by Alan Gold
He’d defended white racists accused of murder of black people, and he’d felt disgust at their self-justification, but he’d reasoned that if he didn’t defend them, then American justice was not for all; he’d defended wife-beaters and serial murderers and traitors and rich city businessmen who had made their wealth from the sweat and misery of others.
But in each and every case that he’d defended, the accused man had assisted him in his work as defense attorney. It might not have been at the beginning of the case, but somehow, sometime during the taking of evidence, or when the trial began and the evidence against the accused was being amassed, the wall of indifference broke down, and the defendant began to defend himself.
It had nearly happened with Wilhelm Deutch. A day or two earlier, the prisoner had been angry in self-justification. Broderick could sense it from his occasional snorts of contempt at the evidence which was being presented in court; even his body language, shifting on his chair, squaring his shoulders as witnesses were unveiling a litany of brutality during his time as a mechanic in the camp, gave expression to his pent-up rage at the way lies were being told and his character was being systematically degraded.
But then, by the end of the day in court, the wall was rebuilt, and again he was indifferent in his silence. Broderick was beginning to wish that he had respected Deutch’s desire to be tried by the initial arraignment with the mechanics from the Einstazgruppen, for by now he’d be in the death cells, waiting for the ultimate penalty. This trial was a waste of time, resources, and energy when there was so much evil abroad, still unpunished.
Thinking back, it was the evidence of the pathetic Jewish prostitute that seemed to have turned him silent again. Broderick had looked deeply into the face of that poor woman, Hannelle, and then at the face of his client. They both appeared to be deeply hurt—she, because of her accounts of how she’d been forced to give her body to the animals—he because the prostitute had told everyone that he was as bad as them. It was strange. Broderick realised that he hadn’t even begun to get underneath the skin of his client. If he had to draw a pen portrait of Deutch, he’d have to admit that all he could do was to show the crudest of features. Underneath, there’d be no humanity, no real man. He waited for the guard to bring his client into the interview room before the start of the day’s evidence. And what a day it would be. This was when the prosecution would present evidence of the horrors of Birkenau, the death camp of Auschwitz.
The door to the interrogation room opened, and two guards entered, followed by Deutch. He was dressed in his usual grey shirt, blue-striped tie, and dark blue suit. He looked more like a clerk in an accountant’s office than a man accused of being an important cog in the machinery of death. He looked—Broderick searched for the appropriate word, and as Deutch sat down, it occurred to him how best to describe his client—banal! Ordinary! Commonplace! He found it hard to mask his contempt. Broderick knew full well that he was breaking the cardinal rule of the advocate … he was believing the evidence against his client.
Broderick began to speak immediately when he saw Deutch shuffling the bundle of papers he’d brought with him into the interrogation room. ‘My view is that the trial proper begins today. All the evidence so far … about your treatment of people and your alleged cooperation with the brutality of the Nazi guards when you were mending the machinery in the slave factories, about your treatment of the camp prostitutes … all of that was the prosecution painting a character for the judge to illustrate your base side, in preparation for laying the groundwork of your willing complicity in making the gas ovens work so that the Nazis could follow Hitler’s orders.’
Deutch nodded in agreement. ‘So it begins.’
‘Is there anything you need to tell me? We’ve had a couple of surprises so far from what came up in evidence against you. The Neimann testimony … the young woman prostitute were very damaging.’
‘Why so? All the camps worked people to death and had brothels. All the guards and commandants used the women there. I was given access because I was on the staff of the camp. What that woman told the court was that I hadn’t beaten her, nor treated her brutally, nor demanded any abnormal sexual performances, as was all too often the case with the others. I could have told you stories of women, prostitutes, who were beaten to death during sex … not for crimes they’d committed, but as a part of the sadism which some of the guards enjoyed. They didn’t need to be restrained, as they were in civilian life. In the camps, you could do whatever you wanted to a prostitute, no matter how base and immoral, and nobody would say a thing. Even if a woman was carried out dead, another would be sent in to replace her before the customer had even lost his erection, and the whole thing would start all over again. What did this witness, this Hannelle Cohen, say about me? What was the worst crime I committed? That I tried to befriend her. That I tried to get to know her.
‘I was lonely. I was separated from my wife and daughter. I worked long, hard hours. There was a great deal of tension in the place. Allied bombers were flying over the area all the while. Air raid sirens. We didn’t know whether they’d target the camps. There were rumours that the Jews in America were petitioning the British government to bomb the camps and put their fellow Jews out of their misery; and to prevent the camps from being used for the purpose of genocide. Whether or not that was true, I don’t know. But it was a rumour, and in those days, our daily bread was rumour.
‘I was always on edge, nervous, frightened. So naturally I went to the brothel to ease my bodily needs and to calm my mind. But I was never like the others. I had no need for lust or brutality. All I needed was a woman with a soft voice and comforting hands to remind me of my wife and the life from which I’d been separated.’
Broderick interrupted. ‘That wasn’t the way in which the witness described your visits to her.’
‘I know what she said,’ Deutch responded angrily. ‘But again, you’re listening to facts, to things said, in a cold and hostile courtroom. You have no understanding of how things were. Of how easy it was to be caught up in that fast-moving vehicle which was Nazism.’
He stood, his mood suddenly growing furious. Broderick noticed that his mood shifts were getting increasingly rapid and regular since the trial had begun, not an altogether unusual phenomenon.
But what was unusual was the anger which Deutch suddenly directed at his defense counsel. ‘Why can’t you understand, you
stupid, arrogant American?’ he shouted. ‘Why can’t you get it through your thick skull that I’m innocent? That I tried to help people like that woman, Hannelle; that there were many people given to me as slaves who I treated with kindness, with respect; that I fed and tried to keep alive. Why can’t you understand that I’m not like the Nazis?’
Softly, Broderick said, ‘Because what I understand isn’t important. We’re in a court of law, and we can’t prove what you’re saying. Because I’ve only got your word, and it’s your word against a truckload of evidence showing that you were there, and you were a willing participant. I might believe you, Mr. Deutch, but I have to convince the judge, and he’s a very sceptical man. A man who, for the past year, has been listening to some of the most horrific tales of bestiality in the litany of humankind’s experience.
‘Where’s the evidence to prove the facts of which you’re trying to convince me? Where are the people you helped? What acts of kindness did you show? You’ve given me nothing except words. Just a constantly repeated theme, a refrain, a chorus that you were forced to be there, that you were swept up, but that you didn’t do what the others did. You keep telling me that you helped the slaves you were given, that you gave them food and sheltered them. But where are they? Why won’t they come forward? I’ve had men out in the refugee camps and the Red Cross and the other agencies all asking for people who’ll speak on your behalf, but not one person has come forward saying you helped him. Not one. Mr. Deutch, I’m trying desperately to present your side of things in the best possible way, but you’ve given me nothi
ng to work with. Nothing.’
Wilhelm Deutch sat down and looked at his lawyer. ‘Even if I did, nobody would believe me,’ he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Allied Occupied Germany, June, 1946
From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:
In Auschwitz, I was afraid of dying.
In Birkenau, I was afraid of living.
Even now, even a year and a half after I left that hell on earth, and no matter how long I live, nothing in my life will erase the smell of that place from my mind. Nothing will shut out the pictures which shimmer in the twilight of my days.
No matter how long I live, or what I might do with my life, nothing will ever help me understand what happened to me when I was given the job of tending to the gas ovens in Birkenau. One day, I’m digging trenches, fixing laundries, mending machinery, putting new wooden staves into shovels to replace ones which had broken—the sort of thing for which my parents once employed a disabled handyman called Heinz; next day, I’m a part of the machinery which kills human beings and burns their bodies to ash. Then I take the ash and sprinkle it on the vegetable gardens so that the dust and embers, the sole remnant of a thousand years of European Jewry, can help lettuces and cabbages grow to feed Nazi concentration camp guards.
If the change had been gradual, I might have been able to understand it. A week, even a month of occasional work in Birkenau to acclimatise, to get me used to the place, and things might have fitted together more gently in my mind. But one day I’m sitting in the open air on top of a roof, repairing the damaged and broken tar and pitch, gratefully sharing the forbidden fruits of Wilhelm Deutch’s lunch, and the next, I’m one of the servants of Lucifer, stoking the fires of hell. From roof repairer over-viewing all around me like some Renaissance prince in his bell tower, I suddenly and inexplicably became a part of a team of Sonderkommandos whose life expectancy is no more than three or four months; and that’s only if they don’t go crazy within a month or so of joining because of the work they’re forced to do.
Some of them did go crazy. These Sonderkommandos were often Jews, human beings! They’d push and shove and shovel their living fellow Jews into the gas chambers, and then when their souls flew up to whatever deity was overseeing this bit of handiwork and only agonised and contorted bodies were left behind, the Sonderkommandos would haul their co-religionists’ bodies into the ovens for burning. So how could you stay normal when you’re doing this sort of demonic work hour after hour, day after day, like some monstrous factory worker on an assembly line?
Yes, some did go mad, and, while still alive, numbed from reality, their colleagues, men with whom only hours before they’d been working, would help them strip off their clothes and assist them in walking towards the doors of the gas chambers. Then their colleagues would bid them farewell and they’d willing die along with all the other pathetic flotsam of Jewish humanity … unbelievable; utterly macabre.
But again, I’m racing on. I must be annoying you, reader, but I don’t mean to. It’s just that these events are not only momentous to me, but so defy my belief in what has happened to me and to the rest of the world, that my mind skips from one nightmare to another.
So let me start from the beginning and tell you how I was sent away from Wilhelm Deutch, the mechanic of Auschwitz, to become the Jew, the prisoner Gutman, one of the Sonderkommandos of Birkenau.
We had just finished putting pitch on the roof of the kitchen, which had sprung a leak after some rainwater froze inside some of the cracks in the old tar. It was a very cold day up there, especially for me in my prison pajamas; there was no protection from the icy wind, no building in whose lee I could shelter. But it wasn’t all bad. From my vantage point on the roof, I could see almost all of the camp. You have no idea how big Auschwitz-Birkenau was. It stretched away for kilometres, as far as the eye could see. Barrack blocks arranged in precise Germanic lines like soldiers on a battlefield, utility huts, administration blocks, and kilometres of barbed wire and fencing, interspersed at regular intervals by guard towers. There were three separate fences made of different wires. The most notorious, of course, was the electrified fencing, against which more and more inmates threw themselves in their despair.
Up on the roof, I could see the layout of everything. But my eyes were invariably drawn to Birkenau, built just three miles away. Originally it was planned to be built within the compound of Auschwitz, but some high and mighty ruler from Berlin came and decreed that it would be built away from the camp … perhaps so as not to frighten the natives. Ha! As if the natives in the camp didn’t see the trains and the crowds of old men and women and young boys and girls being torn away from their relatives and shuffled off to join the long, snaking queue going towards Birkenau. They went in, but no one, ever, came out again. A one-way ticket to extinction.
It was in Birkenau that the evil chimneys kept pumping out their black and grey smoke. Jewish bodies were being burned in increasing numbers as the German armies retreated under the Allied assault. Madness. Mania. Hitler was so desperate to destroy European Jewry, even when the officer corps realised that the war was lost, that he’d ordered increased numbers of roundups, increased gassings, increased burnings. Trains and trucks and precious fuel which must have been urgently needed for the war effort were diverted for Hitler’s insane drive to achieve his Final Solution. The gas chambers and furnaces could hardly keep up; which was why my life suddenly changed course so badly. One minute, I was up on the roof mending old pitch, next minute …
As I was peeling back the pitch, I noticed that one of the commandants from the administration block was on the verandah, looking up at me. Now, I’m no thing of beauty, and this man was a tall, lean, muscular Aryan in an immaculate uniform, known for the sexual demands he made on recently arrived and attractive young women prisoners. Many times, he’d selected one out of a new intake, and she would disappear for a week before being tossed back into the cesspool of Auschwitz, shorn of her hair, and forced to live and die in the camp with the rest of the refuse.
So I knew that this particular officer wasn’t looking at me for the beauty of my body. When a guard or an officer studies you, it’s a sure sign of trouble to come. Why would they waste their time or their precious eyesight looking at human garbage, the bacteria of Europe as Hitler called us, when they could be doing other things for the war effort, like beating prisoners to death and thereby saving on rations? When for the third time I saw him looking up to the roof examining me as if I had horns growing out of my head, it was then that I knew something bad was going to happen to me.
I kept working harder than before, slapping the pitch on to the roof as though I was a demon. Come lunchtime, when Deutch sat on the end of the roof and whispered for me to sneak over and share in his lunch, I kindly declined, whispering that I thought I was under observation from one of the hierarchy. I climbed down the ladder and went to the food table where our watery soup was being doled out. Stupidly, I thought that this might save me. It didn’t.
At the end of the day, the officer came over to the kitchen area where we were working and called Deutch to climb down the ladder to the ground. I say ‘called.’ The mechanic wasn’t called, he was ordered. When this officer came close to us, I could tell that this was Hauptscharführer Habschin, the deputy commander in charge of organising labour in the camp. Not God, not as powerful or as evil as the man in charge of labour, a bastard called Hauptsturmführer Frauenfeld, a sadist and utterly evil man whom every inmate feared; no, this man wasn’t God, just one of the important Archangels, a man who positively rejoiced in the act of persecution.
Deutch responded immediately. He went over to the Hauptscharführer and began to talk to him, casually at first, with what seemed like pleasantries. I watched in horror, my heart pounding, as first the Hauptscharführer looked up at me, and then Deutch, his back turned, also glanced over in my direction. Now the conversation changed. Deutch was arguing … not forcefully, but passionately. I could hear his raised voice, but not w
hat he was saying over the other noises in the camp. Hauptscharführer Habschin shook his head, as if saying, ‘My decision is final,’ and strode away, leaving Deutch immobile, rooted to the spot. I saw him call after the Hauptscharführer, but the arrogant bastard just kept walking away. Deutch walked quickly to follow him, talking all the while, but the officer simply ignored the mechanic, whose body seemed to slump in defeat and acceptance of the inevitable.
Slowly, looking much older than moments earlier, he turned and walked back to the kitchen and climbed the ladder. I knew he was coming to give me news of my doom. I finished my soup, my hands shaking. As though walking to the gallows, I returned to the administration hut where I was repairing the pitch on the roof and climbed the ladder, all strength in my body completely gone. How I struggled up the ladder, I’ll never know. But I eventually reached the top. I saw my benefactor sitting there, looking vaguely into the distance. He was straddling the roof, idly pulling up clumps of old pitch. But his face gave him away; he couldn’t look at me. Every other day, he’d beamed a smile as I breasted the ladder or arrived at his work-site. Every day, he celebrated yet another day of beating the system, of getting the better of the guards and the administration. But now his face was like one of the losers of an important race, a man who had tried hard, yet stumbled at the last hurdle.
‘The Hauptscharführer has decided that they’re shorthanded in the Sonderkommando section of Birkenau, and as you look so strong and fit, he has selected you to make up the numbers. It appears that they had three suicides last night. And their numbers were down anyway because of last month’s revolt.’
The mechanic glanced down at the roof, unable to look me in the eyes. ‘I’m really sorry. I tried to dissuade him, but he had already decided. You start tomorrow morning.’
I could have argued. I could have told him that he needed me on the roof, that by now I was an expert at spreading pitch, and that I was useful in other areas as well, like mechanics and hydraulics … that it would take him weeks to train another inmate up to my skills … but the look on his face and the godlike demeanour of the Hauptscharführer were enough for me to realise that anything I might say would have no effect. And Deutch knew it too. When at last he looked at me, it was as though he was saying goodbye forever to a friend.
