The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  Despite his retort, my last remark must have annoyed Schenke; for the rest of the visit, he confined himself to dry, brief comments. I had myself shown around the KL attached to the factory, a rectangle surrounded by barbed wire, set up south of the complex in fallow fields, on the site of the razed village. I thought the conditions there were deplorable; the Lagerführer seemed to find it normal. “In any case, we send the ones the IG rejects to Birkenau, and they send us fresh ones.” On my way back to the Stammlager, I noticed on a wall in town this surprising inscription: KATYN = AUSCHWITZ. Ever since March, in fact, Goebbels’s press had kept harping about the discovery in Byelorussia of Polish corpses, thousands of officers assassinated by Bolsheviks after 1939. But who, here, could have written that? There weren’t any more Poles in Auschwitz, and no Jews, either, for a long time now. The town itself looked gray, glum, affluent, like all the old German towns in the East, with its market square, its Dominican church with sloping roofs, and, just at the entrance, dominating the bridge over the Sola, the old castle of the duke of the region. For many years, the Reichsführer had promoted plans to enlarge the town and make it a model community of the German East, but with the intensification of the war, these ambitious projects had been put aside, and it remained a sad, dull town, almost forgotten between the camp and the factory, a superfluous appendage.

  As for the life of the camp, it was turning out to be full of unusual phenomena. Piontek had dropped me off in front of the Kommandantur and backed up to park the Opel; I was about to go in when my attention was drawn by some noise in the garden of the Hösses’ house. I lit a cigarette and discreetly approached: through the gate, I saw children playing Häftlinge. The biggest one, who had his back to me, wore an armband marked KAPO and was shrilly shouting the standardized commands: “Ach…tung! Mützen…auf! Mützen…ab! Zu fünf!” The other four, three little girls, one of them very young, and a boy, were standing in a row facing me and were clumsily trying to obey; each one wore a triangle, sewn on their chests, of a different color: green, red, black, purple. Höss’s voice resounded behind me: “Hello, Sturmbannführer! What are you watching?” I turned around: Höss was coming toward me, his hand outstretched; near the barrier, an orderly was holding his horse’s lead. I saluted him, shook his hand, and without a word pointed to the garden. Höss blushed suddenly, passed through the gate, and hurried toward the children. Without saying anything, without slapping them, he tore the triangles and the armband off and sent them inside. Then he came back to me, still red, holding the pieces of cloth. He looked at me, looked at the badges, looked at me again, and then, still silent, walked past me and into the Kommandantur, tossing the badges into a metal trash can near the door. I picked up my cigarette, which I had dropped to salute him and which was still smoking. An inmate gardener, in a clean, well-pressed striped uniform, holding a rake, came out, removing his cap as he passed me, went to get the trash-can, and emptied it into the basket he was carrying; then he went back into the garden.

  During the day, I felt fresh, alert; at the Haus, I ate well, and in the evenings I thought with pleasure about my bed, with its clean sheets; but at night, ever since I had arrived, the dreams came in vast gusts, sometimes short and abrupt and soon forgotten, other times like a long worm uncoiling inside my head. One sequence in particular repeated itself and expanded nightly, an obscure, difficult-to-describe dream, without any narrative meaning, but that unfurled according to a spatial logic. In this dream I was traveling, at different altitudes, but always as if in the air, I was more like a pure gaze or even a camera than a living being, traveling through an immense city, without any visible end, its topography monotonous and repetitive, divided into geometric sectors, its way animated with an incessant flow. Thousands of beings came and went, entered and exited identical buildings, walked along long, straight avenues, plunged underground through subway entrances to emerge at some other place, constantly and without any apparent aim. If I, or rather the gaze I had become, went down toward these avenues to examine them close up, I noticed that these men and women weren’t distinguished from one another by any special characteristic; they all had white skin, light-colored hair, blue, pale, lost eyes, Höss’s eyes, the eyes of my old orderly Hanika, too, when he died in Kharkov, eyes the color of the sky. Railroad tracks crisscrossed the city, little trains came forward and made regular stops to spew out an instantly replaced wave of passengers, as far as the eye could see. During subsequent nights, I entered some of the buildings: lines of people moved between long communal tables and latrines, eating and defecating in a row; on bunk beds, others were fornicating, then children were born, played between the bedsteads, and, when they had grown big enough, went out to take their place in the human waves of this city of perfect happiness. Little by little, by dint of looking from different points of view, a tendency became apparent in the seemingly arbitrary swarm: imperceptibly, a certain number of people always ended up on the same side, and finally went into windowless buildings, where they lay down to die without a word. Specialists came and collected from them whatever could still contribute to the city’s economy; then their bodies were burned in ovens that served simultaneously to warm the water distributed by pipes throughout the sectors; the bones were ground up; the smoke, coming from the chimneys, rejoined, like tributaries, the smoke of neighboring chimneys to form one long, calm, solemn river. And when the dream’s point of view took on altitude again, I could make out an equilibrium in all this: the quantity of births, in the dormitories, equaled the number of deaths, and the society self-reproduced in perfect equilibrium, always in movement, producing no excess and suffering no diminution. When I woke up, it seemed obvious to me that these serene dreams, void of all anguish, represented the camp, but a perfect camp, having reached an impossible point of stasis, without violence, self-regulated, functioning perfectly and also perfectly useless since, despite all this movement, it produced nothing. But upon thinking more about it, as I tried to do while drinking my ersatz in the dining room of the Haus der Waffen-SS, wasn’t it a representation of social life as a whole? Stripped of its tawdry rags and its pointless agitation, human life was reduced to scarcely more than that; once one had reproduced, one had fulfilled the purpose of mankind; and as for one’s own purpose, that was just an illusion, a stimulus to encourage oneself to get up in the morning; but if you examined the thing objectively, as I thought I could do, the uselessness of all these efforts was obvious, as was the uselessness of reproduction itself, since it served only to produce more uselessness. So I came to think: Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?

  But I hadn’t come to Auschwitz to philosophize. I inspected the Nebenlager: the experimental agricultural station in Rajsko, so dear to the Reichsführer, where Dr. Caesar explained to me how they were still trying to resolve the problem of large-scale cultivation of the kok-sagyz plant, discovered, you’ll remember, near Maikop and capable of producing rubber; and also the cement factory in Golleschau, the steelworks in Eintrachthütte, the mines in Jawizowitz and Neu-Dachs. Aside from Rajsko, which was something of a special case, the conditions in these installations seemed if possible worse than at Buna: the absence of any security measures led to countless accidents, the lack of hygiene constantly assailed the senses, the savage and deadly violence of the kapos and civilian foremen broke out on the slightest excuse. I went down to the bottom of the mine shaft via shaky wire-caged elevators; at every level, perspectives of tunnels, weakly illuminated by yellowish lamps, pierced the darkness; any inmate who went down here must have lost all hope of ever seeing daylight again. At the bottom, water trickled from the walls, metallic sounds and shouts resounded through the low, stinking tunnels. Oil drums cut in half with a board across the top served as latrines: some Häftlinge were so weak that they fell inside. Others, skeleton-like, their legs swollen with edema, expended immense effort pushing overloaded carts on
badly adjusted tracks, or cutting into the wall with picks or pneumatic drills that they could barely hold. At the exit, lines of exhausted workers, supporting half-fainting comrades and carrying their dead on improvised stretchers, were waiting to go back to the surface, to be sent back to Birkenau: they, at least, would see the sky again, even if only for a few hours. Learning that almost everywhere the work progressed less quickly than the engineers had foreseen didn’t surprise me: usually they blamed the bad quality of the goods supplied by the camp. A young engineer from the Hermann-Göring Werke had tried, he told me with a resigned air, to obtain an extra ration for the inmates in Jawizowitz, but management had refused the additional expenditure. As for hitting them less, even this man with progressive ideas sadly acknowledged that it was difficult: if you hit them, the inmates advanced slowly, but if you didn’t hit them, they didn’t advance at all.

  With Dr. Wirths, I had an interesting discussion about precisely this question of physical violence, since to me it evoked problems I had already encountered in the Einsatzgruppen. Wirths agreed with me in saying that even men who, in the beginning, hit only out of obligation ended up developing a taste for it. “Far from correcting hardened criminals,” he passionately affirmed, “we confirm them in their perversity by giving them full rights over the other prisoners. And we’re even creating new ones among our SS. These camps, with the present methods, are a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations; after the war, when these men go back to civilian life, we’ll find ourselves with a considerable problem on our hands.” I explained to him that, according to what I had heard, the decision to transfer the work of extermination to the camps was made partly because of the psychological problems it caused among troops assigned to mass executions. “True,” Wirths replied, “but we’re only shifting the problem, especially by mixing extermination functions with the correctional and economic functions of ordinary camps. The mentality engendered by extermination overpowers and affects all the rest. Even here, in my Reviers, I discovered that some doctors were killing patients, exceeding their instructions. I had a lot of trouble putting a stop to such practices. As for the sadistic tendencies, they are very frequent, especially with the guards, and they’re often connected to sexual troubles.”—“Do you have concrete examples?”—“They rarely come to consult me. But it happens. A month ago, I saw a guard who’s been here for a year. A man from Breslau, thirty-seven years old, married, three children. He confessed to me that he had beaten inmates until he ejaculated, without even touching himself. He no longer had any normal sexual relations; when he had leave, he didn’t go back home, he was so ashamed. But before he came to Auschwitz, he told me, he was perfectly normal.”—“And what did you do for him?”—“In the conditions we have here, there’s not much I can do. He would need extensive psychiatric treatment. I’m trying to have him transferred outside the camp system, but it’s hard: I can’t tell the whole story, or he’d be arrested. But he’s a sick man, he needs to be taken care of.”—“And how do you think this sadism develops?” I asked. “I mean with normal men, without any predisposition that would be revealed under these conditions?” Wirths looked out the window, pensive. He took a long while to reply: “That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, and it’s difficult to answer. An easy solution would be to blame our propaganda, the way for instance it’s taught here to the troops by Oberscharführer Knittel, who heads the Kulturabteilung: the Häftling is subhuman, he’s not even human, so it’s entirely legitimate to hit him. But that’s not the whole of it—after all, animals aren’t human, either, but none of our guards would treat an animal the way they treat the Häftlinge. Propaganda does play a role, but in a more complex way. I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic because he thinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage increases and turns into sadism when he sees that the inmate, far from being a subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all, and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard finds unbearable, this silent persistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to make their shared humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes, the more he’s forced to see that the inmate refuses to recognize himself as a non-human. In the end, no other solution remains for him than to kill him, which is an acknowledgment of complete failure.” Wirths fell silent. He was still looking out the window. I broke the silence: “Can I ask you a personal question, Doktor?” Wirths answered without looking at me; his long, thin fingers tapped the table: “You can ask it.”—“Are you a believer?” He took a while to reply. He was still looking outside, toward the street and the crematorium. “I used to be, yes,” he said finally.

  I had left Wirths and was walking up the Kasernestrasse toward the Kommandantur. Just before the checkpoint with its red-and-white barrier, I noticed one of Höss’s children, the oldest one, squatting in the street in front of the gate to their house. I went over and greeted him. The boy raised frank, intelligent eyes to me and stood up: “Hello, Sturmbannführer.”—“What’s your name?”—“Klaus.”—“What are you looking at, Klaus?” Klaus pointed toward the gate: “Look.” The ground in front of the threshold was black with ants, an amazingly dense swarm. Klaus crouched down again to observe them and I bent over beside him. At first sight, these thousands of ants seemed to be running around in the most frenzied, utterly aimless disorder. But then I looked more closely, trying to follow one of them in particular, then another. I noticed then that the disrupted aspect of this swarm came from the fact that each insect kept pausing to touch antennas with every other one it met. Little by little I saw that some of the ants were leaving toward the left while others were arriving, carrying debris or food: an exhausting, vast labor. The ones that were coming must have been using their antennae to inform the others about where the food had come from. The gate to the house opened and a Häftling, the gardener I had seen before, came out. Seeing me, he stiffened and removed his cap. He was a man a little older than me, a Polish political prisoner, according to his triangle. He noticed the anthill and said: “I’ll destroy that, Herr Offizier.”—“Absolutely not! Don’t touch it.”—“Oh yes, Stani,” Klaus gushed, “leave them alone. They haven’t done anything to you.” Klaus turned to me: “Where are they going?”—“I don’t know. We’ll have to look.” The ants were following the garden wall, then hurrying along the curb, passing behind the cars and motorcycles parked opposite the Kommandantur; then they continued straight ahead, a long wavering line, beyond the camp’s administration building. We followed them step-by-step, admiring their indefatigable determination. When we neared the Politische Abteilung, Klaus looked at me nervously: “I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer, but my father doesn’t want me to come this way.”—“Wait for me, then. I’ll tell you.” Behind the barracks of the political department stood the squat mass of the crematorium, a former ammunition bunker covered with earth and vaguely resembling, apart from the chimney, a flattened kurgan. The ants continued toward its somber mass; they climbed up the sloping side, weaving their way through the grass; then they turned and went down a cement section of wall, where the entrance to the bunker formed a recess between the dirt slopes. I kept following them and saw that they went through the half-open door and into the crematorium. I looked around: aside from a guard who was staring at me curiously and a column of inmates pushing wheelbarrows a little farther away, near the extension of the camp, there was no one. I went up to the door, which was bracketed by two frames, like windows; inside, everything was black and silent. The ants were marching over the angle of the doorstep. I turned around and rejoined Klaus. “They’re going that way,” I said vaguely. “They found something to eat.” Followed by the little boy, I returned to the Kommandantur. We separated in front of the entrance. “Are you coming tonight, Sturmbannführer?” Klaus asked. Höss was giving a little reception and had invited me. “Yes.”—“Till tonight, then!” Stepping over the anthill, he went into
the garden.