He rushes to the low brick building in which private mass executions are conducted. A work detail pulling a carrier loaded with bodies emerges from the building as Grieben enters it. There he finds her amidst a tangled heap of fresh-killed corpses. Habit is strong, prisoners’ clothing is always sent to the warehouses, and SS efficiency, even in this emergency, has prevailed: Liesel and all her companions in death are nude.
Grieben lifts her from the floor, holds her in his arms. She has been shot through the left breast and again through the neck. She is still warm. Her brown hair, caught in the bend of his arm, streams down over one cheek and shoulder—as limp and lovely against the white of her skin as the seal-brown ears of a rabbit, a doe rabbit done to death by love on a summer lawn in the breathless silence of a time now three long decades dead.
He carries her to their quarters, washes her, dresses her, weeps for her. As twilight approaches he enfolds her in a blanket and places her in the rear seat of the Skoda, which was to have carried her alive from this place.
That night he buries her secretly in the forest. The next morning he joins in the general retreat.
Three days later, on the wintry road to Ratibor for Auschwitz personnel, among them Boekner, the officer who supervised the final action against Sonderkommandos and inmate office personnel. Boekner, who is a compassionate man by his own definition of compassion, explains to Grieben that he had no choice in the matter: Liesel’s inclusion was mandatory by reason of the classification “inmate office personnel,” which Grieben himself had assigned to her; the order had been given and he, Boekner, was bound by oath to obey it without exceptions of any kind, regardless of his own personal feelings. Grieben agrees; he has lived by that same code himself; he understands that the individual who executes an order cannot be blamed for the consequences of his obedience.
Greatly relieved that Grieben thinks no less of him for being a good soldier, Boekner tells him that as soon as the prisoners had undressed he ordered a subordinate to search for those small personal possessions which prisoners invariably secrete on their persons or in their clothing. He hands Grieben a small sealed packet, no larger than an ordinary-sized envelope, but slightly thicker. It was the least he could do, Boekner explains; surely a man deserves at least some memento no matter how small or inconsequential, to keep green the memory of one he has lost…
When he is alone, Grieben opens the packet. It contains a needle, two buttons, four aspirin pills, a small length of narrow gauze bandage, a two-by-three-inch snapshot of a man with two children (a boy and a girl) climbing over him, and a sealed letter addressed to Herr Professor Doktor Heinrich von Kordt, Max Planck Institute, Berlin. Grieben opens the envelope. It contains a single sheet of his own SS stationery covered on both sides with Liesel’s handwriting. It is dated January 17, 1945—the day of the evacuation. He remembers her excitement on that day, her gaiety, her eager plans for the new life opening up for them, her affection, her kisses.
“My dearest dearest Heinrich and my most darling of children…” She recounts her arrest, her arrival at Auschwitz, her assignment to “a man from whom I fled eleven years ago but who has caught me again and uses me as his whore—which oh my dear and my darling, I am.” The Russians are everywhere; they are evacuating the camp; she will go with Grieben who has promised that she will no longer be an SS prisoner, but his mistress, “although he is now, thank God, much less than a man. I send this letter to let you know where I am. Soon I will write you again, so that you will be able to find me if you still want me. If you do want me—if you truly do—I pray that through love and forgiveness you will help to make me a human being again, even a woman. I have learned so much about love that I am trying to find a different word for it. Please find me. Please help me. Until you hold me once more in your arms, I am, whether in heaven or hell, forever your wife—Liesel.”
So that’s how it was. Lies, betrayal, corruption, filth. The infinite duplicity of woman. And yet I loved you, Liesel, I love you still, I loved you in life, I love you in death, I loved you in my earliest childhood, I will love you in the hour that I die, for without love there is nothing, without love there is only loneliness and despair and darkness—without love I am death himself.
Grieben’s history from that moment forward is recounted in Chapter 1. Only small portions of it need be touched on as the novel ends. He has become an old man dreaming nightmares in the afternoon sun: he weeps again for the squirrel, for the doe rabbit, for Inge, for Morgen, for Winterfeld, for Blobel, and always, of course, for Liesel—the coarse, decadent dreams of nineteenth-century romanticism energized and made real by the twentieth century’s vision of pragmatic materialism.
He sorrows for those he destroyed, yet he remembers and relives their agony with such loving re-creation of detail—even to the smallest moment of pain or humiliation—that it becomes clear the only reason he recalls them is to feel once more the pleasure they gave. Given the power, he would do it all over again in a welter of tears and rapture. He sorrows not for the loss of love, which he never understood or truly wanted, but for loss of the political power which enabled him to commit his crimes and of the sexual power which made them enjoyable.
But this, of course, he does not know. His perverted appetite for absolute power over an animal, a man, a woman, or over all animals, all men, all women, combined with the corruption of having actually possessed it, has blinded him to any suffering but his own, to any virtue except those he finds in his own life and personality. Commanded by voices from the dark forests of German pre-history (and our pre-history, perhaps?), he obeyed the call of the blood, the will of the German folk-soul, and the cry of old gods, treacherously slaughtered eons ago, yet still howling from the swamps for vengeance.
Almost suffocated with the melancholy of self-pity, with nostalgia for the glory and pain of all that has gone from the world, he embarks—an old man, lost, alone, the last bearer of a faith betrayed—on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz.
There, on a chill autumn day, he ascends a small rise that looks down on the deserted camp. He stares at the barracks, row on row; the abandoned headquarters buildings; the rubble which once loomed above the sky as gas chambers and crematoria, from which no smoke now rises; the desolation, the loneliness, the accursedness of a site which once provoked emotions never before known to men.
He remembers the sights and sounds of a hundred thousand human beings huddled together while six thousand of them went up in flames each twenty-four hours with fresh trainloads replaced every hour. He remembers the chimneys which belched black smoke and human souls into gray skies and low-hanging clouds.
He realizes that any place which witnessed the sacrifice of two million members of the human family in so short a time must by its very nature be a holy place; that the experience itself partook of holiness; and that he, Grieben-the-lost, was an attendant priest at those holy rites. Tears fill his eyes. He falls to his knees, lifts his arms toward the vast deserted temple in which his existence soared to its climax, and cries: “Israel, Israel, here in this holy place gave I unto thee thy soul…”
AFTERNOTE
No synopsis is explicit Characters change as they are written and take on lives of their own. The thing I am after here, the devil I am trying to catch, is that dark yearning for power which lurks in all of us, the perversion of love which is the inevitable consequence of power, the exquisite pleasures of perversion when power becomes absolute, and the dread realization that in a time when science has become the servant of politics-as-theology, it can happen again.
D.T.
Part III
THE
GRIEBEN
LETTERS
EDITOR’S NOTE
Trumbo wrote to his friend Angus Cameron, an editor at Knopf, giving his thoughts on Night of the Aurochs and outlining the story. Across the top of his copy of the letter, Trumbo had scrawled: “I was in New York at the Algonquin Hotel.” The first two chapters of the novel, delivered the same day, April 17, 1961, were includ
ed. An earlier draft, dated November 28, 1960, was probably the first writing Trumbo had done on the project. Except for the eighteenth-century-style headnotes, the text of the April 17, 1961, version is identical with the one in this book.
April 17, 1961
Dear Angus,
About the novel. I think I want to call it “Night of the Aurochs.” Authorities differ as to whether the aurochs was a primitive European bison from which European cattle descended, or whether it was itself a primitive cow. They also seem unclear as to whether there are any aurochs presently existing. But these are small matters beside the fact that Goering had beasts which he swore were aurochs at Karinhall, lavished great care on them, and shot them with considerable ceremony. The zoological primitivity of the aurochs struck me as rather an apt corollary to the political primitives who called themselves Nazis. There is something dark and recessive in both. Of course readers won’t know what an aurochs is, but that doesn’t seem very important to me. I doubt they knew what a Babbit was until they read the book.
I intend to use a variety of styles and methods as the book gets under way: first person present tense, first person past, excerpts from diaries, etc., with, I hasten to assure you, sections comprised almost entirely of dialogue.
In the fourth chapter, Grieben, at the age of seventeen and in the last months of World War I, joins the Bavarian army, sees action, and makes three friends. The first is blinded in battle; the second becomes a male homosexual prostitute in Berlin of the early 1920s; the third joins the SA with Grieben about 1929. Grieben shifts to the SS in 1933, and in 1934—“The Night of the Long Knives”—liquidates his SA comrade who failed to make the organizational jump in time.
When the war is lost, the three friends join the Freikorps mainly because there is nothing else for them to do, and enthusiastically put down Poles and Russians in the east, Communists in Berlin and Spartacists in Bavaria. In Munich, Grieben for the first time hears Hitler—in the very early days of the early twenties—and I hope to reproduce the emotional atmosphere of the times and the leader.
Grieben ends in Berlin from about 1925 on. That city, in the throes of depression, inflation and free choice (which was the greatest moral crisis for the obedient, well-organized German) becomes the real background for his following development. It is here he meets, courts, and marries a girl two years older than he, not because he loves her, but because she has a small house free and clear—such rare security in those times that, although unbeautiful, she is greatly sought after. She presents him with two children in quick succession—children he doesn’t very much want.
He spends most of his time in the easy communal barracks of the SA, where there is the security of numbers, of a purpose, plus a place to sleep, and a way to eat. The appeal of this life to the rootless and disorganized German youth is fairly clear. It was rather jolly—and one always had Jews, Communists, and Social Democrats to bully, which gave a pleasant sense of power and program.
About 1932, in Berlin Grieben falls in love with a young dancer (café) and courts her furiously. She is attracted to him, but at the same time afraid of him. He begs her to be his mistress; she refuses. He begs his wife for a divorce; she refuses. This is the first time Grieben has experienced passionate romantic love, and it almost drives him insane.
On the night of the burning of the books, amid banners and chants and songs and bands and torches, he takes her to a park within sight and sound of the book-burning frenzy, and rapes her. However, he ejaculates prematurely and thus merely soils her. He is overcome with embarrassment, but attributes the mishap to his excess of virility. He never consummates the affair with the girl. The next morning she has vanished, and not until years later does he see her.
He passes through the “Night of the Long Knives,” executes his last friend, and goes off to SS training school. Here the intellectual doctrine of anti-Semitism is pounded into his head as pure German classicism (which it may be), dating from Luther, and reflected regularly in every generation by the most revered intellectuals and artists of the German people. Here I hope to show from all classical sources of German education that anti-Semitism as a doctrine has been drilled endlessly into the minds of German youth, until it became an article of faith, and had been so for a hundred years. The Nazis didn’t invent the article, they merely invoked it, and carried it through with absolute German logic.
Then his slow rise—Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and finally, on the third level of command, Auschwitz-Birkenau. There he lives with his wife and teen-age children (both of whom leave home before the war is over for national service), in a lovely cottage, staffed by Jehovah’s Witnesses from the camp, with flower gardens fertilized by materials he brings from the camp, whose great smokestacks constantly becloud the sky above his house. By day he fulfills his duties of extermination.
In the course of 1944, he finds himself on a mission to the Eichmann office in Berlin. Walking along the street one day with an SS comrade, he spots a young woman across the street—it is the girl, the dancer, the loved one.
Through the good offices of friends on SS security, he has her traced, discovers her true identity. Although her maiden name was German, he discovers that her mother was Jewish—and understands somewhat better her reticence to have a liaison with him.
She is married to a physicist of good German family—a von—who works at the Max Planck Institute. She has two young children. By special dispensation, and a little connivery, her husband has managed to conceal all evidence of her half-Jewish origin. But once Grieben is on the trail, she is lost. Three days later she is picked up off the street by the SS, and seen no more by her husband, family or friends.
As a favor to Grieben she is transported in a special van to Auschwitz. He places her in a special room in camp headquarters, immediately adjoining his office, and there enjoys her favors—all possible favors—while insisting that he loves her. As a matter of fact, he does love her in the only way he can conceive of love—the area in which love is related to sadism and death.
In this eighteen-month period of his life, while the extermination camps roared to their climax (together with his affair with his slave), I wish to investigate the whole curious phenomenon of sex-as-death which seemed to dominate Auschwitz at that time, even among certain groups of prisoners, who held their own saturnalias of sex in the very shadow of the ovens.
His heightened sensibilities cause him, unexpectedly and unwillingly, to fertilize his wife, who presents him with an autumnal daughter. He names the child after his slave in the camp, so that he may openly speak the adored name in front of his wife without arousing suspicion or unpleasantness.
Then comes the Russian advance. The slow realization the camp must be abandoned. He sends his wife and daughter rearward. He and others labor like dogs in the final exertion of extermination. The kapos revolt, an oven is blown up, and the main body of prisoners begin their terrible march toward the German heartland. On the last day in camp, all preparations being made, Grieben goes to headquarters to get his slave. She isn’t in her quarters next to his office. He demands to know what happened, is told somebody gave out the order that all inmate personnel were to go to the gas chambers and the ovens.
Howling with rage and anguish, he goes to the gas chamber. Their last service has just been performed. He goes to the ovens, and there amid the corpses, he finds the body of his beloved, still warm. He pulls his gun, kills three kapos who are engaged in cutting her hair and preparing her for incineration. He picks her up in his arms, weeping. Her brown hair streams backward against her white body. She is his rabbit, once again his murdered love. He buries her secretly in the forest and joins in the general retreat.
From this point the opening chapter carries it forward—his loss of family, his return to Forchheim, his prison sentence, and his lonely cottage. Having lived through the experience of his life, he is, at the end of the book, impelled by the enormity of his experiences and of his loneliness, to return to Auschwitz, a one-man pi
lgrimage toward his beginnings.
On a little rise that gives a view of the camp, he stares at the rows of barracks, the abandoned headquarters, the ovens from which no smoke rises, the swampy surroundings, the drifting mist, the desolation, the loneliness of a site which once provoked emotions (as he feels) never before known to man. He remembers the sights and sounds of a hundred thousand persons huddled together, while twenty thousand of them went up in flames every twenty-four hours, and fresh trainloads replaced them. He remembers those chimneys when they belched forth great clouds of smoke. He feels that any place which beheld two million murders in so short a while must be a holy place; that the experience in itself partook of holiness; and that he himself was, in a sense, a priest at holy rites. He falls to his knees, lifts his arms toward the vast sacrificial altar, and says (in effect)—“Israel, Israel, here I gave thee thy soul!”
I should, as you know, have to place a thousand qualifications on every phrase written above, but to do that, it will be necessary to write the book.
All the best,
DALTON
EDITOR’S NOTE
This undated letter from Michael Wilson, screenwriter and close friend of Trumbo, was probably written in late 1973 or 1974. Trumbo had sent him the first eight chapters. (He had an earlier version of the first four, which could not be located in Trumbo’s papers on the novel and may possibly have been the same version Wilson had read in Rome ten years before.)
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