Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

She herself, Frau Margarethe von Bjeck, had been as convinced as anyone that these Bolshevik Jews were a threat to the people of her country and that it was right that they should be interned in work camps in occupied Poland and that her husband Otto, as an SS officer, should have been sent to help run one of these camps. It was a great honour for her young SS-Obersturmführer, who ranked only below the camp commandant who was an SS-Sturmbannführer (Storm Unit Leader or Major). To have been entrusted with such a position was evidence of force of character, a powerful sense of duty and total loyalty to the Führer. Her husband had explained this to her as he opened the doors of their charming little house with its handmade wooden furniture, with little hearts carved into the backs of the chairs, armchairs upholstered in sea-blue velvet, wrought-iron beds and embroidered curtains. He had told her she must never speak to anyone except her neighbours, the wives of other SS officers, must look after the children and never ask him anything about his extremely important and highly confidential work. She had obeyed, passing her days indoors with her family or, with her husband’s permission, being driven in an SS car to a nearby farm village, to buy something for herself and the children. Their daily provisions were brought every morning by a member of her husband’s staff: milk, bread, meat and vegetables for the whole family.

From the windows of her little house on the edge of the camp, Margarethe could see birch trees silhouetted against the sky, and a pen full of geese whose angry and noisy squabbling could often be heard. Large geese with flat yellow beaks who produced gigantic eggs that she mixed with flour to make excellent pies, both sweet and savoury. The vegetables always came in boxes; sometimes asparagus, sometimes white cabbage, sometimes red cabbage. Sometimes she longed for a change, but she never complained.

Her husband, loyal to his country, never talked about his work at the camp. In any case, she had no curiosity and would not have wanted to go and look for herself. She stayed at home making her sweet and savoury cakes with apple or cabbage, and when she ran short of butter she sent to the camp kitchens for lard. A fat, yellow lard enclosed in tall narrow tins with red labels stuck on the top. She must never confuse them, a Polish cook once whispered in her ear as he brought her daily supply of food, with other tall narrow tins with purple labels that contained a gas in solid lumps called Zyklon B. She had gone to the trouble of remembering this but had been too lazy to think about it. Now she realised it had been an obedient sort of laziness, this not wanting to know, typical of SS wives. Better for wives to keep well away from secrets that might be dirty, even if in their hearts they believed them necessary to safeguard the fatherland. They must be shameful secrets, or they would have been discussed openly. Instead, in their identical little houses with their embroidered curtains, little drinks cabinets and cuckoo clocks, the men never spoke of what was happening in the camp. It was as if, when they came home and pulled off their boots and laid aside their stiff peaked caps, they were leaving behind disagreeable and sometimes filthy duties that could not be avoided. In those little houses with their gardens and flower beds, they ate, played with their children and made love to their young wives, as if living on islands of happiness suspended in space and time.

One day when there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, Frau Margarethe decided to go and pick some of the chicory she had seen growing luxuriantly in the fields round the camp, for the savoury pies she made with the goose eggs. She took a small knife and a basket lined with waxed paper. She put on a flowered dress that made the most of her slim waist — the bee, they had called her in the little town of Bremen — and a pair of shoes made with the orthopaedic cork heels that had taken the place of leather during the war. She felt cheerful and happy. She had made love with her husband the night before, after months when he had claimed to be too tired to touch her naked body. But last night he had kissed her again and again, and for once there had been no sign of the smell of permanganate she now so often associated with young Otto. The children had not woken her in the night and she had got up in the morning happy and well-rested, ready for the little domestic duties of the day.

While picking the chicory she had become aware of a strange smell of smoke. A smell she had never noticed in her own house, even when she opened the windows. A sweetish, feral smell, a smell which as it began to fill her nostrils seemed increasingly distasteful and disagreeable to her. She had raised her eyes, trying to make out where it was coming from, breathing the air deeply. But all round her was nothing but fields, wet grass, birches with streaky trunks and, some distance off, the walls of the camp. When the light wind that had carried the smell to her nose seemed to change direction, she had gone back to gathering chicory.

But after ten minutes or so the wind began blowing in her direction again and she had been assailed not only by the nauseous smell but by a puff of dark grey smoke that had seemed to adhere to her skin. She touched her naked arm with her hand and felt something she did not understand on her fingers. When she looked more closely, she realised it was ash. An almost imperceptible greasy ash giving off a disgusting smell.

Looking towards the camp she had noticed the chimney for the first time. It was not visible from her house, or even from her little garden. But from here, from this field where she was picking chicory, she had suddenly seen the tower in its full grandeur. It was belching out turgid grey smoke streaked with white, a bloated, greasy smoke that settled in an adhesive film.

Why did they insist on calling it a tower if it was a really a chimney? Something entered her mind like a secret, hidden memory. Suddenly she remembered words she had not understood at the time when she heard them. Words her husband Otto had spoken one evening to another officer on the telephone. Something about an oven ‘that is not working as it should, two of the furnaces are out of order and what are we going to do with so many bodies waiting?’ What had he been talking about, her SS officer husband Otto von Bjeck? In that moment a suspicion crossed her mind: what was the chimney for? Why did it pour out all that stinking smoke?

That evening Frau Margarethe asked her husband a question, despite the tacit agreement between them that they should never talk about life inside the camp. Despite her knowledge that he would never discuss what happened inside those walls either with her or the children. To protect his family, of course, just as sensitive people should not be exposed to the more painful images of war. But even so, after washing up and putting the children to bed, she had not been able to stop herself asking him what the chimney was for and what the foul-smelling smoke was. He did not answer, but forbade her to go out again without his permission, and above all never again to go gathering chicory in the fields round the camp. Not only that: her young husband’s face, normally so serene and relaxed when he came home to his wife and children, had suddenly hardened and turned pale. The rosy lips she so loved kissing froze into an angry grimace and he said not another word all evening. Later he went out to the camp and came home blind drunk.

This was what Margarethe von Bjeck had written in her camp diary Auschwitz: I Was There Too , carefully preserved by the painter Theodor Orenstein. On page thirty-six she mentions the dressmaker Magdalena Ruthmann, for whom all the camp officers’ wives competed because of her sewing skills. Margarethe von Bjeck sings her praises. She tells how, following her own instructions, Magdalena Ruthmann had transformed a piece of damask owned by a Jewish family whose property had been confiscated on arrival at the camp into an elegant little coat for her younger daughter. And how she had made four shirts for her husband Otto from a sheet taken from the suitcase of an elderly Dutchwoman.