In Europe (60 page)

The yard at Birkenau is now covered in daisies and clover. Swallows dip and soar above the few barracks that have been left standing, the bare red smokestacks, the groves of birch that grow on human ashes. A bird has built its nest amid the rubble of Crematorium III. Above the gate one can still see the soot from the hundreds of steam locomotives that pulled in here.

From the diary of Auschwitz camp physician SS-Hauptsturmführer Proffessor Dr Kremer:

This evening attended
Sonderaktion
(fourth time).

Camp Birkenau is decaying quickly. Half a century later the rusty barbed wire crumbles in your hands, the piles of shoes are only grey and black, most of the buildings have rotted away. Only the smokestacks still rise above it all, the long rows of the remains of hundreds of barracks that once formed the camp for men and families. The inhabitants of Oświeęcim themselves are already taking steps. At the edge of Birkenau, less than a hundred metres from the camp, is a brand new architectural apartment complex. The big living-room windows look out on the brownish-green yards of the camp. The complex itself is generally referred to as ‘the museum’, and that is what it has become for many of those who live here; a sort of park that draws a great many tourists, and nothing more than that.

I stop to talk to Adriana Warno. She is about eighteen, and has a summer job taking tickets at the gate to Birkenau. ‘We've always lived here, my parents too, and we like it,’ she says. ‘For us the museum is what the Eiffel Tower is for Parisians. The museum is down at one end, and Oświeęcim is up at the other, the two don't have much to do with each other. It's a very normal town, you know, what used to be Auschwitz. We go out and everything, no problem.’

For her there is, in fact, only one problem: the strangling boredom that has had the town in its grip the last few years. Most of the shop windows now contain only dusty book bags, macramé goods and cheap dinner settings. Oświeęcim today has 50,000 inhabitants, but no form of higher education. ‘We have to go to Krakow for everything.’ Jobs are scarce, and tourism at the camp is declining as well. Far fewer Americans have come to Auschwitz this year, they say it's because of the war in Kosovo. The walls along the streets are full of anarchist symbols and Celtic crosses.

‘Of course I think about it sometimes,’ Adriana says. ‘Especially when I'm in the museum. It's not taboo, you know. ‘Oh well, that was back then,’ that's what my parents always say. Everyone here knew what was going on in the camp, you could see it, or smell it at least. But no one thinks about that any more. If you did, you'd go crazy. And you have to live your life, and life here is hard enough as it is.’

I ask her about the people who visit the camp. She blurts out: ‘You don't hear anything from the real victims and their families. But you
should see the rest of the people who come here.’ She tells me about women's clubs with tambourines, gurus who come to drive out the evil spirits, sobbing American ladies who come here to deal with past lives, classes of schoolchildren with Polish flags, classes of schoolchildren with Israeli flags, the French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian tour companies that offer a ‘three-camp tour’, starting in Krakow. ‘They all claim Auschwitz for themselves. They've never suffered for a moment themselves, but my, how they'd like to hitch a ride with the real victims! It's enough to make you sick.’

I HAD BEEN IN AUSCHWITZ ONCE BEFORE, AS A RADIO REPORTER IN
January 1995, during the memorial services for the fiftieth anniversary of the camp's liberation. I remember getting lost at the end of one dark winter afternoon in the wooded area behind the Birkenau complex. I stumbled upon a hamlet there, like so many in Poland: chickens, geese, a dog on a chain, three old women and a farmer sitting on his wagon. To my right lay the concrete remains of Crematorium III. To the left were the ponds where the ashes were thrown: later on, ashes and bones were dumped all over these woods. A few patches of snow glistened among the trees, and a thin layer of yellowish ice floated on the quiet surface of the ponds.

Straight ahead of me were the masts of the satellite dishes, cables had been laid across the former gas chambers and bright conversation could be heard from the trailers where the television crews were sitting. When I turned and looked again, I saw a farm that must have been there all those years. The window was brightly lit, through it I saw a living room, a table, a carpet and a stove, outside the house a clothes line and a child's bike lying on its side. From there to the crematorium was no more than 300 metres.

How much did people know? What did the neighbours, the suppliers, the railway engineers and the civil servants know? And how much
could
they have known? And how much did they
want
to know?

Later, in the camp museum at Majdanek, I came across a letter from the Technisches Büro und Fabrik H. Kori GmbH, Dennewitzstrasse 35, Berlin, specialists in
Abfallverbrennungsöfen aller Art
. The letter was dated 25 October,
1941, and addressed to SS-Obersturmführer Lenzer in Lublin. The letter deals with plans to build a number of incinerators at the camp, plus an adjacent changing room and disinfection centre. ‘Our drawing on page 2 CJ no. 9079 shows the solution for the problem of accommodating five crematorium ovens, with number 5 in the middle intended as backup installation.’

It is a letter that will not stop haunting. Like the invoice beside it: addressed to the Paul Reimann firm in Breslau, 100 marks for 200 kilo of human hair at 50 pfennigs a kilo. There is no denying it: thousands of people actively took part in the Holocaust, from a distance. As noted earlier: in thousands of busy offices in Berlin alone, the administration activities went on day in and day out. At SS headquarters, at the finance ministry and the
Reichsbank
, huge quantities of jewellery, clothing and other personal possessions were registered and redistributed. Dozens of local people at the Prussian mint were involved in melting down gold fillings. Banks and insurance companies transferred Jewish holdings to the state treasury or Nazi accounts. Personal possessions were sent as Christmas gifts to the ethnic German colonists. The homes of Jews were plundered, in the knowledge that their inhabitants would never come back. Everyone ‘knew’ it in their own way.

At first the existence of the death camps was talked about only in very small circles. By autumn 1943, almost all the highly placed Nazis had been informed. That was for tactical reasons: after receiving that information, no one could bow out by pleading ignorance or innocence; now they were all part of the conspiracy. That, too, is why Himmler, at a closed meeting of
Reichsleiter
and gauleiter in Poznań on 6 October, 1943, spoke in relatively plain terms about the extermination of the Jews.

What he said, literally, was: ‘The phrase “the Jews must be destroyed” is easy to say, but the demands it places on those who implement it are among the heaviest and most difficult in the world.’

Albert Speer's flat denial at Nuremberg saved his life. Along with Goebbels and Göring he was Hitler's closest assistant, and one of the most senior officials in the Third Reich. In his memoirs he mentioned a visit he received in summer 1944 from his mentor, Karl Hanke. The old Nazi was completely beside himself: never, never must Speer accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in the district of Upper Silesia.
This old friend of his had seen things there he was neither allowed nor able to describe. He could only have been referring to Auschwitz. Speer: ‘I didn't enquire any further. I didn't ask Himmler about it, I didn't ask Hitler about it, I did not talk about it with my friends. Nor did I have it investigated: I didn't want to know what was going on.’

Years later, in her impressive study of Speer, Gitta Sereny demonstrated that he not only
could
have known much more, but that he actually
did
know much more. Once the war was over, however, he skilfully repressed that knowledge, as did countless other Germans.

Primo Levi wrote about a German fellow chemist. Levi and his German colleague performed the same experiments, and both of them worked at the same, huge Buna site. There was one difference between them: in the evening Levi slept inside a barbed-wire enclosure, while his colleague lived on the outside. This
Oberingenieur
said later that he had known nothing about the gas chambers, and that he had never asked anyone about them. ‘He did not comfort himself with lies,’ Levi wrote, ‘but with lacunae, with blank spots.’

How many ‘blank spots’ could a person live with between 1940–5? The pamphlet distributed by the students of the White Rose in Munich spoke of ‘the most beastly murder’ of 300,000 Polish Jews. Tucked away in the house on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht, Anne Frank wrote on 9 October, 1942:‘We assume that most of them were murdered. The English radio speaks of gassing. Perhaps that is the fastest way to die.’ One week later, in Dresden, Victor Klemperer referred to the Auschwitz camp as ‘a fast-moving slaughterhouse’. On 27 February, 1943 he said that it was ‘no longer probable that Jews will return alive from Poland’.

So
they
knew about it. Were they the only ones with eyes and ears?

Tens of thousands of
Wehrmacht
soldiers were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mass executions in Poland. In his classic study of the activities of a typical death squad, Reserve Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning shows that the battalion was in a state of continual flux: respectable fathers from Hamburg reported for duty, took part in mass executions, then went home to carry on life as usual. One of the commanders, newly married, even took his young bride along: in the market square at Miedzyrzec she was a direct witness to the murder of the local Jews. The stories flew around the country: in letters that escaped
the censors’ attention, from soldiers on leave, in photographs sent home from the East. It was only in November 1941 that photographing such executions was forbidden.

After 1943, anyone in Germany who looked around enough – as I once heard a young German formulate it so inimitably – ‘knew for sure that they didn't want to know more.’ In that same year British and American bombers scattered millions of pamphlets over Germany, containing precise information about the systematic murder of the European Jews, the death camps and the gas chambers. Eric Johnson carried out a survey among older Germans in Cologne and Krefeld concerning their awareness of the Holocaust before 1945. Of those questioned, sixty-six per cent admitted to have been more or less informed.

Awareness of the Holocaust was reasonably widespread in other parts of Europe as well. Fifty years later, a group of students examined the war diaries of seventy non-Jewish Dutch people. They wanted to determine what the people in the occupied territories knew about the persecution of the Jews, and when they had found out about it. More than a third of the diarists turned out to have come rather quickly to the conclusion that the Jews were being murdered on a massive scale. The wife of a physician wrote on 9 November, 1941: ‘Most of the Jews in our circles, who were taken away so quickly, are already dead – within a few weeks’ time, in other words.’

On 13 December, an office clerk from Rotterdam wrote: ‘In Poland, the mass murder of Jews continues. They say Himmler wants to kill all the Jews before 1943.’ As from early 1943, the name ‘Auschwitz’ also crops up regularly in the Netherlands. One citizen of Rotterdam wrote, on 14 February, 1943: ‘The execution of Jews and Poles continues: 6,000 a day, in one place; first they are undressed; then … (gas?).’

All these diarists were extremely indignant, and most certainly believed in the rumours about the use of gas chambers. Yet when the camps were opened after the war and it became clear that this unthinkable mass murder really had taken place, the shock was enormous, even among staunch anti-Nazis and resistance fighters. It was as though people knew and did not want to know, all at the same time; as though they knew rationally about the millions of murders, but were unable to accept it in their hearts, even after the war, because it defied imagination. The group
of women with their underwear flapping in the wind in the dunes outside the Latvian town of Liepaja had a face. The 1.1 million killed at Auschwitz were merely a number.

The Allies concentrated on a ‘total victory’, not in retaliation for the Nazi atrocities, but to minimise the risk of individual peace treaties and to keep the mutual ties as close as possible. Only in that way could they, as one British government memorandum put it, ‘solve the entire complex of human problems caused by German domination’. Anything that would distract them from that goal would also harm the Jewish cause. That was the rationale.