Götz and Meyer

uck as if they were marching off to no-man’s land between barbed-wire borders. The Serbian prisoners, mud-splattered, plunged their shovels into the soil and sprinkled it on the overflowing graves as if they were building a bridge spanning the North Sea. And just as the truck was not, in fact, headed for Romania, or Poland for that matter, the bridge they were building took them nowhere. During a flood, there is no dry land. Who could have known? Life is full of tricks, anyway, in war and in peace, it makes no difference. It is always that same convulsive effort to survive just a little longer than planned. Present or absent, God is cruel, there is no genuine mercy in him. When he blinks, he blinks, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it. Souls cluster around him, voices waft his way like the sound of a thousand little bells, but God merely shrugs them off. That was precisely Götz’s, or was it Meyer’s, shrug of vexation when he saw the broken axle. Something like that must infuriate a person, even if he is as disciplined as Götz and Meyer were. Some things are simply stronger than all that the human spirit creates. And besides, Götz, or was it Meyer, or both, had had it with that wild country, the crude people, the lack of order. It isn’t that Götz, or was it Meyer, was nostalgic, his sense of duty was far greater than any homesickness he might have felt, but it was nice, it had to be said, in the quiet of his room, to eat sausages and drink beer. Had he had supernatural powers at his command, Götz, or Meyer, would have fixed that axle with his own hands and returned it to its original condition. Other trucks in the series had indeed been damaged, especially on the rough roads in Russia and Ukraine, but this was no consolation for Götz, or Meyer, or both of them. A person gets accustomed to things and starts expecting the things to accustom themselves to him with the same ease, and when those things betray him, he is rightly disappointed. Not so much so, at least in the case of Götz and Meyer, that he might kick them, here I am referring to the truck, or say something nasty. And not just because the truck had served them well, but because, unlike the people it transported, it had a soul. Götz, or was it Meyer, knew it did, because countless times, while he had been driving, he had felt the cab envelop him in a maternal sort of way. It did all it could to ease his every movement. If the truck had been able to, Götz, or Meyer, was convinced, it would have flown. It only took two days in Berlin to repair the damage, and, as of June 15, 1942, the truck was on its way to Riga. I do not know whether Götz and Meyer were dispatched along with it. If they were not, it is difficult to comprehend the vastness of their grief. They had cleaned it and polished it so often, wiped down the headlights, washed the windscreen and the interior! A tougher man than Götz and Meyer might find tears welling up in his eyes at the thought. In fact, that first night after they were faced with the horror of the broken axle, Götz, or was it Meyer, did, indeed, feel despair as he lay in bed. There can be no talk, here, of tears, but something clutched in his chest, pressure from within him and from without, he could barely breathe. He stretched his arms and crossed them under his head, but that didn’t help. There was no light in the room, and he could see the sky through the window, sprinkled with stars. Their flickering said something to him, he couldn’t grasp what they were saying, but he felt that the message was somehow related to the discomfort he felt, which was not letting up. Was this the cosmic pain he had read about somewhere? Poor Götz, or was it Meyer. I would have liked to have seen his photograph, perhaps then I could describe the expression on his face. I never saw them, Götz or Meyer, so I can only imagine them. My interest in the two of them came at a time when I was trying to fill in the empty slots in my family tree. I had just turned 50, I knew where I was going with my life, so all that was left was to figure out where I had come from. I went round the archives, visited museums, brought books home from the library. That is how Götz and Meyer came into my life. Almost all the women from my father’s and mother’s families died, as people usually put it, at the Fairgrounds camp, though in fact they died on the streets and byways of Belgrade, in the truck Götz and Meyer drove out to the execution grounds in Jajinci. Those two names are first mentioned in a telegram from SS-Obergrupenführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Berlin Gestapo, sent in mid-March 1942, to the chief of the German police in Belgrade, SS-Standartenführer Emanuel Schäfer. The telegram announces the arrival of the specialists with the purpose-built truck, and that they will present their orders upon arrival. I have to confess that this drew me to Götz and Meyer, the fact that they were not little cogs in a vast mechanism, blissfully unaware of what the mechanism was for, rather they were entirely aware of the nature of their assignment, being simultaneously the heralds of death and death itself. I tried to picture the moment when their superior officer informed them of the purpose of their journey. Götz and Meyer are standing at ease, barking their Yes, Sirs, but maybe they didn’t even need an explanation, maybe they had already gained enough experience on the Eastern Front, this is plausible enough, especially if you consider the requirement for maximum efficiency. In that sense, the staff must be so smoothly rehearsed that they would present no risk or weak link in the chain, so Götz and Meyer could hardly have been novices. I tried to picture how, if they were married men, they had said good-bye to their wives. Götz, or maybe Meyer, would kneel before his wife and rest his cheek on her stomach, while Meyer, or maybe Götz, would plant a kiss on his wife’s head. What did he say to her? How much did his wife know? She must have known something, those things slip out, perhaps one of the men talked in his sleep, or maybe he blurted something out during dinner. But, in times of war, it is best, if you are not a direct participant, to know as little as possible, because this is at least a tiny victory over a reality that is the same for everyone, regardless of political conviction. No matter how strange it may sound, it is sometimes easier to understand women than men. What, for instance, did Götz, and Meyer, talk about as they drove to Belgrade? I doubt that they admired the beauty of the flat or hilly landscape, though Götz, or was it Meyer, would quote a verse from Goethe from time to time. They did not speak of the job either, which had already become routine by then, or the calculation, which showed how many days were left until they could go home. (Fifty-four by their count, in fact around eighty.) They may have talked about their return, but then what else would they have to talk about during all the days that stretched before them in that godforsaken hole? Götz, or was it Meyer, the one who was married, was anxious about his daughter Hilda’s frequent sore throats. She’ll grow out of them, Meyer, or was it Götz, consoled him, the one who was probably not married, but it is true, he added, that one must attend to one’s health from childhood. As a boy, for instance, he had longed to be a pilot, but he had not looked after himself, and if he had done a better job, he would have made a better showing on the tests and examinations, and right now, why, he might have been sitting in the cockpit of a Messerschmitt. Götz, or maybe Meyer, had quite a laugh over that story! He slapped his knee. Applauded. But Meyer, or maybe Götz, meant it. His leather pilot’s jacket hung in the cab, and from time to time he’d put it on, with his fellow traveller’s silent consent. Then he liked to open the window and feel the wind in his face. At first he was distracted from his fantasies by the dull thumps and muted cries audible from the back of the truck, but as time passed he no longer noticed them. A person can get used to anything, why not that? And the thumping never lasted long, or the cries, because most of them in there were women and children. It all took longer with grown men, even the thumping, so, at least as far as that was concerned, their work was easier. Götz and Meyer must have known, how could they not, that almost all the Jewish men in Serbia had already been shot. How this had happened they didn’t know, or how the operation had been organised, but, truth to tell, they didn’t care. I, however, did know how it happened: almost all the men in my mother’s and father’s families were killed in the autumn of 1941. Assembled earlier in various collection camps and jails, they were taken off to be shot in smaller and larger groups, often in retaliation for German soldiers who had been killed. Buried at various execution grounds around Belgrade, they created a tangled web of death that I never managed to disentangle completely. As for the ones at the Fairgrounds, at least we know the precise route: over the Sava River bridge, through Belgrade, to Jajinci. I know the route; they didn’t. While they were in the queue behind the truck, they believed that they were headed for a new camp in Romania, or maybe Poland. Hadn’t that been what the camp commander told them, a man named Andorfer who had even made the effort to produce rules for the new camp and distribute them to the members of the Jewish Administration? Quite by chance, though maybe not, Untersturmführer Andorfer, before he dedicated himself professionally to the SS, worked as the business manager of a hotel. The conditions for accommodation in that hotel in Sölden am Öztal were far better than they were at the Fairgrounds camp, where broken windows were boarded up, cracks yawned in the walls and the roofs leaked. No wonder, then, that, at first, the prisoners in the camp volunteered for the transport: to get as far away from that hellhole as possible. They were humiliated not only by the camp’s subhuman conditions but by its full exposure to Belgrade, which watched them from across the river. The pain is more acute when what has been lost hovers constantly before your eyes. Silence can kill. Order is essential in all things, thought Götz and Meyer as they checked in with Standartenführer Emanuel Schäfer, head of the German police, otherwise a doctor of law. Schäfer informed Camp Commander Andorfer of everything, and he, in turn, told everything to his deputy, Edgar Enge. Before the war, or rather up to the moment he was drafted, Enge had worked as a tour guide. So it was that the operation for the final solution of the Jewish question in Serbia was, in fact, put into practice by a former hotelier and a former tour guide, quite ironic though hardly absurd if one keeps in mind the affinities between the two lines of work, using the same vocabulary: accommodation, transport, daily and weekly menus, the ordering of food supplies, hygiene, guests’ complaints. Perhaps one cannot speak of the camp prisoners as guests, perhaps one shouldn’t, and their complaints were hardly taken seriously. In formal terms, the German occupying forces were the host, but the purchasing of food was financed from funds acquired by selling looted Jewish property. The camp prisoners paid for their own accommodation. A total of 26,900,000 dinars was paid to the Municipality of Belgrade for food, the caloric value of which contributed to the great speed with which the prisoners lost weight, ultimately making Götz and Meyer’s job all the easier. The German occupying forces demonstrated the same efficiency when, in mid-October 1941, they decided to shoot the remaining four thousand Jewish men, excepting from that number approximately three hundred, whom they designated to maintain order among the women, children and elderly people in the Jewish ghetto, which was supposed to be in the “Gypsy Quarter” of Belgrade but which was never built. Instead of a ghetto, they opened the Fairgrounds camp. Here their efficiency came to the fore once more: they used pavilions that had since 1937 been the site of international fairs. So the Turkish Pavilion was, with startling aptness, where they set up the baths and, later, the mortuary. The connection between a bath and a mortuary is not entirely obvious, unless one sees the act of death, no matter how ugly it may be, as a transition to a state of greater purity. The camp-command quarters settled into a little building near the gate that used to house the Fairgrounds administration. The Jewish Administration of the camp was located at the Central Tower. Most of the prisoners lived in the third pavilion, the largest of them all, where all the partitions had been torn down. The surface area of this pavilion was about 5,000 square metres, which means that each person, and as many as five thousand souls were there, had the living space of a single square metre. The mortality rate was rather high among the prisoners even before Götz and Meyer got to Belgrade, so sometimes they had more space, which the prisoners mostly weren’t aware of, and therefore they weren’t able to make use of it. One shouldn’t hold that against the prisoners, because they were glad if they could move about at all. That was precisely why they were so delighted when Götz, Meyer and their truck appeared at the gate to the camp: if nothing else, they’d be going somewhere where there would be more food and where they could stretch their legs properly. At such moments life is measured in small increments: the length of one’s bed, for instance, or woollen socks. It was certainly no better at the first pavilion where the Jews brought in later were accommodated, although I don’t know precisely how large a surface area it covered. A kitchen was later opened in the fourth pavilion; at first, food was delivered by car from Belgrade. The Jewish men, the ones who were spared execution by firing squad, lived in the fifth pavilion. The second pavilion was set aside for Gypsies, and afterwards they made camp workshops there: a locksmith’s, cobbler’s, tailor’s and carpenter’s shop. The camp had its own hospital and apothecary: fifty cots or so at the pavilion of the Nikola Spasić Foundation. A real little city unto itself, make no mistake. Such a shame they had to squat out in the open to relieve themselves; if there had been some tidier solution for this, the Fairgrounds might have become a model Nazi camp. This made Commander Andorfer even more unhappy. He was a young man, in his 30s, brimming with energy, thrilled to be alive in the triumphal time of the German Reich, and if there was a war going on around him, and there was, he wanted to be part of it. His petitions were not heard, and he remained in this position until late April 1942, when the Jewish question in Serbia was almost completely solved, and Götz, and Meyer, began having dreams about going home. Götz, in particular, or maybe it was Meyer, had vivid dreams, so much so that he woke up at night, in a sweat if he had dreamed something unpleasant, radiant if he had stepped, in his dream, into his childhood home. Sometimes he wouldn’t wake up at all, but would howl and tremble, and Meyer, unless it was Götz, had to get up, shake him and squeeze his shoulders. You could hear similar screams in the third pavilion at night, although they were more often caused by water or urine pouring down between the boards of the bunk beds than they were by nightmares. Reality was bad enough, there was no need to dream something else, at least not at night. By day you were lucky to be dreaming, because the conviction that everything was happening to you as if in a dream, to someone else, helped you get through the time from dawn to dusk. I am speaking as if time is a river, as if it was the Sava flowing by them, but they wouldn’t have had the strength to wade across even a little stream. They crossed the Sava only in the truck driven by Götz and Meyer, or shrouded in white sheets, stiff and dead, on stretchers carried by Jewish men across the frozen river, the ones who had been kept from the firing squad, and the Jewish women who hadn’t died yet. So the camp prisoners not only fed themselves, they tended their dead themselves. And Götz and Meyer might say that they even killed themselves, because they breathed poisonous fumes without being forced to, and the more they inhaled, the more, paradoxically, they exhaled of their own lives. Sounds absurd, I know, and, chances are, this never occurred to Götz and Meyer, but this was a way they could s