Unity (39 page)

M.A. So you make your films as a safety-valve in order that peoples' darkest fantasies be enacted on screen and not in real life?

T.B. I make my films to make money. I'm a businessman not a therapist nor the Secretary General of the UN. Besides, I don't suppose that even I could ever fathom peoples' darkest fantasies.

M.A. I've always subscribed to the Socratic view that no one can choose to be wicked. People only do evil when they're deluded into believing that they're doing good.
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Pure evil is found nowhere but in literature. We didn't hear Stalin or Pol Pot or even Hitler echoing Milton's Satan in a call for evil to be their good, or vowing that to do ill would be their sole delight. The SS guards behaved as they did because they'd been brainwashed into thinking that they were supermen and their victims vermin. That's why I set so much store by the search for motives. If any precept has sustained me through life, it's Madame de Staël's
Tout
comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.

T.B. Don't you think that they should have resisted the
propaganda
and realised that what they were doing was wrong?

M.A. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not excusing them.

T.B. Oh, I'm sorry. My French must be rusty. I thought that that was what
pardonner
meant.

M.A. I'm trying, first, to make a distinction between the criminal and the crime and, second, to point out that evil isn't inevitable. Whereas you, unless I'm much mistaken, believe that people are evil and there's nothing that we can do about it.

T.B. We can adapt to it. If you live on an earthquake fault-line, you adjust to it – you dig deeper foundations or whatever. We must make similar adjustments to the fault-lines in human nature. I'm a professional adjuster.

M.A. Do you mean in your life or in your work?

T.B. Both. To be frank, I'm surprised at Socrates. If that was the best he could come up with, he didn't take the hemlock a moment too soon. Judging evil by intent, you end up with a position in which Goebbels is more culpable than Hitler because Hitler was at least sincere in his beliefs whereas Goebbels was a cynic who believed only in the packaging. His wife's stepfather was Jewish. He admired the films of Jewish directors. His main aim was self-promotion, having discovered an arena in which his hitherto unrecognised talents could thrive.

M.A. I wouldn't care to choose between Hitler and Goebbels.

T.B. In which case, what about the youth who knowingly and callously robs an old lady of her life-savings? On the scale of intent, he would be more culpable than either of them.

M.A. Then perhaps we should define evil as inhumanity: a refusal to recognise other peoples' essential rights. Whether or not we base our morality on a transcendental being will always be open to dispute. But we must be able to agree on a moral code based on our common humanity. Its arbiter will be our conscience – that conscience which, whatever Hitler may have thought, is as intrinsic a part of human nature as language or imagination.

T.B. You're saying that evil is inhumanity. I'm saying that it is our common humanity. Hitler was no different from you or me or Wolfram Meier or Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
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except in degree. It was his humanity that drove him on. That is what you must recognise if you wish to understand Felicity – or, indeed, anyone else. I see, after all, that I must tell you about Auschwitz. And don't be alarmed. For me, it is not a nightmare or a trauma; it is simply the past. I suffered, but I am not ennobled by it. I am not running an art gallery or writing poems or working for an organisation that promotes world peace. I am not my sister, Vera, another survivor, who cares about nothing but rescuing battery chickens. ‘It's inhumane,' she says, ‘to keep animals under such
conditions
.' And she doesn't appreciate the lack of logic, let alone the historical insult, in her words. I'm not ennobled by suffering but I am strengthened by it, because I know what life is. Hitler wanted to breed a master-race that would be able to withstand anything, and the irony – the deadly irony – is that we did. And why was I one of the chosen ones? Believe me, it wasn't because I was an especially good person or because God thought, ‘I have a mission for Thomas that he should set up the most successful
pornography
business that Germany has ever seen.' No. It was because I was strong: because I reduced myself to an instinct. And, if you want to know which is the most
fundamental
human instinct, just ask any former Auschwitz inmate. We saw it even in the contortions of the dead: in the father climbing on to the back of his son, or the mother pushing aside her daughter in order to reach to the top of the gas chamber and suck out the last gasp of air. The answer, in case you hadn't guessed, is to survive.

M.A. But surely that's only half the picture? I've read about the many acts of altruism that took place in the camps.

T.B. The only altruism came from those who needed concepts of good and evil to sustain them more than bread. Do you know the biblical tale of Jacob and Esau?

M.A. Of course.

T.B. Esau's selling his birthright for a mess of pottage was my favourite bedtime story, preferably narrated in my father's oaky tones. In Auschwitz, we sold our birthright – decency, fraternity, humanity – for a cup of broth, a swill of foetid water that created the illusion of warmth in our bellies. And that wasn't all. Do you know which were the hardest blows to endure in the camp? They weren't the body blows – the kicks from the
kapos
or the beatings from the guards – but the blows to our self-esteem. We were the stinking,
lice-ridden
dregs of creation, tying pieces of string around our trouser legs so that the shit wouldn't ooze into our boots. You may wonder what was gained by treating us that way. I've read books – scholarly books – that said that, if we appeared to be subhuman, it made it easier for the Nazis to mistreat us. But, no, it was to make it easier for us to mistreat one another. So that, when the guards told half of us to lie on the ground and the other half to urinate in their mouths, we didn't hesitate. And the worst of it is that we began to believe that Hitler was right. How could we be human beings when it was only by behaving subhumanly that we managed to survive?
But I'm running ahead of myself. I was fourteen when I was arrested and sent to Auschwitz but, to my great good fortune, I looked older. The worst injustice, to my mind, was that I'd never set much store by being Jewish. It was an accident of birth like the colour of my hair or the other physical features that have become clichés. As a child – years before I'd heard the name of Hitler – I hated the fact that we allowed ourselves to become victims: that we were taught never to draw attention to ourselves. We were Jews as wallpaper long before they turned us into Jews as
lampshades
and other household items … I'm sorry. I see that
I've offended you. You mustn't forget that Jewish humour is almost as legendary as our business sense.

On arrival in the camp, we were marched straight on to the parade-ground. The commandant asked for the names of any barbers. My father was a barber. And, to my shame, I despised the profession as much as I despised the man. But, in a spirit of malice, I raised my hand. And I was chosen. Whereas my father kept his pressed against his side. And he was gassed.

M.A. Wasn't that an example of altruism? He kept his hand down in order to give you a better chance.

T.B. This wasn't a vacancy for a stylist in a fashionable salon! Have you any idea how many people they were preparing to murder every day? They needed a large team. No, the truth is that we'd had a blazing row on the morning of our arrest (it wasn't all laying
Tefillin
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and lighting the Friday night candles). That I should have stolen his trade after they had stolen everything else was the final insult. There again, it may have been the wind. Even at the best of times, he was half-deaf. Shall I carry on?

M.A. Please.

T.B. I was placed in the category of ‘economically useful Jews' and I vowed to remain there for the rest of my life. I cut the hair of the men, women and, yes, children, who were destined for the gas chambers. Everything happened so fast. You ask how the Nazis could have done it morally. At the time, all I could think of was how they could do it
practically
. Hundreds of people were killed in a matter of minutes. It should have taken longer. If nothing else, they deserved that. But I couldn't talk about it to any of my comrades because, providing I kept my concerns to myself, there was still the possibility that it was only me who was losing my mind.

I watched them as they undressed. First the men: the rabbis and teachers and doctors whom I'd been taught to look up to all my life. Without their clothes, they were nothing. Just dry bones squeezed into sacks of old parchment. I knew then that there was nothing sacred about the body. And that was the first lesson that I learnt.

Next came the women. And, as they stripped, I felt a
stirring
in my loins. Some of them were ancient and some scarcely in their teens, but my body didn't discriminate. Suddenly I felt alive. I was no longer weak; I was hard. And that was the second.

We didn't simply cut the women's hair, we shaved them: under the arms and on the pubis. It was the first time I'd realised that women had body hair. The guards dropped by to enjoy the spectacle. While we set to work, they poked the women with sticks as though they were prodding cattle. That's why I was never able to join in the general expression of outrage at sixties fashions. I knew the value of hair.

Once, they brought in a group of girls from my
neighbourhood
. Abandoning modesty as well as clothes, they ran up and clung to me, naked. They were so relieved to find me alive. My survival offered hope for theirs. And do you want to know the truth? I scorned them. How could they be so stupid as to suppose that they were simply taking a shower? Or so naive as to believe that they would be put to work? There were feeble old women and helpless young children among them. One woman had had her wooden leg
unscrewed
.
What earthly use would she be? But no, even in extremis, people cling to their illusions –

M.A. Such as?

T.B. That God is good. That their enemies will be merciful.

M.A. Did you give them any warning of their fate?

T.B. What for? Most were half-dead already. Why poison their last few moments? Some of my colleagues did try, at the risk of their own lives. They claimed that people had a right to know. Perhaps they thought that it would restore their dignity and turn an abattoir into a scaffold. The truth is that, like all so-called morality, it eased their own consciences, relieving their guilt at remaining alive. For that was the cruellest irony: we knew that our presence in the Special Detail depended on regular transports. The moment they stopped, we too would be liquidated. Darwin lives! And so do I. For eighteen months, I survived in Hell. From what I recall, Jesus Christ stayed a mere three days. And in that time I learnt that, if the first human instinct was survival, the second was sex. Women stopped
menstruating
; nursing mothers lost their milk; but the seminal fluid still flowed. Two men who were forced to share a bunk chose to share their bodies, clinging together in a frenzy of desperation, desire and shame. Years later I read that, when they introduced a brothel into one of the camps – I don't remember which; it certainly wasn't Auschwitz
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– first in line weren't the relatively well-fed
kapos
and foremen but the
Muselmanner
, the living skeletons who looked as if the unaccustomed spurt of energy would destroy them. The sexual impulse prevailed.
Meanwhile, we were all actors in a vast pornographic fantasy, one that was played out not on a screen but on a flag. Rape was comparatively rare, even though it wasn't considered
Rassenschande
– I don't know the exact
translation
: race defilement comes close. But then, if you'd been a healthy young Nazi, would you have chosen to have sex with a putrid, hairless, half-starved woman with bones instead of bumps? Some did, of course, risking the wrath of their superiors and feeding their own disgust. But they were few. Most preferred to excite themselves by regular visits to the shower-room. Occasionally, bored guards would force a group of women to strip and parade through the camp, lashing them so hard that the blood ran down their legs in a parody of their monthly cycle.

M.A. Then how can you bear to propagate such images now?

T.B. Because they're the truth. I can't endorse conventional
platitudes
of love and romance as though I'd spent the War in Switzerland. I can't endow the sexual act with a spiritual meaning that it is quite unable to sustain. My films show men and women as they truly are. Why don't you address your complaints to producers in Hollywood? There,
everything
is titillation. The penis must at all times remain hidden – as though the nakedness of an erection would expose the sham of everything else. My films are real. My actors aren't faking.

M.A. I don't want to offend you, but in what way
real
? They occupy a world of total predictability where sex takes place in locker-rooms with the same nod to verisimilitude that saw Thirties musicals set backstage. It's a world where
every nurse and secretary, every pizza boy and plumber, is instantly available and utterly insatiable. And people take that image away from the screen and into their everyday lives.

T.B. People have always led inauthentic lives but, in the past, they did so like Madame Bovary in the context of romantic novels. Now it's in the context of hard-core films. Which is progress of a sort.

M.A. So, if I understand you right, you're saying that it was in Auschwitz that you discovered your vocation?

T.B. (
With a laugh
) What I thought I was saying was that it was in Auschwitz that I learnt not to need one. But, of course, it wasn't that simple. After the War, I planned to make my way to Palestine.

M.A. Then there was at least one ideal that didn't die.

T.B. I prefer the word illusion. Either way, the British put an end to it when they refused me entry. So I came back to this derelict town and rebuilt my life. I didn't have a
pfennig
to my name, so I turned to the most plentiful of natural resources. Fortunately, it was in high demand. We were an occupied country full of men living a long way from home. So what did they want? Girls. Especially girls who did the things that girls at home never do. Girls without
boundaries
. And I cornered the market. Very soon I was ready to branch out, first into clubs and then into films. My fellow entrepreneurs were happy to let me blaze a trail. As an Auschwitz survivor, I had greater licence. I can sense your disapproval …

M.A. No, not at all.

T.B. But, whatever you may think, ours is a reputable business. We're not SS guards in the ghetto forcing old men at gunpoint to rape and sodomise young girls while our comrades capture it on film. We maintain regular hours and
clean conditions. Angel was the first company in Europe to insist on the use of condoms. We lost sales, but it was the only way to safeguard the actresses – some of the girls from the East are so desperate, they'll do anything for a few hundred marks.

M.A. You see. We're not so different. You also believe in
protecting
people from themselves.

T.B. No, merely from the effects of their poverty. Besides, it was sound economics. Not only did we gain prestige but we forced all our rivals to follow suit.

M.A. May I ask you about the actress who died?

T.B. What about her?

M.A. That must have dented your confidence, if nothing else.

T.B. We were cleared of all responsibility. At the post-mortem, they discovered that she'd had an undiagnosed heart
condition
. She could have died at any time. Now, to return to more agreeable matters, did you have a chance to look at our merchandise? Is there anything you'd care to take home as a souvenir?

M.A. Thank you. That's very kind, but no.

T.B. We cater to every taste. If we'd been in business in the Thirties, Hitler would never have had to keep his sexuality a shameful secret with Geli. He could have subscribed to our caviar line.

M.A. In which case, if you believe Meier, there would never have been a Holocaust at all.

T.B. Maybe … there again, maybe not. If we're lucky, the
antidote
to history will be pornography. Did you know that there's a thriving underground market in concentration camp films in Israel?

M.A. No, I can't say that I did.

T.B. Does it shock you?

M.A. Less than it would have done an hour ago.

T.B. Then your visit hasn't been entirely wasted.

M.A. Is there anything that you wouldn't put on film?