Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  A slam of a plate, the yell of my name like my mother’s scold.

  ‘Ernst!’

  I spun from the window, sure a rat had run out of a cupboard.

  ‘Why in hell … why are you wearing that pin?’

  I went back to the window. My eye up the street to the Anger, down to the station corner.

  The car gone.

  Chapter 9

  I rapped on Klein’s office door. The polite two-tone tap. A congenial pat-pat.

  He called me in, sat behind his desk with pen and journal.

  ‘Good morning, Ernst. You have my notes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I put the pad to his desk. Eight-thirty and I was already in my white-coat. I think he approved.

  ‘Sander will bring to your floor some plans for today. I will be chained to my desk, on administration for my labours. Prüfer is back from Auschwitz so we must all jump.’

  ‘It will be good to see Herr Prüfer again. If I get the chance, sir.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ He closed his pen. ‘He is in such a mood when he returns.’ He saw that I was waiting. ‘Is there anything else, Ernst?’

  I brought out the pin.

  ‘I return this, sir.’ I placed it on his journal. ‘But I may have created a problem.’

  The pin was gone, to his hand, to a drawer.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Captain Schwarz asked me when I had joined the Party. I did not want to lie … but I fear I have. I did not want to cause you any difficulty.’

  ‘Ah. I see. No. It is my fault. I did not think on it. A natural question. But it is fine that you concerned yourself, Ernst. About me. But do not worry. I have been a Party member since ’38. Schwarz knows this.’

  ‘But I thought … You said you were not a member? The pin just for impression?’

  He went back into his chair.

  ‘No. I said I was not political. The badge is useful. Being in the Party is useful. I thought it would help you to wear it.’

  ‘But I have lied to him?’

  ‘I appreciate your concern. But do not think, Ernst, that SS captains spend their days trawling over paperwork checking up on junior members of staff of a factory. I should hope he is far too busy. As am I.’ He opened his pen.

  ‘I thought to let you know. He did ask. And I did lie. To an SS officer.’

  ‘I thank you for that. Your motives were for me and the company. Very good, Ernst. I am sorry you were inconvenienced. Please forgive me. I acted in your interest.’

  ‘I will not get into trouble?’ I changed my angle on that. ‘I would not wish to embarrass the company.’

  ‘No. You are right to tell me. If Schwarz should call I can explain.’

  Call. If Schwarz should call.

  ‘I told him that I only joined at my wife’s insistence. That I was not active.’

  ‘So you are being too concerned. Get to your desk, Ernst. Do not worry. I can control my own department. Thank you for your help yesterday.’ His pen to his journal.

  I bowed and left. Sweat in my palms.

  *

  Yesterday, explaining the badge to Etta, had not gone well. I tried to pass it off. As nothing. A small thing.

  ‘Herr Klein gave it to me.’ I plucked the pin from my jacket, pocketed it. ‘To make a good impression in the camp. For appearances sake. It is nothing.’ I moved away from the window.

  ‘It is something. You wore that in the street?’

  ‘No. I came from the car and straight in.’

  ‘Car?’

  I needed a cigarette. The papers and tobacco pause enough.

  ‘Herr Klein gave me a lift. He was going to the Anger. For shopping.’ Only half a lie.

  Etta enraged as she lit the hob for the kettle.

  ‘He should have taken back his badge.’

  ‘I’ll give it to him tomorrow.’ I switched on the light. ‘Do we have money for the meter?’

  ‘Don’t do that. Don’t change the subject. If you want to join the Party to get on that is up to you.’

  ‘What difference does it make? A party is a party.’ I lit my cigarette, resumed my position by the window. To deposit my ash. To watch the street. As usual. Trying not to look up and down the road. ‘It does not mean anything any more.’

  ‘It means you are old-fashioned. That you belong in lederhosen. That you are an old man shouting at the dark. I am sure your father would approve.’

  I left the window. ‘Would it change your opinion of me?’

  She pulled cups and tea from the cupboard. Her face away from me. ‘It is your choice. If you want.’

  Not the words she wanted to say. Not in their tone.

  ‘I didn’t think we were political,’ I said. The same tone.

  ‘Our country is at war, Ernst. Everyone is political. Even this damned tea has a swastika on the box. Why should my husband wear it less? Who am I to object?’ Slammed the tea back to the cupboard. ‘Now. Do you want to tell me about the camp?’

  I waited for the whistling kettle. It would be easier to talk on my day over tea.

  Chapter 10

  I went to my board, the last one on the right, the others smiling or ignoring me as I passed. I was the only one who did not wear glasses, the only young blond man. Everyone else with black slicked hair and thin moustaches. The old men that Klein had said he did not trust. These men had unions once.

  We did not have stools, we stood all day, and that would take getting used to but no matter yet. Today was Tuesday and since Thursday last I had maybe only spent three hours at my desk. I stared at the blank white paper of my board, checked the wheel of the ISIS by moving it from corner to corner.

  ‘Those are yours,’ the voice of my colleague from the row beside me. He nodded to the table between us and to a grey bound folder almost the same size. ‘Herr Sander brought them. I told him you were not here yet.’ That meant he had told him I was late.

  ‘I was with Herr Klein,’ I said, in exactly the timbre to declare that he was not in such company.

  I sat on the edge of the table, slipped off the corner ties and took out the first sheet. A note attached.

  ‘Furnace designs for Auschwitz – Birkenau II & III. Translate Alphabet with annotation in ink. F. Sander.’

  This was a ground plan. An enormous room divided into several others. The ovens in the furthest room, complete with detailed trundles for putting the bodies in. Five triple-muffle ovens. Five in each drawing. Two crematoria. Thirty iron and fire-clay oven doors. For two crematoriums. Thirty doors. And there were still three more crematoria in this prison.

  I was incredulous. Voiced it.

  ‘How many people die here?’

  My colleague never stopped scratching his pencil.

  ‘Hundreds a day. The typhus is everywhere. And they execute criminals all day long. Did you see that fenced area at Buchenwald? By the crematorium?’

  I did not know they were aware of my visit. Perhaps nothing to be hidden between floors. I would note that.

  ‘I smoked there.’

  ‘The execution yard. That is why the fence is so tall. The prisoners cannot see into it. Beside the morgue so you do not have to drag them too far to the chute.’

  Hundreds a day, he said. How many camps the same? Thousands a day. Another front to the war. A war of disease. Did not want to think of it. Pictured the brass band instead. Every camp had a song Klein had said. Think of the better picture.

  I took the paper to my board, clipped it up. I would only have to explain the dashes and breaks of line, the shaded areas and what these meant to the viewer in terms of constructing the building. The names of each room plain enough. But I decided that speaking to Paul would help me understand what I was looking at. What if I found a mistake? What if I could help improve? Make an educated difference. To get to the third floor. I would take a trip to Weimar at the weekend.

  ‘How have you been, Ernst?’

  I jumped at the friendly voice. Kurt Prüfer at my shoulder. His smile like a shy boy’
s. A chubby face behind round spectacles, grey and white hair cropped close to the bone to camouflage his baldness as men who have a roll of fat above their collar are wont to do. Grey suit to match his hair. He did not seem as moody as Klein warned.

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘I see you have Sander’s new designs.’

  We looked at the plan side by side.

  ‘I was wondering, sir – if it should help – I have an old school friend in Weimar who runs two of the crematoria there. I thought I might pay him a visit at the weekend. So that I may better understand our work.’ I thought this would be a good thing to say, to show my interest in the company’s products, and in my own time, but Prüfer’s mouth went thin.

  ‘The Special Ovens accounts for less than three percent of our output, Ernst. If you want to learn more about Topf the malting equipment and granaries would be a better study for a graduate who wishes to get on.’

  ‘Yes, sir. It is my ambition to do so.’

  He rapped the plan. ‘Can this be done today?’

  ‘Yes. I understand it.’ I pointed to the stylised sig-rune heading at the top of the print that corresponded to the eagle and stamp in the right corner, signed by Sander. Not a double ‘S’ at all. An ancient Germanic rune reversed. It now stood for ‘victory’ instead of ‘sun’.

  ‘This is for the camp commander? I am to make it plain, sir?’

  The cherub came back. ‘But do not make it look as if the reader is a novice. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If you can get this done by this afternoon bring it to my office. I have come from Auschwitz with new requests that must be drawn up as soon as possible. Sander is working on them now.’ He pushed his glasses back where sweat had slipped them. I noticed his hands were rubbed almost raw from washing. Sanded almost.

  ‘Before five, Ernst.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ And he left me, as simple as he had appeared. My colleague opposite pretended to hear none of it, as if our desks were in a different universe, and I hummed to myself at his flush of face and set to work.

  The new boy taking his work direct to Prüfer’s office.

  *

  By four-thirty I had finished the annotations. I had started my walk to Prüfer’s office confidently but with each step I realised this was my first completed task.

  Suppose I had not done well? Suppose my notes were obtuse? Vague? It was a deconstruction of the plan. We had done such things at the university many times but perhaps I had been too succinct, perhaps not enough. I would be judged by my first work in the real world and I slowed as I passed Klein’s office and onto Prüfer’s, appropriately the door that ended the corridor. I knocked twice, waited. An age. The shutting of filing cabinets echoed through the corridor.

  ‘Come in, Ernst.’

  Prüfer’s office did not have the draughtsman’s board when he had interviewed me. It dominated the room, appeared strange in the room that I remembered. The room that now demanded something of me. He gave me no instruction as he stood beside it and I bowed, automatically, set the plan to the grips and stood back.

  He removed his glasses, one hand to his back, a sea captain studying a course, and his spectacles roving across the plan like a magnifying glass.

  ‘Excellent, Ernst. Excellent.’ His eye moving along the paper from corner to corner and then he stepped aside, his spectacles’ arms pinned with difficulty behind his ears again.

  ‘This will do well. Sander will be pleased. Well done. Now, tell me what you might think of something.’

  He went to his desk and with anything that came to hand weighted down another plan. I crossed the room, looked down at the paper spread as large as a tablecloth, a cog-like mechanism its centrepiece. Prüfer did not wait for any query.

  ‘The problem with the camp ovens, Ernst, is that they run on coke. It is inefficient to run and damages the ovens quickly. It takes much longer to reduce the matter than our gas ovens – such as your friend probably has in Weimar. One of ours no doubt.’ He was pleased at this. He may have installed them himself.

  ‘The SS will go for nothing less than coke. For cost. Yet they want more efficient ovens every year. They are wrong of course. Although more expensive to build, a gas oven is more economical. But they think like old men. Coal, coal, coal. Coal is cheap, the oven must be cheap. But now it is not so cheap.’ He tapped the cog on the drawing. ‘But see here, see here. The problem is that an oven must be a regulatory size if it is to work correctly. And they simply do not have the space for anything larger than the eight-door muffle oven in any building in Auschwitz. I know. I built them. If they build another crematoria, again no more than an eight-door, otherwise the heat will be too great. The men operating it would burn. By the end of the year there will be fifty-two ovens in these camps. They don’t listen. That will take enough coal to run a railway. But see here, see here.’

  I turned my head to the diagram, like a dog trying to comprehend another’s bark coming from the radio.

  ‘Is this one of Herr Sander’s designs, sir?’

  ‘No. It is my own. It is a circular oven.’ He indicated the protrudes of the wheel that made me perceive the drawing as a cog-piece. ‘These are the muffle doors. Instead of having ovens in a line, each creating its own heat, you have a central furnace. Eight doors all around.’

  I could see it then. Pictured the special unit of prisoners, a trundle, the sliding bed for the body, for each, standing in front of their oven door, trying not to look at each other across Prüfer’s central furnace as they loaded their burden.

  ‘They would have to remove the old ovens of course but it would double the capacity and – with a single larger furnace – it would be more efficient. The problem with each muffle having its own furnace is it negates the savings of using coke. If they had gone with gas jets from the start it would be cheaper overall. But they have made their bed.’

  I saw the single massive furnace roar before me.

  ‘But how would you determine the ashes? From each other, sir? To send to their relatives? For interment?’

  He stared at me, and then back to his crude design.

  ‘I don’t think you understand, Ernst. Do you think Kori of Berlin are not working on furnaces to improve efficiency? Marketing such to the SS? How are we to compete if it is not by better design?’

  I had disappointed him. Could feel it. All design, all invention falling to the same adage:

  Build a better mousetrap. It did not say build a bigger one.

  *

  ‘Thank you for your efforts today, Ernst. Your plans must be brought to my office every night,’ he ordered, ‘for security. One of the reasons for hiring you is that many of the older men are ex-union men. They still hold socialist ideals. And there are many communists amongst them.’

  I kept hearing these words. They were being drilled into me from every office in the building. I began to think that I was not so talented or wanted. Just local. And young. New.

  ‘And we have communists on the factory floor. Sure of it. From our own workforce and from the camps. But without knowing who they are we do not get rid of skilled men when we have need of them. We could not fulfil our contracts without. But we have been instructed by the SS that the men who work on these plans must be totally trustworthy. Must have no communist ties. It is easier to use new men.’ He took the plans from the board and folded them into his safe.

  ‘The new ovens are … important … to the SS. Not for communist eyes.’ He winked his cherubic smile. ‘You will have them waiting for you every morning. Good night, Ernst.’

  I bowed and left, cursed myself. I should not have opinions. A man should admire everything from his superiors, not question. I passed Klein’s office, the sound of him laughing down the telephone at my back as I walked.

  My ISIS machine was the last one on my row, no-one behind me to see, my co-worker beside me too engrossed in his own work and I was sure he would not know what I was permitted to do and not do, but still, I
waited until he took a pipe break to copy the Auschwitz plan from memory. A scaled version in my pocket. Take it home. To show Paul at the weekend. Working at home a good habit for an ambitious man.

  Chapter 11

  When I first met Etta she was that entrancement of a typical zaftig Austrian woman. Curls and curves. City life and style had near straightened her red curls and she maintained them religiously. I imagined that as a child her auburn hair had set her out when all her classmates would have been as shining blonde as the brass in an orchestra.

  Her figure too gone the way of a city girl walking to work, and the privations of war had slimmed her so that her nightwear no longer clung but draped, flowed like water about her. Every year she became a new woman before me. Every year a new bride. I envied even myself over my fortunes with her. We argued because we were so similar. We made up because we were so similar. I had known women before her but all I learned from them was how to erase the errors of arrogant youth so I could correctly love this one. I met her at an Erfurt fair, she had tripped, and I caught her and her soup bowl over my shirt. It was dark, the only light from the bulbs of the market stalls selling pretzels and hot chocolate. I never saw she was a redhead until the next day when we met for lunch. I never looked at another woman after that. My youth had been only training to get to that point, sure that some higher power had closed his book and said, ‘I’m done with this one. Next.’

  We married in Switzerland, where her parents had moved to in ’39. We were twenty-one. I was ending my last year at university. Etta had been coming to the library there for years. We had never met.

  Her parents had rented her an apartment and I advantaged on that to leave my parents, to leave my small box room where I had grown up. This was not a sudden thing. We had courted for months. Needed more time together. It was like playing at house. Decorated the place like a child’s birthday party. Never made the bed up. No point. Ate meals on our laps. Listened to the radio that grew worse every week. Even the music controlled. Everything on it decades or centuries old or just shrill speeches from names we did not know. They took the long-wave from us, took music from us. We shrugged. The country shrugged.