Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (41 page)

During the nine weeks that had intervened, I had been as conscious of the possibility that he might choose to withdraw from these conversations, and even disavow what he had already said, as I was of the enormous emotional and physical strain they had put on him. And I had sent him several messages through the prison governor, Herr Eberhard Mies, to say that I would indeed be coming back quite soon. Herr Mies, his wife and, it seemed to me, all the officers of the prison (and many other people in Germany) had become intensely interested in what these conversations would produce, and the governor, who is not ordinarily in personal touch with individual prisoners, had made a point of making sure that Stangl received my messages. None the less, Stangl’s first words to me in June – reassuring to me in the context of my interest, but indicative of his state of mind – were, both in wording and tone of voice, a reproach.

“I’ve been expecting you every day; I’ve waited for you,” he said at once – instead of bowing or saying
“Grüss Gott
”, as had been his custom. We needed to make sure that the cell was suitable for photography so it was there that we met at nine o’clock that Monday morning. He was wearing a suit and a meticulously laundered white shirt, but no tie – it was obvious he hadn’t quite finished dressing. He bowed. “I’ll be ready in five minutes,” he said and withdrew into his cell.

“He’s been cleaning, tidying his cell since six this morning,” said the officer who waited with us in the corridor.

The photography, to which he had of course agreed, and which was essential for the magazine presentation, had worried me a good deal – the relationship I had established between Stangl and myself was both subtle and exclusive, and very vulnerable, I feared, to intrusion.

The photographer would have to photograph him as neutrally – as basically unemotionally – as I was trying to
talk
with him, and would also need the ability to make himself totally unobtrusive.

Stangl, for whom – as for many other people – being photographed had a kind of status significance, was determined to “pose” for these photographs in his well-cared-for grey suit; it was only after a few such photographs had been taken, and with a good deal of persuasion, that he agreed to a less artificial approach, exchanged the coat for a cardigan and – later still – took off his tie.

That day was an important stage within this experience as a whole, not only because the photographs turned out to be extremely revealing, but also because it was to be the only opportunity I had to see Stangl’s bearing with and towards his fellow-prisoners.

Confirming the prison officers’ opinion that despite his new opportunities to associate with others, he was a “loner”, he had already told me that the only other prisoner he sometimes talked with – had anything to say to – was the man in the cell next to his. Like himself, this man was a long-term inmate awaiting appeal, also there because of, as Stangl put it, “
NS-Sachen
” (Nazi-crime things). But he had shown little interest even towards this man (who, when asked the day after Stangl’s death whether he would be willing to talk to me about Stangl, sent a message that he “really hardly knew him, had hardly talked to him and felt he had nothing to contribute”).

On our way to the interview room, after finishing the photographs in and in front of his cell, we passed several working parties. Some of the men, waving their brooms or whatever implements they carried, made jocular or snide remarks. “Why don’t you come and photograph back there in the shithouse where
we
live – that would be edifying for the good citizens” – “How much do you pay for posing? I’ll pose for you any time.” – “What one obviously has to do to get photographed for the papers,” one man murmured darkly under his breath as I passed, “is to murder half a million Jews.” Others, with a great show of hilarity, called out to Stangl in a variety of dialects, “You looked
great
– cute – very elegant” – “Make them pay through the nose – these newspaper people are all moguls (
Bonzen
)” – “Going to have caviar and champagne now? Have some for me.”

It was interesting to see that the rather lofty attitude he usually displayed towards at least some of the prison officers – the younger ones – gave way to a forced, almost ingratiating kind of camaraderie, born, one felt immediately, of a mixture of fear and need; so much so that when we reached the room there was a set smile on his face, so stiff and determined, it was several minutes before his face returned to normal.

By the end of the seven hours we spent talking that day, we had re-established and indeed deepened our original “contact”. He had repeated – in a slightly modified tone – his question why I hadn’t come back sooner, and I had explained, and then read to him, translating as I went along, a good deal of the first draft I had already written. Above all – without making any concessions to him – every single thing he had said on the most sensitive subjects: his parents, his wife and children, the Euthanasia Programme, Sobibor and Treblinka. He readily recapitulated many of the points I raised, and although photographs were taken throughout, he became unaware of the photographer’s presence.

“There is so much – there are so many more things we need to talk about,” he said that afternoon. “I have done nothing but think while I was waiting for you to come back.”

My professional interest notwithstanding, it had been important to me not to persuade or fatigue this man into disclosing more about himself than he wished to. If the sum total of what he could tell, and possibly teach us, was to be valid and of real value, I felt he had to offer it freely, and in full possession of all his faculties.

He had brought a book from his cell, and his hands, holding it – for the first time since I knew him – trembled. “This woman came to see me while you were away,” he said. “She sent a message that she was from the Red Cross and could she talk to me, so I said, ‘Certainly, why not?’ She had apparently looked after witnesses who came from abroad to testify at my trial and she brought this book; she wanted me to read it and let her know what I think of it. She said the author, Janusz Korczak, who wrote it when he was twenty-eight – had been a very talented pediatrician in Warsaw. His real name, she said, was Henryk Goldszmidt or something like that. She said that shortly after he had written this book, he gave up his lucrative practice and dedicated the rest of his life to the children of the Warsaw Jewish orphanage. She said he came to Treblinka with the two hundred orphans – he was seventy-five years old then – and died there with them. She asked me, ‘What did you feel when you saw these children?’ I said I didn’t remember any two hundred children. She said, ‘You
must
remember them – you can’t have forgotten two hundred children. Didn’t you
feel
anything – how could you not feel anything?’ ” he looked distraught. “I thought and thought about it,” he said, “but I just don’t remember a group of children like that – a school – an orphanage.…”

2

S
AMUEL
R
AJZMAN
, the Treblinka survivor who lives in Montreal, told me about this visitor who had caused Stangl to question himself about the children. Frau Kramer, a remarkable German woman who has worked for years in Düsseldorf for the Society of Christians and Jews, and for the Red Cross, acting as hostess to the survivors who are brought to Germany for the
NS
trials, has become a friend to numerous people who never thought they would ever again wish to call a German a friend.

The Rajzmans, obviously prosperous and well established in Canada, live in a quiet residential district of Montreal; a wide tree-shaded street, large cars, nice brownstone houses. Mr Rajzman, who was the only Treblinka survivor to testify at Nuremberg, at the Polish Treblinka trial, and subsequently at the Treblinka and Stangl trials in Düsseldorf, conducts his flourishing lumber business from an office in his Montreal flat. He and his wife are a quiet gentle couple who found each other after the war during which they had both lost everyone they loved. The story he told about his own little girl illustrated hauntingly how utterly helpless parents were to protect their children.

In July 1942, he, his first wife and their twelve-year-old daughter lived in the Warsaw ghetto. “I knew what was happening,” he said. “Many people knew, but most of them wanted to pretend they didn’t. I knew for certain because, only ten days before I was finally taken [August 27, 1942], a young man called Friedmann came back from Treblinka hidden under rags.
*
His escape had been carefully arranged so as to have somebody come back to bring us the truth; to warn us. But nobody believed him. It was perfectly extraordinary. But I
did.
” (Another source tells how this young man besought the ghetto elders to believe him and how finally they said he was overwrought and needed a rest which they would arrange for him in the ghetto clinic. The President of the Jewish Council in the Warsaw ghetto, Dr Adam Czerniakow, had in fact killed himself one month earlier when the number of Jews he had to make available for “resettlement” was increased from six to seven thousand a day. In view of the terrible posthumous criticism to which the Ghetto Council officials have been subjected, one should, I think, question just what action was open to them apart from rejection of reality.) “My wife and I,” said Samuel Rajzman, “had only one thought: to hide our little girl. In the street where both my wife and I worked at a factory, was a cellar. And in that cellar was a coal-bunker. We took about twenty children and hid them in there and locked the door. Even though we were considered essential workers, the Gestapo came the next day and we were all driven to the assembly square.” After two days – the transports were frequently kept waiting – Mr Rajzman managed to get away and immediately went to the cellar where they had left the children. “The door was open and the children were gone. A neighbour said the Germans had come the day before and taken them.”

His one thought now was to get back to the square. “After all, it was possible the children could still be there.” He had a “Polish” friend, he said – obviously a man who held some kind of official position – and this man went with him to help. The miracle happened – the children were still on the square. “We managed to get my little girl and a boy whose parents were friends of ours out, and we took them back to our factory. They stayed hidden there for some days – but in the end they took them anyway.… Since that day”, said Mr Rajzman, “I cannot bear to look at a child – above all, I cannot bear to look at German children. It is not their fault – I know – but when I was in Germany to testify, every time I saw a little girl – I thought of mine. I will never go there again. I cannot understand Jews who survived Treblinka,” he said, “and then married non-Jewish women … even Germans. That is why it is so extraordinary for us to feel as we do about Frau Kramer. When we met her we were as suspicious of her as all the others; but she convinced us; she gave us back something we had lost; we really love her; she is a valuable – a really valuable human being.…”

They showed me a letter they had received from Frau Kramer in which, after writing at length about her own family, she reports on the visit she paid to Stangl in prison.

“I went to see him”, she wrote, “with this beautiful book by Janusz Korczak. I told him that we’d seen each other so often across the courtroom, I wanted at last to speak to him.” She said that she had asked after his health and his family and that she had told him she wanted to talk to him as a human being, to tell him how someone like herself – who had had nothing to do with it, no axe to grind either way – had felt about Treblinka and to ask him to tell her how he could have done what he did. “He said nothing,” she wrote, “but his colour changed and he bowed his head. Just then – at a most unfortunate moment – the prison chaplain [who was present because she was not allowed to see Stangl alone] no doubt meaning well, intervened, and this, I think, gave Stangl the opportunity to get a hold of himself and then he recited once again all the justifications we have heard so often. I left,” she said. But she thought she had left behind a badly shaken man.…

*
This was evidently before trains packed with the victims’ effects were sent out of Treblinka. The first of these, according to Richard Glazar, left at the end of October. There is no authenticated escape from Treblinka except this young man, in August, and the two others mentioned by Glazar, two months later.

3

T
HE MAIN
reason why Frau Kramer’s approach to Stangl failed (although, as we can see, she did succeed in shaking him) was because her information was incorrect. She tackled him not on his general conduct or attitude, but specifically about Janusz Korczak and his orphans, and in fact Stangl was not at Treblinka when they reached the camp on August 4 or 7 1942. (There are so many stories about Dr Korczak and his little orphans – so many of them contradicting each other as far as bare facts are concerned – that the exact date when he and these children were killed cannot be ascertained. What appears certain is that Stangl wasn’t there, and therefore couldn’t possibly have known about this.)

“There was no specific ‘children-transport’ after I got to Treblinka,” said Suchomel, who arrived there on August 24. “What is true,” he said, “is that towards the middle of October Küttner picked out ten or twelve boys from a transport and assigned them as orderlies for the ghetto camp; they had their own Kapo. However, when this boy was caught giving gold coins to a Ukrainian, Küttner sent all the boys into the gas – they weren’t in the camp more than three weeks.”

The above affair, as well as another involving children, was laid at Stangl’s door by two imaginative novelists. One of them described Stangl (by name) as “playing with these children by the hour”, dressing them up, getting them special delicacies and, when they “no longer amused him, with total indifference and a wave of the hand” ordering them into the gas chamber. In another novel, a similar situation was invented with similar irresponsibility, although not involving Stangl. This time the passing passion for a group of little boys was ascribed to a homosexual (the previously named Max Biele or Bielas
*
) who, according to the author, had a special miniature barrack with miniature beds, night-tables and candlesticks built, in a special rustic setting and kept the boys as a personal harem until he, too, got tired of them and had them killed. It does seem extraordinary that novelists find it necessary to invent such tales when the appalling truth is surely far more “dramatic.”