Confessions (30 page)

‘I’m no engineer, but I’ve managed to get the crematoria in Birkenau to function twenty-four hours a day without breaking down. And I’ve got my men who supervise the Sonderkommando’s rat squads not to go mad.’

‘How did you do it, dear Oberlagerführer Höss?’

‘I don’t know. By preaching the Truth. Showing all the hungry souls that there is only one evangelical doctrine, and that my sacred mission is to keep errors and evil from rotting the essence of the church. Therefore I work to eliminate all heresies and the most efficient way to do so is by eliminating the heretics, both the new and the relapsed.’

‘Nevertheless, the King …’

‘The Inquisitor General Major and the Vicar of the Order, when he came from Rome, understood it very well. He knew of King Pedro’s animosity towards my personage and he appreciated that, despite everything, I continued in my condemnation of the entire works, book by book, of the abominable and dangerous Ramon Llull. He didn’t argue with any of the procedures we’d begun during these years and, in an emotive celebration of the holy mass, when it came time for the sermon, he put forth my humble personage as an example of conduct for all, from the first to the last Oberlagerführer. Whatever the King of Valencia and Catalonia and Aragon and the Majorcas may say. And then I considered myself a happy man because I was faithful to the most sacred of vows that I had taken and could take in my life. The problem, however, was that woman.’

‘There is something that …’ The Bishop, after hesitating,
lifted a finger cautiously. ‘Careful: I am not saying that they don’t deserve to die.’ He looked at the colour of the wine in his glass and it seemed red as a flame. ‘Can’t we …’

‘Can’t we what?’ Eimeric, impatient.

‘Must they necessarily die by fire?’

‘General practice throughout the Christian church confirms that yes, they must die by fire, Your Grace.’

‘It’s a horrific death.’

‘I’m being eaten up by fevers right now and don’t complain, as I continue to work ceaselessly for the good of the Blessed Mother Church.’

‘I insist that death by fire is horrific.’

‘But deserved!’ exploded His Excellency. ‘More horrific is the blasphemy and stubbornness in error. Or don’t you agree, Your Grace?’ – as I looked at the empty cloister, lost in my thoughts. And I realised that I was alone. I looked around me. Where had Kornelia gone?

The group of tourists waited, patient and disciplined, in a corner of the Bebenhausen cloister, except for Kornelia who … Now I saw her: she was strolling contemplatively, alone, right through the middle of the cloister, always unpredictable. I watched her with a certain gluttony and it seemed she knew my eyes were upon her. She stopped, her back to me, and turned towards the group who were waiting for there to be enough people to begin the visit. I waved to her, but she either didn’t notice or pretended not to see me. Kornelia. A chaffinch stopped at the fountain before me, drank a sip of water and gave a lovely trill. Adrià shivered.

On the eve of Saint James’s Day, at dusk, Josep Xarom’s only consolation was being spared Friar Nicolau’s gaze, as the defender of the Church lay in his bed burning up with a stubborn fever. Yet the relative tepidness of Friar Miquel de Susqueda, notary and assistant to the Inquisitor General, didn’t spare him any pain, any suffering, any horror. In the languidly encroaching dusk of Saint James’s Day Eve, scorched by days of inclement sun, two women and a man led three mules loaded down with pack saddles and hampers filled with memories and five children sleeping on top. They
fled the Jewish Quarter and headed to the bank of the River Ter, on the heels of the two families who’d left the previous day. They left behind sixteen generations of Xaroms and Meirs in their beloved Girona, that noble and ungrateful city. The smoke of the iniquity that had devoured poor Josep still rose, Josep who was victim of a fit of envy by an anonymous informer. Dolça Xarom, the only child who awoke in time to have a last look at the proud walls of the cathedral silhouetted against the stars, cried silently, on muleback, over the death of so many things in one single night. A spark of confidence awaited the group at Estartit, in the form of a boat rented by poor Josep Xarom and Massot Bonsenyor a few days earlier, when they saw trouble brewing, when they sensed it without knowing exactly where it would come from, or how and when it would drop on them.

The boat took advantage of a warm western wind to get some distance from the nightmare. The next evening it stopped in Ciutadella, on Minorca, where six more people embarked, and three days later it arrived in Palermo, Sicily, where they rested for half a week from the seasickness brought on by the roughness of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Once they had recovered, taking advantage of favourable winds, they crossed the Ionian Sea and docked at the Albanian port of Durrës, where the six families embarked, fleeing from tears towards some place where no one would be offended by their whisperings on the Sabbath. Since they were warmly welcomed by the Jewish community in Durrës, they established themselves there.

Dolça Xarom, the fleeing girl, had children there, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and at eighty years old, still stubbornly recalled the silent streets of Girona’s Jewish Quarter and the hulking Christian cathedral, silhouetted against the stars and blurred by tears. Despite the nostalgia, the Xarom Meir family lived and prospered over twelve generations in Durrës and time was so insistent that a moment came when the memory of the ancestor burned by the ungodly goyim shattered and was almost erased in the memory of the children of the children of the children, just
like the distant name of their beloved Girona. One fine day in the Year of the Patriarchs 5420, the nefarious Year of the Christians 1660, Emanuel Meir was drawn by the commercial boom to the Black Sea. Emanuel Meir, eighth great-great-grandson of Dolça the fleeing girl, moved to bustling Varna, in Bulgaria on the Black Sea, in the period when the Sublime Porte ruled there. My parents, who were fervent Catholics in predominantly Lutheran Germany, wanted me to be a priest. And I spent quite some time considering it.

‘You would have made a good priest, Obersturbannführer Höss.’

‘I imagine so.’

‘I’m sure: everything you do, you do well.’

Obersturmbannführer Höss puffed up with the well-deserved praise. He wanted to dig deeper into it, with a more solemn air: ‘What you just made out to be a virtue, could also be my ruin. And especially now that Reichsführer Himmler is going to visit us.’

‘Why?’

‘Because as Oberlagerführer, I am responsible for all the failings of the system. For example, I only have two or three cans at the most left from the last shipment of Zyklon gas and the quartermaster hasn’t even thought to tell me to make an order. And so I’ll have to ask for favours, get some lorries to come that probably should be somewhere else, and stifle my craving to yell at the quartermaster because we are all working at our limit, here at O
ś
wieçem. Pardon at Auschwitz.’

‘I imagine that the experience of Dachau …’

‘From a psychological point of view, the difference is vast. At Dachau we had prisoners.’

‘From what I understand huge numbers of them died and still do.’

‘Yes, Doctor Voigt, but Dachau is a prison camp. Auschwitz-Birkenau is designed, created and calculated to exterminate rats. If it weren’t for the fact that Jews aren’t human, I would think we are living in hell, with one door that leads to a gas chamber and another place that’s cremation ovens and their flames, or the open pits in the forest, where we burn the
remaining units, because we can’t keep up with all the material they send us. This is the first time I talk about these things with someone not involved in the camp, Doctor.’

‘It’s good to vent every once in a while, Obersturmbannführer Höss.’

‘I’m counting on your professional secrecy, because the Reichsführer …’

‘Naturally. You, who are a Christian … In short, a psychiatrist is like a confessor, the confessor you could have been.’

For a few moments, since he was letting it all out, Oberlagerführer Höss considered mentioning something about that woman, but, despite strong temptation, he managed not to bring it up. He realised it was a close call. He would have to be more careful with the wine. He expanded on the fact that my men have to be strong to carry out the task they have been entrusted with. The other day a soldier, more than thirty years old, not some teenager, burst into tears in one of the barracks in front of his comrades.

Doctor Voigt glanced at this guest and hid his surprise; he let the other man gulp down another glass of wine and waited a few seconds before asking the question the other man was anxiously expecting: ‘And what happened?’

‘Bruno, Bruno, wake up!’

But Bruno didn’t wake up, he was howling and his agony bled from his mouth and eyes, and Rottenführer Mathäus had the superior officers called in, because he didn’t know what to do, and three minutes later the Oberlagerführer himself, Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, showed up just in the moment when the soldier Bruno Lübke had pulled out his pistol and stuck it into his mouth, still howling. An SS soldier! Every inch an SS!

‘Stand at attention, soldier!’ shouted Obersturmbannführer Höss. But since the soldier was howling and sticking the barrel down his throat, his superior made a motion to stop him and Bruno Lübke pulled the trigger with the hope that he would go straight to hell and thus escape Birkenau, the ash they had to breathe in and the gaze of that little girl, who was identical to his Ursula, whom he’d pushed into the gas
chamber that very afternoon and seen again when a Jewish rat from the Sonderkommando shaved off her hair and put her in the pile in front of the crematoria.

Höss disdainfully contemplated the soldier – that cowardly jackal – laid out on the ground in a puddle of pale blood. He took advantage of the occasion to improvise a speech in front of the shocked soldiers, and he told them that there is no greater inner consolation and spiritual joy than having the absolute certainty that your actions are carried out in the name of God and with the intention of preserving the holy Catholic and apostolic faith from its many enemies who will never rest until they annihilate it, Friar Miquel. And if some day you falter and discuss in public whether or not the amputation of the confessed prisoners’ tongues is appropriate, as much as I recognise your services to me, I can assure you that I will report you to the higher courts, for lassitude and weakness unworthy of an officer of the Holy Inquisition Tribunal.

‘I spoke thus out of mercy, Your Excellency.’

‘You confuse weakness with mercy.’ Friar Nicolau Eimeric began to shake with repressed rage. ‘If you continue to insist, you will be guilty of very serious insubordination.’

Friar Miquel lowered his head, trembling in fear. His soul shrank when he heard his superior add, you are starting to seem suspect of lassitude, not only for weakness, but for collusion with heretics.

‘For the love of God, Your Excellency!’

‘Don’t take God’s name in vain. And be warned that weakness makes you a traitor and enemy of the Truth.’

Friar Nicolau covered his face with his hands and prayed fervidly for a little while. From the depths of his reflection came a cavernous voice that said we are the only eye attentive to sin, we are the guardians of the orthodoxy, Friar Miquel, we have and we are the truth, and as harsh as the punishment we inflict on the heretic may seem, be it to his body or to his writings, as was the case with the abominable Llull whom I lament not having been able to send to the stake, remember that we are applying the law and justice, which is not exactly a fault, but rather of great merit. In addition, I remind
you that we are only responsible before God and not before men. While those who hunger and thirst to be just men are happy, Friar Miquel, those who apply justice are much more so, especially if you remember that our mission was explicitly designed by our beloved Führer, who knows that he can trust in the integrity, patriotism and firmness of spirit of his SS. Or is there any doubt about the Führer’s plans? He looked at each man, dominantly, defiantly, as he walked inaudibly among them. Or do any of you doubt the decision-making ability of our Reichsführer Himmler? What will you say to him when he arrives the day after tomorrow? Eh? And after a dramatic pause of a full five seconds: Take away this carrion!

He drank a couple more glasses of wine, or perhaps four or five, and he explained more things that he doesn’t entirely remember, carried away by the euphoria the evocation of that heroic scene instilled in him.

R
udolf Höss emerged from Doctor Voigt’s quarters quite reassured and slightly dizzy. What worried him was not the hell of Birkenau, but human weakness. No matter how many solemn vows those men and women had made, they weren’t able to withstand having death so close. They didn’t have souls of steel and that was why they made so many mistakes, and there was no worse way to do things than having to repeat them because of … Disgusting, really. Luckily he hadn’t even insinuated the existence of that woman. And I realised that, without wanting to, he watched Kornelia out of the corner of his eye to see if she smiled at the other visitors or … I don’t want to be a jealous chap, I thought. But it’s just that she … Now! Finally there are ten people and the tour can start. The guide entered the cloister and said Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in 1180 and secularised in 1806. I searched out Kornelia with my eyes, and found her beside a very handsome boy, who was smiling at her. And she looked at me, finally, and it was cold at Bebenhausen. What does secularised mean? asked a short, bald man.

That night Rudolf and Hedwig Höss didn’t sleep together in
their marriage bed. He had too much on his mind and the conversation with Doctor Voigt kept coming back to him. Had he spoken too much? Had the third or fourth or seventh glass of wine made him say things that should never have come out of his mouth? His obsession with perfect order crumbled in the face of the enormous blunders his subordinates had made in recent weeks, and he could absolutely not allow Reichsführer Himmler to think that he was failing him, because it all began when I entered the Order of Preachers, guided by my absolute faith in the Führer’s instructions. During our novitiate, led by the kindly hand of Friar Anselm Copons, we learned to harden our hearts to human misery, because all SS must know how to completely sacrifice their personality to the absolute service of the Führer. And the basic mission of the preacher friars is precisely that of eradicating internal dangers. For the true faith, the presence of a heretic is a thousand times more dangerous than that of an infidel. The heretic has fed on the teachings of the church and lives within it, but at the same time, with his pestilent, poisonous nature, corrupts the holy elements of the sacred institution. In order to solve the problem once and for all, in 1941 the decision was taken to make the Holy Inquisition look like so much child’s play and programme the extermination of all Jews without exception. And if horror was necessary, let it be infinite horror. And if cruelty was necessary, let it be absolute cruelty, because now it was history that was picking up the baton. Naturally only true heroes with iron hearts and steel wills could achieve such a difficult objective, could carry out such a valiant deed. And I, as a faithful and disciplined friar preacher, got down to work. Until 1944, only a handful of doctors and I knew the final orders of the Reichsführer: start with the sick and the children and, solely for economic motives, make use of those who could work. I got down to my task with the absolute intention of being faithful to my oath as an SS. That is why the church doesn’t consider the Jews infidels, but heretics that live among us insistent in their heresy, which began when they crucified Our Lord Jesus and continues in every place and every moment, in their obstinacy at renouncing their false beliefs,
in perpetuating human sacrifices with Christian babies and in inventing abominable acts against the holy sacraments, like the aforementioned case of the consecrated hosts, profaned by the perfidious Josep Xarom. That is why the orders given to each Schutzhaftlagerführer in all of the camps dependent on Auschwitz were so severe: the road was narrow, it depended on the capacity of the crematory ovens, the crop was too abundant, thousands and thousands of rats, and the solution was in our hands. Reality, which never comes close to pure ideal, is that Crematorium I and II have the capacity to incinerate two thousand units in twenty-four hours and, to avoid breakdowns, I cannot go above that figure.