The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (37 page)

Schröder sang. He sang lustily, lifting up his voice, not very beautifully and not altogether accurately, but with real feeling. The emotional parts he sang with special fervor, and in some parts his voice was so emotional it sounded as if he were about to cry, but he did not cry. One song he seemed especially fond of was “Heidemarie,” it was clearly his favorite. For a whole hour he sang at the top of his voice, and after an hour the two men changed places, and now Plorin sang.

“Good thing the old man can’t hear us singing,” said Plorin with a laugh. Schröder laughed too, and Plorin resumed his singing. He sang almost the same songs as Schröder, but he seemed to like “Gray Columns on the March” best, this was the one he sang most often; he sang it slowly, he sang it fast, and the especially moving parts, the ones stressing the misery and nobility of a hero’s life, he sang very slowly and dramatically and sometimes several times in a row. Schröder, now at the wheel, stared fixedly at the road, driving the van at top speed, and softly whistled an accompaniment. They heard nothing more now from the inside of the green van.

It was getting chilly up front; they wrapped blankets around their legs, and from time to time, as they drove, they gulped coffee from their flasks. They had stopped singing, but inside the green van it was silent. Everything was silent, for that matter. Outside, everything was asleep; the highway was empty and wet—it must have been raining here—and the villages they drove through looked dead. They were caught briefly by the headlights in the darkness, a house or two, sometimes a church on the main road—for an instant they would leap up out of the darkness and then were left behind.

About four in the morning they stopped for a second breather. They were both tired by this time, their faces gray and drawn and grimy, and they hardly spoke; the hour’s drive still ahead of them seemed endless. They made only a brief halt by the roadside, wiped their faces
with schnapps, listlessly ate up their sandwiches, and swilled down the rest of the coffee. They finished the chocolate from their flat cans and lit cigarettes. Somewhat refreshed they drove on, and Schröder, now at the wheel again, whistled softly to himself, while Plorin, wrapped in a blanket, slept. Not a sound came from the inside of the green van.

A light rain started to fall, and dawn was breaking as they turned off the main road, wound their way through the narrow streets of a village out into the open country, and began driving slowly through a forest. Ground mist was rising, and when the van emerged from the forest there was a meadow, with army huts on it, then another little forest and a meadow, and the van stopped and impatiently sounded its horn in front of a big gate consisting of beams and barbed wire. The gate was flanked by a black-white-and-red sentrybox and a tall watchtower on which a man in a steel helmet was standing beside a machine gun. The gate was opened by the sentry, who grinned as he looked into the cab, and the green van drove slowly into the fenced enclosure.

The driver nudged his neighbor. “We’re here,” he said. They opened the cab doors and got out with their packs.

Birds were twittering in the forest; the sun came up in the east and shone on the green trees. Soft mist covered everything.

Schröder and Plorin walked wearily toward a hut behind the watch-tower. As they climbed the few steps to the door, they saw a whole column of trucks parked on the camp road ready to leave. It was quiet in the camp; nothing moved but the smoke that came pouring out of the crematorium chimney.

The SS lieutenant was sitting crouched over a table and had fallen asleep. As he woke up with a start, the two men gave him a tired grin, saying, “Here we are.”

He got up, stretched, and said with a yawn, “That’s good.” He sleepily lit a cigarette, ran his fingers through his hair, put on a cap, straightened his belt, and glanced into the mirror as he flicked the grains of sleep from the corners of his eyes. “How many are there?” he asked.

“Sixty-seven,” said Schröder, tossing a sheaf of papers onto the table.

“Is that the lot?”

“Yes—that’s the lot,” said Schröder. “What’s new?”

“We’re clearing out—tonight.”

“Is that definite?”

“Yes—it’s getting too hot around here.”

“Where to?”

“Toward ‘Greater Germany—Subdivision Austria’!” The SS lieutenant laughed. “Go and get some sleep,” he said. “It’s going to be another tough night; we’re off tonight at seven sharp.”

“And the camp?” asked Plorin.

The SS lieutenant took off his cap, carefully combed his hair, and with his right hand arranged his forelock. He was a handsome fellow, brown-haired and slim. He sighed.

“The camp,” he said, “there’s no more camp now—by tonight there’ll be no more camp. It’s empty.”

“Empty?” asked Plorin; he had sat down and was slowly rubbing his sleeve along his machine pistol, which had got damp.

“Empty,” repeated the SS lieutenant; he grinned faintly, shrugged his shoulders. “The camp’s empty, I tell you—isn’t that enough?”

“Have they been taken away?” asked Schröder, already at the door.

“Damn it all,” said the SS lieutenant, “leave me alone, can’t you? I said empty, not taken away—except for the choir.” He grinned. “We all know the old man’s crazy about his choir. Mark my words, he’ll be taking that along again …”

“Hm,” said each of the two men, and then again, “Hm …” And Schröder added, “The old man’s completely nuts about his singing.” All three laughed.

“Okay, then, we’ll be off now,” said Plorin. “I’ll leave the van where it is, I’m all in.”

“Never mind the van,” said the SS lieutenant. “Willi can drive it away.”

“Okay, then—we’re off.” The two drivers left.

The SS lieutenant nodded, walked to the window, and looked out at the green furniture van parked on the camp road, just where the waiting column began. The camp was quite silent. It was another hour before the green van was opened, when SS Captain Filskeit arrived at the camp. Filskeit had black hair, he was of medium height, and his pale and intelligent face radiated an aura of chastity. He was strict, a stickler for order, and would tolerate no deviation. His actions were governed solely by regulations. When the sentry saluted, he nodded, glanced at the green furniture van, and stepped into the guardroom. The SS lieutenant saluted.

“How many?” asked Filskeit.

“Sixty-seven, sir.”

“Good,” said Filskeit. “I’ll expect them in an hour for choir practice.” He nodded casually, left the guardroom, and walked across the camp ground. The camp was square, a quadrangle consisting of four times four huts with a small gap on the south side for the gate. At the corners were watchtowers. In the center were the cookhouse, the latrine hut; in one corner of the camp, next to the southeast watchtower, was the bath hut, and next to the bath hut, the crematorium. The camp was completely silent except for one of the sentries—the one on the northeast watchtower—who was singing something softly to himself; apart from that the silence was unbroken. Wispy blue smoke was rising from the cookhouse, and from the crematorium came dense black smoke, fortunately drifting south; the crematorium had been belching dense clouds of smoke for a long time. Filskeit gave a quick look around, nodded, and went to his office, which was next to the kitchen. He threw his cap on the table and nodded in satisfaction: everything was in order. He might have smiled at the thought, but Filskeit never smiled. To him life was very serious, his army career even more so, but the most serious thing of all was art.

SS Captain Filskeit loved art, music. Some people found his pale, intelligent face handsome, but the angular, oversize chin dragged down the finer part of his face and gave his intelligent features an expression of brutality that was as shocking as it was surprising.

Filskeit had once studied music, but he loved music too much to be able to summon that grain of realism that the professional must have, so he went to work for a bank and remained a passionate amateur of music. His hobby was choral singing.

He was a hardworking and ambitious individual, very reliable, and he soon advanced to the post of department head in the bank. But his real passion was music, choral singing. At first all-male choirs.

At one time, in the distant past, he had been choirmaster of the Concordia Choral Society, he had been twenty-eight, but that was fifteen years ago—and, although a layman, he had been elected choirmaster. It would have been impossible to find a professional musician who would have furthered the society’s aims more passionately or more meticulously. It was fascinating to watch his pale, faintly twitching face
and his slender hands as he conducted. The members were afraid of him because he was so meticulous, no wrong note escaped his hearing, he flew into a rage whenever someone was guilty of sloppiness, and there had come a time when these decent, worthy singers had enough of his strictness, his tireless energy, and chose another choirmaster. At the same time he had been conductor of the church choir in his parish, although the liturgy did not appeal to him. But in those days he had seized every opportunity of getting his hands on a choir. The parish priest was popularly known as “the saint,” a gentle, rather foolish man who could sometimes look very severe: white-haired and old, he knew nothing about music. But he invariably attended choir practice, and sometimes he would smile gently, and Filskeit hated that smile: it was the smile of love, a compassionate, poignant love. And sometimes the priest’s face would take on a look of severity, and Filskeit could feel his aversion to the liturgy mounting simultaneously with his hatred of that smile. That smile of “the saint” seemed to say: Futile—futile—but I love you. He did not want to be loved, and his hatred of those anthems and that priest’s smile steadily increased, and when the Concordia dismissed him, he left the church choir. He would often think of that smile, that elusive severity, and that “Jewish” look of love, as he called it, which seemed to him both down-to-earth and loving, and his breast was devoured by hate and torment …

His successor was a schoolteacher who enjoyed his beer and a good cigar and liked listening to dirty stories. Filskeit had loathed all these things: he neither smoked nor drank, and he was not interested in women.

Not long after, attracted by the idea of racism, corresponding as it did to his secret ideals, he joined the Hitler Youth, where he rapidly advanced to the position of regional choirmaster, organized choirs, including “speaking choirs,” and discovered his real love: mixed choral singing. At home—he had an austerely furnished barrack-like room in a Düsseldorf suburb—he devoted his time to choral literature and to every work on racism that he could get hold of. The result of this long and intensive study was an article of his own, which he entitled “The Interrelationship of Choir and Race.” He submitted it to a state music academy which returned it to him with the addition of some sarcastic marginal notes. It was not until later that Filskeit found out that the head of this academy was a Jew called Neumann.

In 1933 he gave up banking for good in order to devote himself entirely to his musical assignments within the Party. His article was approved by a music school and, after some condensing, printed in a professional journal. He held the rank of unit leader in the Hitler Youth but his duties also embraced the SA and the SS, his specialty being speaking choirs, male choirs, and mixed choral singing. His qualities of leadership were undisputed. When war broke out he resisted being classified as indispensable, applied several times for admission to the SS Death’s Head units, and was rejected twice because he had black hair, was too short, and patently belonged to the stocky, “pyknic” type. No one knew that he often stood for hours in despair in front of the mirror at home and saw what it was impossible not to see: he was not a member of that race which he so ardently admired and to which Lohengrin had belonged.

But the third time he applied, the Death’s Head units accepted him because of the excellent references he submitted from all the Party organizations.

During the early war years he suffered greatly as a result of his musical reputation: instead of being sent to the front, he was assigned to training courses, later becoming a course director and then a director of a course for course directors; he directed the choral training of whole SS armies, and one of his supreme achievements was a choir of legionaries which, while representing thirteen different countries and eighteen different languages, sang a chorus from
Tannhäuser
in perfect vocal harmony. Later he was awarded the Cross of Merit First Class, one of the rarest military decorations; but not until he volunteered for the twentieth time for military service was he assigned to a military training course and finally got to the front: in 1943 he was given a small concentration camp in Germany, and at last, in 1944, was made commandant of a ghetto in Hungary. Later, when that ghetto had to be evacuated because the Russians were getting close, he was given this little camp in the north.

It was a matter of pride with him to carry out all orders to the letter. He had quickly discovered the enormous latent fund of musical talent among the prisoners—he was surprised to find this among Jews—and he applied the selective principle by ordering each new arrival to undergo a singing test and by recording each one’s vocal
capacity on an index card, with marks ranging from zero to ten. Very few were given ten—those were assigned immediately to the camp choir—and those who got zero had little prospect of remaining alive for more than two days. When required to supply batches of prisoners for removal, he chose them in such a way as to retain a nucleus of good male and female voices so that his choir always remained complete. This choir, which he conducted with a strictness harking back to the days of the Concordia Choral Society, was his pride and joy. With this choir he could have beaten any competition, but unfortunately the only audience it ever had were the dying prisoners and the guard personnel.

But orders were even more sacred to him than music, and he had recently received a number of orders that had weakened his choir: the ghettos and camps in Hungary were being evacuated, and because the large camps to which he had formerly sent Jews no longer existed, and his small camp had no railroad connection, he had to kill them all in his camp. But even now there were still sufficient work parties—for cookhouse and crematorium and bath hut—to preserve at least the very best of the voices.