Time's Arrow

* * *

  During week two the camp started filling up. In dribs and drabs, at first, then in flocks and herds. All this I watched through a spyhole, under a workbench in a disused supply hut toward the birch wood, with blanket, kümmel bottle—and rosary, fingered like an abacus, as I counted them in. I realized I had seen a few of these same processions on my way north through eastern Czechoslovakia, in Zilina and in Ostrava. The hearty trek and the bracing temperatures had obviously done the men good, though their condition, on arrival, still left much to be desired. And there weren’t enough of them. As in a dream one was harrowed by questions of scale, by impenetrable disparities. In their hundreds, even in their thousands, these stragglers could never fill the gaping universe of the Kat-Zet. Another source, another powerhouse, was desperately needed.… The short days were half over by the time I ventured from the hut (where my motorbike was also preserved. I kept examining it in a fond fever). The officers’ clubroom was busier now, and there were always new arrivals. It felt strange—no, it felt right that we should all know each other, as it were automatically: we, who had gathered here for a preternatural purpose. My German worked like a dream, like a brilliant robot you switch on and stand back and admire as it does all the hard work. Courage was arriving too, in uniformed human units, the numbers and the special daring adequate to the task we faced. How handsome men are. I mean their shoulders, their tremendous necks. By the end of the second week our clubhouse was the scene of strident song and bold laughter. One night, bumping into the doorway, and stepping over a colleague, I made my way out into the sleet, the toilets all being occupied, and as I crouched, steadying my cheek against the cold planks, I peered through the reeking shadows of Auschwitz and saw that the nearest ruins were fuming more than ever and had even begun to glow. There was a new smell in the air. The sweet smell.

  We needed magic, to resolve significance from what surrounded us, which scarcely permitted contemplation: we needed someone godlike—someone who could turn this world around. And in due course he came.… Not a tall man, but of the usual dimensions; coldly beautiful, true, with self-delighted eyes; graceful, chasteningly graceful in his athletic authority; and a doctor. Yes, a simple doctor. It was quite an entrance, I don’t mind telling you. Flashing through the birch wood came the white Mercedes-Benz, from which he leapt in his greatcoat and then dashed across the yard yelling out orders. I knew his name, and murmured it as I looked on from the supply hut, with my schnapps and my toilet paper: “Uncle Pepi.” The trash and wreckage before him was now shivering with fire as he stood, hands on hips, watching all his powers gather in the smoke. I turned slowly away and felt the rush and zip of violently animated matter. When, with a shout, I jerked my eye back to its hole, there was no smoke anywhere, only the necessary building, perfect, even to the irises and the low picket fence that lined its path, before which “Uncle Pepi” now stood, with one arm crooked and raised. Even to the large sign above the door: BRAUSEBAD. “Sprinkleroom,” I whispered, with a reverent snort. But now “Uncle Pepi” moved on. That morning, as I lay on the wooden floor of the supply hut with my teeth chattering in anticipation, I heard five more explosions. Velocity and fusion sucking up the shocked air. By the next day we were ready to go to work.

  What tells me that this is right? What tells me that all the rest was wrong? Certainly not my aesthetic sense. I would never claim that Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz was good to look at. Or to listen to, or to smell, or to taste, or to touch. There was, among my colleagues there, a general though desultory quest for greater elegance. I can understand that word, and all its yearning: elegant. Not for its elegance did I come to love the evening sky above the Vistula, hellish red with the gathering souls. Creation is easy. Also ugly. Hier ist kein warum. Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where. Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race. To make a people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas, with electricity, with shit, with fire.

  I or a doctor of equivalent rank was present at every stage in the sequence. One did not need to know why the ovens were so ugly, so very ugly. A tragically burly insect eight feet tall and made out of rust. Who would want to cook with an oven such as this? Pulleys, plungers, grates, and vents were the organs of the machine.… The patients, still dead, were delivered out on a stretcherlike apparatus. The air felt thick and warped with the magnetic heat of creation. Thence to the Chamber, where the bodies were stacked carefully and, in my view, counterintuitively, with babies and children at the base of the pile, then the women and the elderly, and then the men. It was my stubborn belief that it would be better the other way round, because the little ones surely risked injury under that press of naked weight. But it worked. Sometimes, my face rippling peculiarly with smiles and frowns, I would monitor proceedings through the viewing slit. There was usually a long wait while the gas was invisibly introduced by the ventilation grills. The dead look so dead. Dead bodies have their dead body language. It says nothing. I always felt a gorgeous relief at the moment of the first stirring. Then it was ugly again. Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches. It was I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat. Next, the facade of the Sprinkleroom, the function of whose spouts and nozzles (and numbered seats and wardrobe tickets, and signs in six or seven languages) was merely to reassure and not, alas, to cleanse; and the garden path beyond.

  Clothes, spectacles, hair, spinal braces, and so on—these came later. Entirely intelligibly, though, to prevent needless suffering, the dental work was usually completed while the patients were not yet alive. The Kapos would go at it, crudely but effectively, with knives or chisels or any tool that came to hand. Most of the gold we used, of course, came direct from the Reichsbank. But every German present, even the humblest, gave willingly of his own store—I more than any other officer save “Uncle Pepi” himself. I knew my gold had a sacred efficacy. All those years I amassed it, and polished it with my mind: for the Jews’ teeth. The bulk of the clothes were contributed by the Reich Youth Leadership. Hair for the Jews came courtesy of Filzfabrik A.G. of Roth, near Nuremberg. Freight cars full of it. Freight car after freight car.

  At this point, notwithstanding, I should like to log one of several possible caveats or reservations. In the Sprinkleroom the patients eventually get dressed in the clothes provided, which, though seldom very clean, are at least always pertinently cut. Here, the guards have a habit of touching the women. Sometimes—certainly—to bestow a jewel, a ring, a small valuable. But at other times quite gratuitously. Oh, I think they mean well enough. It is done in the irrepressible German manner: coltishly, and with lit face. And they only do it to the angry ones. And it definitely has the effect of calming them down. One touch, there, and they go all numb and blocked, like the others. (Who wail sometimes. Who stare at us with incredulous scorn. But I understand their condition. I’m sympathetic; I accept all that.) It may be symbolic, this touching of the women. Life and love must go on. Life and love must emphatically and resonantly go on: here, that’s what we’re all about. Yet there is a patina of cruelty, intense cruelty, almost as if creation corrupts.… I don’t want to touch the girls’ bodies. As is well known, I frown on such harassment. I don’t even want to look at them. The bald girls with their enormous eyes. Just made, and all raw from their genesis. I’m a little worried by it: I mean, this fastidiousness is so out of character. The delicacy of the situation, with their parents and often their grandparents there and everything (as in a thwarted erotic dream), would hardly explain the lack of visual stimulation; and I get on like a house on fire with the girls in the officers’ bordello. No. I think it must have something to do with my wife.

  The overwhelming majority of the women, the children, and the elderly we process with gas and fire. The men, of course, as is right, walk a different path to recovery. Arbeit Macht Frei says the sign on the gate, with typically gruff and und
esigning eloquence. The men work for their freedom. There they go now, in the autumn dusk, the male patients in their light pajamas, while the band plays. They march in ranks of five, in their wooden clogs. Look. There’s a thing they do, with their heads. They bend their heads right back until their faces are entirely open to the sky. I’ve tried it. I try to do it, and I can’t. There’s this fist of flesh at the base of my neck, which the men don’t yet have. The men come here awful thin. You can’t get a stethoscope to them. The bell bridges on their ribs. Their hearts sound far away.

  There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and their fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens—awaiting human form, and union.… The sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.

  These familial unions and arranged marriages, known as selections on the ramp, were the regular high points of the KZ routine. It is a commonplace to say that the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational: we found the sacred fire that hides in the human heart—and built an autobahn that went there. But how to explain the divine synchronies of the ramp? At the very moment that the weak and young and old were brought from the Sprinkleroom to the railway station, as good as new, so their menfolk completed the appointed term of labor service and ventured forth to claim them, on the ramp, a trifle disheveled to be sure, but strong and sleek from their regime of hard work and strict diet. As matchmakers, we didn’t know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze. We toasted them far into the night. One guard, his knees bent and swaying, played an accordion. Actually we all drank like fiends. The stag party on the ramp, and the Kapos, like the groom’s best friends, shoving the man into the waiting cart—freshly sprayed with trash and shit—for the journey home.

  The Auschwitz universe, it has to be allowed, was fiercely coprocentric. It was made of shit. In the early months I still had my natural aversion to overcome, before I understood the fundamental strangeness of the process of fruition. Enlightenment was urged on me the day I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire. Then they put his beard back on. I also found it salutary to watch the Scheissekommando about its work. This team had the job of replenishing the ditches from the soil wagon, not with buckets or anything like that but with flat wooden spades. In fact a great many of the camp’s labor programs were quite clearly unproductive. They weren’t destructive either. Fill that hole. Dig it up again. Shift that. Then shift it back. Therapy was the order of the day.… The Scheissekommando was made up of our most cultured patients: academics, rabbis, writers, philosophers. As they worked, they sang arias, and whistled scraps of symphonies, and recited poetry, and talked of Heine, and Schiller, and Goethe … In the officers’ club, when we are drinking (which we nearly always are), and where shit is constantly mentioned and invoked, we sometimes refer to Auschwitz as Anus Mundi. And I can think of no finer tribute than that.

  There are other revealing examples of camp argot. The main Ovenroom is called Heavenblock, its main approach road Heavenstreet. Chamber and Sprinkleroom are known, most mordantly, as the central hospital. Sommerfrische is our name for a tour of duty here, in any season: “summer air,” suggesting a perennial vacation from an inadequate reality. When we mean never we say tomorrow morning—it’s like the Spanish saying mañana. The slenderest patients, those whose faces are nothing more than a triangle of bone around the eyes, they’re Muselmänner: not, as I first thought, as an ironical glance at musclemen. No. The angularity of hip and shoulder suggests Muslims—Muslims at prayer. Of course, they’re not Muslims. They’re Jews. Well, we converted them! When will it happen, the conversion of the Jews? Tomorrow morning. The rumor and gossip, which often tend to overexcite the male patients, we leniently designate as latrine talk.

  Hier ist kein warum.… Disappointingly, my German fails to improve. I speak it, and appear to understand it, and give and take orders in it, but on some level it just isn’t sinking in. My German is no more advanced than my Portuguese. I think it took a lot out of me learning colloquial English. That was my shot. It’s a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it. All those very long words: the literalism, the tinkertoy accumulation. It sounds pushy, beginning every sentence with a verb like that. And take the first person singular: ich. “Ich.” Not a masterpiece of reassurance, is it? I sounds nobly erect. Je has a certain strength and intimacy. Eo’s okay. Yo I can really relate to. Yo! But ich? It’s like the sound a child makes when it confronts its own … Perhaps that’s part of the point. No doubt all will come clear as soon as my German gets better. When will that be? I know. Tomorrow morning!

  In the officers’ bordello, which is situated, appropriately, at the far corner of the Experimental Block (its windows permanently shuttered or boarded), I have changed the amatory habits of a lifetime. Much of the old thoroughness has gone. Much of the attention to detail that was wont to mark my dealings with the gentler sex. It may be an awareness of my married status (of which my colleagues often jokingly remind me), or a way of squaring all my activities with the ethos of the KZ, or a simple boredom with the female face, but now my thrusts of love—so sudden, so hurried, so helpless, so hopeless—are exclusively directed at the source of universal sustenance and fruition. The bald whores give us no money. We ask no questions. Because here there is no why.

  Another Kat-Zet usage, widely current, used in many forms: it sounds like smistig, but it would appear to be a conflation of two German substantives, Schmutzstück and Schmuckstück, “garbage” and “jewel.” Ironically, again, smistig means “come to an end,” “concluded,” “finished.”

  I have started corresponding with my wife, whose name is Herta. Herta’s letters come, not from the fire (das Feuer), but from the trash (der Plunder). And they are in German. My letters to Herta are brought to me by the valet. I laboriously erase them, here, at night, in the silent room. I am left with nice sheets of white paper. But what for? My letters are in German too, though they contain gobbets of English that are playfully pedagogic in tone. I think it makes sense that Herta and I should get to know each other in this way. We’re pen pals.

  It seems that my wife has already conceived her doubts about the work we are doing here. Obviously the misunderstanding will have to be cleared up. There is also the matter of the baby (das Baby). “My darling, my one, my all, there will be other babies,” I write, somewhat confusingly. “There will be lots of little babies.” I don’t much like the sound of this. Is the baby—is das Baby the bomb baby? The baby that has such power over its parents? I don’t think so. Our baby (which has a name: Eva) exerts colossal power as a subject. But not the physical power that the bomb baby exerted, over its parents and over everybody else in the black room: some thirty souls.

  The photograph of her I found in Rome, in the gardens of the monastery—I take it out and look at it. At night my eyes are full of tears. By day I throw myself into my work. I wonder if there will be any end to the sacrifices I am being asked to make.

  * * *

  “Uncle Pepi” was everywhere. This being the thing that was most often said about him. For instance, “It’s as if he’s everywhere,” or “The man seems to be everywhere,” or, more simply, “ ‘Uncle Pepi’ is everywhere.” Omnipresence was only one of several attributes that tipped him over into the realm of the superhuman. He was also fantastically clean, for Auschwitz; when he was present, and he was present everywhere, I could sense the various cuts and nicks on my queasy jawline, my short but disobedient hair, the unhappy hang of my uniform, my lusterless black boots. His face was feline in shape, wide at the temples, and his blink was as
slow as any cat’s. On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions. You felt that he was only playing the part of a human being. Self-isolated as he was, “Uncle Pepi” nonetheless displayed the best kind of condescension, and was in fact unusually collegial—not so much with youngsters like myself, of course, but with more senior medical figures, like Thilo and Wirths. I was moreover privileged—and on something like a regular basis—to assist “Uncle Pepi” in Room 1 on Block 20 and later in Block 10 itself.

  I recognized Room 1 from my dreams. The pink rubber apron on its hook, the instrument bowls and thermoses, the bloody cotton, the half-pint hypodermic with its foot-long needle. This is the room, I had thought, where something mortal would be miserably decided. But dreams are playful, and love to tease and poke fun at the truth.… Already showing signs of life, patients were brought in one by one from the pile next door and wedged onto the chair in Room 1, which looked like what it was, a laboratory in the Hygienic Institute, a world of bubbles and bottles. With the syringe there were two ways to go, intravenous and cardiac, “Uncle Pepi” tending to champion the latter as more efficient and humane. We did both. Cardiac: the patient blindfolded with a towel, his right hand placed in the mouth to stifle his own whimpers, the needle eased into the dramatic furrow of the fifth rib space. Intravenous: the patient with his forearm on the support table, the rubber tourniquet, the visible vein, the needle, the judicious dab of alcohol. “Uncle Pepi” was then sometimes obliged to bring them to their senses with a few slaps about the face. The corpses were pink and blue-bruised. Death was pink but yellowish, and contained in a glass cylinder labeled Phenol. A day of that and you stroll out in your white coat and black boots, with the familiar headache and the plangent perfecto and the breakfast tannic gathering in your throat, and the eastward sky looked like phenol.