haemoglobin, they would have thought he was speaking Chinese. Only later, as if the cloud had held them back, the corpses began tumbling out. The prisoners snapped their mouths shut, but their eyes came out on stalks and the veins on their necks bulged. One of them covered his nose, the second doubled over, the third prisoner’s knees shook so much that from a distance he looked as if he’d been drinking. If the German guards hadn’t shouted and used their rifle butts, who knows how long it would have taken for the Serbian prisoners to recover! Afterwards they got used to it. A person gets used to everything, it doesn’t matter whether he is a barbarian or a member of the master race. It took the Serbian prisoners less than an hour to do their job, I read that somewhere, quite good time, and fitted neatly into the overall requirement for frugality and efficiency in handling this, which was, after all, what the entire functioning of the Reich was based on. Despite this, Götz on that occasion, and undoubtedly Meyer as well, regretted the enforced confidentiality of the task, which prevented him from speaking briefly to those Serbs about the advantages of carbon monoxide. They were permitted to talk about this to Commander Andorfer, but Commander Andorfer had never been interested in such things. It is quite certain that, as a former hotelier, he knew nothing about chemistry. Carbon monoxide, Götz, or Meyer, might have said, is a colourless gas, without fragrance or taste, something lighter than air, and it is produced by the combustion of carbon, or a substance containing carbon, which occurs without sufficient oxygen. The rapid combustion of fuel in the truck’s engine was an excellent example. Carbon monoxide condenses and turns into a liquid at temperatures of −192 °Celsius, freezes at −199 °Celsius and melts at −205°. It is poisonous for all warm-blooded animals, which includes all human beings, with the exception of the Germans and the Japanese. As little as a thousandth of a per cent of carbon monoxide in the air may provoke symptoms of poisoning — headaches, nausea, exhaustion — and a fifth of that same per cent is lethal in less than half an hour. The speed of dying, obviously, increases in proportion to the increase in concentration of the gas, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt Götz and Meyer’s belief that an even shorter journey would have sufficed to ensure success. Now comes the part that Götz or Meyer, would have enjoyed telling the most, if only he had been allowed to, and it has to do with the mechanism by which carbon monoxide acts in the blood of these animals: Russians, Jews, homosexuals and mentally disabled Germans, who weren’t real Germans anyway, because a genuine member of the German race is physically, mentally and sexually completely fit and always as he should be. Götz and Meyer were excellent specimens, especially Meyer, if not Götz as well, who had impeccably developed biceps, triceps and glutei maximi. For a person to live, he needs oxygen, even those Serbian prisoners probably knew that, and he can absorb oxygen into his organism thanks to the presence of haemoglobin in his bloodstream. The oxygen forms bonds with the haemoglobin in the red blood cells, so that it is carried to all parts of the body. This haemoglobin, however, shows an unconcealed inclination to bond with carbon monoxide, which is as much as two to three hundred times as strong as its inclination to bond with oxygen, so, given the opportunity to choose, it will, like an unfaithful spouse, devote itself to the carbon monoxide. Once bonded, the haemoglobin and carbon monoxide create a stable compound of carboxyhaemoglobin, which spreads quickly and reduces the amount of faithful haemoglobin that rushes into the embrace of pure oxygen. Without oxygen, of course, the pulse grows fainter, the respiratory system fails, tissues die like flies, coma sets in, and, in the end, so does death. The devastated organism is relieved that the torment is over, and death is salvation. Since carboxyhaemoglobin has a characteristic cherry-red hue — Götz, or it could be Meyer, always clucks his tongue when referring to cherries — these asphyxiated victims do not turn blue as others do, rather their skin acquires a pinkish tinge and their lips turn bright red. This explains why the Serbian prisoners are thinking: “Lipstick” as the first heap of corpses tumbles towards them. They can guess why the women might be wearing lipstick, but they have not been able to explain to themselves why it is on the lips of the children and the elderly. In work such as theirs, however, you quickly learn not to ask questions, especially about Jews. Götz and Meyer wouldn’t tell them anything about that anyway, not because they didn’t know, but because there was no point in wasting words about Jews. It was enough that they had consumed so much fuel. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the Jews themselves had paid for the fuel required for their transport from the Fairgrounds to Jajinci, since they’d paid for everything else so far, including food, medicine and heating. The Belgrade archives hold the considerable correspondence between the Jewish Administration and the German Command Staff, with its competent services within the Municipality of Belgrade, regarding the procuring of foodstuffs, medicine and the camp inventory. In the beginning I carefully copied out all the dates, and then I gave up, lost in the tons of food and cords of firewood, revolted by so much bureaucracy at a time when life was draining from the prisoners in the camp like water from wet rags. The setting up of the Jewish Administration was one of those sly tricks by which the Nazis organised their entire system of deceiving Jews, convincing them that the camps were merely reception centres on their way to some undesignated country, a huge ghetto that would belong to them alone. If something wasn’t going well at the camp, then the only ones to blame would be the Jewish Administration. The Germans were here merely to help and advise, you could say nothing against them. Later, when Götz and Meyer went there, and their truck became a part of the dreary everyday routine of the camp prisoners, the members of the Administration and their families were saved until the last transport. No need to wonder why this was so: clearly the Administration had to oversee the schedule of departures to the end, the quality of the transportation and the nutrition of those who still hadn’t left. The same order of things would have held true in the real world, outside the camp, and as long as life in the camp was reminiscent, in no matter how reduced a form, of the life that was going on somewhere else, chances are the prisoners would be calm and patient, waiting for their fate. This concern of the German Government for the good of the prisoners is touching, I think I’ve already said that, but at the Fairgrounds it did bear fruit. None of the incarcerated Jews tried to run away, not even after the pattern had become clear and you needed much greater willpower to continue to deceive yourself. During the first three months, when hunger reigned in the camp, it was only some of the bolder little boys, judging by the statements of witnesses, who sneaked through the barbed-wire fence and went off to Zemun to beg for food. They knew that if they were caught as they slipped back in, they would be cruelly beaten, but their hunger was stronger. Hunger is always stronger, I dare say, although I have no experience of starvation, except for the fast at Yom Kippur, which I have been keeping stubbornly, though I can’t say why, for the last twenty years. Götz and Meyer didn’t know even that much about hunger, since they didn’t know what Yom Kippur was. My guess is that they had never seen Jews either, especially if they came from a small Austrian or German town, until they were given their special assignment. It is also my guess that among those who sneaked out through the barbed-wire fence there weren’t any of my twelve young cousins, because I could never muster the strength to do something like that myself, and this leads me to believe, knowing my father’s timidity and my mother’s shyness, that this is a character trait handed down from one generation to the next in their families. Some people stride forward to embrace their fates; others, like my parents, wait for fate to come to them. It would not be good to conclude on the basis of this that the first is better than the other, because in the end fate is what counts, and not the circumstances leading up to it, just as one shouldn’t think that I am dissatisfied with myself. I have found myself wondering sometimes whether things might have been different if there had been risk takers in our family tree, people from that first group. My mother’s decision to go off to the village with me in her arms could be interpreted as taking a risk, but as I later learned in an entirely coincidental encounter in the rooms of the Jewish Historical Museum, she decided to do that only because she couldn’t refuse a request from her best friend, also a Jewish woman and the mother of two little children, to go with her. This won’t last long, her friend claimed, a few months and it will all blow over. They stayed, we stayed, in that village for more than three years, with my mother’s constant complaints that it would have been so much better for her in Belgrade, even when the rumours reached them about the camp at the Fairgrounds. By then, however, it was no longer the Judenlager Semlin, but the Anhaltenlager Semlin — the Zemun Reception Camp — the Jews were all gone. Götz and Meyer had long since returned to Berlin with their incapacitated truck. What sort of group did they belong to, those who seek their fate or those who wait for it patiently, shifting from one foot to the other? For me every driver i