The Zone of Interest Read online

  It was a joint anniversary, commemorating i) our decisive electoral breakthrough on September 14, 1930, and ii) the historic passage of the Nuremberg Race Laws on September 15, 1935. So: a double cause for celebration!

  After a few cocktails in the Crush Bar, Hannah and myself (the cynosure of all eyes) made our way to our seats in the front row. The house lights dimmed, and the curtain creaked ceilingward – to reveal a thickset milkmaid sorrowing over a bare pantry.

  And the Woods Sing For Ever was about a family in a farmstead during the harsh winter that followed the Diktat of Versailles. The frost’s destroyed the tubers, Otto was 1 of its lines, and Get your toffee nose out of that book, can’t you? was another. Otherwise, And the Woods Sing For Ever completely passed me by. Not that my mind went blank – on the contrary. It was most peculiar. I spent the whole 2½ hours intently estimating how long it would take (given the high ceiling as against the humid conditions) to gas the audience, and wondering which of their clothes would be salvageable, and calculating how much their hair and gold fillings might fetch . . .

  Afterwards, at the party proper, a couple of Phanodorm washed down with a few cognacs soon restored my equilibrium. I left Hannah with Norberte Uhl, Angelus Thomsen, and Olbricht and Suzi Erkel whilst I had some words with Alisz Seisser. The poor little thing is off to Hamburg at the end of the week. Alisz’s first item of business: see about her pension. For some reason she was white with dread.

  ‘We’ll go from west to east. There’ll be 800 of you.’

  Szmul shrugged, and produced, if you can believe, a handful of black olives from his trouser pocket.

  ‘Maybe 900. Tell me, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Are you a married man?’

  He said with his head down, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Shulamith, sir.’

  ‘And where is this “Shulamith”, Sonderkommandofuhrer?’

  It’s not quite true to say that the crows of the charnel house are impervious to all human emotion. Fairly frequently, in the course of their work, they encounter someone they know. The Sonder sees these neighbours, friends, relatives, as they come in, or as they go out, or both. Szmul’s 2nd-in-command once found himself in the shower room calming the fears of his identical twin. Not long ago there was a certain Tadeusz, another good worker, who looked to the end of his belt in the Leichenkeller (they use their belts, do you see, to haul the Stucke), and there was his wife; he fainted; but they gave him some schnapps and a length of salami, and 10 minutes later he was back on the job, snipping merrily away.

  ‘Come on, where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Still in Litzmannstadt?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Pardon, sir, but did they see about the excavator?’

  ‘Forget about the excavator. It’s a wreck.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And they’re to be carefully counted. Understand? Count the skulls.’

  ‘Skulls are no good, sir.’ He leaned sideways and expelled the last olive stone. ‘There’s a more reliable method, sir.’

  ‘Oh really? Here, how long’ll all this take?’

  ‘Depends on the rainfall, sir. I’m guessing, but I’d say 2 or 3 months.’

  ‘2 or 3 months?’

  He turned to me, and I saw what was unusual about his face. Not the eyes (his were the usual Sonder eyes), but the mouth. I knew then, up on the rise, that Szmul, immediately after the successful completion of the present measure, would have to be dealt with, by the employment of the apt procedure.

  Have garnered some further information on the sugary Herr Thomsen (despite his record, I think, deep down, he is ‘1 of those’). His mother, Bormann’s much older half-sister, made an advantageous match, ne? She married a merchant banker – who also collected modern art of the most degenerate stripe. Does the mould seem familiar – money, modern art? I wonder if that ‘Thomsen’ wasn’t once something like ‘Tawmzen’. Anyway, both parents, in 1929, died in an elevator plunge in New York (moral: set foot in that Hebrew Sodom and you get what you so ‘richly’ deserve!). So then this only child, this princeling gets himself unofficially adopted by his Uncle Martin – the man who controls the appointment book of the Deliverer.

  Now I’ve had to slave and sweat blood, I’ve had to kill myself to get where I am. But some people – some people are born with a silver . . . Now that’s funny. I was about to employ the usual phrase – but then an improvement popped into my head. And it’s perfect for him. Yes. Angelus Thomsen was born with a silver Schwanz in his mouth!

  Nicht wahr?

  I was bent over my desk at home, deep in weary meditation, when I heard footsteps; they neared and paused. They were not Hannah’s footsteps.

  And I was thinking: I am someone caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the one hand, the Economic Administration Head Office is always after me to do everything I can to swell the labour strength (for the munitions industries); on the other, the Reich Central Security Department presses for the disposal of as many evacuees as possible, for obvious reasons of self-defence (the Jews constituting a 5th column of intolerable proportions). I swiped my fingertips across my brow in a kind of reflexive salute. And now, I see (the teletype lay before me), that that moron Gerhard Student at EAHO is floating the bright idea that all able-bodied mothers should be worked till they drop in the boot factory at Chełmek! Fine, I’ll tell him. And you can come to the ramp and try separating them from their children. These people – they just don’t think. I said loudly,

  ‘Whoever’s out there may as well come in.’

  At last came the knock. Looking very penitent and stricken, Humilia crept into the room.

  ‘Are you just going to stand there and tremble,’ I muttered (I was thoroughly out of sorts), ‘or do you have something to convey?’

  ‘My conscience is upset, sir.’

  ‘Oh really? We can’t have that. That would never do. Well?’

  ‘I was obedient to Miss Hannah when I shouldn’t have been.’

  I said quite calmly, ‘When I shouldn’t have been, sir.’

  *

  It’s the fire, do you see, it’s the fire.

  How to make them burn, naked bodies, how to make them catch?

  We started with very modest accumulations, using wooden planks, and we were hardly getting anywhere, but then Szmul . . . You know, I can see why the Sonderkommandofuhrer leads a charmed life. He it was who made a series of suggestions which, as it happened, proved key. I lay them down, for future reference.

  1) There must be but a single pyre.

  2) The pyre must burn continuously, on a 24-hour basis.

  3) Liquefied human fat must be used to aid combustion. Szmul organised the run-off gutters and the ladling squads, which moreover resulted in considerable economies in gasoline. (Reminder: impress this saving on Blobel and Benzler.)

  There is at this stage only one technical difficulty that periodically confronts us. The fire’s so hot you can’t get near it, nicht?

  Now I ask you, this is really priceless, this is, this really ‘takes the cake’. All of a sudden the phone’s jumping off the hook: Lothar Fey of the Air Defence Authority, angrily complaining, if you please, about our nocturnal conflagrations! Is it any wonder I’m going out of my mind?

  Whilst Humilia saw fit to tell me that my wife has written and dispatched a personal communication to a proven debauchee, she was unable – or unwilling – to enlighten me as to its contents. This has ruined my concentration. Of course, the entire thing could be perfectly innocent. Innocent? How could it be innocent? I have no illusions about the hysterical carnality of which Hannah has shown herself to be capable, and besides it is common knowledge that once a woman loosens the sacred bonds of modesty she quickly descends to the most fantastic depravities, squatting, squelching, squeezing, squirming—

  Hannah briskly knocked and entered and said, ‘You wanted to see me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Biding my time, for now, I said
, ‘Look, there’s no point in you going to Abbey Timbers. The Projekt’s going to take months so you’ll just have to get used to it.’

  ‘I didn’t want to go anyway.’

  ‘Oh? What’s this? Have you got a Projekt of your own by any chance?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, and turned on her heel.

  . . . I raised my hands and rubbed my eyes. This spontaneous action, the like of which any tired schoolboy might reflexively perform over his homework, was quite painless – for the first time in I don’t know how long. In the downstairs toilet I consulted the mirror. Ja, those martyred orbs of mine are still very slightly bloodshot, and slack and pouchy what with all the smoke and the late nights (it’s not as if the trains don’t keep coming). But my black eyes are no more.

  There are the flames and the fumes; even the clearer air ripples and wriggles. No?

  Like a sheet of gauze pulsating in the wind.

  Now the Sonders, under Szmul’s direction, have rigged up a kind of ziggurat of warped railway tracks. It is the size of the cathedral in Oldenberg.

  The scene is I suppose on the very crest of the modern, but when I watch from the mound I keep thinking of the slave-built pyramids of Egypt. Using the wide ladders and the hoists they load the great lattice, then they withdraw to their wheeled towers and feed the fire, do you understand, by tossing in the pieces, sometimes by the bucketful. These towers rock like dark-age siege engines.

  At night the tracks glow red. I keep glimpsing a gigantic black toad with illuminated veins even when I close my eyes.

  *

  Communication from the Geheime Staatspolizei in Hamburg: the widow Seisser is on her way back, but she returns to us with her status revised. Alisz is now an evacuee.

  The Sonderkommandofuhrer was right about the best way of counting. Not skulls. Almost all the pieces were dispatched by the standard Genickschuss but often clumsily or hastily, thus splintering the crania. So skulls are hopeless. The most scientific procedure, we have established, is to count the femurs and divide by 2. Nicht?

  In response to the domestic emergency I have activated the criminal Kapo I maintain in the coal mine at Furstengrube.

  3. SZMUL: WITNESS

  It would infinitesimally console me, I think, if I could persuade myself that there is companionship – that there is human communion, or at least respectful fellow-feeling, in the bunkroom above the disused crematory.

  A very great many words are spoken, certainly, and our exchanges are always earnest, articulate, and moral.

  ‘Either you go mad in the first ten minutes,’ it is often said, ‘or you get used to it.’ You could argue that those who get used to it do in fact go mad. And there is another possible outcome: you don’t go mad and you don’t get used to it.

  When work ends we gather, we who have not got used to it and have not gone mad, and we talk and we talk. In the Kommando, hugely expanded for the current collaboration, about five per cent belong to this category – say forty men. And in the bunkroom we gather a little way apart, usually around dawn, with our food, our liquor, and our cigarettes, and we talk. And I like to think that there is companionship.

  I feel we are dealing with propositions and alternatives that have never been discussed before, have never needed to be discussed before – I feel that if you knew every day, every hour, every minute of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.

  Martyrer, mucednik, martelaar, meczonnik, martyr: in every language I know, the word comes from the Greek, martur, meaning witness. We, the Sonders, or some of us, will bear witness. And this question, unlike every other question, appears to be free of deep ambiguity. Or so we thought.

  *

  The Czech Jew from Brno, Josef, who is gone now, wrote his testimony and buried it in a child’s galosh under the hedgerow that borders Doll’s garden. After a lot of disputation, and a show of hands, we resolve to exhume this document (temporarily) and acquaint ourselves with its contents. I myself am instinctively and perhaps superstitiously opposed. And as things turn out it is one of the episodes in the Lager that I would least soon relive.

  Written in Yiddish, in black ink, the manuscript consisted of eight pages.

  ‘And there’, I began, ‘a girl of five stood and . . . Wait. I think it’s a bit mixed up.’

  ‘Read!’ said one of the men. Others seconded him. ‘Just read.’

  ‘And there a girl of five stood and undressed her brother who was one year old. One from the Kommando came to take off the boy’s clothes. The girl shouted loudly, “Be gone, you Jewish murderer! Don’t lay your hand, dripping with Jewish blood, upon my lovely brother! I am his good mummy, he will die in my arms, together with me.” A boy of seven or eight . . .’ I hesitated, and swallowed. ‘Shall I go on?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. Yes. Go on.’

  ‘Go on. No. Yes.’

  ‘A boy of seven or eight’, I read, ‘stood beside her and spoke thus, “Why, you are a Jew and you lead such dear children to the gas – only in order to live? Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?” . . . A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the—’

  ‘Stop.’

  Many of the men had tears in their eyes – but they weren’t tears of grief or guilt.

  ‘Stop. She “made a very short but fiery speech”. Like hell she did. Stop.’

  ‘Stop. He lies.’

  ‘Silence would be better than this. Stop.’

  ‘Stop. And don’t put it back in the earth. Destroy it – unread. Stop.’

  I stopped. And the men turned away, they moved away, and slackly sought their bedding.

  Josef, the chemist from Brno, was known to me here at the Lager, and I considered him a serious man . . . I am a serious man, and I am writing my testimony. Am I writing like this? Will I be able to control my pen, or will it just come out – like this? Josef’s intentions, I’m sure, were of the best, even the highest; but what he writes is untrue. And unclean. A girl of five, a boy of eight: was there ever a child so fiendishly experienced that it could grasp the situation of the Sonder?

  For a few moments I read on in silence, or I dragged my sight down the rest of the page . . .

  A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the gas chamber . . . She condemned the Nazi crimes and oppression and ended with the words, ‘We shall not die now, the history of our nation will immortalise us, our initiative and spirit are alive and flourishing . . .’ Then the Poles knelt on the ground and solemnly said a certain prayer, in a posture that made an immense impression, then they arose and all together in chorus sang the Polish anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikvah’. The cruel common fate in this accursed spot merged the lyric tones of these diverse anthems into one whole. They expressed in this way their last feelings with a deeply moving warmth and their hopes for, and belief in, the future of their . . .

  Will I lie? Will I need to deceive? I understand that I am disgusting. But will I write disgustingly?

  Anyway, I nonetheless make sure that Josef’s pages are duly reinterred.

  It sometimes happens that when I pass the Kommandant’s house I see his daughters – on their way to school or on their way back. Now and then the little housekeeper accompanies them, but usually the mother does – a tall, strong-looking woman, still young.

  Seeing Doll’s wife naturally makes me think of mine.

  The Polish Jews are not coming to the Lager en masse, or not yet, but some of them find their way here by a twisted road, as I did, and of course I seek them out and question them. The Jews of Lublin went to a death camp called Belzec; a great number of Jews from Warsaw went to a death camp called Treblinka.

  In Łódź the ghetto is still standing. Three months ago I even got news of Shulamith: she is still in the attic above the bakery. I love my wife with all my heart, and I wish her every happiness, but as things now stand I’m glad I’ll never see her again.
/>   How would I tell her about the selections and the disrobing room? How would I tell her about Chełmno and the time of the silent boys?

  Shula’s brother, Maček, is safe in Hungary, and he has vowed that he will come for Shula and take her to Budapest. May it be so. I love my wife, but I’m glad I’ll never see her again.

  At dawn we discuss the extraterritorial nature of the Lager, and everything is back to normal in the bunkroom, we talk, we use each other’s names, we gesticulate, we raise and lower our voices; and I like to think that there is companionship. But something is missing and is always missing; something intrinsic to human interchange has absented itself.

  The eyes. When you start out in the detail, you think, ‘It’s me, it’s just me. I keep my head dropped or averted because I don’t want anyone to see my eyes.’ Then after a time you realise that all the Sonders do it: they try to hide their eyes. And who would have guessed how foundationally necessary it is, in human dealings, to see the eyes? Yes. But the eyes are the windows to the soul, and when the soul is gone the eyes too are untenanted.

  Is it companionship – or helpless volubility? Are we capable of listening to – or even hearing – what others say?

  This night at the pyre two hoist-frame plinths collapse, and I am down on all fours in a dent in the dunes banging bits of it together again when Doll’s open-topped jeep draws up, thirty metres away, on the gravel road. After some rummaging around he emerges (with the engine ticking over) and moves towards me.

  Doll wears thick-looped leather sandals and brown shorts, and nothing else; in his left hand he has a half-full quart of labelled Russian vodka, in his right an oxhide whip which he now playfully cracks. His spongy red chest hair is dotted with beads of sweat that sparkle in the overwhelming glare of the fire. He drinks, and wipes his mouth.