The Devil's Playground (37 page)

started when I got on that train, or more precisely, when I got off the train.

‘I arrived in the winter. The Polish air was cold and bitter and snow lay thick and sleepy over the ground. You know the way snow can

muffle sounds, well, when I got off the train, I felt like I had stepped into some Dali-esque world, some soft, soundless place.’

‘What was it like?’

Jake’s voice was calm, interested but also trailing a wisp of

uneasiness mixed with impatience.

‘Tell me about Auschwitz.’

The Doctor stared at the camera, laughed.

‘Yes, everyone wants to know what it was like. The more terrible a thing is, the more they want to know. Think they’ll understand it.’

The Doctor laughed, turned his head to the left, staring at

his invisible inquisitor.

‘Yes, all right, I will try to tell you. I remember that it was bitterly cold that morning, a sort of visceral cold that I had not previously experienced. The kind of cold that you can feel in your teeth, that makes you aware of every part of your body, its discomforts and

sudden exposure. On disembarking I had lined up like the rest.

When they asked me what I did, I told them I was a doctor, and they sent me to a line where we waited for our tattoos. The next day Dr Werner, an SS man, informed me that I was to be his assistant. He

took me to the “Ramp”. Showed me how it worked.

‘It was an incredible thing, you could hear the screaming before

you heard the trains approach. The endless procession of blinkered cars that came to a stop at the large ramp. You ask me what it was like? If only I could take you there and show you, it was a unique place and a unique moment in history.’

‘Tell me. I need to know.’

Annoyance was creeping into Jake’s voice.

‘Well, you could hear the Jewish band playing soft Viennese waltzes in the cold February air as the figures were unpacked from the train.

Guttural shouts of “Raus! Raus!” and a mass of slow dejected

movement spilled out, hurried along by clubs and whips. The soldiers beat and kicked those who didn’t move fast enough, the elderly, the sick and the young. The band continued playing as prisoners threw the corpses out of the train. Withered skeletons draped with a thin layer of flesh like greaseproof paper. You could see men in striped burlap, shaven-headed, sunken-cheeked ghosts that slowly went around collecting the newly arrived group’s luggage and belongings like obedient bell-hops at a seaside resort town.’

The Doctor leaned back, continued.

The crowd are told to stand still. A handsome, immaculately dressed officer with a gold rosette in his lapel tells them in a soothing southern German lilt that their troubles are over, that here they will work and here they will live. They have merely been relocated. He promises them that they will be kept together; families, the old, the sick, the newly born. They listen to the lachrymose nostalgic sounds of the band and they believe him. Anything else just wouldn’t make sense, after all, would it?

‘They line up as they are told. Those who do not are shot, or beaten to death by smiling soldiers. The officer makes his way down the line, humming a jolly melody that was popular back in the twenties. With a point of his finger he signals either left or right. A quick, almost invisible, movement. The old and the sick, the women and the children go to one line, the healthy and strong to another. He tells them that one line is for those that can work and that the other is for those whose duties will consist of “housekeeping”. The people duly follow his finger, placing themselves on either side of the ramp. You can see that the logic of this affair begins to dawn on some of the prisoners, they smell that strange heavy burnt scent in the air and they can see the massive, red-brick chimneys that silently spew black smoke into the February sky. And, if you look closely, you can see them trying to make themselves look taller, more confident smiling, as the Angel of Death passes them by.

‘A hunchback and a midget are taken to one side. The officer with

the gold rosette questions them and then orders the soldiers to take them to the hospital. The healthy and young are marched away,

towards the barbed wire and the barracks in the distance. The other group heads for the building with the chimneys. They follow silently as the guards shout orders at them. Some of the older ones stumble and fall. They are shot with one bullet to the back of the head or clubbed to death for expediency. The majority of the group take no notice, they believe the SS are shooting at troublemakers, they do not want to believe what they hear. It would have grave repercussions for the rest of them.

‘They stop in front of the brick building. The dashing officer tells them that before they can go to their camp they must first be

disinfected. He takes great relish in pronouncing the word.

They are led across a small cinder path, down some iron steps

and into a massive room. They see the sign at the entrance that

says “Baths and Disinfecting Area” in four languages and they feel relieved. The two hundred selected people crowd into the room. It

is whitewashed and brightly lit and it augurs well. There are wooden benches along its length and hundreds of individually numbered

hangers, the type you might see in any municipal swimming pool or

sports ground. They are told that they will have to take off all their clothes before they can go into the showers. Old men look at each

other, girls blush - after all that has happened they still have some dignity left. But the second order is more menacing and the barrels of the guns point at them, so they slowly take off their clothes. The SS officer puts a great emphasis on the need for them to tie their shoes together and keep their belongings tidily bundled. Some of

the older men laugh at this latest example of German fastidiousness as they knot their shoes, little knowing that pairs of shoes so neatly tied are easier to collect for the home front. The officer informs them of the necessity for them to remember their numbers so that they

can pick up the right set of clothes when they are finished with the disinfecting baths. A huge, collective, sub-vocal sigh of relief goes through the huddled, cold mass of women and children, the old and

the sick, the rabbis and intellectuals.

‘A large oak door opens at the far end of the locker room and they are ordered to go into the shower area where the disinfecting will take place. They slowly walk into the large room, stumbling, not

really wanting to be the first in, some helping the elderly step through, others carrying the large number of babies and small children who

are to be disinfected. The room is once again brightly lit and they look up at the shower-heads in the wall, not knowing that they

are dummies, unconnected and dry. They notice the free-standing

square columns that line the length of the room. Each column has

many small perforations but they cannot begin to guess what

they are.

‘Meanwhile, an International Red Cross van arrives, and two young

SS unload silver canisters of gas from it. The canisters have written on them in large letters, “Poison: For the Destruction of Parasites”.

This is what passes for humour.

‘Down below, the group stands silently as the door is closed. There is a strange atmosphere in the room and all the long-standing fears that they had managed to keep buried all this time suddenly rise up and fill them with dread. A boy cries in the corner, his voice sounding metallic and already dead as it bounces off the tiled walls of the shower room. Babies begin screaming as the lights go off.

Then they hear the water hissing through the shower-heads but they feel no moisture raining down upon them as the room begins to fill up with Zyklon B. A mad scramble ensues. The gas starts at the bottom and works its way up. They are trying to outrun it but the bodies they trample on to get there only go to show that there 1

is no escape, only perhaps a minute or two of respite. The screams reverberate all around the chamber as people climb on to the bodies of the dead, fighting and scratching each other, trying to reach higher ground. Screaming and shouting and crying and praying and shitting and pissing all over their own dead bodies.

The SS doctor in charge opens the viewing hatch. He looks into

the shower room and sees the familiar pyramid of corpses at the far end. He is, by now, used to this strange sight, having witnessed it hundreds upon hundreds of times during his stay at the camp. He

motions to an officer who turns on the electric ventilator. Twenty minutes later, twelve Sonderkommando wearing gas masks come in

and hose down the mountain of corpses stuck together by sweat

and shit and menstrual blood. They carry them to the elevators and send them down to the ovens.

‘In the bright and whitewashed incineration room, the Angel of

Death floats by on the way to his lab. He does not seem unduly

concerned by the overwhelming smell of the burnt flesh nor by the

backlog of bodies stacked up, waiting their turn in the ovens, like pizzas in a busy restaurant.

The men from the Kommando bring the new bodies to the dentists

and hairdressers, the only place in the camp where these services

are available. The hairdressers take the corpses and expertly shave off all head and pubic hair. They place the hair to one side, from where it is collected and sent to a factory in Leipzig that makes

amazing things for U-boats out of it. Then, one by one, the good

Jewish dentists extract all the gold fillings from the mouths of the dead. They use a lever and a pair of pliers; men once renowned

professors of dental medicine at all the leading German universities now prise apart the jaws of the dead, their dead, and extract gold filings, bridges and other shiny things. They put the gold into a

bucket containing an acid that melts away any pieces of flesh or bone that might still be clinging to the metal. They also take off any jewellery or ornaments which they throw into a small area to their left that by the end of the evening will be an Everest of gold and sparkling jewels. One man’s job is to insert his fingers into the vaginas and rectums of the dead looking for hidden valuables. That is what he does all day long until, he too, is sent the same way these corpses came.

‘Fifteen immense shiny doors line the length of one wall. Members

of the Kommando open them and orange spears of fire spill out, as

three by three, the bodies are put into the blazing ovens and sent into the sky. When the ovens have cooled, the remaining ashes are

swept up, loaded into a Red Cross van and deposited into the dark

and turbulent waters of the Vistula.’

The doctor lit one of his cigarettes and took two quick drags.

That was my first day at the camp. It was quite an education as you can imagine.’

‘And how did you feel?’

‘What kind of question is that? It was a long time ago. Now all I

have is memories, what I felt then is lost, gone for ever.’

‘But your people were being killed?’

The Doctor turned from the camera, looked towards Jake.

‘My people? My dear Jakob, you are making the very same mistake

that the Germans made. You think those Romanian and French and

Polish peasants were my people? That I had anything in common

with them apart from a birthright? That is plain stupid. I felt closer to the Germans than I did to most of the other prisoners. That is not to say it wasn’t a terrible thing. It was. But you get used to things. I can’t explain it to someone who wasn’t there. You think, how can

anyone get used to that? But you’d be surprised what people get

used to when they haven’t got a choice.’

‘You were there for selections?’

‘Yes. It was better that I, as a doctor, helped with these. But there was no order to it, only the pretence of order, I found that out soon enough. Sometimes we were told that everyone on that day’s train

would have to go straight to the gas chambers. The camp was

overfilled and Jews were streaming in at an amazing rate from all

corners of the Reich. Sometimes we had to do what was necessary

to keep the ecology of the camp stable. Other times it was the

Goebbels Calendar.’

The Goebbels Calendar?’

‘Ach, it was the man’s twisted sense of humour. Ever since the

mid-thirties, the days of Jewish holiness and festivity were designated by Goebbels for the grandest of actions. The Day of Atonement

was always a big one. Many ghettos burned on that day. Many

deportations and executions. In the camp we had to make extra

selections and everyone newly arrived was not given a tattoo but

marched straight to the chamber.’

‘And you never objected?’

‘What, you think I could have changed all that? You think for one

minute that I wouldn’t have been walking the same path to the

shower rooms if I hadn’t co-operated?’

‘But this way they win.’

‘My dear Jakob, either way, they won. That was how it was. For

them, the ramp was the cornerstone of their philosophy, you could

see the awe in their eyes. I think for the Nazis it was almost a

transcendent moment, not in any cheap religious way or anything,

no, it was something much more spiritual; they really believed that they were reaching into the essence of the Volkische, into that deep well of ancestral history and memory. That they were diving down

to where the water was clear, where it had not been polluted and

poisoned, and I too have to admit that there was a certain seduction to it. They saw us, the Jews, as the rotten appendix threatening to burst and spill its poison all through the Fatherland. Once they

believed that, the rest followed. What starts as metaphor soon