I didn’t hear anything he was telling me. I was undeterred. The more the bookkeeper argued against it, the more insistent I became. The whole reason I was in Poland went back to the intercepted letter from Alfried Krupp—why wouldn’t I take the initiative and try to gather information from inside the very same factory? I insisted, out of a sense of defiance that I believed to be valorous but that was nothing more than a boy’s anger at being treated like a boy. Eventually I told the bookkeeper that I’d find a way into the factory with or without him, and he relented. It’s a miracle he didn’t have someone in the resistance kill me then. I was lucky that, in the midst of all that chaos, he’d held on to a shred of his humanity.
He said he’d get me in for the express purpose of reconnaissance. I was not to try to recruit anyone, I was not to breathe a subversive word to a soul. I agreed. They had their own prisoner-electricians at the factory, but as it happened, by and by there was some high-voltage work to be done on a milling machine and it had to be done correctly, so the master electrician from town was summoned, and as his apprentice, I went along to assist. The factory administration told us that under no circumstances were we to speak to the prisoners except to conscript them if we needed labor for the repairs.
The factory was cavernous. Furious noise and acrid air. Gray concrete and screaming machines carving steel. The first thing I saw when we walked in was a beating, a boy, a teenager, who’d fallen asleep at an inopportune moment and had been spotted by an SS guard. His legs were covered in open wounds, bruises. His feet were mangled.
Twenty-five on the backside with the truncheon. I couldn’t believe that his heart didn’t stop, but he appeared to be alive when they dragged him off. If he’d been killed, they would have rolled him against the wall until the end of the shift and then the others would carry the corpse back to camp. Then tossed in a truck and carted to the ovens at Gross-Rosen.
The master electrician leaned over and whispered to me, What’s wrong? You look like you’ve never seen a slaughterhouse before. He hated me for bringing him to that place, for putting him in such close proximity to the horrors there, for risking his life. In fact, he never spoke to me again after that day in the Berthawerke.
It was a big job. The inside of the machine had been carbonized from a fire caused by a short, and we had to replace every inch of wire, from the heavy-gauge copper cabling down to the little switch wires for the on/off lights. Everything that wasn’t steel had melted. Of course, it had been sabotaged at the behest of our bookkeeper from Lodz. Now, this machine was German. It had been brought in from Essen, and there were a number of recessed panels within the machine, and etched into the inside of each door was a schematic with detailed instructions in German. Neither the electrician nor I could read them, so we requested a translator, and a Polish Jew was assigned the task, a man named Stern—Janusz Stern. He was old enough to be my father, a ring of gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses, a gentle man. Patient. He’d been a teacher in Poznań.
He and I spent a considerable amount of time inside the machine together, in a space about the size of a phone booth, Janusz translating the panels aloud by flashlight, me with a pad and pencil taking transcription as he read, sketching up the schematics. He was all business. There was an SS guard standing just outside the hatch, and once we had a panel translated, Stern would crawl back out and wait by the guard. The master electrician would climb in to lay up the wiring. There were fifteen or twenty of these panels, each bank of instructions very detailed, and by the end of the day Stern and I had spent many hours together. To that point, as I say, he was all business, except for apologizing from time to time for his smell—it was wintertime, and he smelled no worse than I or anyone else, but it was his way of politely suggesting that he was something more than the prisoner crouching next to me. His hands shook from cold the entire time but there was nothing I could do for him, even though I had a nice warm coat and a hat. The guard might pop his head in at any time, and even if I’d only lent him the hat, that would be the end of Janusz. He didn’t complain once, and went about the work pleasantly. He seemed to know intuitively when to pause to allow me to catch up, when to carry on, and his translations were very precise. He never had to rephrase anything. He must have been a superb teacher.
So we worked this way for the better part of the day, and as we finished up the final panel, he turned his face to me and looked into my eyes. He was between me and the hatch—there was no space for me to back into. I couldn’t even lean away from him, it was so tight. I said nothing, but I tensed, ready for close-quarters hand-to-hand if he gave the slightest intention that he meant to do me harm. His face came closer and closer, moving so slowly that I could hear him blinking. Closer and closer, as though he was moving in to kiss me. Then his lips were grazing my ear. He grabbed my hand, the way you’d take a child’s hand to cross the street. And in an almost imperceptible voice he whispered, Szybko, szybko, powiedz mi żart. Quickly, quickly, tell me a joke.
I didn’t understand. Was it some sort of code? I shook my head. He said again, Quickly, a short joke.
A joke? Was this a trap? I had to decide on the spot. I say, loud enough for the guard to hear, Can you look at this section again? Is it correct? And he says, Yes, let me have a look, give me the pad.
I turn my head so that now my lips are against his ear. A joke, I say. He’s as still as stone. I whisper: Field Marshal Keitel returns home from another long day at high command. He takes off his boots and coat, hangs up his hat, and calls out, Liebschen, I’m home! There’s no response, so he goes up the stairs to his bedroom. He opens the door, only to find his wife in bed with Field Marshal Goering. Keitel lets out a heartbroken moan, unholsters his sidearm, and puts it to his own temple. His wife starts laughing and says, You idiot! And Keitel screams, Don’t laugh, you’re next!
This camp where the Jews were imprisoned—Fünfteichen. This was a place of absolute suffering. There were no Dantesque levels of punishment or Miltonian realms of existential pain. There was white, blinding horror, nothing more. There was no separation from god because the existence of the camp itself was confirmation that there was no such thing as god. In a place like that, each person was his own hell.
Yet I was told they prayed even as the guards beat the life out of them. Their lips moved. Because what else can a person do? Hitler hated Jews because he believed they were responsible for creating the individual. Did you know that? He blamed them for introducing philosophies that distracted human beings from constant race war, which he believed to be the natural order. In Hitler’s philosophy, such as it was, the natural state was the state of the animal kingdom. The strong and fast devouring the weak and slow. The strong reproducing. Repeat. Hitler blamed Jewish philosophers for the invention of humanism. Self-knowledge was a Jewish disease. Hitler made them responsible for empathy and the principles that suggest all races might live together in peace. In Hitler’s new era, there was no concept of empathy. There were no nations, either, only races fighting for dominance.