Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

The Germans cannot win the war against the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs. But there will probably be time for them to win the war against the Jews.

Doll is different, now, on the ramp. An effort has been made. He looks less slovenly, and he’s not nearly so obviously drunk or hungover (or both). His diction — this is strange — has become more confident and also more flowery. He is still very mad, in my view, and necessarily so. What can they do but turn up the dial of insanity? Doll is reconvinced; he has communed with his deepest self and discovered that, yes, murdering all the Jews is the right thing to do.

The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord — death of the soul. But the Germans have suffered it too; I know this; it could not possibly be otherwise.

I am no longer afraid of death, though I am still afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying because it is going to hurt. That’s all there is attaching me to life: the fact that leaving it is going to hurt. It’ll hurt.

Experience tells me that dying never lasts less than about sixty seconds. Even when it’s the shot to the back of the neck, and you go down like a marionette whose strings have been snipped — the actual dying never lasts less than about sixty seconds.

And I am still afraid of that minute of murder.

When Doll next comes to see me I am in the morgue, supervising the barber Kommando and the oral Kommando. The men in the barber Kommando work with shears; the men in the oral Kommando work with a chisel or a small but heavy hammer in one hand and, to control the jaws, a blunt hook in the other. On a bench in the corner the SS dentist licks his lips in his sleep.

‘Sonderkommandofuhrer. Come here.’

‘Sir.’

With his Luger drawn but not raised (as if the weight of it keeps his right hand at his side), Doll has me precede him into the stockroom containing the hoses and the brooms, the brushes and the bleach.

‘I want you to put a date in your diary.’

*

There is a length of wurst in front of you, and you eat it, and then it’s behind you. There is a fifth of schnapps in front of you, and you drink it, and then it’s behind you. There is warm bedding in front of you, and you sleep in it, and then it’s behind you. There is a day or a night ahead of you, and then it’s behind you.

I used to have the greatest respect for nightmares — for their intelligence and artistry. Now I think nightmares are pathetic. They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day — and they’ve stopped trying. Now I just dream about cleanliness and food.

‘… April the thirtieth. Make a mental note of it, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Walpurgisnacht.’

It is now March 10. I feel as though I have been granted eternal life.

‘Where?’ he goes on. ‘The Little Brown Bower? The Wall of Tears? And what time? Ten hundred hours? Fourteen hundred? And by what means?… You look oppressed, Sonder, by all these choices.’

‘Sir.’

‘Why don’t you simply repose your trust in me?’

These men, the Death’s Head SS, were probably once very ordinary, ninety per cent of them. Ordinary, mundane, banal, commonplace — normal. They were once very ordinary. But they are ordinary no longer.

‘You’re not getting off that lightly, Sonder. You’ll have to do me a service before you say goodbye. Don’t worry. Leave everything to the Kommandant.’

That day in Chełmno it was deafeningly cold. And perhaps that’s all it is, that’s all it means — the time of the silent boys.

But no. The wind was rushing through the trees, and you could hear that. From five in the morning to five in the evening the German power used whips, and you could hear that. The three gassing vans kept coming down from the Schlosslager and unloading at the Waldlager, and then firing up again, and you could hear that.

On January 21, 1942, the numbers were so great that the SS and the Orpo selected another hundred Jews to help the Sonders drag the bodies to the mass grave. This supplementary Kommando consisted of teenage boys. They were given no food or water, and they worked for twelve hours under the lash, naked in the snow and the petrified mud.

When the light was thinning Major Lange led the boys to the pits and shot them one by one — and you could hear that. Towards the end he ran out of ammunition and used the butt of his pistol on their skulls. And you could hear that. But the boys, jockeying and jostling to be next in line, didn’t make a sound.

And after that, this.

‘She has black hair, your wife, with a white stripe down the middle. Like a skunk. Nicht?’

I shrug.

‘She is gainfully employed, your Shulamith. A skilled seamstress, she adorns Wehrmacht uniforms with swastikas. In Factory 104. At night she repairs to the attic above the bakery on Tlomackie Street. Not so, Sonder?’

I shrug.

‘She will be taken on May the first. A good date, that, Sonder — the third anniversary of the sealing’, he says, with his furry upper teeth on view, ‘of the Jewish slum. She will be taken on May the first and she will wend her way here. Are you impatient to see your Shulamith?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well I’ll spare you. Soppy old fool that I am. I’ll have her killed that day in Łódź. May one. It will happen unless I countermand my order that morning. Understood?’

I say, ‘Sir.’

‘Tell me. Were you happy with your Shulamith? Was it a love whose month was ever May?’

I shrug.

‘Mm, I suppose you’d have to explain why, in her absence, you’ve rather gone downhill. Let yourself go a bit. Ach, there’s nothing worse than the contempt of a woman. Your one, Shulamith, she’s a big girl, isn’t she. Did Shulamith like you fucking her, Sonder?’

August 31, 1939, was a Thursday.

I walked home from school with my sons, in flawless and not quite serious sunshine. Then the family had a supper of chicken soup and brown bread. Friends and relatives looked in briefly, and everyone was asking the question, Had we mobilised too late? There was an atmosphere of great anxiety and even dread, but also feelings of solidarity and resilience (after all, we were the nation that, nineteen years earlier, had defeated the Red Army). There was also a long game of chess and the usual small talk, the usual smiles and glances, and that night in bed I defiantly embraced my wife. Six days later the flattened city was full of rotting horses.

When I went on that first transport, to Deutschland supposedly, expecting to find paid work, I took my sons with me — Chaim, fifteen, Schol, sixteen, both of them tall and broad like their mother.

They were among the silent boys.

And after all that, all this.

‘Fret not, Sonder. I’ll tell you who to kill.’

‘NO, I LOVE it here, Tantchen — it’s like a holiday from reality.’

‘Just plain old family life.’

‘Quite.’

There was Adolf, twelve (named after his godfather), Rudi, nine (named after his godfather, ex-Deputy Leader Rudolf Hess), and Heinie, seven (named after his godfather, Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler). There were also three daughters, Ilse (eleven), Irmgard (four), and Eva (two), and another boy, Hartmut (one). And Frau Bormann, that Christmas, had special news to announce: she was pregnant.

‘Which will make eight, Tante,’ I said as I followed her into the kitchen — the bare pine, the dressers, the kaleidoscopic crockery. ‘Are you going to have any more?’

‘Well I need ten. Then they give you the best medal. Anyway it’ll make nine, not eight. I’ve already got eight. There was Ehrengard.’