The Hand that Signed the Paper, page 11
They resolve to marry, and his mother is pleased. Even though there is no church, there are still weddings, with lots of vodka and sweets and fancy bread. The whole village celebrating. Tables laid out with white cloth. The former priest sneaking a few surreptitious blessings to the young lovers over a glass. Even the Kommissar would come. Ulrike now wears a thin gold band on one finger, to show that she is taken. The band once belonged to Natasha. Natasha stopped wearing it when she no longer had a husband. ‘Take it. Let it give you joy.’ To Vitaly she says, ‘Go and lie with her. There is little else for you now.’ Ulrike admires it in the candlelight before Vitaly’s beautiful ikon, turning her hand about and around. She strokes Vitaly’s head, pushes his yellow hair away from his eyes. He has a little blond moustache, a soft, golden beard. They tickle her as he kisses her breasts.
But the Volksdeutsche are taken, not just from Khmel’nik but from the collectives as well, and the big black NKVD car comes to the farms, generating mixed awe and dread. We must arrest these revisionist enemies of the people! The members of the Uhrman family—even the Russian wife and mother—are bundled into the back seat. The Jewish NKVD man, Zhivkov/Rosendjuft, in charge of the collectivisation of some years earlier, drives the car. Later Natasha says, ‘So much for the aunt in the Party.’
Vitaly is engaged in the task of ploughing legumes into the field beside the road that leads through the collective when he sees this. He abandons the horse-drawn plough to its fate and chases the car; its spinning wheels cover him with mud. ‘Bring her back,’ he yells, ‘I’m going to marry her. Bring her back, I love her.’ He kneels in the street, as though praying. First he cries. Hot, salty tears. A candle of snot hangs pendulously from the base of his nose. He pulls it away. Then he dreams. Dreams how he can kill. Gently, Mirochnik the farmer, after slowly and stiffly striding to the centre of the road, pulls the sobbing boy to his feet. ‘Do not forget her,’ he says. ‘Do not forget this.’
THE BLOND, tanned young man sitting in the back of a German SS lorry with forty comrades looks out onto the devastated countryside. Briefly he remembers a bloodied scythe rising above the heads of wheat in his home village, hears its hacking blows as they are delivered to the body of some yesterday powerful communist kommissar.
He does not know the truth: Kaganovich only kept his power because he was shorter than Stalin, a good two inches shorter. Vitaly thinks that he kept his power through Jewish cunning. He does not know that no one is cunning enough to outsmart Comrade Stalin, and that Comrade Kaganovich enjoyed a measure of authority only because it suited Comrade Stalin for him to do so.
Kaganovich’s reward for his extraordinary loyalty was to be posted to the Ukraine, land of giants. Oh, how it irked him that these people were taller than he! So he wanted power. Power over this sullen race that refused to part with its fields.
Vitaly also feels power himself. He is free. Free to drink himself into a legless happiness. Free to kill his enemies, the killers of his people. Free to fuck the peasant girls who believe in his divinity because he has such a fine black uniform. And many feel as he does.
He is accompanied by many. In Kiev, Voronikov’s mother starved to death, leaving her boy pawing at her grey hand as it hung over the side of the copper bath. In Vinnitsa, Nikolai saw NKVD deport his parents as kulaks, and lost his uncle for sabotage on the collective. In Ulan Erge, the Buddhist temple was burnt down, and the boy Shura was led out to the front of the classroom in the new ‘Communist Party School of Kalmykia’ to scratch out the word ‘family’ written in large Cyrillic letters on the blackboard, while his classmates were forced to applaud. The Headman was dead. The communists had sawed his arms off the night before. The Russians hated the yellow people of his country. They forbade the speaking of Mongolian, the use of script. The boy cried as he crossed out the word. There was no music, even among this singing race, to describe these things.
Vitaly clutches the rifle he has learned to fire to his chest. He heads for service in the inner circles of Hell. Tomorrow, he will arrive in Treblinka.
Through the front gate, a carved, scalloped edifice, there is a riot going on. The air is full of bugs, crawling all over the new arrivals and up their nostrils. Someone yells ‘About time they got here from Warsaw’ and throws his hands above his head, a gesture at once angry and placatory. Dr Eberl is looking out of his office window; he has a fine young face. Liszt is playing through the loudspeakers scattered around the compound. Dr Eberl conducts an imaginary orchestra with a pearl baton that his wife gave him last Christmas. There are too many deportees to be gassed. He points his baton at the German in charge of the Warsaw Ghetto Ukrainians. ‘To the sorting area. There’s a job there for them that I need done. At once!’
There, because the gas chambers have broken down for the nth time that month, the entire transport is to be shot. As the thunder of rifles and machine-guns commences, Dr Eberl relents and plays some Wagner—something from Tristan und Isolde—to appease his deputy. ‘About time you stopped playing that bloody Hungarian all the time.’
THE SS placed the Ukrainians in a barracks of their own, and supplied them with ample food and vodka. Eberl, the witty and clever Kommandant, a graduate of Vienna University, encouraged the singing of those ‘borrowed’ from Warsaw to assist with security. Soon, every morning, the killing fields rang with lively peasant aubades. The separateness of the Ukrainians and their German overlords was important: the Master Race could not be seen to be living too closely with such savages. ‘If we keep them happy,’ he told his close friend Willie, ‘then they will finish this wicked and necessary task all by themselves.’
Later that first week, during a pause between transports, Vitaly saw a beautiful young man in a Waffen SS uniform talking with Dr Eberl on his landing. The young man listened seriously to the things Dr Eberl said. ‘Resoluteness! The group that chooses to be led by a hero! This is what matters!’ Vitaly heard Eberl say loudly, while the lovely young man nodded. Vitaly stopped to admire the visitor. His hair was so shiny and silver, his eyes such portals of light, that Vitaly felt sure that he must be perfect. Although Eberl seemed handsome enough, and some of Vitaly’s fellow Ukrainians had fine hair and eyes, the beauty of the man seemed improbable in this place.
The young man stopped nodding, and said, ‘In my paper for Dr Martin, I argued that authenticity must be attained in the face of technologisation. And Martin argues that resoluteness and authenticity are inextricably linked.’ He made small, neat, chopping motions with his hands as he spoke. Eberl had been drawing furiously on his pipe and rubbing his hands together the whole time that the young man was speaking, when he glanced downwards from his vantage point and spotted Vitaly staring at them. He stood up and glowered over the balustrade. ‘Piss off back to the shooting pits, Ukrainian savage. The mind of Martin Heidegger is far too fine for the likes of you.’ Vitaly saluted smartly and apologised, first to the Kommandant, and then to the beautiful stranger. The young man nodded his perfect head. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said, softly. ‘I am taking up far too much of the Herr Kommandant’s time with my endless speculations, but nonetheless, I believe it’s important that...’
THROUGH the gate, down the road, hunting, hunting escapees. Too much work, not enough security. Eberl wants to set new targets. Eberl is competing with Herr Hoess in Auschwitz. He is not aware that Herr Hoess holds a technological advantage: more efficient gas. There are Polish villages around the camp. The Jews take refuge in them.
‘How do you find Jews in here, ay? I don’t speak Polish.’
‘Simple. Give the Poles a hundred złoty and enough vodka to last ’em until Christmas. Then they give us the Jews. It doesn’t always work. The woods are full of Armia Krajowa, Polish partisans. But it works well enough to keep the Germans happy.’
The Poles queue next to the Nazi lorry. Vitaly and Shura pass bottles and money to these eager helpers. Finally the Poles turn home, some of them already staggering drunkenly. Vitaly looks at the three captured Jews, two men and one woman.
Vitaly asks, ‘What do we do with them?’
Shura answers, ‘Eberl says we have to shoot them.’
‘Couldn’t we just let them go?’
‘Not really. The Germans say they are diseased.’
THE POLISH residents of the Treblinka district were not particularly resentful of this foreign invasion, although some of the yellow-skinned Kazakhs and Kalmyks in the garrison took a little time to assimilate. The peasants from the Ukraine, the Poles appreciated, paid good money for their drink and soon attracted prostitutes and business from Małkinia and Warsaw, which meant money for the town. It doesn’t matter what colour it is, if it spends money, so much the better. The Ukrainians were handsome, and friendly enough, and as nearly everyone in Treblinka village was related, benefit for one villager meant benefit for the many.
Vitaly found himself a rich man since he received German wage rates and was in the position to loot as he liked from the incoming transports of Jews. His freedom was remarkable, indeed. He could buy whatever pleased him, do whatever he found amusing. He visited the city of Warsaw, free now to veer away from the ghetto, his former place of employment, and he saw for the first time a beautiful city with street lamps and taxicabs and trolley cars. He gazed with wonder through lighted shop windows, his nose crawling like a snail on the glass as the busy Poles around him went to and from their places of occupation, busy because, for all its calm and solidity, theirs was a city under siege.
THE MASTER Race prided itself on its efficiency. It did not like its establishments administered in such a shoddy fashion. Eberl, who seemed to think he was the grand duke of some ghastly medieval estate, was unceremoniously sacked. The official reason given was ‘sexual deviance’. Vitaly saw him on the final day of his command, talking with the silver-haired young man again. He seemed to be complaining. The young man had a fat pile of books bound with a leather strap tucked under his arm. Beside him was a girl—no more than a teen-ager—with flowing strawberry-coloured hair. The girl was very pretty, wearing a flat-bellied skirt and long cape. She stared at Eberl. Her pout registered boredom. Eberl said, ‘Well, Willie, this is it.’ Silver Willie shook his head, sadly. Extra trucks were needed to transport Eberl’s library from the camp. Willie was seeing that they were loaded properly. He waved his arms energetically at the two youthful Ukrainians loading the trucks. ‘No, you idiot, empiricism over there. How dare you put John Stuart Mill beside Nietzsche!’
So Eberl and his Liszt records, assorted university degrees, capacity for philosophical speculation, women’s clothes and fierce competitive spirit were exchanged for Herr Stangl’s stolidly middle-class organisational skills: he had run a football club, a school P&C and a Veteran’s Society. He had a complete edition of Shakespeare and a complete edition of Goethe. This was food enough for his mind. He said, ‘Leave these University queers alone for a month and look what they do.’ He respected order, ritual, piety. The cities of Poland with their prominent churches reminded him of his childhood. His tuition by the Dominicans. Domini canes: the Hounds of God.
Herr Stangl stopped transports altogether for a brief duration, and attempted to control the rampant alcoholism of his staff. ‘God these Ukrainians can stick it away. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He had some new gas chambers built, larger, more efficient, prettier. The steps were embellished with potted geraniums. The entrance was covered by a synagogue’s ceremonial curtain. On it were written the words ‘This is the Gateway to God. Righteous Men will pass through.’ There was a gable decorated with a large Star of David. There was even a glass porthole you could look through to see how things were going.
Stangl accepted one recommendation of Eberl’s, and appointed clever Karol Rohozin, who could read Polish and German, as commander of the Ukrainian garrison. Stangl set up the lie of the Lazarett, a burning pit disguised as a field hospital, within which those too sick to run to the gas chambers would be shot by a bored Ukrainian sentry after being duped outside by a fluttering Red Cross flag. Stangl controlled the looting carried out by the Ukrainian garrison, and arranged proper rosters. He set up a camp orchestra and choir, and played Christmas carols over the loudspeakers during the festive season. Stangl also, in letters home, despite the lack of linguistic resemblance between the British Raj and the Third Reich, referred to the Ukrainians as ‘native troops’. Thus, they became, fairly rapidly, the sepoys, the Askaris, of the Nazi Empire. Expendable, obedient, loyal and dependably heartless. They did not try, as yet, to throw out their foreign masters, or place them in a black hole in the ground. It was only later, when those still in the villages realised that the Nazis had no plans for them as people (they were too useful as savages), that they began to fight back. Then they became partisans. But they had two battles to fight: one against the communists, and one against the Nazis. They also lost.
THERE ARE only seventeen Germans in the camp, and one hundred and twenty Ukrainians. There are Polish and Ukrainian women who also live on the premises, cooking and washing for their compatriots in labour. There are also nine hundred prisoners. They are carpenters and doctors, jewellers and watchmakers. They sort the clothes and valuables of the dead, they regularly bribe the Ukrainian guards with the valuables they steal in order to save their lives, and they are not fed starvation rations, because their work is ‘important’. Everyone else who comes to this centre for resettlement and re-education is gassed.
From among the Germans, Kiwe is in charge of the Lazarett, Sidow the brush-collecting detail (it is vital that the whole place is surrounded by scented pine brush) and Franz the sorting yard. Franz has a pet Saint Bernard, Barri, which has taken a liking to Vitaly, and Barri follows Vitaly around the compound when he is off duty, simpering. Barri also kills people at Franz’s command, by tearing out their throats. But there is also a human dog in the camp, Ivan the Terrible, who co-administers the gas chambers with Nikolai Manchuk. Not a hunchback, but worthy of comparison with Quasimodo for his fury.
Stangl the Herr Kommandant is seldom seen; he is not an educated man, like the previous incumbent. Rumours persist about what he does in there. His musical taste is appalling. Fortunately, he leaves the singing to the Ukrainians and the instrumentations to the Jewish orchestra. When they play, the people in the nearby villages hear sweet music pouring forth from what they know is a human abattoir. The guards sing and dance, even the prisoners sing as they march hither and thither. Each week a concert is held in the Tailor Shop, and there is dancing and singing. The Kommandant is a tidy man. Each day two different Ukrainians are rostered to stand beneath the trees on his grounds and catch the leaves before they fall to earth. Nothing so vulgar as a piece of rubbish in sight.
VITALY, like most of the garrison, avoids the Lazarett detail. It makes him feel sick. He thought he would be fighting Bolshevism. He sits beside the pit on a canvas chair, his rifle perched on one knee, waiting for the hour’s quota of victims to be escorted past the Red Cross flag and through the gate. Depending on the number of victims, he will do the shooting alone or enlist the assistance of the escort—usually three men. Sometimes Ivan M. is one of these guards. He is a corporal, and he has Vitaly throw infants in the air so that he may attempt to catch them on his bayonet. One of the German overseers has a phrase—‘long pig’—something to do with the South Sea Islanders, which he uses near the shooting pit when Ivan M. is there. Vitaly does not like it. It sounds bad. The German cackles. Ivan’s swift movements with the bayonet make ‘whooshing’ sounds. The sleeves of his uniform—long on him because he is very young—become soaked. The bodies in the fire make crackling, roasting sounds, and sometimes new visitors to the Lazarett throw up before undertaking their shooting tasks. Shura did this, then recovered sufficiently to remind Ivan that a rifle that filthy must take no small amount of cleaning. Vitaly is glad that the Lazarett roster only lasts for one week. But he is well paid. He has a photo of himself taken in Warsaw, in a proper professional studio. He is handsome, his blond hair sleek like a shiny cap on his head. His uniform fits him better, now: he has filled out and grown another inch. Six feet six. It has a nice ring to it. He comes stalking down the dusty streets of the town near the camp, heading for the house of the old, bent peasant Sławek Juskowiak who sells good quality Polish vodka, under a soft, black summer sky. It is in this state of lordly power—rich, handsome and free—that he meets Magda Juskowiak.
THE HOUSE of Sławek Juskowiak had only three rooms, large rooms with whitewashed walls and slate floors. Sławek and his wife Maria slept in one room, with Magda and Brunek, the oldest of the children still at home, occupying the space at the foot of the paternal bed on hewn wooden bunks. On the very coldest days, the best milk cow would also share this room with Sławek and Maria. Four more children occupied the next room, sleeping on matting and burlap sacks, their ages ranging, stair-step, from three to eleven. There was Nowak, little and bright-eyed, the youngest boy, beloved of Maria Juskowiak. Then Leokadja, a blond and pretty girl, not quite old enough to fetch water from the pump in the yard. Then Anna, who was old enough, and undertook this task each morning and evening. Finally, Piotr, who, along with thirteen-year-old Brunek, looked after the few cows with his father, and brought the hay in, when the time was right, and the potatoes, when the time was right, and married, also when the time was right.
