small, unremarkable, calm man, dressed in a long coat, with his eternal pince-nez with its round lenses. Then I lead him down a long hallway whose walls are covered with books. These books must belong to me, for the Reichsführer seems very impressed by the library and congratulates me on it. Then we find ourselves in another room in the process of discussing things he wants to know. Later on, it seems to me that we are outside, in the midst of a city in flames. My fear of Heinrich Himmler is gone, I feel entirely safe with him, but now I’m afraid of the bombs, of the fire. We have to sprint through the burning courtyard of a building. The Reichsführer takes my hand: “Trust me. Whatever happens, I won’t let you go. We’ll cross together or we’ll fail together.” I don’t understand why he wants to protect the Judelein, the little Jew I am, but I trust him, I know he’s sincere, I could even feel love for this strange man.