Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

I gazed out at the great field without the slightest trace of false sentimentality. It bears repeating that I am a normal man with normal feelings. When I’m tempted by human weakness, however, I simply think of Germany, and of the trust reposed in me by her Deliverer — whose vision, whose ideals and aspirations, I unshakably share. To be kind to the Jew is to be cruel to the German. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’: these concepts have had their time; they are gone. Under the new order, some deeds have positive outcomes and some deeds have negative outcomes. And that is all.

‘Kommandant, in Culenhof’, said Prufer, with 1 of his responsible frowns, ‘Blobel tried blowing them up.’

I turned and looked at him, and said through my handkerchief (we all had handkerchiefs), ‘Tried blowing them up to achieve what?’

‘You know, get rid of them that way. It didn’t work, Kommandant.’

‘Well I could’ve told him that before he started. Since when does blowing things up make them disappear?’

‘That’s what I thought once they’d tried. It went everywhere. There were bits hanging from the trees.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Erkel.

‘We got the bits we could reach. On the lower branches.’

‘What about the upper bits?’ asked Stroop.

‘We just left them there,’ said Prufer.

I looked out on a vast surface that undulated like a lagoon at the turn of the tide, a surface dotted with geysers that burped and squirted; every now and then divots of turf jumped and somersaulted in the air. I yelled for Szmul.

That evening Paulette surprised me in my study. I was on an easy chair, relaxing with a glass of brandy and a cigar. She said,

‘Where’s Bohdan?’

‘Not you too. And that’s a hideous dress.’

She gulped and said, ‘Where’s Torquil?’

Torquil was the tortoise (and I do mean ‘was’). The girls loved the tortoise: unlike the weasel, the lizard, and the rabbit, the tortoise couldn’t run away.

… A little later I tiptoed up behind Sybil as she was doing her homework on the kitchen table — and gave her a good fright! As I then laughingly hugged her and kissed her she seemed to pull back.

‘You pull back, Sybil.’

‘No I don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’ll be 13 quite soon, Daddy. And that’s a big milestone for me. And you don’t…’

‘I don’t what? No. Go on.’

‘You don’t smell good,’ she said, and made a face.

At this my blood really started to boil.

‘Do you know the meaning of the word patriotism , Sybil?’

She twisted her head away and said, ‘I like hugging and kissing you, Daddy, but I’ve got other things on my mind.’

I waited before I said, ‘In that case you’re a very cruel little girl.’

*

And what of Szmul, what of the Sonders? Ach, I can hardly bring myself to set it down. You know, I never cease to marvel at the abyss of moral destitution to which certain human beings are willing to descend…

The Sonders, they go about their ghastly tasks with the dumbest indifference. Using thick leather belts they drag the pieces from the shower room to the Leichenkeller; they extract the gold-stopped teeth with pliers and chisels, and remove the women’s hair with the snapping shears; they tear off the earrings and the wedding bands; then they stack the pulley (6 or 7 per consignment), which is hoisted up to the gaping retorts; finally, they grind the ashes, and the powdery dust is taken by the truckload and dispersed in the River Vistula. All of this, as already stated, they perform with dumb callousness. It doesn’t seem to matter at all to them that the people they process are their comrades in race, their siblings in blood.

And do the vultures of the crematory ever show the slightest animation? Ach yech: when they greet the evacuees on the ramp and guide them through the disrobing room. In other words, they come alive only in treachery and deceit. Tell me your trade , they’ll say. An engineer, eh? Excellent. We always need engineers. Or something like, Ernst Kahn — from Utrecht? Yes, he and his… Oh yes, Kahn and his wife and the kids were here for a month or 2 and then decided to go on to the agricultural station. The 1 at Stanislavov. When there is a difficulty, the Sonders are quite prepared to use violence; they frogmarch any troublemaker to a nearby NCO, who deals with the situation in the suitable fashion.

You see, with Szmul and the rest of them, it’s in their interests that things should go smoothly and briskly, because they’re impatient to rifle through the discarded clothes and sniff out something to drink or smoke. Or something to eat. They are always eating — always eating, the Sonders, eating the scraps filched from the disrobing room (despite the relatively generous rations they moreover enjoy). They’ll sit spooning up their soup on a stack of Stucke; they’ll wade knee deep through the mephitic meadow whilst munching on a hunk of ham…

It staggers me that they decide to persist, to last, in this way. And they do so decide: some (albeit not many), categorically refuse, despite the obvious consequence — for they too, now, have become Geheimnistrager, bearers of secrets. Not that any of them can hope to prolong their cowardly existence for more than 2 or 3 months. On this point we are quite clear and forthright: the Sonders’ initiatory task, after all, is the cremation of their predecessors; and so it will go on. Szmul has the dubious distinction of being the longest-serving undertaker in the KL — indeed, in the whole concentrationary system, I shouldn’t wonder. He is virtually a Prominent (even the guards accord him a modicum of respect). Szmul continues. But he knows very well what happens to them — what happens to bearers of secrets.

For myself, honour is not a matter of life or death: it’s far more important than that. The Sonders, very obviously, hold otherwise. Honour gone; the animal or even mineral desire to persist. Being is a habit, a habit they can’t break. Ach, if they were real men — in their place I’d… But wait. You never are in anybody’s place. And it’s true what they say, here in the KL: No one knows themselves. Who are you? You don’t know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest, and it tells you who you are.

I waited till the girls were tucked up and then strode out into the garden. Hannah in a white shawl stood with her arms folded by the picnic table. She was drinking a glass of red wine — and smoking a Davidoff. Beyond her, a salmony sunset and a tumbling rack of clouds. I said matter-of-factly,

‘Hannah, I think the 3 of you should go to your mother’s for a week or 2.’

‘Where’s Bohdan?’

‘Good God. For the 10th time, they transferred him.’ And it was nothing to do with me, though I wasn’t displeased to see the back of him. ‘Packed him off to Stutthof. Him and about 200 others.’

‘Where’s Torquil?’

‘For the 10th time, Torquil’s dead . Bohdan did it. With his shovel , Hannah, remember?’

‘Bohdan killed Torquil. You say.’

‘Yes! Out of spite, I suppose. And funk. At the other camp he’ll have to start again. It could be hard for him.’

‘Hard in what way?’

‘Well he won’t be a gardener in Stutthof. It’s a different kind of regime.’ I decided not to tell Hannah that at Stutthof you got 25 lashes the minute you arrived. ‘It was me who had to clear it all up. Torquil. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you.’

‘Why should we go to my mother’s?’

I hummed and hawed for a bit, claiming it was a good idea anyway. Hannah said,

‘Come on, what’s the real reason?’

‘Oh all right. Berlin has mandated an emergency Projekt. Things’ll be unpleasant here for a while. Just for a couple of weeks.’