The Inventory: A Novel

by Gila Lustiger

  2.

  Hunger: Streng became acquainted with this gnawing feeling that trumped all other bodily sensations. It alone determined his existence. Although as a “green” — a man of German extraction who had gone off the rails — he was treated better than the other prisoners, he could not fill his stomach properly with the soup and bread allotted him. The growling of his digestive canal and stomach juices accompanied him like penetrating background music to work, and in the latrines, and at the barbed wire. Wistfully he thought back to the prison where Mother Mary had opened the pots of the prison kitchen to him.

  Streng grew thinner and thinner, he began to show certain signs of starvation, and he would have certainly died without fuss had a central command from Berlin not drastically changed his life.

  Because of his formerly garnered experience Streng, no longer answering to his name in the meantime, was taken to the hospital building, showered, fed, and looked after. After one week in which he could eat to his heart’s content, he started to show signs of life. Streng was taken to the commanding officer, who took in his appearance with disgust and gave him orders to set up a site to fight homosexuality, which, in spite of all precautions, had broken out even among Aryans like an epidemic.

  Streng understood. Together with the camp doctor, who was taking care of the hygienic aspect, and the commanding officer, who took control of the aesthetics, he picked out twenty girls from the women’s camp, who in turn were showered, fed, and sent to Streng for instruction.

  Very quickly Streng had set up a brothel in a block provided by the camp management, surrounded by barbed wire for security reasons, one that was hailed as a role model even in Berlin.

  Streng made his women, to whom he gave plentiful food, call him Papi, and during lunchtime every day he walked them once around the block, so that they could have a breath of, if not fresh, at least oxygen-enriched air, which was supposed to keep them rosy-cheeked and healthy. He started finding pleasure in life again and all would have worked out for the best for him, after the delay and numerous escapades, had he not, his immediate bodily needs catered for, fallen in love.

  It was on a spring evening that Streng saw the cause of his ruin for the first time. As though cut out from dark blue crepe paper with scissors, the crescent moon stood out against the starless sky. Streng was bored and decided to relieve his assistant, a simple-minded political prisoner without ambition who had been admitted for cracking a couple of inopportune jokes when drunk.

  After he had taken in twenty vouchers that the kapos and some of the politicals got for good completion of their work and exchanged for scraps of paper with room numbers, racing with them to the first floor so as not to unnecessarily waste any of their allotted twenty minutes, a young man stepped into the hall that Streng used as a reception room and requested to be seen to by none other than the most popular whore, who exclusively served higher officials and had also offered her services in the Reich.

  A Pole, thought Streng, identifying the young man as a political one right away. Shaking his head at the stubbornness of youth, he gave him a scrap of paper with the number of a currently free room and took him into the next room, where a previously convicted woman made of pure German fat, by the name of Erna, performed some maneuvers on him that were primarily hygienic. Driven by some inexplicable curiosity, Streng went up to the young man, who had returned indignant, looked into his deep green eyes, and was lost.

  Streng spent happy weeks spoiling his charge with delicious nibbles and, besides fresh clothes and shaving implements, gave him a silver chain with a gold-plated amulet. He had his initials engraved on it and it reminded him of the time spent with his friend in prison.

  Although he had a privileged position as the manager of the camp brothel, and he could buy the silence of those in the know with the services of his women or with bartered margarine, soon his relationship with the young man known by everyone simply as Pipel was common knowledge. Lying in bed they were taken by surprise one morning and locked up.

  He was seized with longing for his father’s thrashings, for the beatings in Sonnenfeld Correction Center, the beatings in prison and the hunger in the camp that had then appeared to him as his most difficult and unbearable lot. Streng was afraid. He could not help the young man whose begging cries echoed along the corridor. Forgive me, he thought, and covered his ears.

  A week later his Pipel was taken out of the prison cell, put up against the wall, and shot. Streng heard the cries of the boy as they led him past his cell door. Two days later he was taken to the commanding officer and signed a document authorizing his sterilization.

  That very day the doctor carried out the operation. Streng felt nothing and saw everything as though through a veil. When the doctor told him it was all over, he fainted, and woke up, trembling with exhaustion, in the hospital building, and waited to be taken to be annihilated.

  Especially in the night he believed he could hear the footsteps of his death angel. However, as he had proved his worth in his post and since the place had not been put in other hands, Streng was allowed to return.

  Slowly everything reverted to its normal pace. Streng collected the vouchers, checked the rooms, ordered liquor, and took the whores out daily. They called him eunuch behind his back. He had heard about his new name but was not insulted.

  From an always welcome customer, a guard, he learned that his friend had wept as he was shot and that he had written on the wall with his bloody finger, which he had bitten open the night before the shooting.

  Often still, when he was sitting alone in the reception room, as the ladies worked above him, Streng was to remember the wording of the sentence his friend had left him as a testament: “Peter Baslewicz reached the age of eighteen years.” The guard had wiped it off the same day with a sponge and suds smelling of chlorine and curd soap.

  The Ramp

  Portraits of Three Normal People

  Fräulein Gigerlette Invited me to tea Her toilette

  As snowy white as can be

  Just like Pierette

  Was she attired

  Even a monk, I dare to bet,

  By Gigerlette

  Would be afired.

  1.

  When Johann Paul Kremer was called upon on September 2 to carry out his first “special operation,” he wrote in his diary: “Compared to this, Dante’s inferno seems almost like a comedy.”

  He was fifty-nine years old. His hair was thinning, and even his daily exercises could not stave off the toll that time had taken on him.

  During the university recess, he took part in fourteen selections on the ramp and the subsequent gassings. Afterward, he returned to Münster, where he had been teaching since 1935. Kremer was an outstanding professor of anatomy and had seen many corpses in his time.

  “Corpses,” he said in his introductory lecture in the first semester, shocking the new students into embarrassed laughter, “corpses are our field of study.”

  Kremer was not happy about being ordered to Auschwitz. He had already heard about it in Münster. Nothing good. He had hoped to be sent to France or to some warm country to Greece, for example, where he would have liked to visit the Acropolis.

  In his diary he complained about his lot. It was not nice, but it did offer him chances undreamed of until now.

  Indeed, not only could he continue his research, he could also expand upon it in several important areas. Up to now Kremer had been able to experiment only upon the cells of coldblooded animals. Now he was — as he later reported — to be one of the first, if not the very first, doctor in human history to perform tests on people to see whether the hypotheses he had reached through theoretical deduction alone were founded. Unusual, truly remarkable perspectives were opening up to him.

  Above all else Kremer was interested in muscular tissue and how hunger affected it. After the end of the war, in a Polish prison, he said the following about that period of his life:

  “If someone interested me because of a well-advanced
stage of starvation, then I gave the medical orderly the assignment to reserve the sick person for me and to inform me of the date he would be killed by injection. At that point the sick people I had selected were led to the block and laid on the dissection table still alive. I went to the table and asked the sick person details that were of interest to my research. I asked the weight prior to arrest, what loss of weight there had been during imprisonment, whether he had taken any medicine recently, what he ate daily, and so on. After I had obtained the information of interest to me, the medical orderly came in and killed the patient by injecting him close to the heart. I myself never gave a deadly injection.”

  Kremer added that he dissected the patients as soon as they were dead.

  “I took sections of the liver and pancreas and placed them in jars filled with a preserving liquid and took them home to continue my research.”

  Five of these jars were confiscated from the cellar of his house. After Kremer had identified them as his property and handed over the matching documents — he did this voluntarily, without hesitation — they served as incriminating material. In his diary on this subject he states:

  “Today fixated freshest possible material from the human liver and spleen, as well as pancreas.”

  Similar entries crop up again and again.

  Not much is known about Kremer’s character. One of his work colleagues described him as a loner. One of the students who was asked emphasized that he had never tried to impose a doctrine and had always rather stayed in the background. Kremer was an inconspicuous, friendly person who did not need much company. He always liked to keep an option open, a guard said.

  “More out of principle than caution.”

  Kremer was one of those few doctors who spoke to the patients with the polite form, “thou.” During his trial, former prisoners said he had always been courteous to them, with a distanced arrogance, and that they gathered from the way he dealt with them that he wanted to have as little to do with them as possible.

  “He was not coarse like some of the others, but neither was he compassionate. He shut his heart to our suffering. A heart was to him a muscle, and we were a mass of bodies.”

  During his relatively short stay at the camp, Kremer was able to appropriate, besides the human organs, goods of considerable value, which he sent to Münster either in postal packages or with a guard open to bribery.

  The extent of what was stolen from people later determined for selection by him is known down to the last detail. Kremer entered the robbed wares conscientiously in his diary, before entrusting them to a certain Frau König, so that she could look after them until his return. For her services, Kremer rewarded her with perfume and alcohol. Later she claimed repeatedly not to have known where and how Kremer acquired all these things.

  Asked about this point in court Kremer said: “The prisoners stuffed my pockets, I could not ward them off.” It is well known that new arrivals occasionally tried to buy their life or that of those close to them with valuable objects, an attempt that usually failed. Kremer accepted the things unscrupulously — he was seen doing this by several medical auxiliaries — but then selected afterward as he saw fit medically, and seldom made any exceptions.

  “I am not aware,” said the auxiliary, “of Kremer ever granting anyone life because he got something from them. He certainly took it, but there it ended. He saw it as a present, crazy though it sounds.”

  It is to be assumed that this bizarre declaration is true and that Kremer indeed thought that he was legimately entitled to appropriate the things.

  When he was informed at the internment prison that his diaries had been found in the apartment and handed over to the judges to read, he replied that at last people would now be convinced of his innocence, as the jottings made it absolutely clear how he had suffered under the regime.

  It was only in autumn 1943, during the bombing of Münster, that Kremer wrote the question in his diary of whether there was a God. The mass murder that he participated in never led to such considerations.

  Kremer is intelligent and possesses an all-around education, not limited to his area alone. The suppression, which can be called pathological, and his disturbed thinking and memory explain his behavior before the judges and his lacking any sense of guilt.

  After completing his sentence, the eighty-eight-year-old Kremer was called before court once again, this time as a witness. The prosecution told him to comment on a diary entry from October 1942, where he claimed that lots of SS men had volunteered for the “special operations,” because they got extra rations for it. Kremer replied: “But that is perfectly understandable from a human point of view. It was wartime, and cigarettes and schnapps were scarce.”

  Johann Paul Kremer was pardoned in a Polish court of law at the end of the war. Some years later he was charged again, this time in Germany, and sentenced to ten years in prison. The judge gave as the reason for this sentence:

  “Kremer would still be free of guilt today had he not been placed in that position through circumstances that lay beyond his person, from which these crimes developed.”

  2.

  Dr. Hans Delmotte, who worked at the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, came from a rich industrial family. Some of his close relatives held high posts in the Party.

  Delmotte was sent directly from military school to Auschwitz. At school he had attracted negative attention on several occasions. Among other things, he was observed by a fellow pupil reading a Thomas Mann novel.

  Called before the director to justify his reading habits, he explained (and backed up his opinion several times) that Thomas Mann was a good writer and therefore he did not understand the ban. Delmotte was also later called on the carpet for a spectacular deed: he came to the annual carnival ball dressed as a woman, and was therefore sent to Auschwitz as a punishment.

  Like all SS doctors he also had to select from the ramp. One knows through his colleague Münch, with whom he shared the house, that after the first “special operation” performed under his direction he had to be carried to his room and threw up noisily. After that he called in sick for a few days.

  Delmotte refused to take part in selections after that first “special operation,” and requested that the commanding officer, who sent him on to the army doctor, post him to the front.

  Delmotte declared repeatedly that the murder of defenseless children and women was beneath his male dignity. He was prepared to serve the Reich, even willing to kill enemies of the Volk in combat; it was just this underhanded way of killing he could not agree to.

  In reaction to his qualms, Delmotte was placed under Dr. Mengele, who took over the task of convincing him of the necessity of annihilating world Jewry.

  It is not known if Mengele succeeded. It is known, however, that Delmotte, after the short time he spent in Mengele’s presence, selected like every other SS doctor: with disgust, as a camp survivor emphasized years later.

  He treated the victims gently, she added. He was not one for whipping. Above all, the sight of the children, whom he tried to delude to the very end with the illusion that they were really going to shower, made him agitated. He had admittedly not done this out of mercy, but for his own conscience.

  “He just wanted to be able to say that he is different. But he selected nonetheless.”

  According to the two doctors closest to him and to his fiancee, to whom he wrote every week, his nature was changed for ever after that. Only when the selections had ceased, in the autumn of 1944, did he seem more relaxed.

  When the war was over, Delmotte committed suicide. Münch claimed that he had done it out of fear of being arrested.

  “He was a coward,” said Münch, “he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. You cannot do that.”

  His fiancee claimed in an interview in the late forties that it had been an act of despair.

  “He could not come to terms with his life. He was just different. Even as a child.”

  Delmotte did not leave any suicide not
e. Therefore one can only speculate about his motives.

  3.

  In the trial against Dr. Johann Marburg, who had to answer to the American military court along with three other SS doctors who had practiced in Auschwitz, three witnesses gave testimony.

  The former prisoner Tadeusz Lebowic, camp prefect, who had known almost all the doctors, was first to the witness stand. He claimed that Marburg had often come in slightly drunk to the hospital building and at such times had been sentimental and humanely accessible.

  “In that condition I could put the boldest papers in front of him, which he signed freely, without even reading the text,” said Lebowic, adding that in this way he had been able to save some people, between fifty and sixty, without Marburg doing anything to stop it. As to the question of whether Marburg’s behavior could be interpreted as a sort of passive resistance, Tadeusz Lebowic answered: “It was all the same to him.”

  Marburg, according to Lebowic, had indeed sometimes made people step down who were meant for selection out of technical considerations — above all young men whom he found to be capable of working — and thus sentenced fewer prisoners to death than the medical orderly Klehr suggested. As for that one, went on Lebowic, he ate Jews for breakfast and tormented all the prisoners with yellow triangles, above all women who were too weak to defend themselves. Marburg had on the other hand sent an entire section of children to the gas chambers he had suspected of having typhus.

  “He did not have any proof, only the suspicion,” said Lebowic, who now remembered the scene exactly, because even then it had appeared to him to be particularly cynical.

  Marburg had given some chocolate to a boy who did not want to go and was clinging to the bedstead and, making promises and petting him, carried him to the truck himself.