“UNS?”
“The Ustaše Supervisory Service. The special police force that guards these camps. And that reminds me, Gunther. When we get to the brickworks, it would be very advisable if you kept your very obvious disgust under control. It’s not just Serbs, Jews, and Roma who disappear in this part of the world. It’s anyone who the UNS decide they’ve taken a dislike to. And that could easily stretch to include me and you. For all I know, those five Germans who were stationed there didn’t disappear at all, but were murdered. You see, these UNS bastards are killing not for ideological reasons like me and the sergeant but because they like to kill and because they take pleasure in cruelty, and you don’t want to piss them off with any of your Berlin airs and graces. Me, I might enjoy the company of a civilized man like you occasionally, but these boys don’t think like that. Out here the better angels of our nature simply don’t exist. Out here there’s just the beast, and the beast is insatiable. Back in Banja Luka that intelligence officer said something about your evil friend Colonel Dragan that I failed to mention. A couple of times he referred to him as Maestrovich, and once he even called him the maestro, which, as I’m sure you know, is an honorific title of respect. Well, you can imagine the sort of thing that commands respect down here. And it isn’t playing the bloody cello. So, please try to remember that when you deliver your fucking letter.”
I nodded silently.
“Serb or not, I can’t see the point of killing a woman unless she’s a Prole rifle slut, and she’s had a pop at you,” said Oehl. “And even then, not until you’ve had some fun with her.”
“You mean raped her,” I said.
“It’s not rape,” said Oehl. “I’ve never fucked a rifle slut who didn’t want me to fuck her. Really. Even a Prole will try and get you to fuck her if she thinks she’s going to be shot. That’s not rape. They want you to fuck them. Sometimes they want you to fuck them even when they know you’re going to kill them immediately afterward. It’s like they want to die with some life still wriggling inside of them, if you know what I mean. But these girls don’t look like they’ve even been touched.”
Reflecting that the legal niceties of what constitutes consent were likely to be lost on a man like Oehl, I lit a cigarette with the butt of the other. “Camps,” I said. “You said camps, Geiger.”
“The brickworks at Jasenovac is just the largest of at least five or six concentration camps in this area. But there could be more. Out here, in this swamp, who knows? I heard tell that they’ve got a special camp just for Roma where all the usual cruelties have been refined to a hellish level.” He shrugged. “But you hear all kinds of things in this country. Not all of them can be true.”
“I don’t think the Ustaše can teach the SS very much when it comes to cruelty,” I said. “Not after what I saw in Smolensk.”
“Don’t you now? From what I hear, the SS in Poland is killing Jews with poison gas now, for humane reasons.” Geiger laughed grimly. “No one gets gassed in Yugoslavia. As you can see for yourself.”
While we were standing there, at least nine or ten bodies floated by like driftwood. Most had their heads bashed in or their throats cut.
“They smash their heads in with big mallets,” said Geiger. “Like they were knocking in tent pegs. So much for humanity.”
I sighed and took a double drag on my cigarette and shook my head. “To save bullets, I suppose,” I heard myself say.
“No,” said Geiger. “I think the UNS just likes cracking Serb skulls.”
“Why do they throw them in the river like that?” I asked, as if I actually expected an answer that would count as even vaguely reasonable. And the fact was, it wasn’t really a question at all, but an observation born of an infinite sadness and the absolute certainty that I didn’t belong here. I took off my cap, tossed it into the car, and rubbed my head furiously with the flat of my hand as if that might enable me to understand something. It didn’t.
“Saves the effort of burying them,” said Schwörer. “I expect they think the fish will tidy things up. They’re right about that, too. There’s asp in this river that grow to be at least a meter long. I’ve fished a bit so I know. Had a friend once who caught an asp in the Sava that was twelve kilos. You mark my words, in a month or two you won’t ever know those bodies were here.” It was as much as he’d said since leaving Banja Luka.
“Why didn’t you join the Ustaše?” I asked him.
“Me, sir? I’m not Croatian. I’m ethnic German, I am. And damned proud of it.”
In the light of what I’d already seen, I wasn’t feeling proud of being human let alone German so I let that one go.
We got back into the cars and drove through a thick, dark forest and onto a large marshy plain, where we caught our first sight of the camp, and soon after that we stopped at a checkpoint and were obliged to explain our business to the guards. In the distance, running parallel with the river, we could see a train heading for the camp. The guard picked up a telephone, spoke a few words, and then waved us on.
“You’re in luck,” said Geiger. “It seems that Colonel Dragan is here. He wasn’t yesterday.” He laughed. “Apparently he was in Zagreb.”
“That certainly sounds like my sort of luck,” I said. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”
Finally we arrived at the main entrance to what described itself as Camp III. It was easy to see why this was a brickworks; the whole place was enclosed by an enormous brick wall about three meters high, perfectly built, and hundreds of meters in circumference. There was an entrance arch also made of bricks, with a big sign and, on top, an Ustaše shield featuring a U and a Croatian red-and-white flag. Inside the arch was a curiously ornate wrought-iron coaching lamp. Leaving Oehl and Schwörer and the two cars, Geiger and I walked up to the entrance. The Croatian guard escorted us through and it was only now that I perceived the true size of the camp, which was spread across a huge flat plain. The humid, swampy air was thick with the corrupt smell of death and the infernal whine of mosquitoes and I breathed it with more than a little distaste. When the very air contains human decay, it catches on the throat. Running parallel to the Sava River to the east was a single railway track where even now the black steam train we’d seen earlier was making its slow and laborious way to the end of the line.
In front of us to the northwest were the camp buildings dominated by a single-story barracks that was fifty or sixty meters long; behind these were several tall chimneys and some watchtowers. In the distance we could just about see a lake where even now hundreds of prisoners were at work retrieving clay to make bricks. Everything seemed preternaturally calm, but already my eyes had taken in the body hanging from a nail on a telegraph pole, and then a proper gallows on which were hanging two more bodies. But all that was nothing compared with the sight that awaited us in a little picket-fenced garden out front of the brick-built villa to which we were now escorted. Where someone in Germany might have chosen to display some plants in terra-cotta pots, a rockery, or even a series of ceramic garden gnomes, here there was a virtual palisade of severed human heads. As I mounted the steps to the front door I counted at least fifteen. The guard went to fetch the colonel while, waiting for him inside the villa, we discovered the true horror of exactly how the heads in the garden had been obtained. Surrounding the near mandatory portrait of Mussolini on the neatly papered wall were framed photographs of decapitations — men and women, presumably Serbs, having their heads cut off with knives, axes, and, in one particularly nauseating picture, a two-man crosscut saw. This was bad enough but it was the smiling faces on the large team of Ustaše men inflicting these cruelties that disturbed me most of all. These pictures made Goya’s disasters of war look like a set of illustrated place mats. I sat down on a poorly sprung sofa and stared unhappily at the toes of my boots.