The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  ‘But him,’ she said, again lifting her arm and pointing to Deutch, her voice rising in fury, ‘as I said, he was the worst of all. All the time he was with me, he was asking me about my life as a young woman. About my first kiss. About my parents. And he knew how much it hurt me. He knew it was killing me inside my mind. He kept on reminding me of times past, times with my family and with my friends. He made me realise what my life had come to in Auschwitz. And he enjoyed it so much, seeing the panic on my face as I remembered what my life had been; he enjoyed seeing the grief.

  ‘I hated him more than any of the others, because he pretended to understand me. He used to get so excited when he was able to get inside my mind. To make me feel like a woman rather than a machine. He knew precisely what he was doing. The worst moments of my life in the camp were when he forced me to tell him about the times I’d been a pretty young girl in Bonn. About the young men I’d known. He said he wanted to understand the difference between the sunny, beautiful life that I’d led, and the life I was leading now, that of a whore in a filthy room in a concentration camp; a subhuman, a non-person. He loved the hurt in my eyes when I stopped being a machine for the guards and the Ukrainians, when he saw me become a woman. And when I felt like a woman, I realised what was happening to me, and I felt so …’ She whispered the next word. The entire court strained to hear. The prosecutor asked her to repeat it.

  Softly, she said, ‘… guilty.’

  ‘Clearly the young man is lying about what I did or is unfortunately mistaken,’ Wilhelm Deutch said to his defense counsel. ‘I don’t remember him working in a ditch. He’s confused me with somebody else. I wasn’t the only mechanic, you know. There were many others, and some of them were real bastards. You should have cross-examined him. But what I fail to understand is why you say that the evidence of the prostitute, Hannelle Cohen, is so damning? There was no evidence of my brutality. I never beat her. It’s obvious that she simply misunderstood my intentions. You see, I tried to help her.’

  ‘And that’s what I’ll be telling the court when I cross-examine her this afternoon. But you have to appreciate my problem. She’s left an indelible mark in the mind of the judge. She’s singled you out from all the hundreds of men she serviced because she claims that you hurt her more than the other brutes. It’s not hard to unpick her evidence and cast doubt upon your motives for whatever conversation passed between you, but it’s almost impossible to counteract the deep impression I could see she was making in the mind of the judge.’

  ‘So why did you want to talk to me? What can I tell you?’

  ‘I need to know whether you want me to cross-examine her, or whether we leave her evidence and move on to the next witness. Hannelle Cohen was their last minor witness before they bring on the big guns. I want to know whether you want me to put her through the mill again, and force her to confront the evidence you’ve given me about the reasons you wanted to know more about her, her private life before she became a prostitute. But I warn you again that it could react against us.’

  Deutch shook his head as the translator finished Broderick’s last words. ‘How can you adequately explain your actions in time of war? Yes, I wanted to know about her private life, but not for the reasons she gave; not for reasons of cruelty. Only because I wanted her to know that one day her pain and suffering would be over and that she could return to the world before the war, to the music and the dancing and the sunshine that are the right of every young man and woman. But whether you ask her these questions is your decision, Mr. Defense Lawyer. That’s why you’re here. There’s so very much you don’t know, and will never understand about those days. You’re in charge now, Professor Broderick. Thank God it’s your decision, not mine.’

  Allied Occupied Germany, June, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  I’d never been into a brothel before. Not even as a teenager, when it was all the rage in Berlin amongst the Jewish kids. They’d tell their parents they were going around to a friend’s house to study, and instead they’d steal a handful of Reichmarks from their fathers’ wallets and go into the city centre with its lights and girls standing on corners wearing leather skirts and fishnet stockings, and find a woman for an hour or so.

  The richer kids used to ignore these street woman because of the risks of pox, and instead go to brothels.

  I never went. Not for any moral or ethical or religious reasons, but because I didn’t need to go. When I was fifteen, I looked as though I was twenty, and it was easy for me to pick up girls in cafés or in clubs. I’d take them to parks in the summer and make love to them under the canopy of an oak tree; or in the winter, we’d find the apartment of a friend whose parents had gone away for the season, and we’d spend hours in the act of passion. We’d whisper silly words into each other’s ears like ‘I love you’ and ‘marry me’. But the love only lasted until the following morning, and then again the field would be lying fallow and I would find another girl with whom to plough a furrow.

  Nor, I remember, did I ever have a real and true love. Oh, I liked the girls with whom I shared my body, but nobody ever haunted my nights or consumed the thoughts of my days. Each would be a conquest; none would prevent me, the warrior, from seeking another battle.

  Before I could be swept up in the rhythms of a normal life … finding a true and virtuous woman and marrying her … I was swept by the Nazis into the dragnets which they used when fishing for Jews in Berlin. And I eventually landed in Auschwitz. It was there that I first went to a brothel.

  I didn’t want to go to the brothel, especially as the women there saw dozens of men a week … Nazis … and they were almost certainly diseased. But when I’d been working for the mechanic for four weeks, and we’d dug the trenches from the kitchen area, and done all the work which needed doing, he said to me that I deserved a reward. I hardly thought so. I wasn’t losing weight like the others I lived with, and there were some suspicious looks in my direction every now and again. Nor was I exhausted at the end of the day like the others, walking cadavers who only just managed to struggle into bed. Yes, there were looks of surprise at the way I comported myself in the barracks. I had energy; I didn’t have the emaciated, skeletal look of the starved. The suspicions began to grow.

  Of course, there hadn’t been sufficient time since arriving for the weight gain to really show … after all, I’d come to Auschwitz from nine months at Sachsenhausen, so the extra bread and meat he gave me was only keeping me able to do the work without starting to look like a skeleton.

  But the mechanic insisted that I had a reward for all the hard work I’d done in the past four weeks, got the okay from the captain of the guard, and that night took me to the large wooden hut, called Building Number One. There were four fairly new buildings which had been erected. No. 1 was the brothel for the use of the SS, the guards, and privileged prisoners like me. No. 2 was the camp administration, where office staff and others in the so-called political department were housed; No. 3 was where they did the laundry; and No. 4 was a complete secret, though rumours abounded that it housed the infamous Block where Dr. Mengele and the others were said to carry out their experiments on human beings.

  When I first entered the building which they used as a brothel, I was curious about the smell. It was the aroma of a hospital, the sort of smell which you experience in a ward … antiseptic … washed surfaces, cleanliness. It was alien to anything I’d smelled in many years … since my appendix operation when I was a nine-year-old. I didn’t associate this smell with a brothel. For some reason, I thought that brothels smelled of perfume and sensuality. And nor was I concerned about getting the pox, even though I was certain that each of the whores inside was pox-ridden. Why? Because life had taken on a different meaning. On the outside you could plan your future; avoid sexual diseases because you wanted to marry a nice young woman, and you didn’t want to infect her; there was something to look forward to; and you could take steps to defend yourself from what nature threw at you. But i
n the camps, there was no future; only the present. If you survived the day, you looked forward to sleep; if you survived the night and awoke the following morning, you thanked the Almighty for giving you another day. Did I think about the pox as I entered the brothel? Did I worry about its effects on my future? Of course I didn’t. I looked forward to no future; all I lived for was the present!

  There were steps up to the building. The door opened, and facing us was a small reception area, and then four or five corridors which led to a series of cubicles. It was as though we had entered a corporate headquarters and off the corridors were a whole series of tiny little offices, each with a door. Some of the doors were open, and I could detect movement. There were no signs on the door, but I assumed that those that were open contained prostitutes waiting for someone to enter, those that were closed contained prostitutes busy with a customer.

  I think it was seeing the closed doors which made me fully realise that this was a brothel where slave women were used for their bodies. And I also remember my mind splitting in two. One side was saying, ‘Well, isn’t that what the Nazis have everybody else doing?’ The other side was saying, ‘How can you be in a place where women are forced to act like animals?’

  Things which happen in wartime could never happen in peace time. It’s not just the way we accept killing and death … it’s the way we accept the loss of value of the human life. Our own, and others.

  The mechanic led me to a door with which he seemed to be familiar. It was the fifth or sixth door in the left hand corridor. The door was wide open. He nudged me in the arm and said, ‘Go in. Enjoy yourself. Don’t worry.’

  I entered the room. There was a bed, a wooden carpetless floor, a wooden cabinet beside the bed, a chair, and that was all. It was as though this was the cheapest room in the cheapest boarding house in some rural hamlet in the Black Forest. And on the bed was a woman.

  I smiled at her. I didn’t know what else to do. She was just sitting there, looking into her lap. She was wearing only a blue dressing gown. She had short, dark hair. For a moment I thought she was asleep, somehow in a sitting position, but then slowly she looked up at me. Except on the dead, I’ve never seen a face so devoid of expression. I was shocked to my very core. Her eyes were those of some extinct animal, as though once there had been light and laughter, but now the forces of nature had robbed her of existence. Never have I seen such dead eyes.

  Her lips were frozen together in a thin line. I think I tried to smile, to show her some feeling of warmth and human empathy. But if she saw through those mortified eyes, then it failed to translate to her mouth, because she remained expressionless as she stood, and allowed the dressing gown to slip from her body, showing her nakedness.

  I felt a shock, as though hot metal had pierced my body, as she stood before me, exposed but without any self-regard. Embarrassment was an emotion felt only by those who control their own destiny. Embarrassment had left this woman in her first few days in the brothel. She walked past me and closed the door. We were standing there, and she nodded at me to remove my clothes.

  But my mind left her presence and flew out of the room, to a time five or six years beforehand, when I was still young in mind and strong in body; when Giselle had accompanied me to a weekend away at a friend’s lakeside home. Giselle and I had been chaperoned, but we managed to elude her aunt and found ourselves alone in the boatshed. Without talk, without pleading, she removed my tie and shirt and trousers and undergarments, as she allowed me to remove her dress and silks and laces.

  Giselle’s perfume, the rustling of the silk she wore, the softness of her skin came back to me over the years with an intensity which took away my breath. I looked at this pathetic, naked creature, standing there with a look of hatred buried deep within her dead eyes. I looked down at myself as I struggled to undo the top button of my coarse, filthy striped prison pyjamas. I saw my hands, rutted and filthy with scabs and sores and ingrained dirt; I felt my hair, once strong and shining and lustrous with pomade, now as dead and lifeless as my present; I ran my hands over my face and for the first time in a year, felt how it had shrunk with starvation and how my beard struggled to grow. And I saw then how the Nazis had brought me low. And I fell on to this unnamed woman’s bed and sobbed my eyes out.

  For the first time since I’d entered the room, some life came into her eyes. As I sat there crying into my cupped hands, I felt her sit beside me. She knew I was a Jew, a prisoner. But she must have assumed that I was a traitor, earning the special privilege of entry to the brothel because I’d given the Nazis information against my people. So it must have come as a shock to her when I fell on her bed, weeping. I felt her gently take my hands away from my face, as though forcing me to look upon my own shame. And then she spoke for the first time.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked simply. Though she was still young, her voice was deep, as though old with experience.

  ‘I’m so ashamed,’ I told her, though I wasn’t sure she could understand my words though my sobs.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Of what I’ve become.’

  ‘And what have you become?’ she asked me gently. Her voice, deep and soothing, was sweet to hear. But there was a gulf between us. She wasn’t in sympathy with me; rather she was asking these questions as a doctor asks a sick patient.

  ‘Look at me. Look at you. Is this how people should behave towards each other?’

  ‘We’re victims of this war. This is what happens to victims. What have you done that you’ve been brought in here?’

  I looked at her eyes, and it was then that I saw some life had returned to them. They were dark, deep, Semitic eyes, the eyes of Naomi and Judith and Sarah and Rachael. The eyes of a woman who has seen the desert stars and known the torment of five thousand years of being different.

  I told her about how I’d been in Sachsenhausen, and how the mechanic now working in Auschwitz had requisitioned me for special hydraulic work. That I’d been digging a ditch all on my own, and as a reward, the mechanic had offered me … I was about to say ‘a prostitute,’ but I couldn’t use the word. So instead, I told her that the mechanic had offered me … ‘you.’ There was no sense of shock on her face, nor of betrayal, nor of hatred. Just acceptance.

  ‘I’ve heard of this mechanic,’ she told me. ‘He comes in here sometimes. The girls say he’s very good to them. That he’s not violent, and he shows them respect. He even brings in food and sometimes tobacco and once, he brought in some chocolate.’

  I felt her stroking my lice-ridden hair. She was actually touching me. I realised that I hadn’t been touched by a woman in nearly two years. Her hands were gentle and probing, feeling the contours of my skull, moving down to the exposed cords at the back of my neck. Yet I could tell that it was a mechanical movement, devoid of emotion. Something which she’d been taught when she became a whore. Maybe something she’d used in the early days, thinking that her job was to bring pleasure, before she realised that all she had to be was an outlet for relief.

  I moved her hand from my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘You don’t understand. I’m here because he told me to be here. You’re my reward. But I don’t want a reward like this. All I want is food and rest. And to get away from here and to go back to my home and …’ I began to sob again.

  Her mood turned to condemnatory. ‘Pull yourself together. That sort of thing leads to death. You know you mustn’t show weakness in front of these bastards. Tell me, what’s your name?’

  I told her. I told her about my life in Berlin, and my about my parents and brother and sister. I told her about the work I’d done when I was first sent to camp.

  While I was talking, there was the sound of feet marching outside the window. Then the noise of screamed commands, and wafting through the air, as though from a heavenly orchestra, the sound of swing music. Then we heard the sounds of boots climbing the steps of the brothel, and the laughter and coarse remarks of men walking down corridors. The prostitute—I had no idea of her name
, even though she now knew something about me—visibly stiffened at the sounds from the outside world. Her mood changed, and she appeared to withdraw from me in body and in mind. Suddenly there was a bang at the door, a rough thump which shook the light fitting.

  ‘Come on in there, you whore bitch. Hurry up. There’s others waiting.’ It was the accent of a Ukrainian guard, the voice of a sadist. They were all sadists, the Ukrainians.

  The girl called out, ‘I’ve only just started, go somewhere else.’ She looked at me urgently and whispered, ‘Shout out ‘go away!’

  I did. In my loudest and most commanding German. I heard the Ukrainian mumble and his boots disappearing down the corridor to find an open door.

  Funny, in all my time in Auschwitz, my most insistent memory was of being able to shout a command … ‘go away.’

  Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  Theodore Broderick was about to give up on his Nazi client. Well-known for defending the defenseless, the impoverished, the mentally incompetent, as well as Negroes and Latins from South America and other members of the distressed minorities which made up the family of America, in his career as an advocate for people brought before court, he’d also come to the aid of people whom he would not even have bothered recognizing had he met them under other circumstances.