by Martin Amis
He led. We followed. Phenol work became absolutely routine. All of us did it the whole time. It wasn’t until later that I saw what “Uncle Pepi” was capable of, in Block 10.
My wife Herta paid her first visit to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, which was perhaps unfortunate: we were then doing the Hungarian Jews, and at an incredible rate, something like ten thousand a day. Unfortunate, because I was on ramp duty practically every night, finding the work somewhat impersonal too, the selections now being made by loudspeaker (such was the weight of traffic), and having little to do but stand there drinking and shouting with my colleagues—thus denying Herta the kind of undivided attention that every young wife craves.… Wait. Let me go at this another way.
Everything was ready for her. Thoughtful as ever, Dr. Wirths had made available the annex of his own living quarters—a delightful apartment (with its own kitchen and bathroom) beyond whose patterned lace curtains stood a high white fence. Beyond that, unseen, the benign cacophony of the Kat-Zet … Dr. Wirths has his wife and three children with him, at present. I hoped that Herta would spend some of her time playing with the little Wirthses. Though that might touch on a sensitive subject.… I was sitting on the sofa, quietly crying; I think I was wishing that Auschwitz looked better than it did, just now, with its windless heat and plagues of flies homing in on the marshes. As I heard the staff car approach I wandered out into the pale brown of the front garden. What did I expect? The familiar awkwardness, I suppose. Reproaches, accusations, sadness—perhaps even feeble blows from feeble fists. All to be at least partly resolved, that first night, in the act of love. Or certainly the second. That’s how these things usually begin. What I didn’t expect was a statement of truth. The truth was the last thing I was ready for. I should have known. The world, after all, here in Auschwitz, has a new habit. It makes sense.
The driver looked on sentimentally as she alighted from the car and made her way down the path. Then she turned to confront me. She looked nothing like her photograph. The girl in the photograph, whose face was clear.
“You are a stranger to me,” she said. Fremder: stranger.
“Please,” I said. “Please. My darling.” Bitte. Liebling.
“I don’t know you,” she said. Ich kenne dich nicht.
Herta kept her head down as I helped her off with her coat. And something enveloped me, something that was all ready for my measurements, like a suit or a uniform, over and above what I wore, and lined with grief.
Her shyness proved impregnable. We lunched quietly, indeed wordlessly, on the fluidal sausages. Herta was all thumbs with the heavy cutlery and the Swedish glassware. When the servants left, she went and sat on the sofa and stared at the attractive rug. I joined her. She proved immune to my light-headed but rather leaden gallantries, the words so hard to shift around. Actually I felt far from well myself. And worse and worse as the morning wore on. And then entirely terrible, after a convulsive visit to the small but resonant bathroom, whose greasy air was full of racing currents, fire-tinged. I betook myself to bed in some exasperation, and without really bothering to get undressed. When I awoke around four A.M., still in my boots, she was lying beside me, entombed in her woolen nightgown, and fiercely whispering, Nein. Nie. Nie. Never. Never. No amount of caresses or endearments (or good-hearted raillery) seemed likely to soften her. I got out of bed—gah!—and then picked myself up off the floor. Herta was now fast asleep. I remember thinking how white and cold and still her face looked, without the breeze of thought or sentience, as I stumbled off to the tumult of the ramp.
Ours was a human enterprise, but the animal kingdom played its part in the new order of being. Cartfuls of corpses were shoved from the burial pits by mules and oxen, and stupidly, with no animal comment. Cows did not look up from their grazing, their indifference seeming to say, This is all right. This need not be remarked, as if it wasn’t unusual to conjure a multitude from the sky above the river. We kept rabbits, too, in much the same way as we dealt with the people, improvisationally and with desperate brilliance. Men gave up the very linings of their greatcoats to provide the little creatures with fur. And then of course there were the dogs, boxers, their crushed faces, their squat coats bearing the ubiquitous sign of the twisted cross, in honor of the Jews they healed with their teeth and with the snort and quiver of their jaws.
In the clubroom I am told (I think I’ve got this right): Jews come from monkeys (from Menschenaffen), as do Slavs and so on. Germans, on the other hand, have been preserved in ice from the beginning of time in the lost continent of Atlantis. This is good to know. A meteorology division in the Ahnenerbe has been looking into it. Officially these scientists are working on long-range weather predictions; in fact, though, they are seeking to prove the cosmic-ice theory once and for all.
It sounds familiar. Atlantis … twins and dwarves. The Ahnenerbe is a department of the Schutzstaffel. Schutzstaffel: Defense Force. Ahnenerbe: Ancestral Heritage. It is from the Ahnenerbe that “Uncle Pepi” is sent his skulls and bones.
I am, of course, no stranger to feminine wiles. But I was disappointed, I was very disappointed, when the second night with Herta went no better than the first. Went no different, in fact. Will nothing “melt the ice”—the cosmic ice of marriage? The idea of a gradual familiarization was not without its initial appeal. But surely, I thought, on the third and final night, which we were to have all to ourselves …
Herta’s nightdress is childish. It is patterned with genies and sprites. I begged of them, these sprites and genies. Deliriously, all night, in bed, I begged—oh, the bedbug of nightbeg … There were periods, earlier on, when I was calmer and we could talk a little. She spoke tearfully of das Baby; and the baby does sound fairly disastrous. I also got the distinct impression that Herta disapproves of the work I am doing here. In her incensed whisper she called me names I didn’t understand. They made her face ugly, even in the dark. Why can’t I answer?
The next day she was gone and the next night I was back on the ramp. Playing Cupid. I still don’t know what my wife looks like. She never met my eye. No. I never met hers. Things will improve. She will come around, in time. Has someone been telling her what I did to the bald whores?
Out on the ramp beneath the lights and the arrows of rain and the madhouse tannoy squawking links and rechts: fathers, mothers, children, the old, scattered like leaves in the wind. Die … die Auseinandergeschrieben. And I had a thought that made my whole body thrill with shame. Because the trains are endless and infernal, and because the wind feels like the wind of death, and because life is life (and love is love) but no one said it was easy.
I thought: It’s all right for some.
With the war going so well now, and with the perceptible decline in the workload after the feats of ’44, and with the general burgeoning of confidence and well-being, why, your camp doctor is agreeably surprised to find time and leisure to pursue his hobbies. The troglodytic Soviets have been driven back into their frozen potholes: the camp doctor steadies his monocle and reaches for his mustiest textbook. Or his binoculars and shooting stick. Whatever. Depending on natural bent. Winter was cold but autumn is come—the stubble fields, and so on. The simpering Vistula. Never before have I seen lice by the bushel. Some of the patients look as though they have been showered with poppy seeds. Good morning to you, Scheissminister! In one of her baffling letters Herta goes so far as to question the legality of the work we are doing here. Well. Let me see … I suppose you could say that there are one or two “gray areas.” Block 11, the Black Wall, the measures of the Political Unit: these excite lively controversy. And there’s certainly no end of a palaver when a patient “takes matters into his own hands,” with the electrified fence, for example. We all hate that … I am famed for my quiet dedication. The other doctors disappear for weeks on end; but in the summer air of the Kat-Zet I have no need of Sommerfrische. I do love the feel of the sun on my face, it’s true. “Uncle Pepi” has surpassed himself with his new laboratory: the marble table, the
nickel taps, the bloodstained porcelain sinks. Provincial: that’s the word for Herta. You know, of course, that she doesn’t shave her legs? It’s true. About the armpits one can eternally argue, but the legs—surely!—the legs … In this new lab of his he can knock together a human being out of the unlikeliest odds and ends. On his desk he had a box full of eyes. It was not uncommon to see him slipping out of his darkroom carrying a head partly wrapped in old newspaper: evidently, we now rule Rome. The next thing you knew, there’d be, oh, I don’t know, a fifteen-year-old Pole sliding off the table and rubbing his eyes and sauntering back to work, accompanied by an orderly and his understanding smile. We measure twins together, “Uncle Pepi” and I, for hours and hours: measure measure measure. Even the most skeletal patients thrust their chests out for medical inspection in the last block on the right: a scant fifteen minutes earlier they were flat on the floor of the Inhalationsraume. It would be criminal—it would be criminal to neglect the opportunity that Auschwitz affords for the furtherance … I see him at the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz, on the day the gypsy camp was established, personally ferrying the children from “the central hospital.” The gypsy camp, its rosy pinks, its dirty prettiness. “ ‘Uncle Pepi’!” “ ‘Uncle Pepi’!” the children cried. When was that? When did we do the gypsy camp? Before the Czech family camp? Yes. Oh, long ago. Herta came again. Her second visit could not be accounted a complete success, though we were much more intimate than before, and wept a lot together about the baby. As to the so-called “experimental” operations of “Uncle Pepi”: he had a success rate that approached—and quite possibly attained—100 percent. A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place. Women went out of that lab looking twenty years younger. We can make another baby, Herta and I. If I wept copiously both before and after, she let me do it, or try it, but I am impotent and don’t even go to the whores anymore. I have no power. I am completely helpless. The sweet smell here, the sweet smell, and the dazzled Jews. “Uncle Pepi” never left any scars. You know, it isn’t all sweetness and light here, not by any manner of means. Some of the patients were doctors. And it wasn’t long before they were up to their old tricks. I am prominent in the campaign against this filth. The baby will be here soon and I feel very concerned. “Uncle Pepi” is right: I do need a holiday. But my visit to Berlin for the funeral turns out be mercifully brief: I only remember the drizzling parquetry of the streets, the shop-lights like the valves of an old radio, the drenched churchyard, the skin and weight problems of the young cleric, Herta’s parents, Herta’s hideous face. There is a war on, I keep telling everyone. We are in the front line. What are we fighting? Phenol? On my return from Berlin to the light and space of the KZ, what should await me but a telegram. The baby is very weak, and the doctors have done all they can. The casket was about fifteen by twenty inches. I am fighting the phenol war, and thanklessly. No one shows me any gratitude. I seem to have developed a respiratory difficulty—stress asthma, perhaps—particularly when I am shouting. I have to shout. The pits are bursting. In the Sprinkleroom, when the guards touch the young girls, and I repeatedly register my objections, the men mime the playing of violins. They think, because I am now a husband and father, that I have become pious and mawkish. I long to see my little Eva, of course; the present situation, however, is counterindicative. I have stopped going to the bordello but at least I now know why I went: for the gratitude. Those patient-doctors are getting quite out of hand. For some reason they are especially zealous in their interference with the children: how repulsive and wanton this is, when you consider that the children, after all, won’t be around for very long. I am not “in it” for the gratitude. No. I am “in it”—if you want a why—because I love the human body and all living things. It isn’t just phenol we’re fighting, not anymore. In that sense the war front has widened. It is a war on death that now comes in many forms. As well as phenol we are obliged to extract prussic acid and sodium evipan. Time is running out. We have lost two Sprinklerooms. There is a tickling in the heart when completion is so near and there are souls still stacked like desperate airplanes circling above an airport. Some exceptions should be duly noted: an old man hugging and kissing my black boots; a child clinging to me after I held her down for “Uncle Pepi.” But not once did I receive what might be described as sober and reasoned thanks. Oh, I’m not complaining. But it would have been nice. “Uncle Pepi,” who used to thank me, disappeared months ago, leaving me to my own devices. I loved the man. As well as prussic acid and sodium evipan I now extract benzene, gasoline, kerosene, and air. Yes, air! Human beings want to be alive. They are dying to be alive. Twenty cubic centimeters of air—twenty cubic centimeters of nothing—is all you need to make the difference. So nobody thanks me as, with a hypodermic almost the size of a trombone and my right foot firmly stamped on the patient’s chest, I continue to prosecute the war against nothing and air.
6
Multiply zero by zero and you still get zero
Well, how do you follow that? The
answer is: you can’t. Of course you
can’t.
And there comes a point where you have to call an end or at least announce a limit to sacrifice. Ah, I’m no saint, God knows. I wasn’t put here just to live for others. And while I continued to make my contribution, I really did feel it was high time I started looking out for number one.
I followed the Kat-Zet with robust activity, with the wry observances of married life, and with emotion. This new thing in my life called emotion. My departure from Auschwitz I think of as the wrench. It never crossed my mind that I would ever recover from the suffering I underwent during my last days there, and especially my last hours. But it passed, quicker than any marsh fever, as I set out on my journey to Berlin—and was replaced by emotion, by the accession of innumerable sensitivities, not without their pivotal elements of pain. It was the pain, perhaps, of being young. It was 1942. I was twenty-five.… The train to Berlin, by the way, was prompt and expeditious. Auschwitz Central was no mere spur or siding. It was the biggest station I have ever seen, and served all Europe, direct. One of our last shipments went straight to Paris: Special Train 767, to Bourget-Drancy. Auschwitz was a secret. It covered fourteen thousand acres, and it was invisible. It was there, and it wasn’t there. It was outside. So how can you follow it?
Herta is utterly transformed. Yes, my wife is more or less unrecognizable in every way. She is pregnant, after all—prodigious, luminous; and she pampers me outrageously. I don’t quite know what I did to deserve this radical revision in status. Our German baby is of startling dimensions: bigger, if anything, than the woman herself. Herta is no more than the string on the parcel in which the baby sleeps. For the time being we reside with her parents in their small but practical house in the southern suburbs of Berlin. Much of our time is spent in morbid speculation about the baby’s name. We favored Eva or Dieter at first; but now we seem to have settled on Birgitta or Eduard. Sensibly, if laboriously, Herta is dismantling the baby’s clothes. I myself spend an hour or two a day in the garden hut with my father-in-law, dismantling the baby’s cot and high chair. Our room, Herta’s room, seems to be analogously prepared for her own eventual childhood. The fairies of the wallpaper smile down on the conjugal bed, which is a single, as slim as a bunk. Its dairy aroma encloses Herta, her shocking new breasts, her ovoid belly. The baby comes between us. It’s more comfortable if Herta lies on her side and I take up position behind her. Annoyingly, however, I am still impotent. Nervous exhaustion, no doubt; perhaps, too, a guilty reminder (in the way our bodies are juxtaposed) of the gratitude I sampled in the camp. Though Herta has hair: lots of hair. Anyway, she talked to her doctor about it, unbearably, and he says that this is quite a common male reaction to pregnancy. Yes, either that, or it’s the work I’ve been doing.
And continued to do. Oh, you know how it is. You say: Enough with these busybodies and goody two-shoes! And then you’re out
there again, doing what you can. After my fortnight’s leave I completed a five-month tour of duty in the East with a Waffen SS unit, operating downwind, as it were, of the military withdrawal from the Soviet Union. I like to think we achieved a good deal, though it was humble stuff compared to the Kat-Zet. And crude stuff. And aesthetically catastrophic stuff too, of course. Emotion flits around me now. The world continues to make sense, but emotion isn’t so interested in sense, and wonders how things feel.… My face, during this time, can best be imagined as a study in strain. Rather as it looked when I lay there in the dark, wedged between the changed Herta and the cold wall, in full confidence of erotic failure. Then it happens—it doesn’t happen—and you switch on the light and get dressed sadly. The sadness is your very own; it entirely fits you. And Herta’s glance sometimes, and her mother’s glance, and even her father’s glance, which is hard and countervailing, which is on my side (but I don’t want it): these glances say that in my hands there rests a mortal and miserable power. I am omnipotent. Also impotent. I am powerful and powerless.
It was a summer of thunder and sunshine and double rainbows. These were epiphanies. I finally encountered the bomb baby, thus fulfilling the ironic prophecy of my dreams. And with my own eyes I saw the stalled clock at Treblinka.…
What the unit was doing could, I suppose, be seen as a natural continuation of my work in the Lager. We were on the interface of bureaucracy and public relations. At this point the Jews were being deconcentrated, were being channeled back into society, and it fell to us to help dismantle and disperse the ghettos, where the light was always failing and where the children all looked so old and full of knowledge, and everybody moved much too slowly or much too fast. Even as an interim measure, the ghettos, one felt, were a failure, and made one suspect, briefly yet sickeningly, that the whole enterprise, the whole dream, had been fatally grandiose: too many, too many. How one longed to uproot those walls.… One ghetto, that of Litzmannstadt, had a “king”: Chaim Rumkowski. I myself saw him parading through the stunned streets, with courtiers, in his carriage, pushed by a white horse like a paper bag full of water and bones. Rumkowski was a lord. But a lord of what?
