Europe Central (74 page)

Heil Hitler! Yes, Dr. Pfannenstiel and I exchanged ideas just two weeks ago, in Lublin.

Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!

Brigade Chief Globocnik has been entrusted with organizing the actions against the Jews in Lublin District. And how’s the good work coming?

It’s a cesspool here, Günther. No matter how hard we work, there’s more shit and more shit!
Jewish
shit. Hopefully we’ll be able to clean it up faster—

That’s your task, Brigade Chief.

Of course. But they keep dumping more Jews on me. Just when I got Lublin nearly cleaned up, they sent me Jews from Austria. Last week I got a shipment from the Old Reich, and they’re all pretending to be war heroes!

What scoundrels!

They’ve all gone
to the bathhouse
now! Do you understand me, Gerstein?

No, Brigade Chief.

Well, you’ll learn. Now, you’re going to have two jobs at Belzec. First of all, you’ll develop a procedure for disinfecting clothing. We have mountains of it piling up, all used, and crawling with God knows what sort of vermin from Russians, Poles, Jews and all that riffraff . . .

By your order, Brigade Chief.

Secondly, we need a faster working gas than diesel exhaust. That’s where your prussic acid comes in.

Gerstein trotted after them, smiling woodenly as he waited to be enlightened. Dr. Pfannenstiel already knew. Dr. Pfannenstiel horrified him.

Gerstein, meet Kripo Chief Herr Christian Wirth. Wirth, this is
Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, who’s a very ingenious and reliable young man, I’ve heard . . .

Heil Hitler, Captain Wirth!

Heil Hitler! You’ll get used to the smell, Gerstein. Haven’t you ever passed by a rendering plant? Even paper-mills stink. Now, this here is the dressing hut. Do you see that window to turn in valuables? It’s surprising how many of them actually do it. We find that it reassures them. Moreover, it saves work for the Sonderkommando later, although our regulations do require us to inspect every body cavity.

That was when Captain Günther said: You’re not going to disappoint us, will you, Gerstein?

By your order, sir—

Next I’ll take you to the barber room, where we shave the heads of the women. We actually turn quite a profit on haircloth. Jewesses in particular seem to pamper their hair. I suppose it’s a racial characteristic. Then that lane over there with barbed wire on both sides, that leads to the baths, which is where you come in.

By your order, Captain Wirth—

A naked blonde Jewess, smiling at Gerstein without hope or shame, raised her hands one by one above her head and mopped her sweating armpits with a rag which had not yet been taken from her. The hair of her axilla resembled golden wire. Seeing how he looked at her, Captain Wirth shook his head.

Nature is inherently cruel, Gerstein, explained Captain Günther.

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Gerstein, start your stopwatch.

In a fury, Captain Wirth was whipping Heckenholt’s Ukrainian assistant.

After two hours and forty-nine minutes, Heckenholt got the diesel motor working. Thirty-two minutes after that, all the Jews were dead.

Gerstein said to nobody in particular: The Führer himself has stated that Madagascar would be an acceptable residence for the Jews.

As a matter of fact, replied Captain Wirth in a monitory tone, the wishes of the Führer on this matter are top secret. Just remember this: The Final Solution is the only way we can reduce the danger of epidemics.

I understand, Herr Captain.

Now what? he was wondering. The answer proved logical: iron hooks in the mouths, then Captain Wirth gloating over his jam-box filled with the gold teeth of dead Jews. (The Ukrainians had made off with a golden mace from the sixteenth century, some coins, an ivory figurine of some saint.)—Into the mass grave! Now for petrol and match!

Dr. Pfannenstiel approached the pit rather gingerly and said: These bodies have not been completely burned.

So what, man? They’re only Jews!

Dr. Pfannenstiel cleared his throat and reproachfully explained: That’s not the issue. The whole procedure is not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of hygiene.

Gerstein was sure that he must be wearing his horror as conspicuously as an Iron Cross, but down sank another of his illusions. Everybody smiled at the handsome young blond man. Captain Wirth slapped him on the shoulder and said: There are not ten people alive who have seen, or will see, as much as you.

7

There is a roster of good souls. Open the dark grey folder and read: The names and identification numbers of these righteous have been typed in the lefthand column, followed by other boxes which contain in turn the dates of service, the methods employed and the numbers of people saved. To tell the truth, I had imagined that this roster resembled one of those Greek codices with golden anchors and crowns in the margins; but the practice of virtue is such a dreary, low-paying business that it’s all that the angels can do to hire a military typist; not even alphabetical order can be respected here, which is why on one of the loose sheets we find, in this order, Dr. Hermann Maas of Heidelberg, who helped many Jews get safely to England and Switzerland (he got sent to a labor camp in 1944, but survived the war despite his advanced age); Pastor Erik Myrgren of Berlin, whom the Israelis have designated one of the Righteous Among Nations; and Dr. Elisabeth Abegg, also of Berlin, who sold her jewelry in order to finance the escapes of Jews.—The name of Kurt Gerstein is not here.

There is another register, much more voluminous than the first; it’s an old book on whose title page, above the single red Cyrillic word, hangs an immense bar of darkness with white gratings, then spiderwebs surrounded by a cross. This book is as tall as a gravestone; its covers are cast out of lead; it takes six strong men to carry it. At Nuremberg the prosecution caused it to be brought into the courtroom as evidence against each of the major war criminals; the appearance of the defendant’s name on any one of its pages sufficed to ensure conviction, unless he was a rocket scientist. Once West Germany became a crucial Anglo-American ally in the Cold War, this volume was deposited in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and subsequently misshelved. This is why most of its inmates lived out prosperous postwar lives. In its pages have been been written forever the names of Captain Günther, Dr. Pfannenstiel (whose indictment got dismissed), Captain Wirth, Brigade Chief Globocnik, and ever so many others—my random gaze uncovers
-Personalakte Hellmuth Becker, commander of the
Death’s Head Division, who liked to rape Russian women in the streets.—But Gerstein’s name is not here, either.

What then is Gerstein? Wherein should he be inscribed?—
.

His story is as rare, and hence as shocking, as full-figure reliefs of the saints on otherwise featureless walls.

Now that story started to run in earnest, like rope hissing out from greased coils as the gallows-trap drops. He was falling; he was free to make something of himself between beginning and end. On the train from Warsaw to Berlin he met a Swedish attaché and told him what he had seen at Belzec, whispering in his ear all that hot and ghastly night. Soon he’d lapsed into the present tense:
The people stand together on each other’s feet. Seven hundred, eight hundred people in an area of twenty-five square meters!
At his side, Baron von Otter stood rigidly there in the corridor of the sleeping car, turning his face away from the blond man’s breath. It was pitch-dark in the General Government. Soon, thank God, they’d have passed through Radom Station, and then the Reich frontier would come; not long after that he could get away. He lit another cigarette. When he couldn’t bear to listen anymore, he kept politely nodding, his lips moving in what Gerstein must have assumed was a prayer for the dead Jews but which was actually nothing more than a list of all the names he remembered from a recent visit to a Romanian cemetery: Ecaterina, Eufrosina, Maria, Gelu, Andrei, Gheorghe, Nicu, Leni, Ionifia, Elena, Eleffenie, Melinte. Languages were his hobby. He meant to learn Romanian someday. For a Latinist, it surely wouldn’t be difficult. Elena, Eleffenie, Melinte. Then the light came on, glaring on all the naked blue bodies, and one of them was still moving; she stretched out her hands toward the window, so they turned the light back out and Eleffenie, Melinte. He wished to know how accurately Gerstein had counted these alleged victims. The blond man choked out:
My stopwatch has registered everything faithfully. Fifty minutes seventy seconds—the engine still has not started! The people are waiting in their gas chamber. You can hear them crying, sobbing . . .
—In short, he’d fallen prey to the dangerous capability of the
Untermensch
to mask itself behind a human face (his sister-in-law’s, for instance), and thereby excite pity.

Baron von Otter sent a report to his government, but this report must have been stamped
, for it remained unpublished until three months after the war’s end.

8

As for Gerstein, he opened the New Testament and read:
Leave the dead to bury the dead.
Then horror came upon him like a sickness.

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