When work ends we gather, we who have not got used to it and have not gone mad, and we talk and we talk. In the Kommando, hugely expanded for the current collaboration, about five per cent belong to this category — say forty men. And in the bunkroom we gather a little way apart, usually around dawn, with our food, our liquor, and our cigarettes, and we talk. And I like to think that there is companionship.
I feel we are dealing with propositions and alternatives that have never been discussed before, have never needed to be discussed before — I feel that if you knew every day, every hour, every minute of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.
Martyrer, mucednik, martelaar, meczonnik, martyr: in every language I know, the word comes from the Greek, martur, meaning witness. We, the Sonders, or some of us, will bear witness. And this question, unlike every other question, appears to be free of deep ambiguity. Or so we thought.
*
The Czech Jew from Brno, Josef, who is gone now, wrote his testimony and buried it in a child’s galosh under the hedgerow that borders Doll’s garden. After a lot of disputation, and a show of hands, we resolve to exhume this document (temporarily) and acquaint ourselves with its contents. I myself am instinctively and perhaps superstitiously opposed. And as things turn out it is one of the episodes in the Lager that I would least soon relive.
Written in Yiddish, in black ink, the manuscript consisted of eight pages.
‘And there’, I began, ‘a girl of five stood and… Wait. I think it’s a bit mixed up.’
‘Read!’ said one of the men. Others seconded him. ‘Just read.’
‘And there a girl of five stood and undressed her brother who was one year old. One from the Kommando came to take off the boy’s clothes. The girl shouted loudly, “Be gone, you Jewish murderer! Don’t lay your hand, dripping with Jewish blood, upon my lovely brother! I am his good mummy, he will die in my arms, together with me.” A boy of seven or eight…’ I hesitated, and swallowed. ‘Shall I go on?’
‘No.’
‘No. Yes. Go on.’
‘Go on. No. Yes.’
‘A boy of seven or eight’, I read, ‘stood beside her and spoke thus, “Why, you are a Jew and you lead such dear children to the gas — only in order to live? Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?”… A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the—’
‘Stop.’
Many of the men had tears in their eyes — but they weren’t tears of grief or guilt.
‘Stop. She “made a very short but fiery speech”. Like hell she did. Stop.’
‘Stop. He lies.’
‘Silence would be better than this. Stop.’
‘Stop. And don’t put it back in the earth. Destroy it — unread. Stop.’
I stopped. And the men turned away, they moved away, and slackly sought their bedding.
Josef, the chemist from Brno, was known to me here at the Lager, and I considered him a serious man… I am a serious man, and I am writing my testimony. Am I writing like this? Will I be able to control my pen, or will it just come out — like this? Josef’s intentions, I’m sure, were of the best, even the highest; but what he writes is untrue. And unclean. A girl of five, a boy of eight: was there ever a child so fiendishly experienced that it could grasp the situation of the Sonder?
For a few moments I read on in silence, or I dragged my sight down the rest of the page…
A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the gas chamber… She condemned the Nazi crimes and oppression and ended with the words, ‘We shall not die now, the history of our nation will immortalise us, our initiative and spirit are alive and flourishing…’ Then the Poles knelt on the ground and solemnly said a certain prayer, in a posture that made an immense impression, then they arose and all together in chorus sang the Polish anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikvah’. The cruel common fate in this accursed spot merged the lyric tones of these diverse anthems into one whole. They expressed in this way their last feelings with a deeply moving warmth and their hopes for, and belief in, the future of their…
Will I lie? Will I need to deceive? I understand that I am disgusting. But will I write disgustingly?
Anyway, I nonetheless make sure that Josef’s pages are duly reinterred.
It sometimes happens that when I pass the Kommandant’s house I see his daughters — on their way to school or on their way back. Now and then the little housekeeper accompanies them, but usually the mother does — a tall, strong-looking woman, still young.
Seeing Doll’s wife naturally makes me think of mine.
The Polish Jews are not coming to the Lager en masse, or not yet, but some of them find their way here by a twisted road, as I did, and of course I seek them out and question them. The Jews of Lublin went to a death camp called Belzec; a great number of Jews from Warsaw went to a death camp called Treblinka.
In Łódź the ghetto is still standing. Three months ago I even got news of Shulamith: she is still in the attic above the bakery. I love my wife with all my heart, and I wish her every happiness, but as things now stand I’m glad I’ll never see her again.
How would I tell her about the selections and the disrobing room? How would I tell her about Chełmno and the time of the silent boys?
Shula’s brother, Maček, is safe in Hungary, and he has vowed that he will come for Shula and take her to Budapest. May it be so. I love my wife, but I’m glad I’ll never see her again.
At dawn we discuss the extraterritorial nature of the Lager, and everything is back to normal in the bunkroom, we talk, we use each other’s names, we gesticulate, we raise and lower our voices; and I like to think that there is companionship. But something is missing and is always missing; something intrinsic to human interchange has absented itself.
The eyes. When you start out in the detail, you think, ‘It’s me, it’s just me. I keep my head dropped or averted because I don’t want anyone to see my eyes.’ Then after a time you realise that all the Sonders do it: they try to hide their eyes. And who would have guessed how foundationally necessary it is, in human dealings, to see the eyes? Yes. But the eyes are the windows to the soul, and when the soul is gone the eyes too are untenanted.
Is it companionship — or helpless volubility? Are we capable of listening to — or even hearing — what others say?
This night at the pyre two hoist-frame plinths collapse, and I am down on all fours in a dent in the dunes banging bits of it together again when Doll’s open-topped jeep draws up, thirty metres away, on the gravel road. After some rummaging around he emerges (with the engine ticking over) and moves towards me.
Doll wears thick-looped leather sandals and brown shorts, and nothing else; in his left hand he has a half-full quart of labelled Russian vodka, in his right an oxhide whip which he now playfully cracks. His spongy red chest hair is dotted with beads of sweat that sparkle in the overwhelming glare of the fire. He drinks, and wipes his mouth.
‘So, great warrior, how does it go? Mm. I’d like to thank you for your efforts, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Your initiative and your dedication to our shared cause. You’ve been invaluable.’
‘Sir.’
‘But you know, I think we’ve got the hang of it now. We could probably muddle along without you.’