Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

*

It’s the fire, do you see, it’s the fire.

How to make them burn, naked bodies, how to make them catch?

We started with very modest accumulations, using wooden planks, and we were hardly getting anywhere, but then Szmul… You know, I can see why the Sonderkommandofuhrer leads a charmed life. He it was who made a series of suggestions which, as it happened, proved key. I lay them down, for future reference.

1) There must be but a single pyre.

2) The pyre must burn continuously, on a 24-hour basis.

3) Liquefied human fat must be used to aid combustion. Szmul organised the run-off gutters and the ladling squads, which moreover resulted in considerable economies in gasoline. (Reminder: impress this saving on Blobel and Benzler .)

There is at this stage only one technical difficulty that periodically confronts us. The fire’s so hot you can’t get near it, nicht?

Now I ask you, this is really priceless, this is, this really ‘takes the cake’. All of a sudden the phone’s jumping off the hook: Lothar Fey of the Air Defence Authority, angrily complaining, if you please, about our nocturnal conflagrations! Is it any wonder I’m going out of my mind?

Whilst Humilia saw fit to tell me that my wife has written and dispatched a personal communication to a proven debauchee, she was unable — or unwilling — to enlighten me as to its contents. This has ruined my concentration. Of course, the entire thing could be perfectly innocent. Innocent? How could it be innocent? I have no illusions about the hysterical carnality of which Hannah has shown herself to be capable, and besides it is common knowledge that once a woman loosens the sacred bonds of modesty she quickly descends to the most fantastic depravities, squatting, squelching, squeezing, squirming—

Hannah briskly knocked and entered and said, ‘You wanted to see me.’

‘Yes.’ Biding my time, for now, I said, ‘Look, there’s no point in you going to Abbey Timbers. The Projekt’s going to take months so you’ll just have to get used to it.’

‘I didn’t want to go anyway.’

‘Oh? What’s this? Have you got a Projekt of your own by any chance?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, and turned on her heel.

… I raised my hands and rubbed my eyes. This spontaneous action, the like of which any tired schoolboy might reflexively perform over his homework, was quite painless — for the first time in I don’t know how long. In the downstairs toilet I consulted the mirror. Ja, those martyred orbs of mine are still very slightly bloodshot, and slack and pouchy what with all the smoke and the late nights (it’s not as if the trains don’t keep coming). But my black eyes are no more.

There are the flames and the fumes; even the clearer air ripples and wriggles. No?

Like a sheet of gauze pulsating in the wind.

Now the Sonders, under Szmul’s direction, have rigged up a kind of ziggurat of warped railway tracks. It is the size of the cathedral in Oldenberg.

The scene is I suppose on the very crest of the modern, but when I watch from the mound I keep thinking of the slave-built pyramids of Egypt. Using the wide ladders and the hoists they load the great lattice, then they withdraw to their wheeled towers and feed the fire, do you understand, by tossing in the pieces, sometimes by the bucketful. These towers rock like dark-age siege engines.

At night the tracks glow red. I keep glimpsing a gigantic black toad with illuminated veins even when I close my eyes.

*

Communication from the Geheime Staatspolizei in Hamburg: the widow Seisser is on her way back, but she returns to us with her status revised. Alisz is now an evacuee.

The Sonderkommandofuhrer was right about the best way of counting. Not skulls. Almost all the pieces were dispatched by the standard Genickschuss but often clumsily or hastily, thus splintering the crania. So skulls are hopeless. The most scientific procedure, we have established, is to count the femurs and divide by 2. Nicht?

In response to the domestic emergency I have activated the criminal Kapo I maintain in the coal mine at Furstengrube.

It would infinitesimally console me, I think, if I could persuade myself that there is companionship — that there is human communion, or at least respectful fellow-feeling, in the bunkroom above the disused crematory.

A very great many words are spoken, certainly, and our exchanges are always earnest, articulate, and moral.

‘Either you go mad in the first ten minutes,’ it is often said, ‘or you get used to it.’ You could argue that those who get used to it do in fact go mad. And there is another possible outcome: you don’t go mad and you don’t get used to it.

When work ends we gather, we who have not got used to it and have not gone mad, and we talk and we talk. In the Kommando, hugely expanded for the current collaboration, about five per cent belong to this category — say forty men. And in the bunkroom we gather a little way apart, usually around dawn, with our food, our liquor, and our cigarettes, and we talk. And I like to think that there is companionship.

I feel we are dealing with propositions and alternatives that have never been discussed before, have never needed to be discussed before — I feel that if you knew every day, every hour, every minute of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.

Martyrer, mucednik, martelaar, meczonnik, martyr : in every language I know, the word comes from the Greek, martur , meaning witness . We, the Sonders, or some of us, will bear witness. And this question, unlike every other question, appears to be free of deep ambiguity. Or so we thought.

*

The Czech Jew from Brno, Josef, who is gone now, wrote his testimony and buried it in a child’s galosh under the hedgerow that borders Doll’s garden. After a lot of disputation, and a show of hands, we resolve to exhume this document (temporarily) and acquaint ourselves with its contents. I myself am instinctively and perhaps superstitiously opposed. And as things turn out it is one of the episodes in the Lager that I would least soon relive.

Written in Yiddish, in black ink, the manuscript consisted of eight pages.

‘ And there ’, I began, ‘ a girl of five stood and … Wait. I think it’s a bit mixed up.’

‘Read!’ said one of the men. Others seconded him. ‘Just read.’

‘ And there a girl of five stood and undressed her brother who was one year old. One from the Kommando came to take off the boy’s clothes. The girl shouted loudly, “Be gone, you Jewish murderer! Don’t lay your hand, dripping with Jewish blood, upon my lovely brother! I am his good mummy, he will die in my arms, together with me.” A boy of seven or eight… ’ I hesitated, and swallowed. ‘Shall I go on?’

‘No.’

‘No. Yes. Go on.’

‘Go on. No. Yes.’

‘ A boy of seven or eight ’, I read, ‘ stood beside her and spoke thus, “Why, you are a Jew and you lead such dear children to the gas — only in order to live? Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?” … A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the —’

‘Stop.’

Many of the men had tears in their eyes — but they weren’t tears of grief or guilt.

‘Stop. She “made a very short but fiery speech”. Like hell she did. Stop.’

‘Stop. He lies.’

‘Silence would be better than this. Stop.’

‘Stop. And don’t put it back in the earth. Destroy it — unread. Stop.’

I stopped. And the men turned away, they moved away, and slackly sought their bedding.