He didn’t receive a warm welcome. Paul was waiting for him in the corridor and began swearing furiously the moment he saw Hans coming in.

He went through his entire repertoire: “Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn, Herr Gott Sakrament, du verfluchter Idiot, just walking off in work time. You’ve been in that whorehouse next door, haven’t you? I don’t understand how they can set up something like that in a respectable KZ. In Buchenwald I literally didn’t see a skirt for five years until they opened the brothel.”⁵

Zielina, the head doctor, who was standing next to him, gave him a thump: “But then you were there every day, I suppose.”

“What do you think? I didn’t go there once. I might be a Communist, one of those cursed red pigs, but you won’t find me around whores. Anyway, they never got the better class of customer there in Buchenwald. Don’t imagine for a minute you’d have seen a red triangle—a political prisoner—going into the brothel there. I don’t understand what kind of spineless characters we have here in Auschwitz. They’re queuing up there all evening.”

“The food’s too good here,” Zielina mocked.

“But getting back to this emaciated streak of misery,” Paul continued, returning to Hans. “I’ll laugh my head off if the Rapportführer bumps into you there one day. You know what they did to Florek, our barber, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Florek was standing by the window conversing with one of those ladies from Block 10. You know what Florek’s like—the requisite filthy chat, the requisite filthy gestures. And who should come along but Kaduk, the second Rapportführer. He grabs him by the back of the neck, makes a meatball of his face, and then marches him off to the Blockführerstube, where he reported him to Hössler, the Lagerführer: twenty-five on the backside. He got that helping right away—in the bunker with the pizzle.”

“What’s that?”

“Just what I said: a dried bull’s pizzle—a first-class Germanic disciplinary device. Florek had to lie on his stomach for three whole days. He still doesn’t dare to sit down properly and it’s been two weeks already.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of ‘the Land of Twenty-Five’?” Zielina interrupted. “That was German Southeast Africa. The standard punishment for the Negroes there was twenty-five of the best with a whip or a cane. So the whole country got it as a nickname.”

Paul said, “We Germans just happen to be a savage nation.” He glared at Hans with a terribly fierce expression, swore a little more, and then sent him off to Block 21. Because that was what the fuss was all about: there was a transport Kommando that day.

There were already fifteen men standing by Block 21. The doorkeeper gestured frantically, pushing the men into rows of five and madly cursing the blocks who still hadn’t sent their contingent of laborers.

It was all “Schnell! Los! Tempo!” but after the thirty men had been drummed up, it still took another half hour for the SS guard to arrive. And when they’d finally marched out of the gate and arrived at the SS-Krankenrevier, there were no wagons for them to use. The Rottenführer started negotiating and they stood there waiting for another hour. It was cold, bitterly cold, and they were shivering in their linen suits in the middle of the street; the pavements, where prisoners swept away the snow, were reserved for the SS going in and out of the buildings. Three large buildings: SS-Revier, SS-Standortverwaltung Süd-Ost, and the Kommandantur.

These were real beehives, with men swarming in and out, along with the occasional young woman in smart clothes that had undoubtedly belonged to some—now murdered—young Jewish lady. Sometimes there were also Häftlinge from the Kommando SS-Revier, who worked in the SS hospital as cleaners, with some prominents even working as chemists or dental technicians. They were well off. They ate SS food and had all the toiletries and medicine they needed. The Kommando SS-Revier was the camp’s most important source of medicine. The Häftlinge who worked there smuggled it into the camp, where they sold it in exchange for margarine, sausage, and clothes that others, in turn, had stolen from the Bekleidungskammer. All of the medicaments taken from the thousands who arrived on the trains ended up here in the large attics and the enormous hospital dispensary. Together with the consignments from the Sanitätslager der Waffen-SS in Berlin-Lichtenberg, they formed an enormous stock. From this central point, the medicine was distributed to the entire SS across the southeastern front. In the same way, the Auschwitz Bauhof was the distribution center for building materials for all those troops, and the whole of the Waffen SS Süd-Ost was provided with war materials by Auschwitz factories. DAW, the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerkstatte, provided everything that was made of wood, munitions chests in particular. The munitions themselves were made at the “Auto Union” and in the Buna factories. At Buna they also made synthetic rubber.

And here in these buildings was the headquarters of the enormous Auschwitz complex, which consisted of more than thirty camps: Auschwitz I—Hans’s camp; Birkenau, the killing center; Monowitz with the Buna factories; and many smaller camps with mining and agricultural Kommandos. Altogether more than 250,000 workers. All administered here in the Kommandantur and Standortverwaltung.

No, Auschwitz was more than torment writ large. With its factories and mines it was an important part of the Upper Silesian industrial area and its workers were cheaper than anywhere else in the world. They didn’t need any pay and they ate almost nothing. And then, when they were exhausted and fell victim to the gas chamber, there were still enough Jews and political opponents in Europe to make up the numbers yet again.

Berlin coordinated it all. In Wilhelmstrasse there was a special Concentration Camp Department under Himmler’s command. There they arranged the transports to the camps through all of Europe. They were the ones who sent the order to Westerbork: so-many thousand to this or that camp. They calculated which percentage of the transport had to be exterminated immediately and how many people they needed as laborers.

Yes, Grün, the dentist, who had been in the camp for one and a half years, could explain exactly how it all worked. He was the model of a Pole who is not afraid of anything or anyone and never takes other people’s interests into account. He was known all over the camp and always had the best jobs. His friends who worked in the political section had told him all kinds of secrets: command decisions, telegrams from Berlin. He had relationships with girls who worked at the SS-Revier, and when he got caught it didn’t cost him his neck because he had another friend in the SS kitchen, who slipped him a liter of gin for the SS man who had found out too much about him. But now Grün’s position was a little tenuous after all. It was like this: “Do you know what Faulgas is?”

“No.”

“Faulgas is a Kommando of 600 men—they live in Blocks 1 and 2. They walk three miles every day to a site where they’re building a big plant next to a marsh to extract energy from the rotting sludge. There are civilian workers there too. Faulgas is the biggest Kommando for smuggling. The lads who work there take clothes and linen out with them, concealed under their uniforms, and sell them to the civilians for food. Watches and jewelry too. They get their merchandise from others who work in Canada. Everything from the trains goes there first; the people from Canada get a share of the takings.

“Two months ago I had a nice little deal going, but it went wrong. A fellow in Canada had found a couple of magnificent diamonds in the lining of a coat. He brought them to me because he knew I was in Faulgas. There was only one price for those diamonds: freedom.

“First I paid work-allocation a liter of schnapps and that got my mate into Faulgas too. Then we put out feelers with a Polish driver if he could mount a couple of boards under the bed of his truck for the two of us to lie on. Between the crankshaft and the bed. But I had picked the wrong driver, because he was in with one of the guards. I happened to see the two of them talking and reported sick straightaway. It cost me an arm and a leg, but the Kommandoführer ordered a guard to escort me back to camp. I wasn’t even able to warn my friend. They beat him to death that same day. But they didn’t find the diamonds on him because I’d already put them somewhere safe.

“You understand that since then I’ve been keeping a low profile because now there are definitely a few SS men out for those diamonds.”

Hans understood something else too. That when the deal went wrong, Grün sacrificed his friend and took off with the diamonds.

“If you want to shirk,” Grün continued, “the Krankenbau’s the best. Half a liter of spirits and you’re a Pfleger.”

Grün definitely knew how to shirk.

The Rottenführer arrived. He had arranged a wagon. They had to pick up bags from the train and unload them here. Grün had a quick word with him and the Rottenführer gave him a pad and a pencil. He had to keep tally of the bags.

They set out with the wagon. It was fairly calm. They were all Pfleger with a black badge embroidered with the letters HKB on their left sleeve: Häftlings-Krankenbau. The Pfleger’s letters were blue, technical staff had red and the doctors, white. But that division was theoretical, because here they were, all pushing the same wagon.

As a symbol, the HKB worked miracles. With all their aversion to intellectualism, the SS were still scared of it. Was it coincidence that the intellectuals at Westerbork were able to hold their own the longest and were then mostly sent to the privileged camp of Theresiënstadt⁶? Was it coincidence that doctors, who are intimately involved in questions of life and death, had the best chance of survival not just in Auschwitz, but in other camps too?

Definitely not. Primitive man lives in constant fear of the spirit world, and that world is made up of the souls of the dead. If you beat someone to death, their soul will be hostile toward you, and the greater their spirit or mind was in life, the more dangerous they will be as a malevolent spirit after death. Especially dangerous are doctors, the stewards of the spiritual legacy passed on from ancient wizards who had power over the spirit realm of the living and the dead. And who could be more primitive than the Übermensch?

You had to be careful with doctors anyway. Even the greatest SS brute had an inner sense of “you might need him one day.” That was what they owed it to, the doctors and the nursing and technical staff, their not being hurried too much and hardly hit at all.

But the work still had to be done and it was a nasty job. It was a goods wagon full of paper bags: “Malarial mosquito poison” was printed on them followed by the chemical formula, a sulfur compound. A lot of the bags were torn and leaking fine green powder. When you picked them up, the powder went down your neck and formed a crust in the close-cropped hair on your sweaty head. It got in your nose, which started to run, and in your eyes, which began to water.

At first you did your very best to keep the bag in the middle of your back and not spill any, but each bag weighed over one hundred pounds, and once you were tired you had to put the bag on your shoulder and then it was liable to tilt. In no time they were covered with powder: clothes and faces green.

It was worst for your eyes, which stung and itched, and if you rubbed them with your dusty hands they started to burn. You were blinded and couldn’t go on, and had to put the bag down for a moment. But you couldn’t do that either, as the work had to be completed within the allocated time and that was the Rottenführer’s responsibility, so he had to hurry you along. If you then complained about the wretched powder that hurt your eyes so much and stung your skin, the Rottenführer smiled enigmatically. He knew more than he was letting on.

When they got back to their blocks in the evening, exhausted and with bloodshot eyes, they all felt awful. One was shivery, the other nauseous, they all had sore eyes, and some had come out in blisters. Hans felt ill; after roll call he went straight to bed. The next day he couldn’t get up. He was running a temperature and the skin on his shoulders, back, and everywhere the powder had reached was red and inflamed.

He was not the only one: four of the Pfleger had to stay in bed. Paul was quite reasonable. He sent others that day because the work had to go on.

The new workers asked the Rottenführer if they could get something made of rubber to put over their backs and shoulders, or goggles to protect their eyes. But the Rottenführer just shrugged. What did a few sick Häftlinge here or there matter? One of the Pfleger had tried to bring a rubber sheet from a treatment room. The SDG, the SS orderly who inspected the hospital every day, bumped into him with it, gave him a few whacks, and seized the sheet: “Sabotage!”

Sabotage if you tried to conserve your health, if you tried to protect yourself from poison. The milk they give workers in paint factories in Holland must be a mortal sin. Anyway, that evening a few more of us were sick.

Paul looked concerned.

The next day was the same. Now seven of Block 9’s thirty-five Pfleger were sick, just from the malaria powder. But the job was done.

Hans was not dissatisfied. The fever would pass, his body would excrete the poison, and the patches of eczema that had formed everywhere would flake off. Meanwhile the rest was doing him good. The only bad thing was not being in touch with Friedel. He had sent her a note saying he wasn’t well, but she hadn’t been able to get an answer back to him. The lads who took the food to Block 10 were too scared. A few had just been beaten and one they’d found notes on had been sent to the Strafkommando in Birkenau.