He paused.
“You know, we Germans are in love with death.”
He was talking to himself, to his dead lover. For her, death had been neither the sister nor the mother of beauty.
She remained silent. His words seemed ridiculous, nonsensical. “It was late August and we watched the showers of meteorites.
A rain of shooting stars in an August night. Lilo called them laurel tears. It was the ioth of August, Saint Laurentius’ day. Fireflies.”
“She knew more about war than she wanted to know. That was her second year out east. Kursk, the great tank battle, was in her bones.”
He paused, then continued.
“I too know more about war than I would wish to. The beautiful side and the merely necessary one. What about you?”
“I’m new here,” Skinny answered.
“Who initiated you?”
“We aren’t supposed to talk of anyone we’ve been with.”
“I can see we’re not suited to polite conversation,” he said. “I only talk to you, but you don’t talk to me.”
“I answer you.”
“When I was a little boy our parents took us to the Savoy Alps in France for a winter holiday. The mist in the valleys had a similar colour to this fog here. It was beautiful, unattainable and sad. At lunchtime, as we sat in the dining room, the sun lit up the snow-covered trees and shrubs so fiercely that for just a few moments it was as though they were made of glass. They had an almost surreal brilliance. Father pointed it out to us. He loved the snow, the mountains, winter. In the evening, at the Golden Court Hotel, father showed us Mont Blanc in the moonlight. He had tears in his eyes.”
Did it amuse him to confide in a little tart who did not have much to say for herself? She realized that he was treating her as if he wanted to make her a friend, or create something memorable between them.
“I’m feeling lonely. I feel lonely wherever I am.” Then he said: “I kill in order not to be killed and I experience life most intensely with people like you.”
Suddenly Skinny felt like telling him that she was 15 and Jewish. But only for a hundredth of a second. Instead, she walked over to stoke up the fire. She thought of her race and his. Of her legislated uncleanliness alongside his immaculate race. The things the captain had told her were intended for the ears of a pure-blood. If he knew that she was Jewish he would treat her like a diseased person whose skin was covered with impurities. He would shrink from touching her, he would let her be exterminated.
“We lost 20,000 men,” the captain said. He did not say when.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau as many as that died in a single day and night, 20,000 people were the cargo of a mere four or five trains, each with 50 wagons, arriving from Prague, Warsaw, Copenhagen or Paris, from Bordeaux, Oslo, Berlin or Bremerhaven.
Soon none of this would interest anyone, anywhere. The victors would remain, the vanquished would disperse like vapour, blown by the wind to the Arctic Ocean. She knew everything about what she was not supposed to speak of. She no longer wondered how much of it was illusion. She took in what he was saying; she no longer asked herself why.
Four
On one occasion 50 girls from Block 18 had been driven to the No. 2 crematorium to clean up whatever the S S ordered them to. Skinny had found herself in a large underground room with three light bulbs in wire frames on the wooden beams across the ceiling. On the walls, where the concrete was cracked, there were brownish stains, just as there were on the floor and ceiling. No-one said that it was blood. It could have been blood and probably was. At first they felt a vague sense of relief at the thought that they were in a shower room. The door with a small window, of glass so thick that it seemed like translucent concrete, stood open against the wall so it wasn’t possible to see if there was a handle on the inside or not. The outside handle was of massive steel with a lock and a bolt. They understood that they were in a gas chamber. They were scrubbing the floor of a gas chamber. Skinny saw before her the rough concrete on which the bare feet of children, women and old people had stood; all of them together. Now the chamber was empty and there was no smell of gas, only an odour of decay, of a subterranean place. Under the ceiling, along the beams, ran the electricity supply in steel conduits, half sunk into the concrete so they couldn’t be torn out. The walls looked as if someone had emptied countless vats of water from above, water that had run down the sides and left stains, perhaps from sweat, or fingerprints, or torn skin. Or perhaps someone had hosed the walls down with a water jet. None of the women or girls said a word. They were overcome by a horror they dared not show.
An S S man watched them clean up, then said, enough, that would do. They were marched upstairs with their buckets, rags and mops. Possibly they were the only humans of their race who had been in a gas chamber and emerged alive.
For Skinny the concrete floor was fixed in her mind’s eye; she saw the little hollows she had noticed in the floor. What had caused them? They could have been made by hobnailed boots, but she knew that by then people were barefoot. What had caused those countless little grooves in the floor, like footprints? The image of the gas chamber was imprinted in her mind and would remain with her, she knew, for as long as she lived.
It was said that in Bordeaux a rail traffic controller wondered why the trains that left packed with thousands of Jews (as he had worked out for himself) all returned empty. In Vichy they had the exact numbers and the papers. They knew that 75,000, including thousands of children, had been rounded up with the help of informers who were lining their own pockets. All the French Jews were picked up by the French police. The Germans only looked on. An NCO who had come from France had told the traffic controller that the Red Cross workers there had recorded 50,000 children without parents. The adults had disappeared as early as the time of the evacuation of Paris, or they had been killed.
“We have sex to convince ourselves that we are still alive,” Captain Hentschel said. “Isn’t it the same for you?”
“I don’t know,” Skinny answered quickly.
“I like it to be nice. I don’t like to feel like an animal. Or if it has to be like an animal, then an agreeable animal. And this must apply to both sides. Even from the waist down you don’t have to be an animal.
“Ludicrous, isn’t it,” he said, “that my ancestors took their wives, daughters and children with them into battle. When things got tough, the wives bared their breasts to remind their warriors of what the enemy would squeeze in their hands if they let them win. We didn’t lose even against the Romans. If you want evidence, look at the fair-haired and blue-eyed Italians. I often look back to the days when we occupied lands beyond the Elbe.”
He mentioned Prague. It gave her a small jolt. In the cubicle, with Captain Hentschel, Prague seemed to her more remote by a dimension that could not be measured in miles any more than her experience could be measured in light years. Prague to her was a vanishing image, a dying echo, a star fading in the night sky. She did not want to think about the city that had been her home, a city that continued to live regardless of what had happened to so many. Prague was vanishing in darkness and mist, beyond a snow-covered wasteland by the River San, distant and unreal like the destinies of the nameless.
Then he spoke of the front near Moscow. The Germans had hoped to seize the Russian capital by a lightning campaign as early as the autumn of 1941. Their machine guns had mown down the enemy troops, wave by wave. But there were always more, like locusts. The Russians had to step over the mounds of their own dead. Suddenly Captain Hentschel’s troops had stopped firing. They understood the signal the enemy was sending them and they were seized with horror. The Russians had more men than the German army had ammunition.