A Perfect Madness (40 page)

“
Why not take the dead?”
Erich asked, utterly amazed at what he was hearing.

“
No, they are always alive
when they go to him. That’s all any of us know.”

“
It was good then that he
killed them.”

Erich said nothing more, but waited
with Franz for the last of the prisoners to be taken from the ramp
and transported to the gas chambers. Then he went to the officers’
club with him, got slobbering drunk, and passed out sitting in a
chair, where he remained until morning came and a new day of
selecting began again.

Nothing changed at Auschwitz as the
seasons passed, except thousands more Jews came to die. There were
not enough ovens for them and large new trenches had to be dug to
burn the corpses in, some still alive when the burning began.
Working through all that was happening, Erich had come to the
conclusion that whether you believe something or not depends on the
situation. There is no separate truth. It is in those moments that
the unthinkable becomes credible for those that are a part of it.
And so it was just that for Erich on a cold winter Saturday, the
Sabbath day of all the Jews standing and shivering on the ramp
before him.

When they came, as he knew they might
someday, he was not ready. But he had known he never would be. He
had hoped they would be transported to another camp when their time
came, but the increasing number of Jews arriving from
Czechoslovakia told him otherwise. He had thought many times of
such a moment when they might appear before him, how he would act,
whether he should speak to them, or whether he would recognize
them? But it was they who would not let the moment pass quickly,
making it easy for him.

Standing before Erich, Dr. Kaufmann
with his gentle wife Anka waited for him to speak their names
before walking to the waiting trucks, which would take them to the
ovens. When they arrived, Dr. Kaufmann had refused to say he was a
doctor, which might have kept him alive, choosing instead to stay
by Anka’s side until the end came for both of them. If they were to
go to God now, they would be together when they met Him, he
whispered to her moments before they climbed down from the boxcar
to the ramp. They had come with all their family to this place to
die, except for Julia and Hiram, whose lives he had never stopped
thanking God for. No word had come from them in nearly five years,
but in his heart he knew they were safe.

Through the time since Julia and Hiram
left Prague in 1939, he had watched the houses and streets and
synagogues empty and the voice of the Jew grow silent.

“
After this year, the
blood of our ancient fathers will be gone from Prague,” he told the
rabbi one Saturday, only weeks before they were to report to the
authorities.

But the rabbi smiled and shook his
head and said, “It may go away and hide for awhile, but it will
come back as it has through the ages.”

Both embraced then and he left,
knowing that what the rabbi said was true. The Jew had been pushed
out of Prague too many times to count over the centuries, but his
soul never left. Julia and Hiram and many of the other children who
had escaped would surely come home when all that drove them away
had left.

Franz had joined Erich this night on
the ramp, having been away on other assignments for some time, and
recognized Dr. Kaufmann only moments before Erich did. He no longer
looked at Dr. Kaufmann but to Erich, staring at him cruelly,
relishing the strange drama playing out before him. What were the
odds? Two dear friends, traveling different distant roads, meeting
again as they did in such an isolated moment in history where one
would select the other to die.

“
It was like a Greek
tragedy,” he would say later to Erich, taunting him. “How did it
feel sending your lover’s father to his death?”

But Erich would say nothing, and would
never speak of the night to anyone.

When he realized Julia’s father and
mother were standing before him waiting for selection, he could do
nothing but stare blankly at their faces. Neither one spoke to him,
both looking beyond the ramp at the trucks ahead filling up with
prisoners. But, in a moment that seemed to complete the Faustian
bargain Erich had long ago made with Mephistopheles to remain in
the world a little longer, Dr. Kaufmann turned to him. No words
were spoken. Only the unmistakable question, “Why?” was there to be
read in his eyes, and then they were gone.

Watching the scene unfold, Franz
clapped loudly, as if hoping Dr. Kaufmann and his wife would return
to the ramp for a repeat performance. The delight he felt for
Erich’s agony would carry him high for days, and he would teasingly
tell him so many times, just to prolong it. What he said, though,
was of little consequence to Erich now, because what little piece
of honor that somehow might have been left in him after all the
terrible things he had done, rode with Dr. Kaufmann and his wife to
the gas ovens.

When the night’s selection was over, a
clouded darkness swept across the empty ramp as it always did,
lending an eeriness to the silent death cries that could be heard
if one listened closely, from the thousands who had been there only
moments before. He was alone now, and the haunting scenes in his
dreams had become real. It was not that Dr. Kaufmann and Mrs.
Kaufmann were any different from those who had gone before to the
ovens. In the reality of things, they were Jews like the others who
died. But in his mind he had separated them from all the other Jews
in the world because he loved Julia. And this fact changed the
equation. He had come to love and respect them more so than anyone
else he had ever known. Dr. Kaufmann’s imposing intellect had
captivated him from the day they first met, constantly fueling the
intense bonding that grew between them through the years. All Erich
knew now was that he could never speak of this moment to Julia
should they meet again, nor how her parents went to their
deaths.

Walking back onto the ramp, he traced
his fingers along the sides of several empty boxcars still smelling
of the humanity they brought to the death camp. From time to time
he would stop and look in one, as if expecting to find a terrified
child hiding back deep in a dark corner, pretending he couldn’t be
seen. Looking at the almost endless chain of boxcars that delivered
daily thousands to the camp and to the ovens, Erich knew he had
been given a gift of time that others hadn’t. He knew that the
lives of those who came to be killed in Auschwitz embodied more
truth than his compromised life did, and now all he had become was
a man who had moved beyond forgiveness.

In the weeks ahead, until the end of
Auschwitz, Erich spoke very little to anyone, nor drank and
socialized in the officers’ club, keeping to himself much as
possible. When duty permitted, he sat alone in his quarters reading
and rereading Goethe’s
Faust
and Dostoevsky’s
The
Double.
Like Faust, he had gone further than anyone thought he
could, and pledged himself also to Mephistopheles in exchange for a
few more precious days breathing in the world around him. Now his
soul, he knew, would soon be carried away by the prince of demons
to some distant world where the rest of the captured souls moaned
in eternal agony.

For a while, he believed himself and
all the doctors around him mad. No one could do what they had done
unless they were. But in time, he concluded no one was really mad
or crazy, not even Josef Mengele. He had learned long ago that a
man didn’t have to be mad to kill a tiny baby like he had little
Brigitte and the other crippled children, if one found a reason for
doing so, a reason to make it seem right. In time then, the
unbelievable becomes believable, like what the Nazi regime was
trying to accomplish here in Auschwitz. For whatever reason is
used, he decided, it births another self, another personality
within us that could in time adapt to killing without feeling
oneself a murderer. Watching and listening to the other doctors,
some spoke proudly of duty and loyalty as their reason, others of
science and eugenics, but none from hatred of the Jews like Franz.
Those that hated the Jews, and there were many in the camp that
did, needed no reason for slaughtering them—their hatred had long
ago erased any thoughts of guilt from their minds. Setting all
reasons aside, Erich wondered if there wasn’t a psychology of
genocide, where just maybe killing was the normal thing to do and
could be seen as right. After all, humans are animals, too, only
dressed in the tattered clothing of a few hundred years of trying
to be civilized. Surviving is what life is all about among animals,
and killing other animals to stay alive is certainly a part of
that. How else do you explain the thousands of wars the world has
suffered?

So who was he now? Erich wondered,
because he didn’t know the work of fiction he had become. Perhaps
he would never know; so many days of change had come his way. All
he could do was to try to stay alive and go home when the war was
over and start again.

***

TWENTY-SEVEN

Auschwitz, 1945

H
immler’s order to
destroy the crematories and start preparations for evacuating
Auschwitz in January was not unexpected. The rumors were too
pervasive throughout the death camp to be otherwise. No one really
knew why, except perhaps the war was near its end, and Germany had
lost, a stark truth that could no longer be hidden by the worried
faces of Dr. Wirth and his medical staff of Nazi doctors. The
steady flow of refugees ahead of the advancing Russian army did not
pass unseen. For some, among those still waiting to die in the gas
chambers, it was as if God had seen enough killing of His people to
last another hundred years and had finally decided to stop it.
Whatever the reason, to Erich it was an early Christmas gift that
brought a warm glow to his face that had been all but extinguished
the past two years.

That evening he returned to the
officers’ club for the first time since he passed Julia’s mother
and father through the selection to their deaths. It was the right
time to celebrate, though it would stay silent within him. A few,
like Franz, still believed in the cause, and any expression of joy
over its demise would be met with swift punishment by the
Gestapo.

Franz was sitting alone at a small
corner table away from a mixed group of boisterous camp doctors and
SS officers, all quite drunk. Since the moment the order came from
Himmler, Franz had struggled throughout the day, as he was now, to
understand what went wrong. Any suggestion at the war’s birth of a
possible defeat would have been as unbelievable to him as any idea
that the earth really was flat. However, with the reality of a lost
war staring him in the face, he wouldn’t crawl away to hide like
some mangled and beaten beast. Wirth and Mengele and the others
would, he knew, for what they had done. But he would fall with the
rest of the German warriors, if that is what the gods wanted his
ending to be.

Seeing Franz brooding alone, Erich
went to the table and sat down. Ignoring him for the moment, Franz
signaled the serving orderly to bring two more steins to go with
the four he had already consumed. He had aligned the empty steins
upside down in a tight row across one side of the table.

“
That is what’s left of
the great Wehrmacht, empty glasses. We are fighting the fucking
Russians with glass soldiers,” Franz said, gesturing with a
sweeping wave of his hand and knocking over the row of
steins.

Erich remained silent, looking
nervously around the room for the face of any Gestapo who might be
sitting unnoticed in the room. Franz’s words were enough to have
them both arrested.

“
Things will change, I’m
sure,” he said in a loud reassuring voice for those in the room who
might want to hear his words.

Erich knew that rampant rumors and
paranoia would be on the menu every day until Auschwitz was finally
closed, a classic study of where the reality of what has been done
is suddenly seen for what it is, shaking everyone loose from the
unreal world they had been living in. Though the terrible gas ovens
were to be immediately destroyed, the lingering smell from
thousands of cremated bodies had become a part of everything its
tentacles touched. Mingling with the rising smoke from the bodies
still smoldering in the open ditches, it covered the camp in a
blanket of human memories woven together as one so they would never
become unreal and forgotten.

After a long moment of silence, Franz
took a last swallow of the warm beer he loved and stared
glassy-eyed in a hypnotic way at Erich.

“
We have no more Jews, or
anyone else to kill, do we, my timid friend,” he said with the
familiar smirk across his twisted lips.

“
Not here, but they will
find others for us, I’m sure.”

“
Perhaps, but why wait. I
am to accompany Dr. Wirth to Berlin tomorrow, and when I return,
you and I can go together to fight the Russians by the waters of
the Elbe. It will be a glorious ending for both of us.”

Erich turned away; he was in no mood
for such insane dialogue with Franz. Not at this moment, when
everything was disintegrating around them. Madness and failure go
hand in hand at times, and it was happening with Franz, he
believed. All that Franz had planned for and worked for and killed
for was crumbling before his eyes. Nothing in the darkening shadows
of his tomorrows would be the same, and he knew it, and he was
lost. But he was not afraid to die, and in his mind that set him
apart and above all men that were, like Erich. It was a power he
long believed in, that belonged to only a chosen few. For when one
holds no fear of death one becomes like Nietzsche’s
ubermensch
, he had argued many times with those who would
listen, unloosed to be free from all reality. That is why Jesus
meant nothing to him, nor what he proclaimed. He was very much
afraid of dying, and turned his back on an endless glory that
should have been his, had he not been.