Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

Led by 1 armed guard (all right it was Staff Sergeant Palitzsch, but 1 armed guard?), the Poles, in columns of 5, began to fill the space. And I could hardly believe my senses. These Haftlinge were built like bears or gorillas, their striped uniforms were taut with bulk and muscle, their broad faces were tanned and glowing (and they even wore real shoes!). They were galvanic with esprit , too — like some crack brigade of motorised Waffen (and a sector of my heart duly if briefly ached to lead them in battle). On and on they kept sternly massing, 100, 200, 250, 300 — followed, if you please, by another casual soloist, the reviled ‘ex-Pole’ and long-time collaborator, Lageraltester Bruno Brodniewitsch!

Mobius frowned and nodded. ‘Strammstehen!’ he said with a slap of his folder on the tabletop. ‘First the Kommandant will say a few words.’

This was news to me. I looked out at them. We officers had our holstered Lugers, of course, and Palitzsch and Brodniewitsch were there with light machine guns slung over their shoulders. But I knew beyond doubt that if this battalion of bruisers scented danger — a twitch was all they’d need — there was no possibility of a single German getting out alive.

‘Thank you, Untersturmfuhrer,’ I said, and recleared my throat. ‘Now, men, you’ll doubtlessly want to know… You’ll want to know why you were detached from your various Kommandos this morning. Ja, there’ll be no work for you today.’ There was a lightly appreciative murmur; and I almost went ahead and mentioned the double ration (the double ration, quite honestly, is a complete giveaway). ‘So you’ll have your lunch and then some free time to yourselves. Well and good. Untersturmfuhrer Mobius will explain why.’

‘… Thank you, Sturmbannfuhrer. Now listen. You Poles . I’m not going to pull the wool over your eyes.’

And here I couldn’t quite suppress a somewhat queasy smile. For Fritz Mobius was consummate Gestapo. Watch, listen, I thought — here comes the subterfuge. He’ll play them like a lute…

‘At some point this afternoon, probably around 5,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘each and every 1 of you is going to be shot.’

I tasted vomit (and I might even have let out a cry)… But all that answered Mobius was silence: the silence of 300 men who had ceased to breathe.

‘Yes, that’s right. I’m talking to you like soldiers,’ he loudly continued, ‘because that’s what you are. You’re Home Army, the lot of you. And shall I tell you why you’ve been holding back? Because you can’t convince your Centre that the KZ’s an active asset. They think you’re all bags of bones. And who’d believe there are men like you in a place like this? I can hardly believe it myself.’

The Untersturmfuhrer consulted his green file, whilst Hauptsturmfuhrer Eltz topped up the 7 glasses of soda water with a mesmerisingly steady hand.

‘I shudder to think what you must’ve been getting away with. If you heard the word from Warsaw you’d be up our fundaments before we could blink. Men, it’s over. You know full well what’ll happen if there’s any monkeyshines this afternoon. As I took the trouble to remind you yesterday, we have the parish registers. And you don’t want your mothers and fathers and your grandparents clubbed on to the cattle wagons, you don’t want your wives and children and nephews and nieces frying in the crema. Come on. You know what we’re like .’

The silence gained in depth. Mobius sucked his tongue and said,

‘All you can do is die like warriors. So let’s keep it orderly. You show us some Polish pride and courage. And we’ll show you some German respect. Oh, and you’ll get your last supper. You’ll get your double ration of warm bilge. Now raus ! Hauptscharfuhrer? If you please.’

At 22.07 that night I was obliged to get out of bed and receive Prufer’s oral report. From Bunker 3 I’d gone straight to the Krankenbau, where Professor Zulz gave me a vitamin shot and 2 cc’s of chloropromazine, which is supposedly an anti-emetic as well as a sedative. It didn’t stop me practically sicking my ring out in the recovery bay, and I was sure I’d collapse in the slush as I stumbled home (no question of meeting the midday transport).

Now I said to Wolfram Prufer, ‘Excuse the dressing gown. Come on through.’ All right, I’d sworn off alcohol for the nonce, but I reckoned Prufer was due a gulp, after that kind of day, and it would’ve seemed unmanly not to join him. ‘Ihre Gesundheit. How’d it go?’

‘Pretty smooth, sir.’

In the yard of Bunker 3 a small fraction of the Polish contingent chose to die fighting (a barricade, quickly overrun), but the rest of them, 291 men, were uneventfully shot between 17.10 and 17.45.

‘Quite exemplary,’ said Prufer, with no expression on his unreadable face. ‘In its way.’

I refilled our glasses, and we talked on, dispensing, late as it was, with the usual formalities. I said,

‘Weren’t you surprised Mobius was so… unsubtle about it? I was expecting a stratagem of some kind. You know, some form of deceit.’

‘The deceit came yesterday. He told them they’d have to be taught a lesson, and he threatened to round up their families if they tried anything.’

‘What’s deceitful about that? That’s what we do, isn’t it?’

‘No, not any more. Apparently it isn’t worth the bother, so we stopped. Costs too much tracking them down. See, they’ve all been evicted and shuffled about. And besides…’

He proceeded to say that in any case these families, in large part, had already been bombed or strafed or hanged or starved or frozen — or, for that matter, shot in the course of earlier mass reprisals. Prufer drawled on,

‘And those children he mentioned, ½ of them, all the 1s that’re any good, have been packed off to the Reich and Germanised. So it’s just not worth the sweat.’

‘And those men,’ I said. ‘They simply…?’

‘No trouble at all. They had their soup and spent an hour or 2 writing postcards. When the time came a lot of them were singing. Patriotic stuff. And nearly all of them yelled out something like Long live Poland last thing. But that was all.’

‘Long live Poland. That’s a funny 1.’

Prufer stretched his neck and said, ‘There was almost another cock-up — ferrying the bodies away before their mates got back from work. We covered the carts but we couldn’t do anything about the blood of course. Wasn’t time. The men saw. It was tense. It was tense, mein Kommandant. Mobius thinks we may have to do another batch. Repeat the whole palaver.’

‘… Na. How’s your brother, Prufer?’

‘Which 1?’

‘The 1 in Stalingrad. Freiherr? No. Irmfried.’

Left to myself, I engaged in an hour of soul-searching, sprawled on the easy chair by the fire with the bottle on my lap. There was I (I mused), offing old ladies and little boys, whilst other men gave a luminescent display of valour. I was of course thinking with envious admiration of the Untersturmfuhrer. Facing down those massive Polacks like that, saying, with ice in his heart, ‘ Ihr weisst wie wir sind .’

You know what we’re like.

That’s National Socialism!

And mind you, disposing of the young and the elderly requires other strengths and virtues — fanaticism, radicalism, severity, implacability, hardness, iciness, mercilessness, und so weiter. After all (as I often say to myself), somebody’s got to do it — the Jews’d give us the same treatment if they had ½ a chance, as everybody knows. They had a pretty fair crack at it in November 1918, when the war profiteers, buying cheap and selling…

… I levered myself upright and wandered out into the kitchen. Hannah was standing at the table, eating a green salad from the bowl with the wooden fork and the wooden spoon.