by Alan Gold
Deutch nodded and took no offence. Tone and contempt were untranslatable, and by the time he’d listened to the German, he’d forgotten the look of disdain, the sneer on Broderick’s face, the snarl in his voice. ‘Yes, we are a precise race. We keep accurate records. It used to be our strength. Now it is our undoing …’
‘Okay, Deutch, tell me about how you first got to Auschwitz or Monowitz or wherever the hell you went. Not the train journey, but your first impressions. I need this to convince the judge that you were like a fish out of water. That you weren’t a real or willing part of the horror.’
But that was only part of the reason. He needed to know for himself.
The German shook his head in bemusement. How could an American possibly understand the route which took him to Auschwitz? It was more than just a train journey, more than packing for a new job in a new town. It was a mission from up high. The Messiah had led them out of the wilderness of the great depression. Where once there’d been abject misery, now there were jobs, money, national pride, and strength. Strength through joy! Thanks to Hitler, Germany was once again a nation to be taken seriously, to which all other nations looked in awe and wonder, no longer the bruised and battered bully of the Great Patriotic War which had been taught a lesson, but a people who had risen phoenix-like from the dust and rubble of the battlefields of France and Belgium, who had recaptured their rightful place in the world of nations.
Germany’s blitzkrieg to salvage its stolen territory, to reclaim its German-speaking people from the grasp of foreigners, had left the whole world gasping. Communities of good German volk beyond the nation’s constrained borders were again absorbed and incorporated into Greater Germany. The French, puffed up and full of pride as they humiliated the German people with the diktat, were now being humiliated themselves. Arrogance and self-confidence again were swelling in the bosom of every German.
But then the country had again been stabbed in the back. Where once they’d been great military victories which would be sung about for a thousand years, suddenly Russia had brought defeat and humiliation because hidden and secretive forces had caused terrible losses in wilds of the east, and now the war in Western Europe wasn’t going well.
The Führer needed his help to put the nation back on top. What? Would he have refused to go where the Führer asked? He would have shot himself if the Führer had wanted him to. So a trip to Auschwitz to maintain some rubber factory, or to help keep the gas ovens going to exterminate their enemies, or even to assist with such mundane things as kitchen equipment, was the very least he could do for his Führer and to help the lads at the Front. It was the least he could do for Adolf.
CHAPTER THREE
Allied Occupied Germany, 1946
From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:
‘Don’t let the sudden arrival of Adolf Hitler amongst the pantheon of German monsters fool you. Don’t think for one minute that we Jews had been honoured citizens, living in some blissful German paradise for centuries, and then this Beelzebub, this acolyte of Lucifer, suddenly erupted on the scene to the shock and horror of every decent Hans and Helga in the land. No, the Führer didn’t spring up from nowhere. Like other noxious weeds, his seed had germinated in fertile ground. Hitler wasn’t a new or sudden phenomenon; Hitler was of the Germans, for the Germans, and by the Germans. In retrospect, now that the War has been over for a year or so, it’s possible to look back and see from which pile of dung this latest flower of German manhood grew.
‘Germans and Germany have always been anti-Semitic. Even as far back as the Crusades when Jews first settled in Germany, looking for security and a better life than under the Arabs or the Spaniards or Portuguese, the good Herrs and Fraus and Frauelines, hearing of the approach of a Christian Army intent on freeing Jerusalem, would round up the Jews at knifepoint and force them out of their walled cities into the oncoming path of the knights, and lock the city gates behind them, leaving them to their awful fate. These good German burghers enjoyed the naïve hope that the Knights of the Cross, impelled to personal salvation and wealth through the rantings of an anti-Semitic Papacy, would satisfy their bloodlust on the Jews and then move on, leaving the city alone. I don’t know if it ever worked, but it certainly shows the utter contempt in which Jews were held by the good Christian townsfolk on the way from Europe to Jerusalem.
‘There were great hopes when Martin Luther emancipated Germany from the indulgencies of Rome. He wrote his theses, held out his hand, and welcomed us as brothers. But his love of us lasted as long as it took us to reject his concept of converting the entire nation of Israel to Protestantism; he didn’t take rejection very kindly, and became so infuriated that he metamorphosed from a warrior-monk indignant at the Papacy, into a ranting, anti-Semitic lunatic, Adolf Hitler’s mentor and brother in arms, advocating the extermination of Jews as the vermin of the world.
‘Of course, you’d think that over their hundreds of years of experience, the Jews of Germany would have learned something, wouldn’t you? Yet despite all the evidence of the dangers of assimilation, despite centuries of pogroms and killings and theft and desecration, the Jews couldn’t wait to leave their ghettos and mix with proper German society. When Moses Mendelssohn advocated that the Jews of Europe leave the confines of their walls and the strictures of their rabbis, and stand in the forefront of the intellectual gales ushered in by Rousseau, the German Jews were the first in line, throwing off their kaftans and prayer shawls and skull-caps and eagerly standing in the main streets in their silk hats and fur coats with their hand outstretched in the hope that some passing burgher would clasp it, hoping for the sustenance of recognition and respect.
Sceptical? Cautious? Concerned that a millennium of hatred might not end quite so easily? Not a bit of it. As the Jews emerged from the ghettos, they became intoxicated by the champagne air of the Enlightenment and made Germany their own. But Germany didn’t want any part of the Jews, and their intolerance to us grew as we came out from behind our walls. Oddly, there’d been some safety when we’d been huddled together with the walls of the ghetto for protection. Sure, there were beatings and killings, but they were sporadic. So long as the Germans didn’t have to see us and deal with us, but just knew we were there, they usually left us alone—given the odd blood lust or two throughout the ages. But with the emancipation, with the raising of the hopes during the Enlightenment, an increasing number of Jews were now visible in drawing rooms and trading rooms, wearing the uniform of the Good Middle-Class German; and this sudden eruption of my people from their squalid homes into the centres of the towns and cities brought confusion, then scorn, and then the traditional organisation of hatred by the Germans. We found that far from allowing us to live and breathe the free air of the cities, the wonderful Germans began organising anti-Semitic leagues and political parties with the express purpose of expunging us. And don’t think that the Catholic or the Lutheran Churches came to our aid. You should read what lies about the Jews the Catholic newspapers were printing in Rome; and France was no haven for Jews, not with the scandal and lies of the trial of poor Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
‘So I ask again whether the rise of Hitler in Germany a surprise to us? To those German Jews who stood back and viewed the Germany with which we were so familiar from our knowledge of our history, his coming was as predictable as that of the Messiah.
‘After the ignominy of losing the Great Patriotic War, all that was needed was a rabble-rouser to blame someone else and inflame the ire of the people to boiling point. The Jews were inflamed by Rousseau; the Germans by Hitler.
‘And from the rubble of reason, bound together by mortar made from the bitter ashes of emancipation, grew the foundations of Auschwitz. I didn’t go to Auschwitz until April 1944. Prior to that, I had been a prisoner in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, twenty-five kilometres north of Berlin.
‘It was there that I first met the mechanic who saved my life. He was on secondment from Auschwitz where he worked in the I. G. Farben factory making r
ubber. He was sent to Sachsenhausen because they couldn’t fix some of the important machinery in the DAMAG works, the Deutsche Maschinenfabrik AG, close by at Falkensee. I was working there as a slave labourer, and was given to him as his assistant for the three months he was there. Sometimes he shared his lunch with me, though it was strictly forbidden. He used to see the thin watery soup we were given, and feel sorry for me, and let me eat some of his rations. And often he shared stories and good humour. But most importantly, he shared his time. He allowed me to rest. Unlike the other poor bastards who were worked, quite literally, to death.
‘But I race ahead. Again, hurry, hurry. As though my memory will fade and I will fail in my duty to those who can no longer speak on their own behalf. No, what I suffered, what my people suffered, cannot be forgotten. Or forgiven! Have we forgotten our days of slavery in Egypt? Our misery under the boot of Rome? No, some in the future might want to forgive, but we can never forget. It’s implanted in our racial memory for all time. And of all the evil memories which we carry with us, we will never forget Hitler and the Nazis. What frightens me, though, is that the world will forget. And what we forget today we will repeat tomorrow. And the Jews cannot survive another Hitler. I have no idea how many Jews are left in the world. American Jews are safe; but in a decade or a century, will the destruction of my fellow European Jews have led to our extermination? Will Hitler have won through the laws of nature? Are there enough of us European Jews left alive to continue our thousand-year relationship with this continent of culture?
‘In Sachsenhausen, there were ten thousand of us, crammed into barrack blocks. How to describe Sachsenhausen? How do you describe hell? Dante made a valiant attempt, and frightened the wits out of his Renaissance readers, but Hitler surpassed even that Italian genius’s abilities. For he actually built hell on earth. Nobody who entered Sachsenhausen could possibly forget the squalor, the filth, the stench, or the vicious salivating German shepherds clawing the ground and snarling as they strained to break out of their leashes to tear at our throats, dogs barely able to be restrained by the SS guard. Nobody could forget the pall of death which hung like a grey menacing cloud over the uniform rows of huts. And none of us who first entered the camp could possibly have imagined that there was anything worse on earth than Sachsenhausen … but we were so wrong, for we had never heard of Auschwitz-Birkenau!
‘What I recollect most vividly when I first saw Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, was the crowds of people ambling slowly nowhere, some of them barely moving, they were so weak. Everywhere in the degradation of the place, in the huge central compounds, were multitudes of skeletal people just standing, or shuffling about. And gliding through this forest of dying trees, of greys and deathly pallor, were the black and shining uniforms of the Nazis, a mockery of the spit and polish of the Wehrmacht. These strong young German men and women would be completely impervious to the danger of being in the middle of thousands of their sworn enemies. Yes, they carried guns, but they knew with absolute certainty that they were safe to wander in their realm. For who would dare to lift a hand to strike against them? Who had any courage or strength left? Who could summon up any will to resist, when they lived every day among the dead, and when their only willpower was devoted to the will to survive? And who could forget the way some inmates would suddenly admit their own defeat and summon up their last reserves of strength to hurl their bodies against the electrified wire in order to end the nightmare?
‘In many ways, I led a charmed life at Sachsenhausen. Charmed? An interesting way to describe the manner in which I spent such important years of my youth. While young men in their early twenties in America were driving in open-top cars and going to drug stores with soda fountains and dancing at clubs and seeing movies with their girlfriends, I was being beaten and whipped and starved and forced to sleep in lice-ridden straw with three other men. It was in this bed that I learned what we came to call the night dance, constantly moving your legs and arms, even in your sleep, so that you weren’t bitten by rats. And worse, I and all the others were in constant danger of being shot because I hadn’t looked at a guard in the proper respectful way … and all for the crime of being a Jew.
‘But I was young, and healthy—well! Healthy, compared to the other poor devils who died from malnutrition or disease or because they simply gave up their love of life. I was tall and had good shoulders from being a swimmer when I was in my teens, and so on selection when I first went to Sachsenhausen, I was sent to work in the slave labour camps, satellites of the internment camp, places where we Jews did our bit to support the German war effort.
‘How did we arrive at Sachsenhausen? By train or by lorry. We were rounded up in Berlin in one of the daily sweeps which the Gestapo or the police made to clear out the refuse and human lice. We were forcibly evicted into the streets from out of our houses. The British bombers had made such a mess of Berlin housing, that any available house was wanted for Aryan Germans. As Jewish families were evacuated from their homes by the collection units of the SS, they were rounded up and sent to the synagogue on Levetzowstrasse, a shell of a once glorious building, still in ruins from its destruction on Kristallnacht. The night I and my family were rounded up was the last time I saw my mother and father and brothers and sisters. I have no idea where they are now, or if any of them are still alive. And for some reason, I don’t care. For if my family were forced to live through what I lived through, death was a far better outcome than life.
‘What a night that was, the night I spent in the bombed-out synagogue. I plumbed new depths of fear as the SS guards pushed me around with the barrels of their rifles. Despite the freezing cold, all the Jewish families were forced to remain in Levetzowstrasse for three days, exposed to the bitter elements, before being marched in procession through the city to the train station at Grunewald, where they were taken to ghettos in eastern Poland, Belorussia, Lithuania, and into Russia itself. I was fortunate. Being young and strong, I was selected for labour. Old women, children, old men … who knew at the time what fate had in store for them? I know now what happened to those who couldn’t work, but even so, what could we have done? Their journeys on the cattle trains and the trucks across Europe must have been murderous. My journey lasted only two hours. As to my family …
‘When we arrived at Sachsenhausen, those who were in my intake batch on arrival were divided according to the irredeemable stain of their nature … Jewish men to the A queue for medical examination and processing, Jewish women to the B queue, Poles and Slavs to the C queue, homosexuals to the D queue, Gypsies and other vermin to the E queue, children (regardless of race or creed) to the F queue, German and Austrian career and habitual criminals and antisocial persons to the G queue, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the work-shy to the H queue. Oh, it was all so precise, so German, as though it were the first day at school.
And after processing, we were all forced to undress and run naked in a line past the guards and doctors for the medical examination. Attractive women, those with good bodies and good hair, were pulled to one side and forced to stand by the guards who would fondle their private parts. Older men and women would try to hide their shame with their hands. I looked away. I couldn’t bear to see their faces, humiliated, disgraced … and all the while wondering whether my parents were being forced by these animals to do the same.
We were then forced to huddle, naked, in the freezing cold air waiting for the next aspect of our induction to take place, terrified of would happen to us. We tried to talk, but when one elderly and indignant man was bashed to the ground with the stock of a rifle just for asking how long we would all have to stand there, the rest of us immediately became silent. I’d seen pictures in a nature book of penguins at the South Pole, standing huddled against the fierce Antarctic winds. Was I now like some animal? Had I lost my humanity so suddenly?
Then a guard with a gun entered our midst and isolated the next group of ten, and forced us over to a troop of men dressed in filthy uniforms with vertical stripes. Even
their caps had stripes. These men were the barbers. We had to kneel down as though we were going to be beheaded, and all of our hair was cut off with shears. Somebody said something about delousing, but the masses of hair were collected in sheets and I have no doubt that it would be used for making blankets or stuffing pillows. That’s the Germans for you. Nothing is left to waste.
Naked both in my body and on my head, I looked around at the pathetic group of men and women who were still huddling for warmth. With their shaved heads, and their bodies emaciated from three years of the deprivations of war, it was hard to tell the difference between the groups of men and the groups of women. Nobody looked at one another. Instead we all looked at the ground, wondering how much more we would all have to suffer before the nightmare came to an end. How little we understood that it was only just the beginning.
In the air, above the howling banshee winds of winter were the merciless voices of guards, barking out orders and battering people with the butts of their rifles when they didn’t respond instantly. Children were crying. Men were whimpering. But oddly, the women were stoically standing there, hiding their private parts, turning themselves inwards so that they couldn’t be seen by the guards or their menfolk.
And then the Almighty descended upon us, as though from Heaven. The commandant, Obersturmbannführer Anton Kaindl, drove through the gates of the camp proper into the receiving area where we had been rounded up. He was standing—as Röhm and Hitler used to stand—in the back of his black Mercedes, stiff and formal, immaculate in his brilliant black uniform, clutching the handrail between the front and back seats, looking at the six hundred of us with utter detachment. We could have been sheep, for all our humanity.
His driver manoeuvred the car in a large circle so that it came to a halt in front of us. I remember feeling shamed that I was shaved and naked and shivering in front of a man dressed so immaculately. I felt utterly wretched. Kaindl used his automobile as a mobile podium. We weren’t even worth his getting out of the car.
