by Alan Gold
‘But that only saved a few of them, because when you live in rubble, it’s not easy to change your outfit. So most women would be walking through the streets of Berlin, and they’d hear the command, ‘Woman, come here.’ Then they knew they were going to be raped, right there in the streets. Pack raped, sometimes by as many as a dozen men. And the Russians would walk off laughing, and these poor women would be forced to get up and stagger away; and then there’d be the shout, ‘Woman, come here,’ and they knew that they were going to be raped again. I’ve heard reports from independent and authoritative sources that some women were raped ninety times in a single day, and then raped again and again the following day and the day after.’
Broderick realised that he’d stopped eating.
‘Nothing,’ said Gerherty, ‘absolutely nothing seemed to be able to stop the barbarity. Nothing, that is, until Marshal Zhukov suddenly decided, for no apparent reason, that enough was enough. And then just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. You know Theo, it’s been two years since that happened, and German women are still committing suicide every day because they can no longer live with the shame.
‘Sure, the SS did hideous things. But is it fair to identify the Germans as the only monsters in this war? Is it fair to single out one insignificant cog like this guy you’re defending in Nuremberg from the massive machine which went crazy, and say that the cog is as guilty for doing what it’s forced to do, as is the crazy machine for what it produces? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough?’’
Gerherty and Broderick finished the remains of their meal in silence.
Allied Occupied Germany
June, 1946
From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:
When it came, it came with unexpected suddenness. I had been sleeping in our special barracks, reserved only for the Sonderkommando. Often we didn’t even go back to our barracks, but instead knew that we could only get a couple of hours of sleep in between the batches of new arrivals earmarked to die, and so instead of going across the compound of Birkenau to our quarters, we pulled together some coats and dresses that the now-dead Jews had stripped off, and used them for mattresses and blankets.
Can you imagine sleeping in a charnel house? We didn’t dream, for how could nightmares have been any more frightening than the daytime visions which we saw. But sleep we did, fitfully and restlessly, breathing in the smoky atmosphere and the stench of old clothes.
And yes, we worked hard, and we needed our sleep, or we’d have been beaten, and we’d have been the ones gassed and burnt. So we slept and in the morning we rose and stripped off the clothes from soon-to-be dead men and woman and children, and we forced them into the gas chambers and pushed their bodies into the ovens … and that was what we did to survive.
I was sleeping in the barracks when I heard my name being called. I didn’t respond at first, because I didn’t realise that the name belonged to me. It was so long since someone had referred to me as anything by ‘you’ or ‘hey, Jew’, or ‘fucking Yid’ that when the guard called out the name ‘Joachim Gutman’ it simply didn’t register on my brain that he was talking about me.
Someone thumped me in the ribs. The man next to me, a Pole, was even more taciturn and uncommunicative than I had become. He almost never even looked at me … or at anybody. He just seemed to stare at the ground and perform his tasks. Never seemed to show any feelings, any emotions. I’d seen them like that before. They were the first to commit suicide.
I awoke with a start and listened to the guard. ‘Gutman!’ he shouted again. And then I remembered that it was my name and I realised he was talking about me.
When I’d been a student at school, if the teacher had called my name, ‘Gutman!’ I’d have been mortified. I knew I was in trouble and would stand reluctantly in order to follow him to the principal’s office for punishment.
But this place wasn’t school. And when you were about to be punished, they didn’t call you by name. They simply took out a truncheon and beat you or clubbed you with the butts of their rifles. It was all so anonymous.
So I knew when I stood that this would be to my advantage. I struggled over the other still-sleeping forms and followed the guard out of our barracks. There was a motorcycle and sidecar waiting there, its exhaust making clouds in the freezing early-morning air. There was no point in asking where I was being taken, or complaining, or even being frightened. If I was going to my death, then I was travelling in style; if I was going to be tortured and bludgeoned, then I would be rested by the time I arrived. Either way, a feeling of peace overcame me.
I struggled into the sidecar and shifted my matchstick legs until they were comfortable. On top of the sidecar was a machine-gun, although it was obvious that it wasn’t engaged. I suppose that given sufficient time, I could have reengaged it and killed a few Nazis; I could have gone out in a burst of glory. But to do that, I’d have had to have the enthusiasm, and anyway, I didn’t have the strength to be a hero.
But despite my braggadocio, it was all fanciful. The moment the guard saw me fiddling with it, he would have brought his massive hand down on my skull and killed me. And now wasn’t the time for me to die. I was travelling by motorcycle. And I was intensely curious about where I was being taken.
It’s odd that, having been among the dead and the almost dead for three weeks now, the fear of death was no longer any part of my being. It had been expunged, eliminated, driven out by the demons which circled my head every waking moment of the day. Being a Sonderkommando, the only thing which I had to cling on to, the only thing which differentiated me from the dead who I threw into the furnaces, was my sanity. In the workplace of the damned, my death would have been the sanest result of my life. So as the guard and I rode off in his motorcycle towards the gates of Birkenau, and then out into Auschwitz, I knew that I was leaving death behind.
CHAPTER TEN
Allied Occupied Germany, 1946
From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:
It was as though I was taking part in one of those Hollywood movies. As though this wasn’t me, or my life, but I’d become part of a dream. Suddenly I wasn’t part of the reality around me; suddenly neither death nor the darkness of the rooms where I burned corpses, nor the awful perpetual stench of the gas chambers, were any longer a part of my existence.
No, this was altogether a performance of my inner mind, a play put on by my imagination to make me happy just before I died. Even though I pinched myself and bit the inside of my cheek to anchor me in reality, my mind wouldn’t accept that where I was, and what was happening, was my existence. Suddenly I was playing the part of an actor who’s forgotten his lines and wanders through the set, trying to work out what’s going on. Surreal is the only thing that I can call it. Suddenly my life was lived in one of the paintings which Hitler and Himmler said were the corruptions of the Western decadent mind … paintings by Degas and Renoir. I felt as though I was floating in a dream. As though the colours were muted and gentle, flimsy green and blue and yellow pastels; as though the landscape was that of gently flowing rivers whose banks were given cooling shade from the warm sun by the cascading leaves of willow trees.
I could smell again; smell the fragrant air of the countryside. I could see again, the sharp edges of buildings and the distant outlines of the poplar trees. I could taste again, the saltiness of the sweat of my lips, the erotic flavour of the turnip and beets in the soup I was given. It was as if a protective angel had come to earth, touched me with his finger, and transported me into the arms of God.
Where was I? Was the war at an end? Was I once again in the bosom of my loving family, and had the past six years been just been a nightmare from which I was slowly waking? Was I sleeping in my comfortable bed in my bedroom in my house in Berlin, having woken up in sweat and confusion from the middle of some hideous and terrifying psychotic episode?
No, it was none of these things. But I suddenly found myself away from the gas chambers and the ovens and the hell of Birkenau,
and back in the safety, the protection, the ease of Auschwitz. Back where people were still living, where occasionally they still smiled, where there were still expressions on faces instead of the look of living death which we Sonderkommandos wore as part of our uniform.
I think back now and still cannot believe it. Sachsenhausen had been the worst place I’d every encountered when I was there; but it was a virtual paradise until I came to Auschwitz. Could there ever have been a hell more obscene, more painful, than Auschwitz? Could humankind in its most evil and bestial nightmare have invented a place more hideous than Auschwitz? Yet when I was released from being a Sonderkommando in Birkenau just three kilometres down the railway line, on returning to Auschwitz, it seemed like a heaven on earth. I could see its beauty, the freshness of the air, the cleanliness of the barracks, the delightful precision of the barbed wire fences which surrounded it. I actually walked around Auschwitz smiling. People thought I was crazy. How can one smile in Auschwitz? Well, when you’ve survived Birkenau, then yes, you can smile, even in Auschwitz.
I was working beyond the perimeter of the prison’s fence, within the compound of the guards and the administration. I was now ensconced in the head office, pretending to be a highly qualified bookkeeper. I was doctoring the figures of what Auschwitz had been all about.
Instead of killing human beings, I was killing history. I was murdering truth.
So how had I escaped the landscape of death? How had I been chosen to become a clerk in the employ of the Greater German Government? How could I have been plucked from the maw of Hell and allowed to enter the gates to Paradise?
What happened was simply this. When I was chauffeur-driven in a motorcycle out of Birkenau, we roared down the road to Auschwitz. I remember the cold, clear air against my face. It felt glorious, erotic, elegant after the coke-laden noxious atmosphere of the ovens. When the motorcyclist guard circumnavigated the compound and drew up outside the steps of one of the blocks, I stepped cautiously out of the sidecar and found myself weaving giddily in front of the central administration building. I knew it was where the commandant and his assistants worked, because I’d been inside the administrative building of my former concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, and I knew the look and the feel of a place which administered the reality of genocide. Guards standing like sentries at the entryway; men in middle-ranking uniforms running up stairs clutching sheaves of papers; and occasionally a primly dressed woman secretary or typist who walked down a corridor, who looked at me with a sneer on her face as though I were sullying her environment.
Perhaps it was these women whom I found most amazing. I’d known such women who were the clerical workers for my father and his fellow judges in the days before the war, plump and officious fraus who organised the legal system; and here were their sisters, more plump fraus who administered the system of death and destruction. It didn’t matter what their job … these women would have been as efficient and purposeful running a charity as running a killing machine. To them, the nature of the place and what was done there was incidental, compared with the necessity to do the paperwork accurately, to make sure that everything was just so, and to ensure that the management could get on with its work.
But I digress. I’m getting to the end of my story, and I’m beginning to smell the seductions of freedom. So I shall continue where I left off.
The motorcycle guard had deposited me at the foot of the stairs which led up to the main entryway of the large administrative building, ordering me to climb the steps and ask the guard for the office of Hauptsturmführer Erich Frauenfeld.
Again, as happened to me in Sachsenhausen, I noticed how filthy I was. My prisoner pajamas were covered in the grime of death. There were blood and mucus and excrement stains all over me from where humanity had leaked its insides in the throes of dying. In Birkenau, I didn’t notice any of it. It blended in with the filth of my environment. But here, amidst the clean uniforms and the sparkling walls and the shining floors, I quickly noticed myself. I felt ashamed. Again! When would I stop feeling guilty for what these monsters did to me?
Guards in the Administration Block seemed to know of my arrival. I mumbled, ‘Hauptsturmführer Frauenfeld?’ and they just pointed to a door along a corridor. What struck me most forcefully was that I was left on my own to wander down the corridor. For the past year of my concentration, I was guarded, pushed, shoved, threatened, never ever alone even for a second … always within the immediate control of an SS man or a slavemaster or a Blockführer. Yet suddenly I was at liberty, with no one by my side. Suddenly I was free to wander.
I knocked diffidently on the door. A command to enter was barked out. I opened the door, and sitting behind a large wooden desk, full of reports and papers and open books, was the man who dealt out work to the Auschwitz inmates, their slavemaster, the Mephistopheles of Auschwitz. It was Frauenfeld who often stood on a mobile dais—the back of a flatbed truck—and took morning parade, determining those who would work and in which of the many factories within and around Auschwitz they would do their work. But he didn’t simply give out work; he was also keeping his eyes on those who were so exhausted that even though they stood up straight, and tried to look as if capable of a twelve-hour day, were so exhausted that a light wind would fell them. These, he would order to remain where they were; these we wouldn’t see again; these were the men and women sent to Birkenau.
Frauenfeld was a large, square-set man of middle age. He sat comfortably behind his desk, as though in his den at home, looking at me in curiosity as I struggled with the weight of the door. It was a very large desk, and his arms only reached halfway across; and the desk lamp was like something out of one of the fashionable shops on the main streets of Berlin, delicate and flimsy with a cord which you pulled to turn it on. It seemed ridiculous, so out of place in comparison with its surroundings. More on his desk … photographs of him in his shiny uniform with other uniformed men wearing heavy medals on their breasts. Yet none of a woman or children … only him in the various stages of his career.
I remember he was wearing half-moon glasses, staring at me in curiosity. He could have been my favourite uncle, except that he was dressed in the death-black uniform of an SS officer. And sitting opposite him, smiling at me in encouragement, was the Messiah. There, ensconced in a chair opposite Hauptsturmführer Frauenfeld was my saviour, Wilhelm Deutch.
‘Stand in front of my desk,’ the Hauptsturmführer ordered. I did as I was commanded. ‘Herr Mechanical Engineer Deutch informs me that while you were working for him on the roof of the kitchen, you informed him that you were an expert in bookkeeping. That you were the chief accountant for a large Jewish firm of jewellers. Is that correct?’
I looked at Wilhelm Deutch. His face was impassive because the Hauptsturmführer was observing both of our reactions; but in his eyes, he was begging me to play along with the charade. I nodded. I remained wordless. Morally it was better than lying. Morals? Ha!
‘What type of work did you do there?’ asked the Hauptsturmführer.
I cleared my throat and tried to remember what the clerks in my father’s old law practice used to do, though I was little more than a child when they used to do it. ‘Sir, I used to keep the records of income and expenditure, of debits and credits, of stock and sales, of prices and international dealings.’
I began to warm to the deception as a wave of relief swept over Deutch’s face. ‘I occasionally had to visit stock markets in other countries and I also bought and sold precious stones and metals. Sometimes we had additional stocks which we’d bought at good prices and …’
‘Enough!’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want to know everything about your life. Come. Sit,’ he said, standing and bringing over a chair. I felt my mouth drop in surprise. An SS officer being hospitable to me. Unheard of. But I sat.
‘Gutman. I know from Herr Deutch that you’re not a fool. You’re a highly educated man. So it won’t come as a surprise to you that Germany is doing badly in this damn war. The Russians are
within smelling distance, and despite brave resistance by the Wehrmacht, we’re being overwhelmed. We have plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, but what I’m more concerned about is myself. I’m talking to you like this, Gutman, because Herr Deutch assures me that you can be trusted, and that I can be open with you; that you’ve learned the bitter realities of what happens to men who betray secrets.
‘Be aware that what I am about to discuss with you must be known only amongst the three of us. Remember, Gutman, that I’m the one holding the gun.’
Quite suddenly I felt faint. It occurred to me that Deutch might have told the Hauptsturmführer about our secrets, about the meat and bread and margarine; but then I realised that the secrets he was talking about were those of the Hauptsturmführer and not mine. So I sat and listened.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Gutman? I’m trying to save my life, and if you breathe one word of this conversation outside of this office, I’ll blow your head off.’
I continued to stare mutely at him.
‘Well!’ he demanded.
I had no idea what he wanted me to say.
Softly, Wilhelm Deutch spoke for the first time. ‘Joachim, the Hauptsturmführer wants your assurance that your work for him will remain absolutely secret and confidential. Being the commandant in charge of work rosters, he has the power to employ you in a private capacity, working for himself. He is commanding you to keep any activities you undertake here on his behalf strictly private and confidential, and that you tell no one on pain of death. Do you understand?’
Again, I remained silent. The changes were too rapid, too great.
‘Is he a moron?’ snapped the Hauptsturmführer, looking at the mechanic as though he’d introduced some contagious disease into the office. ‘Why doesn’t he answer?’
