9.09 am: Weidemann conducts me back downstairs. Only sound is a muffled drumming coming from the far end of the room, from beyond the suitcases the piles of still-warm clothes. A small glass panel is set into the oak doors. I put my eye to it. A man’s palm beats against the aperture I jerk my head away.
Says one guard: “The water in the shower rooms must be very hot today, since they shout so loudly.”
Outside, Weidemann says: now we must wait twenty minutes. Would I care to visit Canada? I say: What? He laughs: “Canada” — a section of the camp. Why Canada? He shrugs: nobody knows.
Canada. 1 km. north of gas chamber. Huge rectangular yard, watchtower in each corner surrounded by barbed wire. Mountains of belongings — trunks, rucksacks, cases, kitbags, parcels; blankets; prams, wheelchairs, false limbs; brushes, combs. Weidemann: figures prepared for RF-SS on property recently sent to Reich — men’s shirts: 132,000, women’s coats: 155,000, women’s hair: 3,000kg. (’a freight car’), boys” jackets: 15,000, girls’dresses: 9,000, handkerchiefs: 135,000. I get doctor’s bag, beautifully made, as souvenir — Weidemann insists.
9.31 am: Return underground installation. Loud electric humming fills the air — the patented “Exhator” system, for evacuation of gas. Doors open. The bodies are piled up at one end [Illegible] legs smeared excrement, menstrual blood; bite claw marks. Jewish Sonder-kommando detachment enters to hose down corpses, wearing rubber boots, aprons, gas masks (according to W., pockets of gas remain trapped at floor level for up to 2 hours). Corpses slippery. Straps around wrists used to haul them to four double-doored elevators. Capacity of each: 25 [Illegible] bell rings, ascend one floor to …
10.02 am: Incineration room. Stifling heat: 15 ovens operating full-blast. Loud noise: diesel motors ventilating flames. Corpses from elevator loaded on to conveyor belt (metal rollers). Blood etc into concrete gutter. Barbers either side shave heads. Hair collected in sacks. Rings, necklaces, bracelets, etc dropped into metal box. Last: dental team — 8 men with crowbars pliers — removal gold (teeth, bridgework, fillings). W. gives me tin of gold to test weight: very heavy. Corpses tipped into furnaces from metal pushcarts.
Weidemann: four such gas chamber/crematorium installations in camp. Total capacity of each: 2,000 bodies per day = 8,000 overall. Operated by Jewish labour, changed every 2-3 months. The operation thus self-supporting; the secret self-sealing. Biggest security headache — stink from chimneys flames at night, visible over many kilometres, especially to troop trains heading east on main line.
MARCH checked dates. Luther had visited Auschwitz on 15 July. On 17 July Buhler had forwarded the map locations of the six camps to Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery. On 9 August the last deposit had been made in Switzerland. That same year, according to his wife, Luther had suffered a breakdown.
He made a note. Kritzinger was the fourth man. His name was everywhere. He checked with Buhler’s pocket diary. Those dates tallied also. Another mystery solved.
His pen moved across the paper. He was almost finished.
A SMALL thing, it had passed unnoticed during the afternoon; one of a dozen or so scraps of paper stuffed at random into a torn folder. It was a circular from SS-Gruppenfuhrer Richard Glucks, Chief of Amtsgruppe D in the SS Economic Administration Main Office. It was dated 6 August 1942.
Re: the utilisation of cut hair.
In response to a report, the Chief of the SS Economic Administration Main Office, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Pohl, has ordered that all human hair cut off in concentration camps should be utilised. Human hair will be processed for industrial felt and spun into thread. Female hair which has been cut and combed out will be used as thread to make socks for U-boat crews and felt stockings for the railways.
You are instructed, therefore, to store the hair of female prisoners after it has been disinfected. Cut hair from male prisoners can only be utilised if it is at least 20 mm. in length.
The amounts of hair collected each month, separated into female and male hair, must be reported on the 5th of each month to this office, beginning with the 5th September 1942.
He read it again: “U-boat crews…”
“ONE. Two. Three. Four. Five…” March was underwater, holding his breath, counting. He listened to the muffled noises, saw patterns like strings of algae float past him in the dark. “Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen…” With a roar he rose above the surface, sucking in air, streaming water. He filled his lungs a few more times, took an immense gulp of oxygen, then went down again. This time he made it to twenty-five before his breath exploded and he burst upwards, slopping water on to the bathroom floor.
Would he ever be clean again?
Afterwards, he lay with his arms dangling over the sides of the tub, his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling, like a drowned man.
PART SIX
However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.
ONE
In July 1953, when Xavier March had not long turned thirty and his work as yet consisted of little more than the arresting of whores and pimps around the docks of Hamburg, he and Klara had taken a holiday. They had started in Freiburg, in the foothills of the Black Forest, had driven south to the Rhine, then eastwards in his battered KdF-wagen towards the Bodensee, and in one of the little riverside hotels, during a showery afternoon, with a rainbow cast across the sky, they had planted the seed that grew into Pili.
He could see the place still: the wrought-iron balcony, the Rhine valley beyond, the barges moving lazily in the wide water; the stone walls of the old town, the cool church; Klara’s skirt, waist to ankle, sunflower yellow.
And there was something else he could still see: a kilometre down-river, spanning the gulf between Germany and Switzerland — the glint of a steel bridge.
Forget about trying to escape through the main air or sea ports: they were watched and guarded as tightly as the Reich Chancellery. Forget about crossing the border to France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy — that was to scale the wall of one prison merely to drop into the exercise yard of another. Forget about mailing the documents out of the Reich: too many packages were routinely opened by the postal service for that to be safe. Forget about giving the material to any of the other correspondents in Berlin: they would only face the same obstacles and were, in any case, according to Charlie, as trustworthy as rattlesnakes.
The Swiss border offered the best hope; the bridge beckoned.
Now hide it. Hide it all.
He knelt on the threadbare carpet and spread out a single sheet of brown paper. He made a neat stack of the documents, squaring off the edges. From his wallet he took the photograph of the Weiss family. He stared at it for a moment, then added it to the pile. He wrapped the entire collection tightly in the paper, binding the clear sticky tape around and around it until the package felt as solid as a block of wood.