Robert Lautner - The Draughtsman

I could not stop myself blinking, waking from my dream.

‘Camp song?’

‘Of course. Pride in their camp. Good for morale.’

The rain gone fully now and the brass of the band glistened from it, some of the band conscientious enough to wipe their instruments with their sleeves, proud of them, did not wipe their own faces. Their box-caps flat on their heads where they had stood in the downpour.

I flinched to the sound of loudspeakers along the fence crackling into life, the distinct sound of needle scratching record.

Trumpets and oboes blared, a fast drum beat. I would almost call it a ‘swing’ tune as the crash of cymbals came in and Zarah Leander’s voice came tinnily out.

‘To Me You’re Beautiful’ the song. I did not know if the colonel in the red-framed building knew it but this had originally been a music-hall Yiddish song. No. Maybe he did know.

The jolly song used instead of a klaxon. Hundreds of men were coming from huts like bees from a hive. The mass of them terrifying and I stepped back to the security of the steel car and Klein laughed at my reaction.

‘This is just the main camp-men. The work details. With the sub-camps there are almost sixty thousand here. Filthy. Diseased. Typhus. Do not worry, it is clean here. This is the good side.’

I could only stare. The only word for it. Stared. For such a sight. There was something familiar in it. Something I could not place. In the bones of us perhaps. Such sights.

The song came to its end, the men accustomed to timing themselves to assemble in the square before the finish, packed in the square, not an inch between them, and then a prisoner stepped from the band, came to the front. The conductor.

I was watching a conductor at eight in the morning in a prison. A captive audience of hundreds, a choir of hundreds. I began to smile myself, with Klein, to smile as at elephants or bears performing for handfuls of nuts. In absurdity. To not think how the elephants or bears are trained. It was if this were for us, for Klein and myself. But no. This happened every day. Twice a day. Their roll call. They did not even know we were here.

The band began. A martial tune, not like the record, a rousing powerful song, the type used as food for starving soldiers to forget their holed boots and damp socks. But the voices were not rousing, they were dulled and low like a warped record winding down, exactly as Zarah Leander’s wasn’t. The counter of her voice.

‘Here,’ Klein said. ‘They like this bit. Watch them stand straighter.’

It was the chorus. One line in it that came stronger than a mumble. Something on once being free from prison walls.

‘They wrote the song themselves,’ Klein tapped the roof of his car. ‘Ten marks to the composer. A competition. That is quite impressive, no? Every camp has a song. And they beat those who do not sing well enough – which is bad, but it is their song. They should sing it proud. They voted for it. Come.’

We walked away from the car and I remembered to look at the gate with the backwards writing, for those facing it on the inside.

‘TO EACH HIS OWN’.

Klein watched me read it. Saw everything. Always.

‘It means, “You get what you deserve.” And don’t we all, Ernst? At the end. And at the beginning, if you are lucky enough. And work well.’ He waved me to the stairs, to the wooden building above the gatehouse. Guards and their machine-guns walking around the balcony.

‘This is the main guard tower. We passed the commandant’s quarters along the road but Pister likes to breakfast with his men. Likes to hear the song. Walk smarter, Ernst. You are to meet a colonel!’

The marching tune ended. The roll call begun. Zarah Leander again, quieter this time for the guards to hear the names.

This like my first day at school. Bewildering, fearful. I could only think of telling Etta of it, as telling my mother of my first day with my teacher and the strange new children. The strangeness, my clothes even out of place against the stripes of prison suits, stripes of barbed wire and the gates. No walls, electric wired fences. Green freedom just beyond, in sight all around. Bears tumbling each other in a zoo. My first day.

Senior-Colonel Pister opened the chalet door himself. I did not know what I expected but not the portly, white-haired man in red sweater and red braces above his SS trousers. If it were not April, if not for his lack of beard, I might have just met St Nick.

A wood stove, the smell of coffee and bacon warming the room. I was jarred for a moment, almost hiding behind Klein as Pister welcomed us against the sound of names being barked in the square below.

Pister’s arms opened wide as if to embrace.

‘How are you, Hans?’

‘Very well, Colonel.’

Klein negated, defeated, Pister’s open arms with a handshake, his left hand on Pister’s arm, drawing Pister’s hand into the shake. ‘I am so glad we managed to catch the song.’

The ‘we’ directed to me and that was how I was introduced and how I realised Klein controlled rooms. He did not wait for Pister to ask who he had brought, he did not reciprocate Pister’s embrace but initiated his own and I tried to recall if he had done the same to me, and then I saw that his hand was on Pister’s back, gently, and this I recalled, and the pace up the stairs on my first day. Keep up, keep up.

Keep up. Klein’s way. Keep up with me. Or I will leave you all behind. A trick. You could not keep up. He would not let you, and he did it so naturally you would never notice. My only insight. Seeing him do it to someone else.

Pister took my hand. ‘Welcome to Buchenwald, Herr Beck.’

Klein spoke for me.

‘Herr Beck is new to Topf. Our new draughtsman. He has never seen a prison before. I am pleased he can see it under your command, Colonel. Rather than before.’

Pister’s face saddened.

‘Ah, yes, Herr Beck. I inherited a sorry place I can tell you. Now, to business, gentlemen.’ He bid us to sit, offered the percolated coffee. Klein had told me in his office that he did not drink coffee, and, in truth, he did not touch it other than to dip a biscuit Pister had given as the names still came loudly from outside and men with guns walked past the windows.

Pister bemoaned the ovens.

He wanted a six-muffle oven, six doors, to increase capacity. The reduction of matter too much for the old set. A new oven. The old three-door model broke down too often. Was never meant to work so hard. It would have to be replaced.

‘I will not return to using just pits like my predecessor. That is animal work.’

I was taking the notes. Needed clarification. Klein’s jaw clenched when I spoke.

‘Why do the ovens break, Colonel?’

Pister sat back in his red leather armchair. With his black boots and red sweater his Christmas look almost completed. I waited for him to pat his knee for me to sit upon.

‘We have a high death rate here. The other camps send only their sick and old to us. We are more morgue than prison. The healthy stock comes from the Sinti and Roma, and the POWs. When I can get them.’

Klein snapped his biscuit.

‘Building a new oven, Colonel, will take a month. Herr Prüfer will have to build it and Herr Sander would have to sign it off. And I can tell you, Colonel, that Prüfer will not build a new oven for less than sixty thousand marks.’

‘That is preposterous,’ Pister said. ‘Nonsense.’ Christmas no more.

‘Nevertheless. We could replace some of the bricks in the existing oven, add one more three-muffle, which would only take two weeks, and provide you with mobile ovens in the meantime to maintain your conversion rates. That we could do for forty thousand marks.’