Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘Watch the Roman candles. And oh yes — humour me. Klempnerkommandofuhrer Szmul , no less, wants to give you a present. He worships you.’

‘Does he? Why?’

‘Why? Didn’t you tell me you once bade him good morning? That’s sufficient for a person of his sort. I let slip it was your birthday, and he wants to give you a present. Come on, it’s nice out. I won’t mind if you smoke. And there’s something I have to tell you about our friend Herr Thomsen. I’ll get your shawl.’

… The sky was a vulgar dark pink, the colour of café blancmange. Down in the dip the flames of the bonfire were darting and wriggling. In the smoky air you caught the tang of scorched potato skins.

‘Tell me what about Thomsen?’ she asked. ‘Is he back?’

I said, ‘Hannah, I sincerely hope there hasn’t been any kind of intrigue between you 2. Because he’s a proven traitor, Hannah. A filthy saboteur. The purest scum. He’s been wrecking some very crucial machines at the Buna-Werke.’

And I felt the charge of vindication, ½ thrill, ½ stoic disburdenment, as Hannah said,

‘Good.’

‘… Good, Hannah?’

‘Yes, good. I admire him and fancy him all the more for it.’

‘Well, he’s in a great deal of trouble. I shudder to think what the next months will hold for friend Thomsen. The only person who can alleviate his extremity’, I said, ‘is myself.’

I was smiling and Hannah smiled back and said, ‘Oh, sure.’

‘Poor Hannah. Fatally attracted to the sweepings of our prisons. What is it, Hannah? Were you sexually interfered with at a tender age? When you were an infant, did you play overmuch with your pooh-pooh?’

‘Nicht? Don’t you usually say nicht ? After 1 of your jokes?’

I chuckled and said, ‘All I mean is you don’t seem to have much luck with your boyfriends. Now Hannah. This could lead to an investigation. Into you. Reassure me. You weren’t involved with his efforts in any way? Can you swear, hand on heart, that you’ve done nothing to impede our project here?’

‘Not nearly enough. I’ve made a Piepl of the Kommandant. But that wasn’t hard.’

‘… Thank you for saying that, Hannah. Yes, that’s right — get your laughing done with. Are you relishing your cigarette?’

I just want to see the look on her face.

‘Why d’you need your gun?’

‘Standard procedure with Haftlinge. Here he comes. With your gift. Look. He’ll be taking it out for you now.’

It won’t be this morning, it won’t even be this afternoon. It will be at the end of the day, as darkness falls.

Although I live in the present, and do so with pathological fixity, I remember everything that has happened to me since I came to the Lager. Everything. To remember an hour would take an hour. To remember a month would take a month.

I cannot forget because I cannot forget. And now at the last all these memories will have to be dispersed.

There is only one possible outcome, and it is the outcome I want. With this I prove that my life is mine, and mine alone.

On my way over there I will inhume everything I’ve written, in the Thermos flask beneath the gooseberry bush.

And, by reason of that, not all of me will die.

ROUGHLY CHRONOLOGICALLY…

Szmulek Zachariasz stopped living at about six forty-five on April 30, 1943 — an hour after my arrest.

Roland Bullard received a bullet in the back of the neck on May Day.

Fritz Mobius suffered a fatal heart attack towards the end of a nightlong interrogation on June 1.

Boris Eltz — six weeks later, on July 12 — was killed on the climactic day of the German defeat at Kursk: an engagement of thirteen thousand tanks on a battlefield the size of Wales. His frenzied Panther was just a ball of fire by the time he rammed it sideways into two charging Russian T-34s; and he was posthumously awarded the pour le mérite .

Wolfram Prufer, along with two other SS, got beaten to death with rocks and pickaxes in the Sonderkommando revolt of October 7, 1944.

Konrad Peters was among the approximately five thousand suspects arrested in connection with the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944; he was also among the approximately twelve thousand prisoners who died of typhus, in Dachau, during the first four months of 1945.

Uncle Martin, Martin Bormann — well, it was several years before the facts were finally verified. He was wounded by a Russian artillery shell (and then took cyanide) as he tried to flee the Chancellery in Berlin in the small hours of May 1, 1945 — after the joint suicide of the newlyweds and their subsequent immolation, which (with Goebbels) he oversaw. He was condemned to death in absentia on October 1, 1946.

Ilse Grese was hanged in Hamelin Prison in the British Zone on December 13, 1945. She was twenty-two. All through the night she loudly sang the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and ‘Ich Hatt’ einen Kameraden’; her last word (spoken ‘languidly’, according to her executioner, Pierrepoint, who also dealt with Lord Haw-Haw) was schnell. Quick .

Paul Doll was demoted sideways in June 1943 to a clerical post at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, in Berlin (which was being bombed nightly, and then daily as well as nightly), and subsequently reinstalled as Commandant in May 1944. He was captured in March 1946, tried at Nuremberg, and delivered to the Polish authorities. As part of his final statement Doll wrote, ‘In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.’ He was hanged outside Bunker 11 in Kat Zet I on April 16, 1947.

Professor Zulz and Professor Entress were among the Nazi doctors put on trial in the Soviet Union in early 1948 and sentenced to ‘the quarter’ — twenty-five years in the slave camps of the Gulag.

Thirteen IG Farben executives and managers (not including Frithuric Burckl) were convicted at Nuremberg in July 1948. Suitbert Seedig was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for slavery and mass murder. Rupprecht Strunck, called out of early retirement (which began in September ’43), was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation, slavery, and mass murder. Not a kilogram of synthetic rubber, nor a millilitre of synthetic fuel, was ever produced at the Buna-Werke.

Alisz Seisser contracted tuberculosis of the hip, and in January 1944 was transferred to the (very occasionally Potemkinised) camp of Theresienstadt, near Prague. There is a better than even chance that she survived the war.

The fate of Esther Kubis is unknown, at least to me. She won’t go down , Boris used to say. She’s rash, but in the end her spirit will refuse to give them the satisfaction. And he often cited the first thing she ever said to him. Which was I don’t like it here and I’m not going to die here…

I last saw her on May 1, 1943. We were in a sealed Block together, just the two of us. I was about to be carted off to some other camp (Oranienburg, it turned out); Esther was serving the final hours of a three-day confinement (without food or water) for not making her bed, or for not making it properly — Ilse Grese was very particular when it came to the making of beds.

We talked for almost two hours. I told Esther about the promise Boris extracted from me (to do everything in my power for her), a promise I was no longer able to keep (I had nothing to give her, not even my wristwatch). She listened to my urgings with real attention, I thought — because I was now so clearly on the wrong side of the Reich. Nor did I correct her silent inference that Boris too, perhaps, was not all he seemed.