There is a spiritual purpose here I’ve only lately begun to understand. Jew-free we can survive defeat itself and still, in some proper future time, achieve the victory that twice has been denied us; Jew-infested, no victory, now or in the future, can save us from the inevitable fate of peoples and nations who fail or refuse to excise the Jewish cancer from their guts.
The transport in question consisted of the poorest human material imaginable: eighty-six went to the work force, the rest to the showers.
21 August 1944
An ugly bit of carelessness with yesterday’s contingent of Hungarians. A work squad sorting out clothing in one of the undressing sheds discovered a year-old child (female) crawling through the stuff, obviously hidden there and left behind by its mother. Guards were summoned, and the child was immediately shot.
Such incidents are always bad for the morale of custodial personnel, in this case particularly so because the child in question had blue eyes and the guard—Heintzel by name—whose duty it had been to kill her awakened in the middle of the night shouting that he’d murdered a German child and threatening to shoot anyone who came near him. Two men were killed and a third wounded before he was finally subdued and transferred to the psychiatric ward.
Stricter supervision of female undressing sheds has been ordered.
18 November 1944
I have feelings of exaltation. I love birds. Yesterday I gave cheese to a child. I am not one of the fatherless. I fish in meadows. I provide. I pretend. I premeditate. But not murder. I am a premeditator of goodness. Unrecognized goodness. Unrequited goodness. Unwanted goodness. Unneeded goodness. Unjustified goodness. Undesirable goodness. Extreme goodness, which is to say the goodness of God himself who gave life to man, beast, bird, and cockroach for the sole purpose of taking it away, of taking it back by stealth, by torment, bit by bit, cell by cell, until the cockroach dances itself to exhaustion, the bird sinks, the beast falls to his knees, and man, driven quite mad, drowns in the vomit of his own despair. To such a God I say, “You’re a thief, a liar, a ravager, a holy barracuda, a sacred cannibal who feeds exclusively on the fruit of his own loins.”
What’s happening to me? I’m turning Jew. I’m talking to God. I’m arguing with him. I’ve watched them here, watched with bewildered astonishment those endless lines of shivering, gray-headed, knob-kneed old Jews shambling toward the gas chamber like mutilated insects, warmed by nothing more substantial than the stench of their own dung, and talking the whole distance, talking to God every step of the way, each in his own fashion, to be sure, but each sustained to the very end by the passion of that interminable colloquy with his maker.
There’s a point to this. I’m not just babbling into my diary for the sake of literary exercise, I’m trying to extract one small kernel of sense out of the raging nonsense that fills my life. The kernel of sense is this: To debate with God is to bring him down (or to try to bring him down) to man’s level, i.e., to the level of a human being who knows he must die. As such, it is an attempt on God’s life, an act designed to complete itself in deicide. Having already killed God’s son, the Jew’s next move—indeed, his only logical move—has to be against the life of God himself.
Now even if there is no God, as mostly I’m sure there isn’t, the desire to kill him (much less the actual attempt) is a crime. Beyond this, if you try to kill God, which any form of debate with him actually means, why be surprised if he retaliates by killing you? And that is the most remarkable thing of all about the Jew: he is never surprised by God’s wrath, nor put off by his inconceivable thirst for Jewish blood. Since Jews are thus the only people who understand death and God’s appetite for it, it follows that they’re the ones who most deserve it if only because they’re better prepared than the rest of us to receive it.
Thus we of the SS are actually engaged in God’s work. Even more terrifying, we engage in it at the risk of becoming like God. The question is whether or not we dare take that risk: whether extermination of the Jew is actually worth risking admission to the terrible realm of Almighty God with all his avenging angels, his princes, his cherubim, and the forty-two frightful sanctities who surround his throne?
It seems clear to me that God is inhuman by any definition, and that so am I who faithfully does his work. Except—and there are exceptions in every case—except in certain weak and unmanly moments during which I listen to the crickets at night, to the dawn recognition call of infant birds, to the soft-rustling, deliberate courtship of snails on a leaf, to the shrill orgiastic murmurings of life that rage through the meanest weedpatch day after night after year to the end of time.
I’m saying Amen to you, God, Amen from Auschwitz where daily we do what your slightest gesture could have stopped us from doing had the doing of it not been thy will. I mumble prayers in my sleep—not for me but for you. Fuck you, God. Fuck you who has fucked every creature on earth from the beginning of time. Fuck you forever. Fuck you until I am as dead by your hand as thousands, tens of thousands, are already dead by mine. As one who knows you for what you are, and therefore no longer fears your terrible vengeance, I say fuck you forever, time without end, Amen.
26 November 1944
Orders came through yesterday and were announced today: liquidation of the Jews will cease immediately; gas chambers and crematoria will he dismantled as quickly as possible; hail Mary full of grace.
I observe with some interest that the order to kill no more came not from God nor his local delegate, the Pope, but from His Excellency, the Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
♦ 3 ♦
Grieben at Auschwitz
In the beginning of 1944 Grieben finds himself on a mission to the Eichmann office in Berlin. Walking with an SS comrade along the Unter den Linden, he spots a woman, a young woman, as he feels, no more than thirty-two, perhaps thirty-five years old; a smartly but not too expensively dressed woman whose brisk walk and confident bearing bespeak life at its flux, and a future to which she looks forward with something more than hope—a life she anticipates with expectancy. She is Liesel.
Through the good offices of SS friends he discovers her true identity. Although her maiden name, Dahlem, is legitimately German and therefore Aryan, her mother, born Levin, became Aryan only by marriage, which means that Liesel, under the Nuremberg Code, is a Jew. She is married to a physicist at the Max Planck Institute, whose name is honorably preceded by a von, and the mother of his two young children. Because of his scientific value to the state, her husband, through friends and perhaps a little bribery, has been able to secure for her a special dispensation which conceals all evidence of her half-Jewish origin.
The next day, while selecting children’s stockings in a shop on the Friedrichstrasse, she is seized by SS agents. An hour later her clothing, stuffed into a paper bag and labeled with her name and number, is deposited by a reception clerk in the storage basement of SS Headquarters, Berlin, while Liesel, naked but for a towel and a small bar of medicated soap, stands before the allocation officer’s small desk. She is assigned to Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Departure, 8:00 P.M. Special Transport. As she passes with her towel and soap toward the rear for medical examination and delousing procedures, she has no idea that Grieben’s adoring eyes follow her from the other side of a one-way window disguised as a mirror. All that she sees reflected in its grime as she passes is despair.
At Auschwitz, two hours after passing through selection, Frau Liesel von Kordt is delivered in prison garb to the office of Sturmbannfuehrer Grieben, who indicates the day’s admission list on his desk. He recognized her name and sent for her at once. He deplores the unhappy coincidence that after so many years has brought them together in circumstances so unfortunate. If he can be of any service…
The instant she sees him Liesel knows precisely what has occurred, and why, and how she must deal with it. No friend or relative will ever be notified of what has happened to her or where she is, nor will inquiries from them ever be answered. All that will be known is t
hat at a certain hour on a certain street in Berlin, some miracle of the law changed her from a human being to a statistic.
Once the fatal fact of her parentage came into SS hands, nothing could have prevented the next step and the next and so to the end. The only power that still remains to her is choice, the power to decide whether she will go to the ovens and certain death or to Grieben and a chance for life. She is still young, she has a husband whom she loves, two children who need her, and much to live for. She opts for Grieben in full understanding of the danger he represents: she knows the grossness of his spirit and the corruption which stands between his desire for love and his inability to give or accept it. She knows, in short, the risk she accepts in staking her love of life against Grieben’s love of death.
She says, “I know why I’m here and I’ll do anything to stay alive.”
She is moved into a cubicle adjoining Grieben’s office. Their struggle for survival continues for eighteen months as the war and the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau roar to a mutual climax. In a time when the Reich is besieged on two fronts by the massed armies of a dozen nations, at a moment when German survival depends on the swift transport of troops from east to west or west to east and south, entire divisions are immobilized for the passage (from Salonika and southern Greece to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland) of sixty trains, each consisting of fifty to a hundred cattle cars filled with human beings. The war has become holy—a war which, even though lost for Germany, will be won for mankind if Europe is cleansed of its last Jew before the curtain descends.
Here, then, is madness, the ultimate madness, the mating of science with Satanism, of politics with theology, of love with death, in a form and on a scale which Europe has never before known. Day and night long trainloads of human cargo rumble into the reception depot at Auschwitz. Day and night the inmate bands celebrate the rites of selection while the echoing gas chambers fill and empty and fill again and the ovens devour their predetermined quotas, blackening the sky by day, reddening it by night.
In such rituals no participant is sane, neither those who are to be killed nor those who are to kill them, for both are hopelessly engrossed in the death-infatuated ecstasy of love and hate, which always lies at the threshold of human dissolution. Despite the general apathy and despair which prevails in this vast compound of the doomed, there still remain those who hate death, who deny and defame and deride him. Among them arise strange cults for the celebration of sex, which is the origin of life, rather than death, which is its end. In the very shadow of the ovens by day, in the glow of their fires by night, men and women and sometimes even children come together in strange, unplanned saturnalias through which life and love are perceived purely as sex—pornographic sex, obscene sex, unnatural sex, wild, abandoned, and sometimes excremental sex—orgiastic affirmations of life in the shadow of that greatest of obscenities and perversions which is death himself, the ultimate enemy whom they mock and defile at the very moment his hand reaches for their throats.
Thus, also, with Grieben and the woman of his dreams—the first and only woman over whom he has absolute power, the woman whose living flesh must enact every fantasy that enters his mind, the woman whom he can clothe or unclothe as he wishes, whom he can openly fondle for the titillation of outsiders, whose favors he can offer to anyone he chooses while he stands with them as voyeur to observe the ways in which they are taken by the recipient and yielded by their involuntary donor. In the first month of their association Grieben’s heightened sexuality causes him, quite inadvertently, to impregnate his wife with a third and unwanted child to bless their autumnal years.
Liesel, clinging fiercely to life, studies and obeys him as intently as a lion its trainer. She apprehends and measures every mood that rises and ebbs in the dark wastes of his hungering heart. When she perceives that his need calls for tears, she weeps; for humiliation, she abases herself; for entreaties, she begs; for punishment, she submits; for love, she drowns him in it. The only thing she denies him is the pleasure of overcoming her resistance, for she knows that in denying him this she denies him all—and denies it in a way he can’t possibly resent, since what manly man can resent a woman’s refusal to disobey even his most outrageous command?
The longer death moves hand in hand with his possession of Liesel, the wilder his infatuation becomes. When his wife births a baby girl he names the child Liesel so that he may utter the beloved name openly in his own house and freely adore it in the presence of his son, his daughter, his wife, and the Witnesses for Jehovah who are his servants. When the child dies three weeks later, he is inconsolable save for the comfort of Liesel’s arms in the house of death, which has become their trysting place.
FROM TRUMBO’S NOTES
Once he gets her in Auschwitz, and once he has sent her to the brothel for the first day—he treats her with all the romanticism of first love; he tries, he asks, he begs, but he never forces—the result, as we discover, her underlying corruption.
This is the key. Her desolate corruption because she becomes the selector.
And they do, in the end, come together gently, lovingly, in their corruption.
When he gets her into Auschwitz, he never touches her—he never rapes her—he courts her. And what he cannot understand is that although he never uses force, still she does not love him. The greater his deference, the greater her resistance. Until, at last, they almost fall in love—with what the other is not
♦
I think when he gets Liesel in Auschwitz he treats her with elaborate courtesy—gentleness, consideration, respect, genuine love. He enslaves himself to her.
Does she use him? Probably. This could be the form of his corruption. If she uses him to some certain lines—she herself has succumbed to the corruption—to the power of selection. It is this that destroys her morally and physically in the end. She walked to her death, invited it. The corruption is everywhere; it affects us all.
I think she, through him, has engendered an escape route.
Her problem—what right have I to save this child at the cost of an old man’s life.
Does she have a diary—or a record intended for her husband—which he finds after her death and uses in his account (the novel) as if he had it at the time? Thus we get her posthumous account as a contemporary comment by her.
LIESEL’S DIARY
I too—
I too—am selecting my favorite Jew—and is it not—you, you, you! You who are only my husband by law—but never was—because I have found my lover—the only one who truly wants me and has beckoned to me always; his name is Death, and I have gone to him. Forever—and ever—and ever his. Death. Her diary. Write it, write it.
(He and I are the damned. We are engaged in a union and divine division that makes us one.)
Make it a true marriage between Grieben and Liesel—the only possible marriage open to either of them. In the midst of the world which is theirs. His last words are Liesel—Liesel—Liesel…I shall come.
As 1944 draws to an end, the dream begins to fade. In the West the Allies move eastward through France; in the East the Russians are encamped on the Vistula. Such news filters down even to prisoners. In September, a special Sonderkommando prisoner rebels and manages to destroy Crematory IV. The uprising is drowned in blood and the killing resumes. Grieben’s children join the youth services and leave home. He sends his wife to live with relatives in Dresden and abandons the most luxurious cottage he has ever lived in.
He moves into an apartment at SS Headquarters, Auschwitz, to live openly with Liesel. He clothes her in gowns and furs from Rome, Paris, Berlin, all confiscated when their owners, now deceased, first arrived at the camp. They dine on Westphalian ham, pâté from Strasbourg, caviar from the Volga, marzipan from Vienna, washed down with champagne and Rhine wine and Hungarian bull’s blood.
In November, the SS Berlin orders the killings to be halted. The camp is to he converted into a slave labor headquarters for the manufacture of arms and synthetic rubber. Early in December
the gas chambers are blown up and the remaining crematoria destroyed on command of SS Headquarters Berlin. In that same month, only a week before Christmas, Grieben discovers that he is becoming impotent.
In January, 1945, the last German incursion into the Ardennes is repulsed, and the Western allies advance toward the sacred borderlands of the Reich itself. In the East the Russians open their last great offensive through Poland and, ultimately, Germany itself.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau the evacuation of able-bodied prisoners begins. Trains, trucks, even horse-drawn vehicles and marching columns move westward through winter snows for the distribution of prisoners to Bergen-Belsen and a dozen other camps, while SS personnel and Sonderkommandos labor frantically to destroy all evidence of what Auschwitz-Birkenau really was.
Through it all Liesel loyally supports and obeys her master, indulging whims and peculiar desires which daily become less tormenting, less degrading as Grieben’s impotence increases and finally becomes absolute. He proposes to take her with him when complete evacuation is ordered. She gladly agrees. His emotional dependence upon her increases in direct proportion to the growing seriousness of his professional difficulties. The more his impotence prevents him from taking from her, the more his increasing passion for her expresses itself in odd, sometimes childlike, and often pathetic ways.
On the morning of January 17, 1945, the Russians enter Warsaw and the final evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau begins. The last Sonderkommando group is to be killed (as always), some 5,000 of the sick and infirm are to be left for the Russians, after which camp SS personnel will filter westward for new assignments.
Grieben orders Liesel to pack their hags while he goes to the village, takes his Skoda sedan (gift of a deceased Czech inmate) out of storage, and returns with it to the camp for Liesel and their belongings. It is three-thirty in the afternoon when he returns. Their bags are packed, but Liesel is not with them. She is not in his office. She is not in evacuation headquarters. He rushes from office to office, from department to department, until at last a guard informs him that an order went out to kill all Sonderkommandos and inmate office personnel before abandoning camp.
Night of the Aurochs Page 14
