Parallel Stories: A Novel (114 page)

Success would also be denied because in his heart he had always kept a place for tenderness. Should blame no one but himself.

And then, dead silence in the barracks, for a brief moment, frozen stillness. The very same thing, although with a slight delay, in the noise of distant cannon fire that reached, separately, everyone’s consciousness.

That Bulla might have betrayed them.

Perhaps it was the low-hanging, heavy metal lampshades that were amplifying the fine humming of the strong lightbulbs. Several people had been beaten to death with these shades. The silence of about four hundred men; this too has considerable weight. During the last days, an even two hundred more had been let in, drawn from evacuees of one enemy-threatened camp or other; overall, there were now more than four thousand in the camp. Himmler ordered that these people be neither killed nor left behind to the enemy, an order that was impossible to carry out but from which one could deduce that the leadership was hoping for a favorable turn in the conduct of the war. There were so many dead that they could not be burned in the crematorium’s two small ovens. The bodies, like logs, were stacked in piles in front of the north gate. During the day when it thawed for several hours, the naked piles began to loosen and stink; the pale bodies slid and wobbled, while on-foot transports of exhausted people, screaming with hunger and filthy with dysentery, kept arriving. Kramer needed all his ingenuity and cruelty to ensure that they could stay together in the great congestion, at least in their sleeping places, and that they had something to eat; most likely, the kapos’ blows sealed the fate of several people who, unsuspecting, had wanted to crawl into those two sleeping places.

The newcomers fell silent together with the old-timers.

Many of them believed that König or perhaps Königer was the real name of the person who was now the focus of four hundred silent faces; even his orderly, who slept next to him, did not have to share his place with anyone. Some of them added the name Bear. Now they could see and hear that Walter Kramer was the name of this hulking, stentorian German who in the eyes of the camp’s veterans was king of the Pfeilen camp. Peix should have feared him too, because of his size and voice, but he did not.

A simple locksmith, a man like you or me or anyone else. A kind and dedicated communist whom the Gestapo had arrested in January 1939 in the brilliant snow-covered mountains. Since then he’s become completely gray. For four months, they kept him chained to a cell wall, his handcuffed hands tight behind his back. If it hadn’t been for his guard who out of mercy regularly loosened his rope for a few hours and took off the handcuffs, his arms would probably have had to be amputated. They arrested his wife, who, after protracted torture, asked him to end the nightmare by making a detailed confession. Hearing the request, what else could he have done: he banished from his heart the woman who had allowed herself to be instructed by his torturers. If he had acceded to her request, he would have had to betray more than a dozen men. Maggots settled in his festering wounds and by the time the prison doctor was willing to take a look, they had eaten a good-size chunk out of his shoulder and thigh. He had a barely perceptible limp and he could now not fully raise his left arm.

Of course they managed to get the information they needed out of other prisoners, his wife being one of them.

He had too much to answer for; he killed without giving it a thought.

By then he had been smuggling comrades across the Czechoslovak border, near Annaberg. These people had gone all the way to Prague or Moscow, or happened to be sent back from those cities with new assignments of illegal work. Kramer stayed mainly in Chemnitz and conducted operations from there, working with runners. He developed an entire network of smugglers and confidential collaborators whom he did not know personally but about whom he knew everything. It finally took a dozen agents to surround him and catch him. But not before he killed two of them. The last person he smuggled over the border was the young son of a Hungarian comrade of his named Kovách. He had to rescue him from the Wolkenstein hunting lodge, from a secret boarding school for boys well concealed in the Erzgebirge woods and used for genetic experimentation. He did not want to entrust this delicate operation to anyone else. But by then agents were following his every step. The child got across all right, a car was waiting for him on the other side, but Kramer was wounded in his shoulder and thigh.

He returned fire as he fell and could still see the car speeding away in the snow despite a damaged rear wheel.

But now he did not see how he could go on.

And he had accomplished so much in the camp with his incredible caution and implacably calm nature.

For a long time he had been considered the master of life and death in the Pfeilen camp. When he had been first called up, near the end of the Great War, he had completed his training as a medic, having seen typhoid fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, all manner of injuries and mutilations. In times of need, SS officers had him operate on them instead of prisoner doctors or, especially, the two SS surgeons, since one was an alcoholic whose hands shook terribly if he did not have something to drink every hour, and the other was probably a morphine addict with similar problems in getting his required dope—where to get it and how many milligrams to inject. But now, despite everything he had done, Kramer had to go to the south gate because of Peix.

At first they entrusted him only with disgusting, septic operations, out of convenience and because the two surgeons feared infection. Kramer became a specialist in purulent inflammations; every morning he had to open and expertly clean these terrible wounds by the dozen. After a year in the pathology section of Buchenwald, he knew no less about human anatomy than the learned physicians did. The pathology section was shared by the men’s and women’s camp—the only place where not only body parts of both men and women, kept in thick-walled glass vessels, came in contact on the same table but where prisoners of both sexes worked and ate together; some of them were well-known specialists. Life was comfortable and convivial; the men cooked for themselves, could bathe to their heart’s content and chat endlessly with their shaven-headed female colleagues. Kramer worked with an elderly Jewish pathological anatomist, a prosector, who had been the head of his department at the university in Prague. The furnishing, installations, and equipment of the two dissecting rooms met the requirements of the most modern medical technology. Every morning they had to select in the barracks, and then in the mortuary of the sick bay, the
Krankenrevier
, those bodies that showed some deformation of a hereditary character or bodily anomalies that might be considered exceptional. The corpses had to be those of Jews. Organs and limbs of scientific interest were severed and together with detailed, comprehensive autopsy reports were shipped to Berlin, to the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Dahlem, on Ihne Street. The addressee was always a certain Prof. Dr. Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, and two large red stamps were always affixed to the package. One stamp called attention to the fragile contents and the other to the urgency and speed with which the shipment, of great military importance, must reach its destination. On each occasion, its arrival was duly acknowledged by Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, whom the laboratory workers in the camp imagined to be the feminine version of the famous former pathologist from Prague: short, round, and bespectacled. Sometimes she addressed brief questions to her colleagues, and these questions revealed her attentiveness and expertise. Professor Nussbaum never mentioned that the baroness had been his student in Prague, but perhaps he did not even remember her. At other times, in exceedingly warm words, the baroness expressed joy regarding the excellent condition or the professionalism of the autopsy findings.

All the autopsy material had to be stored in the refrigerator until permission came from Ihne Street regarding the exceptional cases.

On very rare occasions, there were instructions to boil a corpse down to the skeleton and then preserve it in a benzene bath. Or not to boil it but rather to dissolve the softer tissue in chloride of lime; this was the longer procedure. In any case, a collegial and friendly relationship developed between the camp laboratory and Ihne Street which neither their respective situations nor their tasks could begin to justify.

Later, in Pfeilen, troublesome aseptic cases were also assigned to Kramer, such as hopeless orthopedic operations and amputations. By then, Obersturmführer Eisele, who in the chaos of the approaching collapse had lost all sense of self-discipline, had been absent for more than a week. Nobody missed him and probably nobody held it against him that lately, with the help of SS physicians, he had been selecting many of the sick to be taken to the north gate, to the open area covered with snow. From the guard tower they shot only those who tried to crawl away; the rest stayed until their turn came. According to the criminals in the camp, Eisele’s wife and two small children had been evacuated in a lightning-fast action, before dawn, from the officers’ quarters in a suburb of the town. Peix had relayed this news to Kramer by the next morning. They both knew what danger awaited them. From the viewpoint of the communist cells, Eisele’s constant use of Peix offered considerable protection, but Eisele had reasons to maintain a tight and passionate relationship with the criminals too. In every possible and impossible secret hiding place, in the mouth and anus of every living and dead person he had been searching for gold, and proved to be very good at it. If he could be made to disappear, just like that, along with his accumulated gold, there was a good chance the criminals would make their own move against the now-defenseless Kramer.

What they really wanted, however, was Peix, alive.

This was such a threat to life in the camp that, to avoid it, the four hundred prisoners were ready to continue their panic-filled silence in the dark barracks for a long time, but the loudspeaker started to crackle, then play music. If this can happen, anything may happen is what people usually say in such cases. It was once again the famous entrance of Countess Maritza from the Kálmán operetta,
*
blasting at the prisoners from early morning until late at night so they could not hear the sound of cannons.

Kramer has to perish alone.

Nothing more terrible than this could possibly happen in the camp, because it would leave Peix on his own, with no one to restrain him, to keep him from doing whatever he pleased.

Döhring, the commandant’s new deputy, the younger and crueler of the two Döhring brothers, would surely use Peix differently from the way his predecessor Eisele had done.

Kramer might have been the only person to whom it never occurred that for other people real hell meant Peix.

Everyone was terrified of Peix.

A few days sufficed for newcomers to become terrified by the beauty of this healthy, strong person. Many of them would start coughing at the sight of him.

Past the pine forest, in the middle of a plowed field, Eisele had ordered a long, wide burning pit to be dug, seven meters wide and four meters deep, and for more than a week the living and the dead had been burning in it. A nice footpath led to the pit from the north gate. They set the fire with gasoline, applied generously, and when hair, skin, and fat were happily blazing with eager little flames, they kept on feeding the fire. This was Eisele’s last deed, which does not sound too good but, as people in Pfeilen then said, it was necessary to prevent epidemics; the pit smoked and sizzled. Brains and spinal marrow oozed from skulls and spines opening in the heat at the wide bottom of the pit and very slowly began to glow. Brain and spinal marrow become flammable only at a very high temperature. The high temperature was created by the corpses’ own energies. Easily flammable fatty and hairy parts continually ignited the burning mass. Even if people had wanted to, the fire couldn’t have been put out. After a while, the liquid brains acted as perpetual kindling. Of this, however, nobody spoke in either of the two small towns nearby or in the camp itself; all of them, unequivocally and despite the confusion, inhaled the stench of burning human flesh and bones, and had the impression that the smell had a material-like substance, something sticky, and that they were also eating it. It was impossible not to inhale it. The smell and taste in one’s saliva became a little like those of cheap church candles made of tallow. People coughed cautiously whenever the wind blew across the low pine forest, because after a cough one would have to inhale more deeply. Although they had grown used to everything, the knowledge that burning human flesh was what their sense organs were experiencing in this peculiar way and that tomorrow, in all probability, they too would be burning brought tears to their eyes and literally deprived them of air. Acrolein, which is nothing but unsaturated aldehyde, mildly polymerized at high temperatures, stinks like this; it irritates the mucous membranes whether or not one knows what sort of chemical and physical processes are taking place.

Big, strong young men were terrified of him no less than decrepit enfeebled old ones, who, perhaps because of their stupor and helplessness, might enjoy another happy half hour under the eaves of the
Krankenrevier
. But if Peix had a chance, he tortured these men too. They warmed themselves in the pale sunshine, together with the flies that dared emerge from the cracks in the dark-brown plank wall of the barracks. Icicles dripped happily. Squatting above the filth and stench of their own dysentery, these men waited for Kramer to perform a miracle and perhaps find room for them. The flies still had enough strength to crawl onto the men’s warm necks, where they became stuck or fell down and buzzed in the stubble-like growth that appeared in place of normal hair. If Kramer saw somebody persevering, he might have him sent to the sick bay, or at least the rumor among the prisoners was that he would find beds for them there. Until somebody else died in bed, they could lie on the cold stones in the warm, clean air and, in their fever-induced daydreams, stare at the snow-covered beautiful pine trees outside.