Death’s Head Page 10

  After several months Schwarzenbach realized that there was little point in retaining the records he had kept so diligently and eventually he made notes only in the most casual fashion. Besides, he doubted that the research had any genuine objective value. For one thing, the subjects of his experiments were never in the best of health. Consequently their resistance to pain was lowered and their reactions exaggerated: how therefore was it possible to establish any general facts of universal value? Secondly, the conditions were primitive. He was expected to work in unhygienic surroundings with instruments that were out of date. He devised somewhat naïve means of quantitively measuring pain in terms of heart and pulse reaction but even these left a great deal to be desired. Slowly he realized that he was inflicting pain simply for the sake of inflicting it: the screams that he listened to and the expressions of terror he saw were without scientific value, but he continued to function – partly in the hope that something useful would come out of it all, partly in the belief that he was contributing to the destruction of the enemies of the Reich. But killing wasn’t his job primarily: the fact that most people died on his crude operating table was irrelevant. He was a scientist. He wasn’t one of those brutes – like the guards – who seemed to derive an animal satisfaction from killing cold-bloodedly.

  Step by step he slipped into a deep depression. The work was unsatisfactory. Poland was a dreadful place. The camp itself was bleak. He rarely left the confines of his hut which, in cold weather, was impossible to keep warm. His demands for better equipment were ignored and a personal letter he wrote to Gruppenführer Brandt went unanswered. Everything had been sacrificed to the war effort and science had been relegated. The SS guards were unlike any he had ever come across in Germany: most of them, he suspected, were criminals or lunatics, chosen only for their murderous inclinations. Sometimes in the evenings one of the brothel girls would visit him, but these encounters were hardly ever successful. Bored, he found that the only outlet was in devising new ways of inflicting pain and this occupied most of his leisure time. He ordered books from Germany that never arrived, and newspapers were always out of date. His wireless set needed a valve that he had requisitioned but it was never delivered. The only thing to look forward to was the daily work session: the fact that he had become an official torturer barely crossed his mind. The people who were brought to him knew what to expect when the door of the wooden hut had closed behind them, and since their screams could be heard all around, he imagined that his surgery had become the most feared place in the camp.

  The days dragged one into the other. Few people visited him – apart from the girls, who looked on him with awe, and one or other of the commandant’s minions, who would ask if he had any requests, knowing that they would never be met. But he continued to work: it was expected of him.

  In 1942 he was given six weeks’ leave and he returned to Germany where he felt curiously out of place, like someone plunged out of darkness into a room of blinding electric light. There was a mood of optimism that somehow he found difficult to share; while people could talk about their work in munitions factories, and women might worry about their husbands on distant battlefields, and radio broadcasts were filled with propagandist speeches and martial music, he knew that there was a darker side to the mood. It existed in rural Poland, in backwater places carved out of a sullen landscape, it thrived on death and disease, and it had inspired a murderous new vocabulary. There were no brass bands and no stirring speeches: there was silence.

  Early in 1943 he returned to Poland, travelling in hideous conditions on a train that was shunted into sidings with tedious regularity, and he sat – frozen in the icy air of his compartment – staring at the bleak countryside that went past in a sequence of half-caught images: German soldiers heaving against trucks that had frozen solid in the snow, a pack of alsatian dogs howling at the barricaded door of a tin hut, field guns covered with white tarpaulins, sad dark people moving along the side of the tracks as if in the hope that they might eventually lead somewhere.

  He found himself wishing that the war was over and that he could go home. What did Poland mean to him? Where was the point in his work? Those stupid frightened faces in the camp and the camp itself, which reminded him of a vast archaic slaughterhouse where people came to receive death like children taking gifts at a Christmas party, meekly, coyly – what did all that mean to him?

  A request to Bothmann, asking that his application for a transfer be directed to the proper authority, was received without sympathy. Bothmann was concerned only with the fact that his attempt to dynamite some mass graves into oblivion had resulted in the surrounding countryside being showered with sizeable pieces of human bone. And so Schwarzenbach laboured on. He had his radio repaired and listened to announcements of German victories interspersed with speeches and military music, which helped for a time. But boredom was always beneath the surface of his life; even the girls who visited him – Polish Jewesses who couldn’t speak a word of German, and who seemed continually to be changing – were invariably uninteresting. His days became a mixture of the bloody and the tedious: he had become a surgeon of death. And in miserable stinking Poland it was difficult to remember the reason for one’s life, or to recall the feelings and beliefs that had brought him there in the first place. He discovered one other disturbing thing: he had become anxious to kill the people who were brought to him, to kill them as quickly as possible, as if the whole point of the exercise were finally and irrevocably lost.

  It was in the spring of 1943, at a time when he was experiencing an especially severe depression, that Leon-hard Grunwald was brought into the hut.

  PART THREE

  Berlin, October 1945

  10

  The weather had become intolerably cold. For some days he had been sleeping in the cellar of a house near Charlottenburg Station. At nights his dreams had been haunted by extraordinary images, most of them for some reason connected with the dead girl in the Augsburgerstrasse, and he would wake shivering in the cold, drawing his coat around him – yet sweating, always sweating in the same fevered way. He had not eaten properly for several days. Scraps that he picked up here and there, slops left behind by the military – but strangely he was never very hungry. The idea of standing in one of the food queues was appalling to him. Whenever he thought about the past all he seemed capable of remembering was the journey back from Poland. But why should that be singled out? Of all the things he could have remembered, why that? And he realized, in some strange way, that the sight of Schwarzenbach had released the memories most closely associated with the man: strange birds, dark birds, seemed to shift across his mind like creatures thrown into panic by the sound of a gun.

  Sometimes he felt that he was dying and the thought brought a certain comfort. He was afraid to close his eyes at night and he would lie awake listening to the rats that moved through the broken stones. He was a coward: he wanted to close his eyes but there was the penetrating fear that he might never open them again. Death remained an impossible comfort to attain. And so there was nothing for him to do but drag himself through the days that fell across one another in artificial divisions of light and dark. He could die and it would barely matter. It was an indictment of the age – death didn’t matter.

  But if he was afraid of death there was still the other fear – the possibility of seeing Schwarzenbach again. Lying awake in the cellar near Charlottenburg Station, he imagined what he might feel if Schwarzenbach came through the open doorway and turned a torch on his face; and his limbs seemed to freeze, he seemed suddenly to cease to exist, his heartbeat stopped, his mind emptied of images like scraps of rubbish rushing down a sewer, and he wanted to scream – but speech had died in his throat. Sometimes he tried to convince himself that the man he had seen wasn’t Schwarzenbach at all. And sometimes this almost worked. But never entirely.

  In 1943, the men who administered the Reich policy towards the Jews shipped several thousand inmates from the Mauthausen camp into Poland. Grunwald wa
s amongst them. They travelled in cattle trucks through the night. Nobody spoke because there was nothing to say. They listened to the racketing of the train and they knew intuitively, as animals on the way to an abattoir are said to know, that they were going to their destruction. Grunwald had worked for more than two years on the quarries in the Mauthausen camp. It seemed to him that survival depended very largely on remaining discreet, anonymous and silent, and so he had spoken to nobody. Human relationships were impossible and inconceivable. People died in the quarries, either pointlessly shot by one of the guards or as the result of deprivation. People were tortured for no apparent reason and Grunwald quickly realized that in the order of things the concept of rational behaviour had been demolished. He became like a snail, able to draw silence around him in the barracks at night, and he discovered in himself hidden depths of strength. It was strength without purpose other than that of surviving. He laboured on the quarries, digging, endlessly digging, a task that seemed just as futile as everything else.

  Then Poland. On the train it occurred to him that his time was running out. He had been found out, his disguise had been penetrated. They were taken from the train to Lodz ghetto and left there for some days. The ghetto was a miserable, defeated place filled with people who seemed surprised that they were still alive. German Jews, Poles, Polish Jews – they were herded into the ghetto which was the last point of rest before the inevitability of death. For almost a week Grunwald lived there. In some ways it was worse than Mauthausen, in other ways better. For example, there was an illusion of freedom in the sense that there were houses instead of barracks. If you didn’t look at the barbed wire, and forgot the fact of your hunger, it was possible to create an illusion. Grunwald the tourist, visiting Poland for the first time. But the illusion didn’t last. Every day people were taken from the ghetto in trucks and he knew that sooner or later he would be forced to enter one of those trucks himself. It was this realization that shocked him. Where did the trucks go? What happened when they arrived?

  He thought of the possibility of dying and sometimes he wondered if Martha was still alive – or had she already passed through a place like Lodz on the way to her own destruction? After a week he was taken from the ghetto and pushed into a truck. He was beaten on the head and shoulders with the butt of a rifle and only half-conscious for most of the journey. Chelmno: it seemed a strange name for the final location of his life and the finality of this, the sudden realization that he was being taken somewhere to be killed, shocked him. But how could he stay alive now? What act was there left to perform as they were driven, more than a thousand of them, through the lines of SS guards into the camp?

  He was numb, awkward, barely able to lift his legs. He was stricken by fear and the knowledge that nothing in the world could save him from dying. Around him men and women, as well as a few children, were stumbling through the rain, and sometimes one or other of the SS men would smile, or make a joke, as if it were funny, too hilarious to contemplate, these sodden, miserable creatures fumbling through the rain, a strange joke, and sometimes they lashed out with their rifles against bodies as if this too were a part of the joke. From the corner of his eye Grunwald saw that someone was taking photographs with a small box camera and he tried to imagine exactly what sort of album would contain these snapshots, what sort of eyes would turn the pages and remember – years later – the souvenirs of the war in Poland. And then it was all funny suddenly, it all seemed part of a huge cosmic pantomime, and they were entertainers groping through the rain in front of a small but highly appreciative audience. Dogs yelped. Rain soaked through everything, sleeting, blinding rain. Grunwald lost his balance and fell forward in the mud. Someone kicked him in the side of his body and he rose to his feet. He laughed. He could see the funny side of it now. As he laughed he was taken out of the line and pushed against the barbed wire fence. The Sturmmann’s overcoat was stiff, clinging like cement to his body, and his face was covered with rain. In his gloved hands he held a whip that he continually turned around between his fingers.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  Grunwald was aching from the wounds of the barbed wire.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ The Sturmmann raised the whip. At the very tip of his long nose there hung a globule of rain.

  Grunwald covered his mouth with his hand. The insanity of the proceedings was overwhelming. And on such a dull, Polish day. The sky was heavy and piled with black cloud and the rain was never going to stop. It was the setting for madness; it was a mad, crazy landscape.

  ‘You must find something bloody funny.’ The Sturmmann held the whip up and his hand was shaking.

  The Unterscharführer came up out of the crowd. ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s going on here?’

  Grunwald then felt strangely solemn; the mood, the mood of madness, seemed to have left him. He was alone with the landscape again, watching the crowd stumble past, like people on their way to a spectacle that is never going to take place.

  ‘This man was laughing,’ the Sturmmann said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, let him laugh,’ the Unterscharführer said. ‘If he thinks there’s something funny, that’s his business.’

  Grunwald said nothing. He was alone, isolated within the structure of his own fear.

  The Unterscharführer said, ‘Get him back into the line.’

  The Sturmmann pushed Grunwald forward. As he did so, the Unterscharführer called out, ‘No! Wait! If he thinks there’s something to laugh about, I know just the place for him.’

  Grunwald was dragged back out of the line again. He was marched between the Sturmmann and the Unterscharführer to another part of the camp. He was pushed into a small, tiled room and told to wait, as if there were any likelihood of being able to leave: and he waited until the Sturmmann came back alone to take him elsewhere.

  Sometimes Grunwald felt an intense but impossible desire to visit the house where the girl had been murdered; and he felt this desire in spite of the fact that he knew Schwarzenbach lived somewhere in that vicinity. The idea frightened him and fascinated him at the same time. When he thought of his own life, and then of Schwarzenbach, he realized that it almost seemed as if they were nailed together by coincidence. Coincidence was meaningless, he knew. Life was a series of accidents. If you were to draw a graph of a man’s life, the high points would be those where accidents had taken place – chance encounters, unexpected meetings, impulsive decisions with consequences that altered everything. If he had not remained with the corpse of the girl, he might never have seen Schwarzenbach again. The memory of the man might have faded in time like a disease that can only be cured with patience and forgetfulness. If he had not met the American in the first place, his life would never have collided with that of the girl. It seemed senseless to make any attempt to impose a manageable pattern on these events, to create out of them some kind of design. The world was chaotic.

  Sometimes he still thought of going to the Americans and telling them about Schwarzenbach. But what could he say? The kind of statements he might make, and the truths he could reveal, would only destroy him in the end. And the thought of faceless authority ploughing over his own past, churning up old stones, inducing yesterday’s wounds, was painful. He was a Jew in the wreckage of Berlin: he had survived the death camps. These were the only two facts he felt he wanted to reveal. Everything else was irrelevant. The decisions he felt he should make about the future, his own future, were either postponed or abandoned indefinitely.

  And so he wandered the city, sifting the past like a scavenger. But in his wanderings he found that unconsciously he walked on the shaded sides of streets and preferred to move only when it was dark. He was like a night animal, compelled by an instinctive fear. He resented fear, which he thought he should have left behind him in the past. But he did not know how to exorcize it.

  11

  On the second Thursday of October Schwarzenbach went to Broszat’s apartment. Sometimes different faces appeared – old acquaintances,
former colleagues, old friends of Katzmann or of Broszat himself. Invariably these were men passing through Berlin on the way south, where escape routes were said to be easier. It had taken some of them months to reach Germany from places like Poland and Hungary. They brought vague rumours with them: that the Russians were slaughtering any former SS men they found in the Soviet-occupied territories, murdering without trial and with few questions asked; that high-ranking men like Sturmbannführer Anton Brunner and Obersturmbannführer Gustav Friedl were prisoners of the Russians and awaiting execution. They spoke with despair, men who had seen their lives change inexorably and who had become – in the vast desert that was Europe – victims themselves.

  On that second Thursday in October there were two newcomers: Rudolf Winkel, who had returned from Rumania, ill and desperately tired: and Reinhardt Ecksdorff, who had commanded an Einsatzgruppe in Poland towards the end of 1944. Ecksdorff spoke of the terrible vengeance the Russians were exacting upon anyone who had assisted the German war effort in any way. He had seen Poles gunned in the streets because they had collaborated; he had witnessed unarmed German soldiers brutally massacred; he had seen the execution of a group of SS men; and he had survived himself only after several months of hiding and running.

  Schwarzenbach listened to all this with a profound sense of pity. These were men who had arrived at the very limits of their despair and who fed now – like blind, hungry animals – on a diet of rumours, half-truths and an inherent belief in their chances of escaping arrest. But he was tired listening to them. Their voices were monotonous, their words filled with false optimism. Winkel was ill and miserable, barely able to speak. He had contracted venereal disease from a whole sequence of Rumanian peasant women. And Ecksdorff, who had arrived in Berlin only that day, was planning already to go to Geneva where he had heard of a group of SS men who had organized a highly specialized travel-agency. Both men wore shabby overcoats; if anything remained of their pride and dignity, it was manifest only in something they occasionally said, or the way they infrequently referred to the past – the better past before the war.