The death rate in the Schillstrasse camp is high; in late 1944, between eight and ten corpses a day are stripped naked, relieved of their gold teeth, allocated numbers, and packed in paper bags to await the transport of back-axle parts to Vechelde. The transport of back-axle parts is on Mondays. In the meantime the corpses are stored in a hut, where the corpses often make the bags wet, so they tear easily when they’re being loaded onto the truck. Eventually, the bags are replaced by wooden boxes, each accommodating ten corpses. By January 1945, between four hundred and five hundred corpses have been transported from Aussenlager Schillstrasse to Aussenlager Watenstedt via Unterkommando Vechelde. I haven’t been able to find any statistics for the number of corpses added each week in Vechelde, but that camp is smaller and conditions are better and the death rate is, for now, significantly lower.
I will thus dare to say that you’re lucky, since Unterkommando Vechelde happens to be your first place on the road from Auschwitz. Of course, there’s no need to keep repeating how lucky you are, so I shall say it only once. Luck, chance, and freak are the stones with which every road from Auschwitz is paved. There are no other roads from Auschwitz but those of improbability. You’re loaded onto a train in Auschwitz and find yourself, utterly improbably, unloaded onto a freight depot platform in central Braunschweig for further delivery to Unterkommando Vechelde. You’re part of a group of 350 Jewish men who were recently on their way from the ghetto in Łódź to the gas chambers and crematoriums in Auschwitz, and who by some blind fate have been nudged onto a route leading to a freight depot platform in the heart of Germany. You can’t believe your eyes. “Some Sturmführer” asks if you’re all hungry! You get your own plates to eat from! The Sturmführer personally (!) ladles out the soup, and asks if it tastes all right (!) and whether you’d like some more! You think you’re dreaming. “After Auschwitz, this is Paradise,” you write a year later, while the memory is still fresh, to the woman who is to be my mother.
In February and March 1945, Büssing’s factories in Braunschweig are being bombed, and the slave labor camps are evacuated, and yet another circuitous journey through the camp archipelago begins, and hell makes its presence felt again.
It’s on the trail of this journey, not far from its end, on the winding and solitary road to the pretty town of Ludwigslust, with my eyes staring vaguely ahead and my thoughts somewhere else, that I’m caught on camera, contravening the law against repulsive acts.
In Vechelde, all that remains of the Büssing factory for making truck axles is a Romanesque-style gateway of red brick and white marble. It takes a while to understand what it’s doing there among the detached brick houses and box hedges that have sprung up all around, a lost factory gateway connected to nothing and leading to nowhere, until you come closer and discover the two memorial plaques on each side of it, one commemorating the jute mill and the other the slave labor camp. I’m not surprised. Anyone who knows at which points along your road from Auschwitz there ought to be a memorial plaque will most likely find one, and perhaps even a small monument if you search for it, and occasionally even a memorial museum. You have to hand it to the Germans, even in commemorating repulsive acts, they’re conscientious. Touchingly conscientious, you might say. On the right-hand plaque, put up in October 1989 by Gemeinde Vechelde (the community of Vechelde), it says:
Between September 1944 and March 1945 this former jute mill housed a concentration camp, under the command of the camp in Neuengamme, outside Hamburg. As part of the German defense industry, some 200 Jewish concentration camp inmates from Auschwitz, mainly of Polish and Hungarian nationality, were forced to work for the vehicle manufacturer Firma Büssing in human-destroying (menschenvernichtenden) conditions.
On the site of the slave labor camp in Schillstrasse there’s a memorial monument too, in fact a whole memorial area. A rabbinical saying (rabbinische Weisheit)—“The future has a long past” (Die Zukunft hat eine lange Vergangenheit) — is written in large white letters on the wall of a modern factory building that happens to overlook the small walled enclosure where testimonies to the repulsive acts in Braunschweig have been put on permanent display for all to see. At my side is Dr. Karl Liedke, without whose help I would have found neither the road that leads here nor the memorials lining it. Dr. Liedke is my cicerone. He has drawn the map I’m following. It’s useless as a driving map, but it’s the only map in existence that shows your road from Auschwitz. It has dates and places and arrows showing directions and a green line showing the route absentmindedly crossing its own tracks among the red dots of the camp archipelago.
Perhaps you find it strange that anyone should devote several years of his or her life to mapping your particular road from Auschwitz, but no one who wishes to study the industrial history of the town of Braunschweig can avoid it.
Not all roads from Auschwitz have a Karl Liedke following their trail.
Karl Liedke is born in 1941 in Warsaw as the youngest son of an ethnic German father and an ethnic Polish mother and grows up in postwar Poland, where for understandable reasons, ethnic Germans are not in favor. When Germany invaded Poland, the father was recruited by the Polish army as a Polish citizen, and after the German victory, by the German army as an ethnic German, which turns out to be reason enough for vengeful Poles to have him killed in the wake of the war. In Karl Liedke’s earliest childhood memory, his father is wearing a uniform and his mother won’t answer the boy’s question about which uniform it is. Later in life he’s trained as an industrial economist.
In the summer of 1981, Karl Liedke gets permission to go on holiday to France but travels instead, as planned, to West Germany, a country to which he as an ethnic half-German would never have received permission to go, but where as an ethnic half-German he’s received like a long-lost son. West Germany’s need for Polish-educated industrial economists in their forties is somewhat limited, however, and after a long search for work, Karl Liedke takes a job with a historical research society in Braunschweig. His task is to carry out a financial feasibility study for a proposed museum of the industrial history of Braunschweig. Karl Liedke’s study shows that while such a museum would not be financially viable, the industrial history of Braunschweig is well worthy of further study and in fact urgently demands it.