SKETCH OF INSTALLATION BY MARTIN LUTHER
[Dated 15 July 1943; handwritten; 1 page]
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THE lobby of the Prince Friedrich Karl was deserted: the guests were out for the night. As they passed through it towards the stairs the receptionist kept her head down. They were just another of Herr Brecker’s little scams — best not to know too much.
Their room had not been searched. The cotton threads hung where March had wedged them between door and frame. Inside, when he pulled Luther’s case out from beneath the bed, the single strand of hair was still laced through the lock.
CHARLIE stepped out of her dress and wrapped a towel around her shoulders.
In the bathroom at the end of the passage, a naked bulb lit a grimy sink. A bath stood on tiptoe, on iron claws.
MARCH walked back to the bedroom, shut himself in, and once more propped the chair up against the door. He piled the contents of the case on the dressing table — the map, the various envelopes, the minutes and memoranda, the reports, including the one with the rows of statistics, typed on the machine with the extra-large letters. Some of the paper crackled with age. He remembered how he and Charlie had sat during the sunlit afternoon, with the rumble of traffic outside; how they had passed the evidence backwards and forwards to one another — at first with excitement, then stunned, disbelieving, silent, until at last they came to the pouch with the photographs.
Now he needed to be more systematic. He pulled up a chair, cleared a space, and opened the exercise book. He tore out thirty pages. At the top of each sheet he wrote the year and the month, beginning with July 1941 and ending in January 1944. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. Then he began to work his way through the heap of papers, making notes in his clear script.
A RAILWAY timetable — badly printed on yellowing wartime paper:
Date Train no From Departs To Arrives
26.1 Da 105 Theresienstadt Auschwitz
27.1 Lp 106 Auschwitz Theresienstadt
29.1 Da 13 Berlin 17.20 Auschwitz 10.48
Da 107 Theresienstadt Auschwitz
30.1 Lp lO8 Auschwitz Theresienstadt
31.1 Lp 14 Auschwitz Zamocz
1.2 Da 109 Therienstadt Auschwitz
2.2 Da 15 Berlin 17.20 Auschwitz
Lp 110 Auschwitz Myslowitz
3.2 Po 65 Zamocz 11.00 Auschwitz
4.2 Lp 16 Auschwitz Litzmannstadt
…and so on, until, in the second week of February, a new destination appeared. Now almost all the times had been worked out to the minute:
11.2 Pj 131 Bialystok 9.00 Treblinka 12.10
Lp 132 Treblinka 21.18 Bialystok 1.30
12.2 Pj 133 Bialystok 9.00 Treblinka 12.10
Lp 134 Treblinka 21.18 Grodno
13.2 Pj 135 Bialystok 9.00 Treblinka 12.10
Lp 136 Treblinka 21.18 Bialystok 1.30
14.2 Pj 163 Grodno 5.40 Treblinka 12.10
Lp 164 Treblinka Scharfenweise
…and so on again, until the end of the month.
A rusty paper clip had mottled the edge of the timetable. Attached to it was a telegraphic letter from the General Management, Directorate East, of the German Reich Railways, dated Berlin, 13 January 1943. First, a list of recipients:
Reich Railway Directorates
Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Halle (S),
Karlsruhe, Konigsberg (Pr), Linz, Mainz, Oppeln, East in
Frankfurt (O), Posen, Vienna
General Directorate of East Railway in Krakau
Reichsprotektor, Group Railways in Prague
General Traffic Directorate Warsaw
Reich Traffic Directorate Minsk
Then, the main text:
Subject: Special trains for resettlers during the period from 20 January to 28 February 1943.
We enclose a compilation of the special trains (Vd, Rm, Po, Pj and Da) agreed upon in Berlin on 15 January 1943 for the period from 20 January 1943 to 28 February 1943 and a circulatory plan for cars to be used in these trains.
Train formation is noted for each recirculation and attention is to be paid to these instructions. After each full trip cars are to be well cleaned, if necessary fumigated, and upon completion of the programme prepared for further use. Number and kinds of cars are to be determined upon dispatch of the last train and are to be reported to me by telephone with confirmation on service cards.
[Signed] Dr Jacobi
33 Bfp 5 Bfsv Minsk 9 Feb. 1943
March flicked back to the timetable and read it through again. Theresienstadt/Auschwitz, Auschwitz/Theresienstadt, Bialystok/Treblinka, Treblinka/Bialystok: the syllables drummed in his tired brain like the rhythm of wheels on a railway track.
He ran his finger down the columns of figures, trying to decipher the message behind them. So: a train would be loaded in the Polish town of Bialystok at breakfast time. By lunchtime, it would be at this hell, Treblinka. (Not all the journeys were so brief- he shuddered at the thought of the seventeen hours from Berlin to Auschwitz.) In the afternoon, the cars would be unloaded at Treblinka and fumigated. At nine o’clock that evening they would return to Bialystok, arriving in the early hours, ready to be loaded up again at breakfast.
On 12 February, the pattern breaks. Instead of going back to Bialystok, the empty train is sent to Grodno. Two days in the sidings there, and then — in the dark, long before dawn — the train is once more heading back, fully laden, to Treblinka. It arrives at lunchtime. Is unloaded. And that night begins rattling back westwards again, this time to Scharfenweise.
What else could an investigator of the Berlin Kriminal-polizei deduce from this document?
Well, he could deduce numbers. Say: sixty persons per car, an average of sixty cars per train. Deduction: three thousand six hundred persons per transport.
By February, the transports were running at the rate of one per day. Deduction: twenty-five thousand persons per week; one hundred thousand persons per month; one and a quarter million persons per year. And this was the average achieved in the depths of the Central European winter, when the points froze and drifts of snow blocked the tracks and the partisans materialised from the woods like ghosts to plant their bombs.
Deduction: the numbers would be even greater in the spring and summer.
HE stood at the bathroom door. Charlie, in a black slip, had her back to him and was bending over the wash basin. With her hair wet she looked smaller; almost fragile. The muscles in her pale shoulders flexed as she massaged her scalp. She rinsed her hair a final time and stretched a hand out blindly behind her. He gave her a towel.
Along the edge of the bath she had set out various objects — a pair of green rubber gloves, a brush, a dish, a spoon, two bottles. March picked up the bottles and studied their labels. One contained a mixture of magnesium carbonate and sodium acetate, the other a twenty-volume solution of hydrogen peroxide. Next to the mirror above the basin she had propped open the girl’s passport. Magda Voss regarded March with wide and untroubled eyes.
“Are you sure this is going to work?”
Charlie wound the towel around her head into a turban.
“First I go red. Then orange. Then white-blonde.” She took the bottles from him. “I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with a crush on Jean Harlow. My mother went crazy. Trust me.
She squeezed her hands into the rubber gloves and measured the chemicals into the dish. With the spoon she began to mix them into a thick blue paste.
SECRET REICH MATTER. CONFERENCE MINUTES. 30 COPIES. COPY NUMBER…
(The figure had been scratched out.)
The following participated in the conference of 20 January 1942, in Berlin, Am grossen Wannsee 56/58, on the final solution of the Jewish question…
March had read the minutes twice that afternoon. Nevertheless, he forced himself to wade through the pages again. “Around 11 million Jews are involved in this final solution of the Jewish problem…’Not just German Jews. The minutes listed more than thirty European nationalities, including French Jews (865,000), Dutch Jews (160,000), Polish Jews (2,284,000), Ukrainian Jews (2,994,684); there were English, Spanish, Irish, Swedish and Finnish Jews; the conference even found room for the Albanian Jews (all 200 of them).