Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

At the end of the day, after stopping by the Haus der Waffen-SS to wash and change, I went back to the Hösses. In front of the gate, there were now only a few dozen ants left, rapidly crisscrossing the surface. The thousands of others must have been underground now, digging, clearing away, shoring up, invisible but continuing their mad labor without respite. Höss welcomed me on the steps, glass of Cognac in hand. He introduced me to his wife, Hedwig, a blond woman with a fixed smile and hard eyes, wearing a becoming evening gown with a lace collar and sleeves, and his two eldest daughters, Kindi and Püppi, also prettily dressed. Klaus shook my hand in a friendly way; he was wearing a tweed jacket of English cut, with suede patches on the elbows and large horn buttons. “That’s a handsome jacket,” I remarked. “Where did you find that?”—“My dad brought it back for me from the camp,” he replied, beaming with pleasure. “The shoes too.” They were polished brown leather ankle boots, with buttons up the side. “Very elegant,” I said. Wirths was there and he introduced me to his wife; the other guests were all camp officers: there were Hartjenstein, the garrison commander; Grabner, the head of the political department; Lagerführer Aumeier, Dr. Caesar, and a few others. The ambiance was somewhat formal, more than at Eichmann’s, in any case, but cordial. Caesar’s wife, a woman still young, laughed a lot; Wirths explained that she had been one of Caesar’s assistants, and he had proposed to her soon after his second wife died of typhus. Conversation turned on Mussolini’s recent fall and arrest, which had made a strong impression on everybody; the protestations of loyalty from Badoglio, the new Prime Minister, didn’t inspire much confidence. Then we discussed the Reichsführer’s plans for developing the German East. All sorts of contradictory ideas flew among the guests; Grabner tried to draw me into a discussion on the Himmlerstadt colonization project, but I replied evasively. One thing remained clear: whatever people’s views were on the future of the region, the camp was an integral part of it. Höss thought it would last at least ten or twenty years. “The extension of the Stammlager has been planned with that in mind,” he explained. “Once we’ve finished with the Jews and the war, Birkenau will disappear, and the land will be given back to agriculture. But the industry of Upper Silesia, especially with the German losses in the East, won’t be able to do without Polish labor; the camp will remain vital for control of these populations, for a long time.” Two inmates, wearing simple but clean dresses made of good material, circulated among the guests with trays; they wore the purple triangle of the IBVs, also known as “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The rooms were nicely furnished, with rugs, leather sofas and armchairs, furniture in rich, well-tooled wood, vases with fresh flowers on lace doilies. The lamps gave off a yellow, discreet, almost subdued light. Signed enlargements of photographs of the Reichsführer visiting the camp with Höss or holding his children on his knees decorated the walls. The brandies and wines were of good quality; Höss also offered his guests fine Yugoslavian cigarettes, Ibars. I contemplated with curiosity this rigid, conscientious man, who dressed his children in the clothes of Jewish children killed under his direction. Did Höss think of that as he looked at them? Probably the idea didn’t even enter his mind. His wife held his elbow and emitted curt, sharp bursts of laughter. I looked at her and thought about her cunt, under her dress, nesting in the lace panties of a pretty young Jewish girl gassed by her husband. The Jewess had long ago been burned along with her own cunt and had gone up in smoke to join the clouds; her expensive panties, which she might have put on especially for her deportation, now adorned and protected the cunt of Hedwig Höss. Did Höss think about that Jewess, when he took off her panties to honor his wife? But maybe he wasn’t much interested anymore in Frau Höss’s cunt, however delicately it was covered: work in the camps, when it didn’t make men insane, often made them impotent. Maybe he kept his own Jewess somewhere in the camp, clean, well fed, a lucky one, the Kommandant’s whore? No, not him: if Höss took a mistress from among the inmates, it would be a German, not a Jew.

It is never good to have such thoughts, I know that. That night my recurrent dream had a final intensification. I was approaching that immense city by way of a derelict railroad track; in the distance, the line of chimneys was peacefully smoking; and I felt lost, isolated, an abandoned whelp, and the need for men’s companionship tormented me. I mixed with the crowd and wandered for a long time, irresistibly drawn by the crematoriums vomiting spirals of smoke and clouds of sparks into the sky, like a dog, both attracted and repell’d / By the stench of his own kind / Burning . But I couldn’t reach it, and entered instead one of the vast building-barracks, where I occupied a bunk, shoving away an unknown woman who wanted to join me. I fell asleep promptly. When I woke up, I noticed a little blood on my pillow. I looked closer and saw there was also some on the sheets. I removed them; beneath, they were soaking in blood mixed with sperm, big gobs of sperm too thick to seep through the cloth. I was sleeping in a room in Höss’s house, upstairs, next to the children’s room; and I had no idea how I could bring these soiled sheets to the bathroom, to wash them, without Höss noticing. This problem was causing me a horrible, agonizing discomfort. Then Höss came into my room with another officer. They took off their underpants, sat down cross-legged next to my bed, and began to masturbate vigorously, each crimson glans disappearing and reappearing from the foreskin, until they had sent huge jets of sperm onto my bed and onto the rug. They wanted me to imitate them, but I refused; the ceremony apparently had a precise significance, but I didn’t know what it was.

This brutal, obscene dream marked the end of my first stay in the KL Auschwitz: I had finished my work. I returned to Berlin and from there went to visit some camps in the Altreich, the KLs Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, as well as many of their satellite camps. I won’t expand any further on these visits: all these camps have been amply described in the historical literature, better than I could do; and it’s also quite true that when you’ve seen one camp, you’ve seen them all: all camps look alike, it’s a well-known fact. Nothing of what I saw, despite local variations, perceptibly changed my opinion or my conclusions. I returned to Berlin for good around mid-August, in the period between the recapture of Orel by the Soviets and the final conquest of Sicily by the Anglo-Americans. I wrote my report quickly; I had already gathered my notes together along the way, I just needed to organize the sections and type it all out, a matter of a few days. I was careful with both my prose and the logic of my argumentation: the report was addressed to the Reichsführer, and Brandt had warned me that I would probably have to give a verbal report. When the final version was corrected and typed up, I sent it off and waited.

I had gone back, without much pleasure I have to confess, to my landlady Frau Gutknecht. She went into raptures, and was determined to make me tea; but she didn’t understand how, since I was coming home from the East, where one can find everything to eat , I hadn’t thought to bring back a pair of geese, for the household of course. (Actually, she wasn’t the only one with this in mind: Piontek had returned from his stay in Tarnowitz with a trunkful of food, and had offered to sell me some without coupons.) What’s more, I got the impression that she had taken advantage of my absence to search through my belongings. My indifference to her whining and her childish behavior was beginning, unfortunately, to wear thin. As for Fräulein Praxa, she had changed her hairdo, but not the color of her nails. Thomas was happy to see me again: great changes were under way, he affirmed, it was good I was in Berlin, I had to be prepared.