by Ramona Koval
As an Austrian interned for his activism he was given a privileged job as clerk to the chief SS physician in the infirmary, and from his position in that circle of hell he could both witness and document events. His number was 60355, so he had arrived before Max, but not long before.
When he was liberated, Langbein became general secretary of the Comité International des Camps and set about not only analysing what he had seen but reading all the other available survivor and witness testimonies. He started campaigning to bring some of the perpetrators to justice—such as it was in post-war Germany. He filed accusations against Carl Clauberg, who had conducted sterilisation experiments in Auschwitz; he filed accusations against Josef Mengele, who fled to Argentina before he could be extradited; he filed accusations against Wilhelm Boger, which led to the first big Auschwitz trial, in Frankfurt in 1963. He attended most court sessions and published a documentary account of the trial shortly after the verdicts came down.
As was the case with Robert Antelme, being a political prisoner gave Langbein a more protected life in the camp. More than that, his sober understanding of the human condition, perhaps because he was already mature when he was interned, made him a contemporary Virgil for me.
From Langbein I learned that Max was well placed to be given a work detail on his arrival in Auschwitz, being twenty-eight in 1942, tall, strong and a tailor, one of the trades needed for factory work in the camp. Langbein quotes Primo Levi, from Survival in Auschwitz:
At Auschwitz, in 1944, of the old Jewish prisoners (we will not speak of the others here, as their condition was different), ‘kleine Nummer’, low numbers less than 150,000, only a few hundred had survived; not one was an ordinary Häftling, vegetating in the ordinary Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There remained only the doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp; or they were particularly pitiless, vigorous, and inhuman individuals, installed (following an investiture by the SS command, which showed itself in such choices to possess satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos, Blockältester, etc.; or finally, those who, without fulfilling particular functions, had always succeeded through their astuteness and energy in successfully organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advantages and reputation, the indulgence and esteem of the powerful people in the camp. Whosoever does not know how to become an ‘Organisator,’ ‘Kombinator,’ ‘Prominent’ (the savage eloquence of these words!) soon become a ‘musselman’…They followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea.
And in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi elaborates:
Unlike the purely persecutory labour…work could instead at times become a defense. It was so for the few in the Lager who were made to exercise their own trade: tailors, cobblers, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers; such people, resuming their customary activity, recover at the same time, to some extent, their human dignity.
Tailors made uniforms for the Wehrmacht and the SS, including specialist riding breeches, as well as civilian clothes. The factory offered an opportunity to mix with Polish workers from outside the camp, and this meant a chance to trade. Langbein details the underground economy, the possibility that if you had a connection in ‘Canada’ there might be a chance of obtaining a watch or a piece of jewellery which could be bartered for food on the outside.
A few eggs or butter that had been exchanged for a diamond would not be consumed by the ravenous black marketeer but rather be traded with people who worked in the bakery for loaves of bread. The bread would be divided among all who’d taken part in the process. Every step, every transaction came with the risk of death, and many unlucky traders were executed.
I knew from Alan that Max had said he’d managed to get a better job in the infirmary. But what was a tailor doing there? I discovered that SS medics who assisted in the infirmary didn’t have to be trained, and in Aleksander Lasik’s account in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp they were often cobblers, tailors and farmers.
My Virgil, Hermann Langbein, wrote that the infirmary was a desirable posting, despite the possibility of contracting contagious diseases, as it provided a roof over your head, you were excused from violent roll calls, and there was more to eat, because
there were always patients with no appetite and dead people whose rations could still be obtained, since they were prudently not reported as having died until the number of required meals had been submitted. Finally, members of this detail belonged to the upper stratum of camp society, for experienced inmates fostered friendships with HKB [infirmary] personnel.
Max worked first as a tailor and then in the infirmary, a step up. His younger nephew told me some years after we first met that Max’s brother-in-law had been a Kapo in the camp. I thought this connection might have been how Max got a better job, and been the source of rumours about him. No wonder he was proud of his number, a signal to himself and others that here was a strong man, a clever man, a cunning man, a lucky man, and perhaps a man not to be trifled with.
An email arrived from an academic I’d written to in the law faculty at the University of Amsterdam who had an interest in war-crimes trials.
Dear Ms Koval,
Max Dunne is named as a witness in a judgment relating to a killing in Striegenau, Poland (see case no. 755: http://www1.jur.uva.nl/junsv/brd/Tatortengfr.htm). He may well have testified in other cases as well, but as his testimony was not explicitly included in the judgments of these cases, we have no knowledge about that. This can only be established by checking the files of the relevant Auschwitz cases, but you might also inquire with the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg. Perhaps they know. The files of the Striegenau case (including Dunne’s testimony) are either at the State Attorney’s Office (Staatsanwaltschaft) with the Landgericht Arnsberg (judgment of the 23 June 1971; file number: 6 Ks 3/70), or at a state archive to which the people at the Staatsanwaltschaft will, no doubt, be able to point you. You can find the address of the Staatsanwaltschaft by means of googling the Landgericht. Good luck with your search!
Yours sincerely,
Dick de Mildt
I did as he suggested and, in the halting German I’d learned in the two months at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin, I wrote to the Staatsanwaltschaft in Arnsberg for a copy of Max’s testimony.
While I waited I read Rodinsky’s Room, by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, about the search for a man who disappeared from his room above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Spitalfields, London in 1969 and was never heard of again. David Rodinsky’s room was opened up a decade after his disappearance, and since then people had been going through the mess and books and his notes, trying to work out who he was and what might have happened to him.
Like my project, it too was a quest, and I could see the romantic projections that Lichtenstein made as she travelled all over the world following up clues in the cabbalistic notes of her quarry. I had to examine myself for signs of romanticism. There didn’t seem to be, on the surface at least, much romance in finding the truth of Max’s story and the way it might have intersected with mine. Max Dunne sounded like an angry, damaged man, even if it was clear to me why he might have become like that.
I combed through Auschwitz literature to find out more about the jobs that were regarded as ‘good’ in the camp. What went on in the infirmary? How romantic could I be with this material that I had to work with?
Rachel Lichtenstein had far more to go on than I did. She had photographs and documents and other people’s memories. And she could make contact with people and ask them anything she liked without feeling as if she was going to open old wounds or embarrass them or shock them with her very existence.
Then an envelope from Germany arrived in the post. I was renting a shared writing room in an old mansion near my house and my writer roommate, a German speaker, happily agreed to help me with the translation. We headed to our local coffee shop. I was excited, as I expected to ‘hea
r’ the voice of my father for the first time. Though not the voice of a father reading a little girl bedtime stories or praising her school results or warning her tenderly about the ways of the world.
It would be the voice of a former Auschwitz inmate who had been damaged by terrible experiences, who had lost most of his family and who was probably under great stress, standing in a German courthouse twenty-five years after his liberation, giving evidence in a war-crimes trial. It was not a transcript of every one of the words he spoke, but a deposition of his evidence. It had been given in his recently acquired English (did he speak with a strong accent, did he hesitate?) and translated into German at the time. And I was attempting a translation back to English, more than forty years later. What voice could I really expect to hear?
The date of the testimony was 21 October 1970. I was finishing Year Eleven at that time.
First, Max confirmed his identity through his Australian passport: G262151.
He described himself as a manufacturer and designer. He was fifty-six years old and living in Melbourne, Australia—he was younger then than I was now, I realised. Max told the court:
I was born on 23 December 1914 in Mława. I went to the government school in Mława and later to a school for design in Warsaw. Afterwards I came back to Mława. Then the war broke out. I was not yet married. My brother went to Australia in 1937. I moved to the ghetto in Mława at the beginning of 1941 with my parents and was there till 16 November 1942 when we were deported to Auschwitz with the second transport.
Max testified that he was present at mass hangings and shootings on particular days in the ghetto. He described how people looked, estimating their heights and remembering details of what they were wearing and who else was there:
A lieutenant of the Schutzpolizei [security police] from Mława, I can’t remember his name at the moment, but it may come to me. I remember him especially because his girlfriend Marysia Wrablowska went to school with me. He was good-looking, about thirty-eight years old… he was six feet tall, with middle-blond hair. There were also others there.
A man called Paulikat.
He had a light-green uniform on and was a member of the gendarmerie. He was as far as I know an under-officer. He was very good-looking, with a round face and about six feet tall. As I heard it he had lost his finger when he had taken part in the Spanish Civil War.
At the hanging there was also a member of the security police from Mława called Fost. He was very tall, more than six feet, maybe in his middle-thirties, he wore a dark-green uniform and a round SS insignia on his jacket.
There was also a Schutzpolizei called Blum who was thirty-five years old and five feet eight inches tall.
From his descriptions I imagined that Max had a designer’s eye for detail and a tailor’s sense of bodily proportions. I caught myself thinking that I may have inherited his eye for detail.
I remembered a joke Dad told about a tailor. Why was I thinking about the joke now? I was assuming that Max was a better tailor than Dad. I wanted him to be.
Dad’s joke was about a man who went to his tailor to be fitted for a new suit. When he put on the coat he saw it was longer on one side. He complained, and the tailor said it was because the man was standing crooked and if he would just raise one shoulder the suit would fit fine. Same story with one of the pants legs. (You really need to see me when I tell this joke, as it has a physical punch line.)
When the man with the new suit was walking crookedly along the street with his shoulder and leg adjusted as the tailor required, he was spied by another man across the road who whispered to his wife, ‘I must find out who made that man’s suit,’ and the wife said, ‘Why do you want to know?’ and the husband said: ‘Because if that tailor could make such a nice suit for a cripple like him, imagine what he could do for a normal man!’
When Dad occasionally made a coat for me when I was young he would say that the coat fitted well but that I was standing crookedly, so it didn’t look quite right. The coat Dad made me was wrong because I was wrong.
And that is why I was combing a translated war-crimes testimony for things I might be proud of in the man who may or may not have been my father; who may or may not have been a damaged, difficult man; who may or may not have even cared if I was dead or alive. And part of me was stretching out the experience of hearing the transcript, as I could see it was only a page or two and this was almost certainly the first and last time I’d be able to read something that resembled a direct address by Max.
He was talking about what had happened in the past and, although he did not know it then, he was addressing himself to the future, to me (whoever I was to him), sitting with my friend in a coffee shop more than four decades later:
I knew all the murdered people, as they were from Mława. At the moment I can only remember a few names of the seventeen—Samuel Korzenik, Chaim Solarski.
In autumn 1942, it was two months before the deportation to Auschwitz, it was in September, when hundreds of young men, including myself, were arbitrarily singled out by the Mława security police.
We had to line up in the square of the ghetto. I remember distinctly that Fost was there. I believe that Paulikat was also there. When we were taken to a house in the ghetto I managed to run away. The remainder were held under arrest for a week. The guards had the house surrounded. Another person was probably arrested in my place.
Max managed to run away. He knew that this meant that another young man was arrested in his place. The moral code of the camps and the ghettos was beginning to take hold of him.
He also tells the court that someone else was probably killed because he’d taken the chance to escape. He didn’t have to say it. But it was on his mind after everything he had experienced.
[F]our hundred young men were all shot. The entire ghetto population was ordered to be present at the shooting. I saw with my own eyes that Fost and Paulikat took part in the shooting. All the security police with reinforcement from nearby locations formed the firing squad. The shooting lasted several hours.
At the beginning of 1942 a woman named Pultuskier was shot by Fost on the street. I came a few minutes afterward to see the corpse of the woman lying in the street. I heard that Fost had shot the woman. The reason for the shooting I don’t know, it was maybe because she had with her some bread or milk. He did it just for fun. He was a beast.
By then, Max must have known bestiality when he saw it. I respected his judgement.
In 1942, the exact date I can’t remember, Mr Perlmutter from the ghetto elders committee was called to the guard police outside the ghetto and there he was shot by Fost. It was Fost that shot him. It was told to me by Wengelein’s chauffeur who is now a taxi driver in Mława who I spoke with when I visited there in June 1967. I don’t know why Perlmutter was shot. The name of the lieutenant which I have just remembered was Wengelein.
So Max had gone back to Mława in 1967. Although Alan had said Max had been back to Auschwitz, I hadn’t known that he went back to his hometown, too. It was very early to be making the trip back, at a time when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain. I wondered if he was researching his testimony, collecting his wits, reliving his time there.
Maybe if he hadn’t had to be a tailor or a manufacturer or a designer or whatever he thought of himself as, he would have been a thorough researcher. I was happy to see he’d remembered the name of the lieutenant that had earlier escaped him. I silently cheered him. I was becoming attached to Max, or at least to his account of himself.
Our transport to Auschwitz was under the command of the accused. We had to go three kilometres from the ghetto to the railway station. That was the longest journey of my life.
It was already very cold.
The accused was present on the march.
He supervised the transport from the ghetto to the station.
Ten people lay dead who couldn’t manage this three-kilometre journey.
Those who couldn’t continue were shot.
Who shot them
, I couldn’t today say.
I don’t know any more today if Wengelein was there, but I am sure that the accused was.
The people were hopeless and dejected.
I don’t know if the accused had a dog with him, I had to take care of my relatives.
That was the longest journey of his life, he said. He had to take care of his relatives.
He cared for his relatives, for everyone. Everyone, that is, but me.
17
How do I look? What do they think?
LET’S leave Max there, on the longest journey of his life, from the ghetto in Mława in that cold winter of 1942 to the train station. His life in a new kind of hell is about to begin—and you may well be thinking that I am being whiny and unreasonable in writing, ‘Everyone, that is, but me.’
I’ve tried to look at things from the point of view of an adult who is piecing together the story of her life from scraps, from whispers here and there, from veiled comments, from the unreliable recollections of people who might be ill or traumatised or have little direct experience or knowledge of the things that I wanted to tell. What can I say in my defence? (Why have I put myself on trial here?)
It was just a small cry from a little girl who was overlooked, ignored, passed over. What about me, Daddy?
