Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (58 page)

“Yes, I am sure there was,” he replied. “Perhaps the Jews were meant to have this enormous jolt to pull them together, to create a people, to identify themselves with each other.”

It is impossible not to feel a sense of outrage at hearing either of these two people, so horrifyingly involved, say this. And yet, the way they both said it, they were, if not honourable, certainly trying – and meaning – to search for honesty.

At the very end of our conversations I told Frau Stangl that I needed to ask her an extremely difficult question which I wanted her to think about deeply before attempting to answer. “It is the most important question as far as my talks with you are concerned,” I said, “and to me, the reply you give me will determine your own position; the degree, if you like, of your own guilt.” I suggested that, before replying, she should leave me for a while, lie down, think about it.

“Would you tell me”, I asked, “what you think would have happened if at any time you had faced your husband with an absolute choice; if you had said to him: ‘Here it is; I know it’s terribly dangerous, but either you get out of this terrible thing, or else the children and I will leave you.’ What I would like to know,” I said, “is: if you had confronted him with these alternatives, which do you think he would have chosen?”

She went to her room and lay down; I could hear the bedsprings creak as she lowered herself on to the bed. The little house was silent. It was very hot outside and the sun shone into the living room where I sat waiting, for more than an hour. When she came back she was very pale; she had been crying, had then washed her face and combed her hair and, I think, put on some powder. She was composed; she had made a decision – the same decision her husband had made six months earlier in the prison in Düsseldorf; to speak the truth.

“I have thought very hard,” she said. “I know what you want to know. I know what I am doing when I answer your question. I am answering it because I think I owe it to you, to others, to myself; I believe that if I had ever confronted Paul with the alternatives: Treblinka – or me; he would … yes, he would in the final analysis have chosen me.”

I felt strongly that this was the truth. I believe that Stangl’s love for his wife was greater than his ambition, and greater than his fear. If she had commanded the courage and the moral conviction to force him to make a choice, it is true they might all have perished, but in the most fundamental sense, she would have saved him.

This was not, however, the last word to be spoken between Frau Stangl and me on this trip to Brazil. The next morning I had to leave my hotel at 6 a.m. to fly to the interior, and only returned late in the evening. At the desk they handed me a letter. “A lady brought it,” the clerk said, “early this morning.”

“Dear Doña Gitta, I want to beg to correct an answer to a question you asked me where I had, at the time of our talk, too little time to ponder my reply.

“The question was whether my husband, in the end, would have found the courage to get away from Treblinka had I put before him the alternative ‘me, or Treblinka’. I answered your question – hesitatingly – with, ‘He would have chosen me.’

“This is not so, because as I know him – so well – he would never have destroyed himself or the family. And that is what I learned to understand in the critical month of July 1943.

“I can therefore in all truthfulness say that, from the beginning of my life to now, I have always lived honourably.

“I wish you, dear Doña Gitta, once more all the best,

your

Thea Stangl”
*

I telephoned Frau Stangl late that night.

“When did you write this letter?” I asked her. “It sounds like something written in the middle of the night. This isn’t really what you want to say, is it?”

She cried. “I thought and thought …” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. So finally I wrote it at 3 o’clock in the morning and brought it in on the first bus.”

“What would you like me to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

I told Frau Stangl that I would put in my book what she had said to me the previous day – which I thought was the truth. But that I would also add the letter, which only showed what we all know, which is that the truth can be a terrible thing, sometimes too terrible to live with.

*
Author’s translation from the German.

7

P
ERHAPS IN
the end it was easier for her husband to tell the truth because, I think, he knew he would die when he had told it.

The last day I spent with Stangl was Sunday, June 27, 1971. He had felt faintly unwell much of that week with stomach trouble, and that day I had brought him some special soup in a thermos – it was an Austrian soup he had said his wife used to make for him when he didn’t feel well. When I came back to the prison after a half-hour lunch break, he looked quite different: elated, his face smooth, his eyes fresh.

“I can’t tell you,” he said, “how wonderful I suddenly feel. I ate that wonderful soup and then I lay down. And I rested so deeply, somehow like never before. Oh, I feel wonderful,” he repeated.

As my time for these talks was running out and I only intended coming back once more – the following Tuesday for an hour or two, to recapitulate on anything important before flying back to London – the prison governor had said I could stay later than usual this Sunday. We spent four hours that afternoon, going back over many questions we had discussed before.

He talked again, at length, about the fairy-tale book by Janusz Korczak; he became fascinated with the subject of what children should, and should never again, be taught. He spoke for a long time in a decisive but thoughtful and quiet manner. Then he turned to stupidity in general. As he warmed to the subject and went back to relating it to his own experiences, as often before during these talks, his personality changed brusquely and startlingly; his voice became harder and louder, his accent more provincial and his face coarse. (“It happened,” his wife had said to me. “God help me; I saw it again here in Brazil – not for years, but then just in the last two years; it happened most often when he was driving and got angry about other drivers – stupidity, he called it, and it frightened me to see his face like that.”)

“In Brazil,” he said, his voice harsh, his accent almost vulgar, “at vw, the stupidity of some of the people there had to be seen to be believed. It sometimes drove me wild.” He gestured with his hands. “There were idiots amongst them – morons. I often opened my mouth too wide and let them have it. ‘My God,’ I’d say to them, ‘euthanasia passed
you
by, didn’t it,’ and I’d tell my wife when I got home, ‘these morons got overlooked by the euthanasia.’ ”

“
Do you think
”, I finally asked – it had become very late – “
that that time in Poland taught you anything
?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice once again calm and pensive – the increasing abruptness of these repeated metamorphoses becoming ever more disconcerting. “That everything human has its origin in human weakness.”

“
You said before that you thought perhaps the fews were ‘meant’ to have this ’enormous jolt’: when you say ‘meant to’ – are you speaking of God
?”

“Yes.”

“
What is God
?”

“God is everything higher which I cannot understand but only believe.”

The awful distortion in his thinking had shown up time after time as we had talked. And now here it was again, as we came to the end of these talks.

“
Was God in Treblinka
?”

“Yes,” he said. “Otherwise, how could it have happened?”

“
But isn’t God good
?”

“No,” he said slowly, “I wouldn’t say that. He is good and bad. But then, laws are made by men; and faith in God too depends on men – so that doesn’t prove much of anything, does it? The only thing is, there
are
things which are inexplicable by science, so there must be something beyond man. Tell me though, if a man has a goal he calls God, what can he do to achieve it? Do you know?”

“
Don’t you think it differs for each man? In your case, could it be to seek truth?”

“Truth?”

“
Well, to face up to yourself? Perhaps as a start, just about what you have been trying to do in these past weeks
?”

His immediate response was automatic, and automatically unyielding. “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself,” he said, in the same stiffly spoken words he had used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. “I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself,” he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the guilt.… Because my guilt … my guilt … only now in these talks … now that I have talked about it all for the first time.…” He stopped.

He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.

After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.”

“
Still here
?”

“I should have died. That was my guilt.”

“
Do you mean you should have died, or you should have had the
courage
to die
?”

“You can put it like that,” he said, vaguely, sounding tired now.

“
Well, you say that now. But then
?”

“That
is
true,” he said slowly, perhaps deliberately misinterpreting my question. “I did have another twenty years – twenty good years. But believe me, now I would have preferred to die rather than this.…” He looked around the little prison room. “I have no more hope,” he said then, in a factual tone of voice; and continued, just as quietly: “And anyway – it is enough now. I want to carry through these talks we are having and then – let it be finished. Let there be an end.”

It was over. I got up. Usually a prison guard had come to fetch him; this time, because we had continued much later than usual, the instructions were that he was to come downstairs with me to the entrance of the prison block, from where a guard would take him back to his cell. When we stood up he became suddenly very gay, fatigue appeared to have gone; he helped me pick up my papers and insisted on carrying the coffee cups.

When we got downstairs, we stood for a moment near the door which was opened for me to leave the block. He stuck his head out. “Nice air,” he said, “let me smell it a moment. I’ll be glad to see the lady out,” he jested to the officer on duty who smiled and pressed the button that closed the electronic door. When I waved from outside, he smiled and waved back. It was just after 5 o’clock.

Stangl died nineteen hours later, just after noon the next day, Monday, of heart failure. He had seen no one since I left him except a prison officer who had taken the food trolley around. On a piece of paper tacked to his wall he had jotted down a name he had been trying to remember. On his table everything was in perfect order. Inside the book of fairy tales by Janusz Korczak, the sheet of paper with which he had marked a page he wanted to show me was no longer blank as I had seen it, but covered with emphatically underlined quotes from the book, each headed by the appropriate page number. The prison library book he was reading at the time of his death was
Laws and Honour
by Josef Pilsudski.

The possibility was certainly in everybody’s mind – including mine – that he might have killed himself, and he was carefully examined at the obligatory
post mortem
.

He had not committed suicide. His heart was weak and he would no doubt have died quite soon anyway. But I think he died when he did because he had finally, however briefly, faced himself and told the truth; it was a monumental effort to reach that fleeting moment when he became the man he should have been.

Epilogue

I do not believe that all men are equal, for what we are above all other things, is individual and different. But individuality and difference are not only due to the talents we happen to be born with. They depend as much on the extent to which we are allowed to expand in freedom.

There is an as yet ill-defined, little-understood essential core to our being which, given this freedom, comes into its own, almost like birth, and which separates or even liberates us from intrinsic influences, and thereafter determines our moral conduct and growth. A moral monster, I believe, is not born, but is produced by interference with this growth. I do not know what this core is: mind, spirit, or perhaps a moral force as yet unnamed. But I think that, in the most fundamental sense, the individual personality only exists, is only valid from the moment when it emerges; when, at whatever age (in infancy, if we are lucky), we begin to be in charge of and increasingly responsible for our actions.

Social morality is contingent upon the individual’s capacity to make responsible decisions, to make the fundamental choice between right and wrong; this capacity derives from this mysterious core – the very essence of the human person.

This essence, however, cannot come into being or exist in a vacuum. It is deeply vulnerable and profoundly dependent on a climate of life; on freedom in the deepest sense: not license, but freedom to grow: within family, within community, within nations, and within human society as a whole. The fact of its existence therefore – the very fact of our existence as valid individuals – is evidence of our interdependence and of our responsibility for each other.