In Palestine the wandlike Waltraut set me an example that I have followed all my life: without true feeling, mere congress is — let’s face it — a pretty squalid business all round. In this regard I am not a typical soldier, I realise; I would never speak disrespectfully of a female; and I detest vulgar language. Thus I have been spared the world of the brothel, with its unimaginable slime and filth, likewise the ‘sophisticated’ lewdnesses — the court shoe squeezed between the leather boots beneath the table, the hand up the skirt in the kitchen, the rumpy waddle of the city hussy, the daubed orbits, the shaved armpits, the gossamer panties, the black stockings and the black garter belt framing the creaminess of the upper thighs… Such things, thank you very much, are of precious little interest to your humble servant, Paul Doll.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Thomsen tries to home in on Alisz Seisser. Quite a striking thought — the cream-haired beanpole feasting on that shapely currant bun. She looked most fetching at dinner the other night. Well he’d better be quick — she’ll be off back to Hamburg in a week or 2. This is her grace period, whilst she recovers from the loss of the sergeant major — the loss of Orbart, who laid down his life to foil an escape from the Women’s Camp. This fact lent nobility to the mien of his survivor. Besides, black is a very becoming colour. And, as we caroused at my villa, Alisz’s weeds (with that tight top) seemed to be softly ensilvered by the rays of German sacrifice. There you are, you see. Romance: there must be romance.
How long does Hannah suppose she can keep this up?
Take my word for it: there won’t be sufficient petrol refuse, and I’ll have to go to Katowitz all over again.
‘Pull up here, Unterscharfuhrer. Here.’
‘Yes, my Kommandant.’
Now I had not been to Sector 4IIIb(i) since July, when I accompanied the Reichsfuhrer-SS on his day-long ‘look-see’. As I climbed from the truck (and as Szmul jumped down from the flatbed) I uneasily realised that I could actually hear the Spring Meadow. Said meadow began perhaps 10 metres beyond the mound where Prufer, Stroop, and Erkel stood with their hands pressed to their faces — but you could hear it. You could smell it, of course; and you could hear it. Popping, splatting, hissing. I joined my colleagues and gazed out at the great field.
I gazed out at the great field without the slightest trace of false sentimentality. It bears repeating that I am a normal man with normal feelings. When I’m tempted by human weakness, however, I simply think of Germany, and of the trust reposed in me by her Deliverer — whose vision, whose ideals and aspirations, I unshakably share. To be kind to the Jew is to be cruel to the German. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’: these concepts have had their time; they are gone. Under the new order, some deeds have positive outcomes and some deeds have negative outcomes. And that is all.
‘Kommandant, in Culenhof’, said Prufer, with 1 of his responsible frowns, ‘Blobel tried blowing them up.’
I turned and looked at him, and said through my handkerchief (we all had handkerchiefs), ‘Tried blowing them up to achieve what?’
‘You know, get rid of them that way. It didn’t work, Kommandant.’
‘Well I could’ve told him that before he started. Since when does blowing things up make them disappear?’
‘That’s what I thought once they’d tried. It went everywhere. There were bits hanging from the trees.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Erkel.
‘We got the bits we could reach. On the lower branches.’
‘What about the upper bits?’ asked Stroop.
‘We just left them there,’ said Prufer.
I looked out on a vast surface that undulated like a lagoon at the turn of the tide, a surface dotted with geysers that burped and squirted; every now and then divots of turf jumped and somersaulted in the air. I yelled for Szmul.
That evening Paulette surprised me in my study. I was on an easy chair, relaxing with a glass of brandy and a cigar. She said,
‘Where’s Bohdan?’
‘Not you too. And that’s a hideous dress.’
She gulped and said, ‘Where’s Torquil?’
Torquil was the tortoise (and I do mean ‘was’). The girls loved the tortoise: unlike the weasel, the lizard, and the rabbit, the tortoise couldn’t run away.
… A little later I tiptoed up behind Sybil as she was doing her homework on the kitchen table — and gave her a good fright! As I then laughingly hugged her and kissed her she seemed to pull back.
‘You pull back, Sybil.’
‘No I don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’ll be 13 quite soon, Daddy. And that’s a big milestone for me. And you don’t…’
‘I don’t what? No. Go on.’
‘You don’t smell good,’ she said, and made a face.
At this my blood really started to boil.
‘Do you know the meaning of the word patriotism, Sybil?’
She twisted her head away and said, ‘I like hugging and kissing you, Daddy, but I’ve got other things on my mind.’
I waited before I said, ‘In that case you’re a very cruel little girl.’
*
And what of Szmul, what of the Sonders? Ach, I can hardly bring myself to set it down. You know, I never cease to marvel at the abyss of moral destitution to which certain human beings are willing to descend…
The Sonders, they go about their ghastly tasks with the dumbest indifference. Using thick leather belts they drag the pieces from the shower room to the Leichenkeller; they extract the gold-stopped teeth with pliers and chisels, and remove the women’s hair with the snapping shears; they tear off the earrings and the wedding bands; then they stack the pulley (6 or 7 per consignment), which is hoisted up to the gaping retorts; finally, they grind the ashes, and the powdery dust is taken by the truckload and dispersed in the River Vistula. All of this, as already stated, they perform with dumb callousness. It doesn’t seem to matter at all to them that the people they process are their comrades in race, their siblings in blood.
And do the vultures of the crematory ever show the slightest animation? Ach yech: when they greet the evacuees on the ramp and guide them through the disrobing room. In other words, they come alive only in treachery and deceit. Tell me your trade, they’ll say. An engineer, eh? Excellent. We always need engineers. Or something like, Ernst Kahn — from Utrecht? Yes, he and his… Oh yes, Kahn and his wife and the kids were here for a month or 2 and then decided to go on to the agricultural station. The 1 at Stanislavov. When there is a difficulty, the Sonders are quite prepared to use violence; they frogmarch any troublemaker to a nearby NCO, who deals with the situation in the suitable fashion.
You see, with Szmul and the rest of them, it’s in their interests that things should go smoothly and briskly, because they’re impatient to rifle through the discarded clothes and sniff out something to drink or smoke. Or something to eat. They are always eating — always eating, the Sonders, eating the scraps filched from the disrobing room (despite the relatively generous rations they moreover enjoy). They’ll sit spooning up their soup on a stack of Stucke; they’ll wade knee deep through the mephitic meadow whilst munching on a hunk of ham…