The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  Allach porcelain shop, Warsaw, 1938

  Details matter to Himmler. He counts on Pohl and they are in constant communication. On 6 February Pohl sends Himmler, as requested, an inventory of the materials taken from Jews in Auschwitz. 155,000 women’s coats, 132,000 men’s shirts, 11,000 boys’ jackets, 6,600 pounds of women’s hair.

  There is now a very grand shop in Warsaw. Figures are peering in, a woman in a fur coat hovers on the doorstep. The porcelain is a great success, on the up, on the move, finding new audiences.

  viii

  Most of these figures were white.

  This was at Himmler’s request. They were either white glazed or unglazed bisque ware. Production numbers of white porcelain far outweighed coloured porcelain.

  ‘White porcelain is the embodiment of the German soul’, says the first catalogue for Allach.

  The whiteness of the skin of this porcelain is the whiteness of marble surfaces, the perfection of the Greek statues in the museums in Berlin and Munich. The Pergamon Museum, holding the greatest sculpture of the classical world, is the whitest building in the Reich. Allach’s porcelain figures obey the strictures of Germany’s great critic Johann Winckelmann: ‘Since white is the colour that reflects the most rays of light, and thus is most easily perceived, a beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is.’

  Here is the cult of the body, the fetishised smoothness and correct proportions, the cleanliness, the asexuality. This is porcelain to pick up and hold, to collect. You can buy the nudes. Or you can get the set of SS types and show the accuracy of the details of the insignia to your fellow officers as you relax after fulfilling your duties.

  I remember Susan Sontag writing about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and ‘the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical’. White searches out degeneracy.

  I remember Ezra Pound in Rapallo, writing letters obsessively, denouncing the Jews, Jew influence, the Hebrew disease, denouncing everyone. And in his Canto LXXIV, ‘what whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor?’

  White pretends to candour, covers so much, covers too much.

  This is the story without people.

  Chapter sixty-one

  Allach

  i

  I go to Dachau to find out what happened.

  It is early autumn and there is low mist. Pumpkins and squashes are stacked up outside the houses by the side of the road. Each pile has an honesty box.

  It is so grey and humid that everything seems caught. I mean that I’m caught in being here and I notice the height of the perimeter fence, the watchtowers, the ground where the punishments took place, the walls for the executions, the beds of gravel that mark the run of demolished barracks for the prisoners. The poplars on the boundary are unmoving in the still air.

  The archivist meets me. There is a long table, a library of research books and files. A woman is sitting quietly, whitely, looking at photographs. She makes very small pencil marks in her notebook.

  The archivist has been here for fifteen years, knows the intricacies of the SS subcamps, how prisoners were detailed to work in particular factories, the terrible realities of the granite quarries, the manifests, the trains, the death marches.

  And he is kind. He brings out the documents I need to see. There is one testimony that is central, he says, and he tells me about Hans Landauer, who worked in the factory and wrote testimony, spent his life after the war speaking about what happened. His home was Vienna but he came here often.

  I ask him if by any chance Herr Landauer can still be visited?

  And he gestures to his office where there is a photograph of a large, open-faced, smiling man above his desk. He died last week, he says. He was a great man.

  ii

  Hans Landauer was an Austrian socialist who had joined the International Brigade at sixteen and was arrested fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was deported to the French camp at Gurs and arrived in Dachau on 6 June 1941.

  The archivist gives me the context for his story.

  It is May 1941 and a note is circulated to Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen and Sachsenhausen:

  due to various civil workers having to go to war, the running of the porcelain factory in Allach cannot be kept up … the order has been made that the possibility to use useful prisoners for this command has to be considered. This concerns modellers, kiln-firers, formers and ceramicists. There has to be an immediate check-up on forces in the concentration camps to find who has already been working in the area of ceramics and who is capable of working here.

  Ten days later there is a list of names. They have located one Jew, four ASR – antisocial prisoners – one Bib-F – a Jehovah’s Witness – and twelve political prisoners.

  Six days after this, Buchenwald says they can’t find any workers for the kilns, or modelling, but they have fourteen people for forming porcelain, one person to work a mill, one person to paint and one person to throw porcelain. These include one Jew and one labelled only as ‘ill’.

  On 5 July 1941, thirteen prisoners arrive in Allach to make porcelain. This group contained no kiln specialists, so an Austrian and a Spanish fighter, Franz Pinker and Karl Soldan, two Rotspanier, Communists, were selected to work on the firings in the factory.

  And these men in turn select Hans Landauer, their comrade newly arrived from a French camp. Initially, he is to work on the railway, pulling coal from the station at Dachau to the porcelain factory, ‘in the way that boats were pulled on the Volga’.

  This, writes Landauer, in his memoirs, is ein Glücksfall, the piece of luck.

  Hans Landauer, Vienna, 2006

  iii

  Dachau is not an extermination camp. Death here is both deliberate and it is random.

  The work is deliberate and it kills. Reveille is at 4 a.m., there is an hour or more of standing to attention at roll call and then the march to your work detail to clear rubble, work on the underground bunkers, in the factories, in the granite quarries where you carry blocks until you drop, or the plantation, where you dig ditches. Then there is the march back, the roll call of one or more hours of standing to attention, then cleaning your barracks. Lights out at 9 p.m.

  The conditions are deliberate. You are given very little food. Six months later there is even less. You are debilitated. The numbers increase. There are six times as many prisoners in 1944 as 1942 in the same barracks. You are given little medical care. Every illness is endemic. Then there is no medical care.

  Being here in Dachau is random.

  You are here because you are asocial, political, Sinti, Christian, homosexual, Jewish, Polish, Czech, Communist.

  Death comes to you randomly. You are killed trying to escape. You are killed as an example. You are killed in the quarries and on the plantation. You are killed because you are too slow marching home. You are killed through typhoid. You are killed by a kapo. You are killed because you despair.

  And you try everything to make a difference, to find the way of eating a little more, keeping your strength up, not stumbling, not attracting the attention of a kapo, not dropping a block of granite though your hands run with blood.

  iv

  I’m sitting in the archive and Landauer’s memoirs make this contingent moment, this Glücksfall, seem incredibly close. This is the moment when whilst he was unloading coal in the courtyard at the factory, he was asked if he could draw.

  He said yes and drew a small sketch.

  This sketch takes him from the cruelty of dragging the coal wagons outside over the threshold and into Allach. It was the first step for him in the ‘direction of surviving hell’. He starts work on the candle-holders and then he works on the figurines and then becomes ‘irreplaceable’ when he works on the horse riders that Hitler and Himmler so value.

  I only had to look out of the basement window from my desk, when the emaciated figures of th
e Kommando Kiesgrube, the gravel quarry, stumbled while pushing carts full of dead prisoners, or those not capable of walking anymore, back into the camp … It must be understood from a human point of view that I was trying to produce good work, particularly because with this production it wasn’t important for the war … When the factory was extended – from 1942 we also produced plates, cups and cups for cream in field hospitals – we also had increased the amount of prisoners who had no formal training who were able to learn how to make these things very quickly.

  And he records how strange it was that this group of workers in the Allach Porcelain Factory, from so many different nations, were the people who had to produce the cult symbol of the party, the Julleuchter lantern, for the solstice celebrations, and that making this product could give him and his fellow prisoners a higher chance of surviving the camp.

  In Allach, the working hours were extended which meant that the prisoners didn’t have to return for roll call at midday, reducing the danger of being punished for ‘bad singing or bad marching’ by the SS guards. From 1943, Allach allowed the prisoners in the factory to wear proper leather shoes because it was impossible to carry the porcelain products on long boards whilst wearing wooden clogs.

  Landauer is an extraordinary witness. He recalls seeing the closed carriages arriving from France, full of the dead and dying.

  He recalls his fellow workers, Franz Okroy, Herbert Hartmann, Franz Schmierer. There were two more Polish prisoners, whose names he can’t remember, who worked on the small figurines. One was a professor from Krakow who committed suicide in 1942 or 1943, by running into the electric fence. There was Erwin Zapf, and the porcelain painter Gustav Krippner. There was Karl Schwendemann, who after an argument with an SS modeller, was taken out of the factory and back to Dachau main camp.

  Reading these names is salutary. I read them again.

  Landauer is a careful man. He says when he cannot remember something. And he is careful too to say that there are moments of kindness in Allach, ‘sometimes only a shy, well-meaning look’, or when one of the SS guards gives Kärner’s radio to the men in the kiln room to listen to at night.

  I try to take care with this testimony. It isn’t mine.

  v

  In the manner of archives, the next sheet of paper is a letter of thanks to Himmler. It comes from SS-Brigadeführer Friedrich Uebelhoer and profusely thanks the Reichsführer Himmler for his gift of a porcelain standard-bearer and the card, and the recognition of his support for all the work he’s doing in building a New Germany in the East. He is the governor of Lódz, and is building the ghetto.

  The second letter is from Frau Himmler to Frau E.R., which says she is very sorry to cause trouble, but has ‘little Ekhart’ received his kinder- relief candle as a gift from his godfather, the Reichsführer, yet. ‘Also whether Sigrid and Irmtraut have received their candles as well.’ Frau Himmler sends condolences for the bombing.

  The third letter, dated 15 January 1945, is from Dr Hopfner to an unknown recipient stating that the Julleuchter should no longer be produced, but the production of the plates with SS phrases on the bottom should be increased. The texts can be uplifting in ‘the coming difficult months’ to those who use them.

  There is to be no more coal for the crematorium in Dachau, but supplies will continue to be delivered to fire the Allach kilns.

  I need air and go outside for ten minutes. And when I return, the archivist explains that a local collector of Nazi memorabilia has died and his daughter has gifted a box to the archives. He brings in a grey plastic washing basket filled with Nazi objects in bags and wrapped in newspaper. There is Allach porcelain, he says, but on top there is a belt, some buttons, a chart of the thirty-eight divisions of the SS and magazines. He puts them on the table.

  Then he unwraps the first object. It is Bambi.

  And then following that, there is a sleeping dachshund, another standing up looking mournful, and then a deer lying down, legs tucked under it.

  I’d expected a storm trooper, something white.

  And I’m faced with Bambi, liquid-eyed, spindly legs, head tilted, carefully glazed. I pick it up and look underneath as you should always do and there is the cartouche with Allach and TH Kärner and the SS runes.

  This is my fifth white object in the world.

  vi

  I thank the archivist and wrap up the porcelain again and put it back in the laundry basket. I walk down across the ground, down the long avenue between the barracks, all the way to the perimeter fence.

  And on the way back to the airport, I make a detour to the first Allach factory, on the outskirts of Munich.

  It is a safe jigsaw of small streets, kids on bicycles, a dog walker, trimmed hedges. A road sign says dead end, and unexpectedly there is an industrial site, prewar factories, something big alongside the road.

  The taxi stops at No. 8. The street has been renamed. It is now Reinhard von Frank Strasse. No. 8 is a high gabled house, six steps up to a front door, a workshop running to the right behind a tangled hedge. It is derelict. The windows are broken and the gate is padlocked. It looks exactly like the workshop I was apprenticed in.

  This is where it began, a suburban street nowhere special.

  Keep Out warns the notice.

  Chapter sixty-two

  false sail

  i

  I keep thinking of the story of Theseus’ return from killing the Minotaur, and why he forgets to hoist the correct sail as he approaches home. He had promised his father King Aegeus that there would be a black sail if he had met his death, a white sail if he had been victorious. His father sits and scans the horizon. And he sees a black sail.

  And that is that. Aegeus throws himself from the cliff. The coming home in triumph is a return to loss, to grief. Theseus forgets.

  You make promises. You intend to keep them, and something happens, intrudes, your attention is elsewhere. And the promise is unfulfilled, left open. There is an empty space.

  There are so many promises. To make things right for your children. To make a new home in a new place. To create gold, to create porcelain, a family. To return with a white punchbowl and sit and celebrate how one material turns into another.

  I’ve left my Jesuit monk and my mathematician with his lenses and my Quaker apothecary and a child in a factory working in the dust stranded in my story. And now I’ve left Hans Landauer too, in a porcelain factory in a concentration camp.

  And if you tell stories you have to keep your promises.

  You can’t leave them open. I’ve just discovered on my laptop the novel I was writing with Anna three years ago. We started a story one summer holiday in Scotland, about a couple of children on an adventure, and would add bits when we could. And in Jingdezhen, in the middle of the night, I’d write and send a chapter home, promising to finish. But I started this journey to Dresden, Dachau, Stoke, Carolina, Jingdezhen, and have forgotten to finish Scotland.

  When you get in sight of land, which sail do you choose to hoist?

  ii

  On the night of 13 February 1945, Dresden was bombed by British planes. It was bombed again the following day. It was Ash Wednesday. No one had expected air raids. There was an expectation that the cultural significance of the city would spare it.

  Dresden was always densely populated but now it was crammed with people fleeing the Russian advance, refugees from the other cities severely bombed over the winter, Jews waiting to be sent to the camps, American POWs, labourers drafted into the factories, German troops.

  The air was full of fire. The river was full of fire. The firestorm of the burning city could be seen from sixty miles away.

  There were limited air-raid shelters. People died in their thousands in their cellars. At least 25,000 people died in the conflagration, possibly many, many more. Possibly ten times this figure. These numbers have become a fault line in history.

  Dresden was destroyed. The rubble was so high that streets disappeared. The skyline collapsed, ragged. The Alt
markt became an open crematorium for the bodies pulled from ruins. The photographs of the days after the bombing show stooped figures walking amongst the dead.

  ‘The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden’, wrote Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris of Bomber Command, responding to the outcry over his raids, ‘could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions work, an intact government centre, and a key transport point to the East. It is now none of those things.’

  He was right. It was none of those things.

  The bombs destroyed tens of thousands of lives, thousands of families. It also destroyed churches and palaces, the Zwinger, 85,000 houses, innumerable artefacts, Tschirnhaus’s lenses, and on a truck, parked overnight in the castle courtyard, crates of early Meissen porcelain stolen from a Jewish family in Berlin. Dresden shepherdesses.

  iii

  On 29 April, the Dachau concentration camp was liberated by US troops. The troops arriving from the West came across boxcars full of executed prisoners. Over the previous week 10,000 prisoners had been forced to leave the camp on trucks or on foot towards the Alps. 1,000 prisoners died on this march.

  There were 3,000 dead in the camp. The destruction of incriminating evidence had been going on for three weeks but the crematorium was overflowing.