Götz and Meyer

die, as if she would be taking her own life by saying it. Götz and Meyer would certainly have understood her: they didn’t use the word either, instead they spoke of “moving” or “processing”, using the euphemistic German terminology in which no things are what the language usually calls them but are something else, a reality taking place within unreal coordinates. Memory, I said, is the only way to conquer death, even when the body is forced to disappear, especially then, because the body merely goes the way of all matter and spins in an endless circle of transformations, while the spirit remains in a transparent cloud of mental energy moving slowly through the world and pouring, randomly as it first may seem, into restored matter, so that no-one knows what they’ll find in themselves when they look within. I stopped talking. If I had gone on, I surely would have lost them forever. I could see in their desperate glances, in their faces, which expressed a fear of slipping, the possibility that they might stay in a world about which they knew nothing until yesterday, until that very moment. I breathed deeply. That frightened them too, as if I was leaving them no oxygen, as if I was sucking up the last bit of air from their lungs. I smiled. Now we’ll talk poetry, I said. Tell me how experience becomes a poem. For a moment their eyes flashed with the old fire, but it was already too late, they had gone out, those fires, as Adam’s memories descended from the heavenly heights and sank into their every pore. By the way, no matter how odd it may sound, while he was at the camp Adam did write poetry. Not, indeed, on paper, because that would have been a luxury for frozen fingers, but in his head, especially in the morning, in line, during roll-call, and in the evening, when the sun sank beyond the plains. They were short poems, with flawed verse schemes and failed rhymes, but they were poems, a series of images which expressed wonder at the miracle of creation and the insecurity of existence in a world in which there are no discernable shapes. You might say, I added, that those were prayers, they were so sincere and simple, so precise in expressing fervour, fear and submission. If Götz and Meyer had had a chance to hear them, perhaps they would have been transformed and given up the task they’d been entrusted with or at least approached it with a feeling of alarm. You can’t love God and act against his will at the same time. The moment I said those words, I realised how pointless it is to say such a thing, but the students believed me, I could see that in their lowered eyes, in the way their fingers were intertwined, the joints clutching so tightly that they were white. But, I said, this is a hands-on class, let’s set our speculations and spiritual questions aside, and let’s do something. I said this, in fact, more for my own sake than for theirs, just as I chastised myself when I’d get lost in guesswork standing in front of the drawing of my family tree that used to hang on the wall of my sitting room. I must say here that it is entirely possible in the case of Götz, or possibly Meyer, that God was more present than one usually thinks, because Götz, or possibly Meyer, survived the explosion of a bomb which killed at least nine soldiers from his company, thanks only, as he often said, to God’s will, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Because of that Götz, or maybe Meyer, thanked the Lord every day for his goodness, especially while they were jouncing along in the truck on their way to Jajinci, while in the same truck, in the back, Jews were screaming at their God with their last breath, asking him why he wasn’t there, why he wasn’t there yet, why he was never there? There is nothing so awful as dying in doubt, coming unravelled, without anything to lean on. I stopped talking, again. I had said too much, as always. A breeze touched our foreheads, rustled the leaves, the sky glistened like gelatin. Suddenly, the bus driver appeared from behind the barracks. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks creased, he must have fallen asleep leaning on his hand or the wheel. How much longer is this going to take, he grumbled, we need to leave soon. A few more minutes, I said, Götz and Meyer are on their way, they haven’t got here yet. The driver nodded, turned, scratched his rear end and disappeared around the same corner. The students stared sadly after him, as if he were taking with him their last hope of salvation, which was not far from the truth. I recited the dimensions of the special vehicle that Götz and Meyer drove, the way I’d found them in a confidential report: 5,800 millimetres long, the height of the load space 1,700 millimetres, total structural weight 1,700 kilos, able to carry a load of up to 4,500 kilos. That meant, I said, that the vehicle could take about a hundred people who weighed up to 50 kilos each, which, after three months spent at the Fairgrounds camp, was a realistic average weight per prisoner. All the students looked reprovingly at a chubby girl who wore a headband, and a blush crept across her face. That also means, I added, that many had to bend down as they got in, and that later, during the ride, and especially after the light was put out, they bumped their heads on the ceiling as they tried to get as comfortable as possible. The people driving these vehicles, I continued, went through a special training course, and often among them, which may have been the case with Götz, or Meyer, or both, there were soldiers who had come back from the front because of injuries. At first, however, despite this training, certain mistakes were made which, fortunately, did not detract from the efficiency of the work, but did attract the attention of their superiors, so in Untersturmführer Dr Becker’s report, whose inspection trip I have already mentioned, I am sure that he draws attention to the necessity of gradually increasing the level of gas, because “it has been shown”, I read from one of the sheets of paper in my bundle, “that by releasing the gas as regulated, death comes swiftly and the prisoners die half-asleep. Now you no longer see convulsed and disfigured faces on those who have been suffocated, and there is not as much vomiting and defecation as there used to be earlier, when the gas was released all at once.” Their concern for the welfare of the prisoners is touching, I must say. I’ve said it before, I am repeating myself. Although I have no reliable information, I am convinced Götz and Meyer did not make that sort of mistake. I have not managed to track down any written complaints about their work. On the contrary, one might say, though there are no such expressions in military jargon, they fulfilled their assignment with a dedicated tenderness. I stood at the centre of the ring of students. Götz and Meyer are still quite far away, but soon their truck will pull up at the gate to the camp, there, behind you. Again I dedicated myself to my bundle of papers. The tense breathing of my students and, if I am not mistaken, the occasional sob, made me feel as if I were amid a tossing ocean of air. I was both floating and sinking, like a divided being that cannot re-connect. An awkward feeling that sends chills down my spine even now. The list in my hand turned into a flapping sail. Each of you, I said, will now become someone else, each will become first the name, and then the person who bore that name. I began handing out names as if I was scattering seeds. The boys became my boy cousins, the girls my girl cousins. I gave them an age for each name, an occupation, real or imagined, sometimes hair colour, density of eyebrows. I gave myself Adam. Adam was always separate from his group, even when he was a part of it. Shorter than the others, he always stuck out above them. That was when he began to think that maybe his preparation for his Bar Mitzvah was futile, because a week at the camp felt like a whole year, so by early March he felt he was already 25, maybe a little younger, he wasn’t quite sure of his calculations, but certainly older than he really was, so the Bar Mitzvah ritual was moot. He had earned his maturity during his second week there, when he turned 15, if we use his method of calculation, when he first bent over a person who had died. More precisely, an old woman who had died. Whether or not he got closer to God at that moment is tough to say. Maybe he merely saw that the path leading to God had far more turns in it than the image he had carried within himself. Here it looked like a winding path along a sunny slope, not very steep, so that climbing up would require almost no effort. All that changed when he bent over the old, dead woman, when it took so much effort to straighten up that his thighs wobbled and his knees buckled. In an ancient book it is written, I said, that sometimes you have to lean way down in order to see the face of the Lord. And now picture, each of you in your own mind, I went on, the faces of the people whose names you’ve been given. And not only their names, imagine them as whole people, their every move, every part of their body, each of you be the person, feel how that person’s muscles tense and their lungs fill, dream their dreams, okay, no-one was dreaming there, so instead just look, look with their eyes, and wait in a way you have never waited. Götz and Meyer would probably have been confused by such volubility, hardly surprising if you keep in mind the conciseness of military language and its resistance to gushing feeling. The students were also confused: what sort of waiting did I have in mind? Waiting, I said, for something to happen which would finally make some sense, because it was simply not possible that all this could be happening without making any sense. Then the waiting, I said, took the shape of a rumour about being transferred to a camp in Romania or maybe Poland, to a safer place, somewhere settled, the story had it, with other Jews and far enough from that city on the other shore, which was closing its eyes shamelessly to the scenes of their precipitous fall. While all this was going on, Götz and Meyer were receiving instructions for their special assignment, then they devoted themselves to checking even the most minute technical details of their Saurer’s special equipment. All that was left was to depart, which they soon did, heading towards people who, though at first glance seemingly motionless, were actually hurtling towards the two of them, waiting for them on precisely the spot where we are now standing. Then I began a roll-call, to turn them into little family groups, to arrange them in a column, and, though a little disorderly, they marched with even steps to the gate to the Fairgrounds camp. The bus was waiting, bathed in sunlight. The driver was asleep, resting his cheek on his arms folded over the steering wheel. As I called their names and as they got onto the bus, I told them they should imagine how the person whose name they carried entered the grey truck, whose dimensions I had repeated several times and which was driven by Götz and Meyer. You can’t see them now, I said, but take my word for it, they were refined gentlemen. Götz, or maybe Meyer, one of them, wouldn’t, as people often say, harm a fly, but he was capable of tossing a cat from the roof down into the concrete yard. Cats are stupid, he said, I would never like to be a cat. No-one laughed. Adam turned and glared at me. I started to say the names, the bus filled slowly, the driver woke up, smacked his lips and immediately began to whistle, the students’ faces were grim, anxious, they were all silent, although the mothers touched the children, the husbands leaned over their wives, but all in silence, as if under water or at a very high altitude, in rarified mountain air. Wherever it was, I found myself among my relatives, and I have no words to describe the sweetness I felt, that same way I felt when I hung the drawing of the family tree on the wall for the first time. Later I took it down, but now I am no longer certain where it is, on the wall or in a file. Perhaps that doesn’t really matter. More important is what happened with Adam when he saw the grey truck. That same moment he began to understand the language spoken by Commander Andorfer and the other soldiers, suddenly he could see that there were parallel worlds, that the worlds were created by language, and that it was enough to alter the meaning of several words in order to change the existing world into a new one. And he saw precisely where that new camp was, the one about which Commander Andorfer had informed the members of the Administration did, indeed, exist, and what route one had to take to get there. He didn’t know precisely what went on inside the grey truck, because he was not familiar with how an automobile engine works. He had never been interested in such things. Then one night he dreamed that from the dense darkness, faces of people who were asphyxiating flew out before him. He opened his eyes and stared at the pale darkness of the great hall, filled with all the possible sounds the human body can produce. So it was that he was awake and saw the moment when the hall would be empty, and he almost fainted at the deafening silence. But before that, I said into the microphone, we must see, no, we can’t see, because the people whose names you carry were in the dark, we must feel what they felt, packed into the Saurer, driven by Götz and Meyer. At first there wasn’t much, I mean, they felt almost nothing, they just groped in the dark for their ne