Götz and Meyer

bon, 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 is someone seeking his own fate, if not provoking it, and this is why I have never learned to drive, but that cannot be taken as a yardstick in conditions of war. I must be fair to Götz and Meyer, I often thought, not only because of their cautious drive to Jajinci but just for the sake of being fair. They, too, had the right to be misled and hoodwinked as much as the Jewish prisoners did, I can’t possibly deny that. But all I had to do was picture one of them crouching to move the exhaust pipe of the truck over, and everything in me would be smashed to bits. Their load was still alive then, the trip had only just begun, and the brief stop did not arouse any doubts among the Jews. They were far more disturbed by the fact that they were travelling in the dark and that there was no room for them to get more comfortable. They felt the aluminium-covered walls and the wooden flooring, they touched each other and thanked the Lord that they weren’t blind, it would be so terrible to live in eternal darkness, and then, with a shudder, the truck set off again, they could hear the engine rumbling good-naturedly, they could even smell the fuel, well that’s all right, at least they were back on the road again, just so they’d never have to return to the cold and the hunger. If they could have, they probably would have shouted to Götz and Meyer to drive a little faster, to get as far from there as possible, to pay no attention to their nausea and mild headaches, surely from all the jouncing around and lack of fresh air, these were just little discomforts compared to what they were leaving behind. They had no idea how much further and airier than anything they had imagined those distances would be. And Götz, and Meyer, drove along, whistling, exchanging jokes. Every job done according to a strictly defined formula becomes tedious in time. At first it is interesting, the second time confirms the first, by the fifth time it inspires annoyance, by the tenth it is routine, and by the fifteenth time Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, announces that he could drive to Jajinci with his eyes closed. Meyer, or was it Götz, who is always extra cautious, feels that it is probably a better idea to drive with your eyes open, all it takes is for a cat to cross your path, not even a black one, and everything acquires a new dimension, a new meaning. Götz, or Meyer, shrugs this off. There is no such cat, he says, which could stop the victorious advance of the German Reich, not even in a land as wild as this Serbia is, where the cats scratch more than they did back in the Fatherland. Then they fall silent. Both of them are thinking of the cats they used to know: Götz, or maybe Meyer, thinks of a Siamese cat which his maiden aunt used to comb every day and feed with all sorts of treats, while Meyer, or maybe it was Götz, recalls a tiny striped cat that used to come into their garden, and he put its eye out with a stone from his slingshot. And then he sinks into fantasies about flying a fighter plane. It isn’t nice, but there are times when he wishes that his fellow traveller would become ill, nothing too serious: a slightly worse cold with a bad cough, just enough so that he could be alone in the truck for one day, and then he’d put on his pilot’s cap by the obligatory open window. It never happened, and if it did, there is no written trace of it. They were healthy lads, sturdy and resilient like all true members of the SS, not like those nobodies behind them to whom everything stuck like flies to flypaper. How much time had to pass for the required fifth of a per cent to accumulate? And did the diameter of the exhaust pipe, no less than 58 nor greater than 60 millimetres, have a part to play in this? What would have happened if it had been larger? Or smaller? Look at what I have been filling my head with since I turned 50. I fill page after page with figures and information which I copy from books with fragile pages in archival cellars, although I have no idea what to do with most of it. For instance, on the basis of the report of the acting chief of the Section for Social Welfare and Social Institutions of the Municipality of Belgrade, written on April 17th, 1942, precisely 1,341,950 meals were issued to feed Jews at the Fairgrounds camp. What do I divide that by? If I presume that there were 5,500 Jews at the camp on average every day, and that no food was delivered right from the very first day, it works out that every one of them received nearly two full meals per day, more precisely: 1.96 meals per day. But if one knows that the number of delivered meals is based on the total amount of delivered foodstuffs, most of which were not edible to begin with, that produces a rather different figure, around 1.3 meals per day. The food at the camp was served up with spoons of various sizes, only some of which corresponded to the standard of four decilitres, and this, as well as the fact that during April the number of prisoners dropped dizzyingly, sends this calculation into the sphere of higher mathematics, at least it does for me, a teacher of the Serbo-Croatian language and the literatures of the Yugoslav peoples. It is no wonder that I can’t sleep night after night, and that in the morning, when I go down to the corner shop, I find myself counting loaves of bread in delivery crates, multiplying that number by the number of crates, and then multiplying that by the average weight of a loaf and, finally, dividing by 150 grams, which was what the prisoners at the Fairgrounds, according to the testimony of witnesses, received daily. One night, exhausted by all the figures, I dreamed of Götz, or maybe it was Meyer. We were sitting, he and I, in the cockpit of a fighter plane, crammed into the single pilot’s seat, and he told me, in Serbian but with a strong German accent, the figures on the number of shells and machine-gun rounds, the fuel consumption and the flight speed, and finally he turned to me and said that he had given away 327 chocolates. In my dream, just as when I’m awake, he had no face, the earflaps and ties on his pilot’s cap framed a space of whiteness. Only his lips were bright red, as if he had applied a thick layer of lipstick. I leaned over and looked out of the window, and below, quite clearly, I could see the blueprints for the Belgrade Fair, precisely as it was imagined by the architects Milivoje Tričković, Rajko Tatić and Djordje Lukić. And now, said Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, we will look at all of this up close, the plane began to plummet with a piercing whine, straight for the blueprint of the Central Tower, and, with a shriek, I woke. I lay in the dark, afraid to breathe. But if before I could have been in a plane, now I might be in the back of the Saurer, and the longer I held my breath, the longer I’d be able to preserve my soul. How long can a person hold his breath? Half a minute, one minute, two? I counted to 38 to myself, my lungs bursting. I gasped and gulped greedily at the air. In the flat above me I could hear soft footsteps and knew that it was my soul, cloaked in a garment of the thinnest light, moving lightly along a path I still had to discover. Götz and Meyer wouldn’t care for this frequent mention of souls, as I have said before. According to them, a person is a sack, and when everything is shaken out of the sack, it is over. All that is left is the rag, and rags are no good for anything. Sometimes, when they’d clean out the truck in the yard of the police station, Götz and Meyer would find odds and ends: a child’s shoe, a comb, a blurred photograph, a crust of bread, a handkerchief, a nail file, a brooch. Götz, or Meyer, would drop these things into a paper bag; Meyer, or Götz, preferred not to touch them. Nothing sadder than things without owners, even he knew that, just as he knew that the time of the Reich was a time of joy and little things like these dared not degrade it. How old were Götz and Meyer? One more question I can’t answer. When one of my students is unable to answer a question, for example on the structure of a wreath of sonnets, I do not hesitate to enter, first in my notebook and then in the register, a bad grade. If I were to apply the same criteria to myself, I would have been held back long ago. So it goes with history, the woman told me from whom I’d heard the story abo