The Birthday Buyer (12 page)

Again and again, and with an insistence for a lost cause the rest of the men in the barrack had never seen before. Every day, while Hurbinek was alive, Henek sat by his side and patiently repeated his name. He was loathe to accept, after pronouncing those syllables, just as he’d heard them, that in fact the child was only emitting a sound of pain or sorrow.

But Hurbinek never said Hurbinek, in spite of all that.

Henek understood the nurses reasonably well. He mixed up words from the languages he had heard in the camp: Yiddish, Hungarian, Polish, plus a couple of greetings in Russian, sexual obscenities in Slovakian, three ways of saying “don’t forget me” and “I hate you” in Greek, and the odd German word, like
mensch
,“fellow,” that was forever on his lips as an epithet for anything.

Thanks to that mosaic of languages he managed to find food and clean clothes for the sick in the shack, particularly for Hurbinek, who immediately dirtied himself and never had the right clothing—his body shrunk so rapidly by the day, and he was so worn down at the end, when he died, that his shroud consisted of a trouser leg and half a blanket. Consequently the words that began to be more habitual around him appertained to material objects, were all concrete and real: shirt, blanket, bowl, spoon, cap, shit, water, bread, morphine, hair, cudgel, rat, eye. Henek repeated them ten, twenty times, when he had the opportunity, so he would learn—“My shirt, shirt, shirt,” and pointed to his clothes, “Your cap, cap, cap” and touched what he was wearing on his head. “Water, water, water” and made him drink from a tin. “Your eye, eye, eye” and put his finger on Hurbinek’s cheek.

Sometimes Henek tried to teach him words he had heard the executioners use, such as
fressen
, that he used meaning “to eat” when in fact it meant “throw the pigs some feed” or “fodder” because that’s what they were in the eyes of the SS, livestock, animals only kept alive to be slaughtered. Or
spritzen
, the favorite word of Höss, the Camp Commandant, who would repeat it to great laughter when they were slicing through a child’s neck and the blood streamed down its body, “Spurt, spurt!” Patzold and Goldstein reproached Henek for using these words that were damned because they evoked a raft of painful experiences that they then re-lived. Primo Levi told them those meanings were degraded, were language that must be forgotten, erased from dictionaries, removed from all tongues, destroyed in books. “They are words that should be tried and executed,” schoolmaster Rubem Yetzem would say in turn.

“
Wstawać
!”

Primo Levi relates how this Polish word was the word he most feared and hated, the one that pursued him in his nightmares for the rest of his life after January 1945. It was the dawn word, the word for waking up from a sleep into which your body collapsed exhausted, sleep that healed nothing, simply a paralyzing of life in motion where the torture of starvation surfaced in the subconscious, the only sleep really possible. It was a cruel word that carried within it an unpleasant sensation of cold and intense discomfort, reality that couldn’t be eluded, non-sleep. He defined it as “the foreign order”: “Get up!”

Henek hears that word no longer and similarly no one else in the camp hears it now. It has disappeared. But the tinny, absurdly nasal voice over the loudspeakers (when Henek heard the word “death” it would always remind him of the nasal loudspeaker in Auschwitz) still echoes in the ears of everyone and begins in the middle of the night. It is easy to mistake Hurbinek’s coughs for the howls from that loudspeaker: “
Raus! Raus
!”
³

They take their time to become mere coughs in the head of Henek, who suddenly wakes up, eyes bulging out of their sockets and temples quivering. Frightened, he gets up in the night and seeks consolation by kissing and touching Hurbinek.

Then when he recovers his sense of absurd normality, Henek helps Hurbinek; a torture renewed every night; death zigzags across the anonymous child’s straw cradle. He runs his hand over his back and presses the sores; the child produces an even wheezier rattle. What did he say? Henek wonders, but it isn’t a word, only a word in disguise, a stammer, an intention that is never fulfilled. Hurbinek’s eyes want to live and are glued to Henek’s reactions. He repeats his two words, or perhaps one.
Mass klo
, very quietly. Sleepy Henek hasn’t heard it.

“
Mass klo
” Hurbinek repeats making a supreme effort.

Henek brightened up when he heard that and understood he was asking him to stay there, where language and time had been suspended. He cuddled up to him and for the first time realized that Hurbinek’s belly was going up and down very fast. That was his reply.

Are words eternal?

For almost fifteen years, the Führer’s fetish word and the favorite word in Germany was
Vernichtung
, “annihilation.” It was used as much as
auszurotten
, “eradicate.” In the bed next to me, my companion in this hospital ward is reading these same words in a sporting newspaper. The German language has a very poor memory.

Walter Benjamin had a prophetic dream on September 10, 1939, a year before he died. He was sitting on the branch of a tree. Underneath him was a kind of lawn or green wooden dais and a huge crowd spread over a meadow on a hillside. They wandered about like zombies and lived in barracks that were aligned symmetrically; they all wore prison garb. They were skinny, and some repeated in their companions’ ears “They will burn us, they will burn us.” They looked up, to where he was sitting, but weren’t looking at him, as he thought, but at a huge figure even higher up. It was a child in a general’s uniform. He couldn’t see his face but could make out his arm and his stripes. His arm made movements similar to a child putting his hand into a box of toys. Perching on his branch, he jotted down the most important ideas he’d ever had, and did so on sheets of paper that then drifted down onto the crowd. His tiny writing filled each sheet and left no margins. Those who read a sheet, ate it and looked back up. Were they perhaps expecting more? As if responding to the unvoiced question as to why he was writing those sheets, Benjamin replied loudly, “It is very spiritual,” but the child in the general’s uniform didn’t respond, and put his head into the box the wood of the tree with the branch where he was sat had become. Everything seemed to indicate they would stay like that indefinitely—him writing, the people down below reading, then swallowing the sheet—when he discovered that the child was sick and was about to die. From his branch he heard the doctor say, “When he dies, shut the box and throw it on the fire.” That horrified him so much he woke up. Who could have imagined that Benjamin’s dream anticipated camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka? “I have had a frightful dream,” he wrote to a friend, “but I don’t know what it means.”

Walter Benjamin was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.

Place is all. Place creates reality. That’s why I buy realities. That’s why I buy places.

One cannot understand Auschwitz
in its totality
without knowing the place, without knowing the place
in its totality
by heart.

What is its climate like, what is the color of the soil, what is the snow like in Auschwitz, what sort of view does one get
from there
? The thousands of photos I’ve seen have never made me feel I am in that place.

What does one breathe in Auschwitz?

I buy memory. I buy the lot, that is, I buy that climate, that soil, and that air. The location, in a word. I am a desperate, alert buyer in this Frankfurt hospital room.

I will visit the Auschwitz camps—now called
Oświęcim
once again—in Poland; of course I will; I will visit them later, in the cold month of March. I will succeed in what I have failed so far. Perhaps I really will some day, I tell myself, but not now (my body is in so much pain, my legs are still sheathed in plaster, I so badly need to leave this country whose history is like a throbbing migraine!) I will visit the Auschwitz camps in due course, will go on a tourist package with lots of Jews, Italians, and two or three Spaniards, but no Germans (evidently, Germans never visit Auschwitz—statistics don’t lie), I will accompany the group to the entrance over which one can read the undulating letters—an imitation of a strip of cloth—and the cruelly ironic slogan
Arbeit Macht Frei
, “Work Makes You Free”—the motto for all the camps ever since someone inscribed it in the first, Dachau-1933—and I will see the railroad tracks, and then, inevitably, the truncated brick chimney, all that remains that seems genuinely sinister, though abstract as if it were an object out of context. Everything here is out of context, I will reflect as I walk over the paving in the camp, stones full of voices that are heard by very few, that are heard by me. Whispered voices more like. Crazed voices. Voices that are suddenly silenced, struck by real blows that split open skulls or break jaws.

The place is now only an empty space, a uniformly flat, snow-covered plain where one can see the silhouettes of distant lines of barracks and barbed wire fences with lamps shaped like butchers’ hooks, hanging intact on concrete posts, nightmarish adornments memory imprints on its wax against oblivion, on behalf of the ghosts. That day I will have traveled the fourty-five miles from Krakow and alighted from bus number 24, at the end of its route opposite the Auschwitz Museum, a few feet from the car park. Soon I will deliberately get lost, searching for Hurbinek’s tree in the little forest of birchtrees surrounding Crematorium VI at the feet of which are hundreds of labels with names in Hebrew nailed on small stakes. Only ruins and gaping holes remain of the actual Crematorium.

Everything in Auschwitz is a gaping hole in something else that no longer exists.

Close by, covered in earth and weeds, are signs of several narrow gullies. Barely fifty years ago they were full of half burnt corpses because the ovens couldn’t keep pace with demand.

This is what I shall see the day I go to Auschwitz.

The place. I need to refer to the place once again.

Oświęcim
, the city in Upper Silesia, first Polish, then Austrian, then Polish again, then German, then finally back to Polish, is today a city with a population of 45,000 inhabitants: for some it is a tortured place, for others it is accursed. In 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, it had 12,000 inhabitants, and an antiquated artillery barracks that surrendered without offering any resistance. Only a sergeant in the Polish army, by the name of Prohaska, died. A few months after
Oświęcim
was taken, Arpad Wigand, a colonel in the Security Police, visited on a fact-finding mission, carrying out orders from
SS Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler, and he concluded he had found exactly the right place on the plain one could see from the barracks to build the large concentration camp for the East that they were planning in Berlin. Himmler was delighted with the report he received from Wigand and on April 27, 1940 he signed the decree for the camp to be built. In Wigand’s view, as he noted in his report, the suitability of the place was based on the fact that it was a railroad junction, the Auschwitz-Birkenau station, reached by trains from Silesia, Czechoslovakia and Vienna, and from the cities in the East under the recent General Government, like Katowice, Krakow and Warsaw. It was also very easy to re-direct convoys there that were coming from the Ukraine and Byelorussia. Moreover, it had an added advantage: the Vistula and Sola Rivers flowed into each other in the nearby area of Broschkowitz, north-east of Birkenau, Brzezinka in Polish, thus creating a huge hairpin that isolated a large part of the region of Bielitz, under the administration of the city they now re-christened as Auschwitz. The camps were rapidly built and repeatedly extended between the two rivers.

The gas chambers were mostly set toward the north-east, in the area of Birkenau known as Auschwitz II.

The lethal Zyklon-B basically comprised cyanide acid, a gas concocted for the purpose of killing rats by its manufacturers, Degesch, a Frankfurt enterprise—Frankfurt yet again!—the diabolical city where I am now convalescing, the city I want to escape from but can’t.

It was Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss, who found a new use for that gas. He had discovered it had been tested out in the spring of 1942 as an agent for exterminating Jews. It was a highly successful experiment. That summer Höss began to order thousands of cans of Zyklon-B from its distributors, two Hamburg firms, Tesch and Stabenow. All these firms prospered throughout those years and continued to exist after the war and even contributed to the “German economic miracle.”

As many as 20,000 prisoners passed through the gas chambers daily. Two out of every three prisoners who got off the cattle trucks went straight to be gassed.

Men, women and children were stripped before they went in. They had no false expectations about where they were headed. Children consoled their parents.

Death from breathing in the gas wasn’t immediate, but was terribly drawn out, people could take a minimum of five minutes and a maximum of twenty, even thirty, to die. The bodies writhed, then lay twisted and tangled on top of each other. It was a good forty minutes before they were removed, the time required to re-fill the chambers with fresh air.

I have seen a photo of Dr. Eduard Wirths. He joined the
Waffen SS
on his thirtieth birthday in 1939. The day the photo was taken, Wirths is doctor-in-chief, the
SS-Sturmbannführer
commandant, responsible for the sanitary area in Auschwitz: he is a gynecologist and expert in racial liquidation and sterilization, a friend of Mengele’s and a special, close friend of Höss, the camp boss, with whom he shared a great fondness for horses. Wirths is smiling in that photo, is standing and looking at the photographer, posing with his hands clasped behind his back. It could be a perfectly innocent photo, taken in any field barracks anywhere on the front, if it weren’t for the presence behind him of Crematorium IV operating at full strength, on a November day in 1942. Black smoke is coming out of the two square chimneys that leave macabre particles of soot floating in the air. Wirths is looking south, close to the window of the
Waffen SS
’s messroom near the kitchen and toilets. Barely sixty-five feet further on, to the east of this building, you can see the skylights of the room where people took their clothes off (used soon after as the dumping ground for the very same individuals who had stripped off there, whose corpses were piled up like sacks to facilitate the extraction of teeth before they were placed in the ovens), and a little further away, in the most distant section of that building, you get a glimpse in the photo of the sealed doors of the chambers. A man in his striped prisoner garb and wearing a cap is looking at the thin, tall, elegant, uniformed, haughty Wirths. He has just arrived from Norway to take up his new duties. He is wearing riding boots. He has promised Höss’s mother, a childhood friend of Wirth’s mother in Würzburg, that they will go for a ride every morning in the area around the Birkenau camp as far as the camp in Budy, the other side of the Harmense ponds, to the south-west of Auschwitz. A three or four miles ride in all to help put worries aside, even though his greatest worry is ending the outbreak of typhus now spreading everywhere. They must gas more people, burn them more quickly, the two riders comment as their steeds’ hoofs ring out over the ground. Speed up, speed up, is the slogan. Fire destroys all evil. Höss’s stables are different to the prisoners’ barracks in that they are cleaner and well looked after, even bedecked with vases of flowers. Every morning Wirths himself changes the flowers. When he hung himself in September 1945 all they found in one of his pockets was a photo of him with Höss grooming his horse in one of the Auschwitz stables. He was held to be a good doctor. He killed two million Jews.

The ashes finally impregnate everything with their dark gray. They fall and settle like strange black snow. When an easterly wind blows, the inhabitants of houses in Auschwitz and Birkenau must shut their windows. The surface of brooks flowing from the Vistula and Sola slurp along under a thick, dirty-foam-like layer of ash. A lot of barbel and trout swallow this ash in the water. People sometimes eat this fish and think it’s tasty, and why shouldn’t they? The rain melds the ash into the soil on the farms. The porridge they feed to many of the prisoners, as well as the potato and cabbage soup with mutton eaten by the camp guards in the area of Auschwitz—that is Birkenau, Monowitz, Jawischowitz, Goleschau, Neu-Dachs, Budy and Blechhammer—the milk drunk by the inhabitants of the Bielitz region, from cows grazing on local pasture land,
everything
edible contains something of the ashes the Crematoria chimneys expel night and day. The region has descended into a new, unsuspected form of pandemic cannibalism.

Only the blind didn’t see the ashes; nobody and nothing else could escape them.

When I spoke to Fanny and the girls a while ago, I could hardly keep myself upright on the crutches the nurse left me. It is not easy to coast along on legs in plaster-casts. I’ll soon be leaving, I told them, one more week at most. Fanny offers to come and get me. I convinced her not to. What would be the point? Who went in search for Hurbinek, who went only to bring anyone back from Auschwitz? No one, and I don’t want anyone to fetch me from here. What am I saying? How can I even compare myself . . . ? I’m on the mend, even though I run the risk of going mad in this Universitäts-Kliniken on Theodor Sternstrasse. They brought me these crutches. I can walk now, I practice a few steps every day, I venture out of my room and wander down the hallway. Someone from the Spanish Consulate paid me a visit the other day. A short, chubby guy who turned out to be the consul; he spent the whole time telling me about the sober, brown furniture in the Consulate, “in the late-fascist style of the thirties,” he said, transported there in the days of Castiella. He insisted I should go and take a look before returning to Madrid. He assured me that almost all the furniture dates back to 1939, when Serrano Súñer was ambassador in Berlin on behalf of his brother-in-law Franco. The consul says Hitler always said how much he liked the furniture in the Spanish Embassy. Did he actually visit the place?

“Once, one July 18.”

When the consul was leaving, he said, “You know, things last longer than we do.”

The stones in Auschwitz came to mind.

At 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday in the autumn of 1944 Wirths landed in the aerodrome of Gleiwitz, some three hours away from Auschwitz. He was on his way back from Berlin, where he’d arrived the previous day, from the family estate in Baden-Baden. His mother had bought him a horse and he had gone to see it. Wirths called it
Auschwitz
. He also brought regards for Höss’s mother from her son. When they said goodbye, no one could imagine that both they and Germany would be dead in less than a year.

He had breakfast at a checkpoint in the station in Biala. As he was eating, three train loads of prisoners came through on their way to Auschwitz. They did not stop.

He left at noon for Auschwitz.

At 1:00 p.m. he reached the camp and went to see Höss. When he arrived, they were unloading the third trainload onto the ramps on the Auschwitz 1 platform. The convoy had come from Hungary. All of those on the train were immediately taken to the gas chambers.

At 4:00 p.m. he went to the infirmary to sterilize four gypsy women. Two bled to death on their bunks. He issued the usual, pertinent orders for such cases.

At 5:30 p.m. he went to Crematorium III to personally supervise the cremation of the two gypsy women. He was very conscientious about his work. However, he didn’t find them because their bodies had been mixed up with the 133 other bodies that were being gassed at the time.

At 6:10 p.m. he visited the camp stables and lingered for fifteen minutes feeding and grooming his horse.

At 7:00 p.m. he had dinner with other officers. the
Meistersingers
in his bedroom.

At 8:30 p.m. he cleaned his pistol.

At 9:10 p.m. he fell asleep. By then they had already killed that day in the camp 185,302 prisoners. However, no one knew the precise number: the list of those eliminated wasn’t exhaustive.

A year later the citizens of Baden-Baden ended up eating
Auschwitz
, the horse that his mother gave him as a present.

The camps in the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau alone occupied an area of 489 hectares. They built on that terrain 640 units for barracks, crematoria, gas chambers, housing for the SS garrison responsible for guard duties, rooms for officers, central command, workshops, hospitals, stores, punishment cells, water purifiers, factories, as well as the stables and the barracks for prisoners. The average number of prisoners housed at any time was 250,000. When the Red Army entered the camp there were only some 65,000. There were six crematoria, each equipped with 12 ovens, each one divided in turn into 45 sections. Each section could take five adult corpses, and took twenty minutes to burn a corpse. As they gassed people quicker than they could incinerate them, they also began to burn bodies in mass open graves, by sprinkling gasoline over the bodies. The smell spread several miles around. They used every means to manufacture the dead at top speed.