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‘I see you have Sander’s new designs.’
We looked at the plan side by side.
‘I was wondering, sir – if it should help – I have an old school friend in Weimar who runs two of the crematoria there. I thought I might pay him a visit at the weekend. So that I may better understand our work.’ I thought this would be a good thing to say, to show my interest in the company’s products, and in my own time, but Prüfer’s mouth went thin.
‘The Special Ovens accounts for less than three percent of our output, Ernst. If you want to learn more about Topf the malting equipment and granaries would be a better study for a graduate who wishes to get on.’
‘Yes, sir. It is my ambition to do so.’
He rapped the plan. ‘Can this be done today?’
‘Yes. I understand it.’ I pointed to the stylised sig-rune heading at the top of the print that corresponded to the eagle and stamp in the right corner, signed by Sander. Not a double ‘S’ at all. An ancient Germanic rune reversed. It now stood for ‘victory’ instead of ‘sun’.
‘This is for the camp commander? I am to make it plain, sir?’
The cherub came back. ‘But do not make it look as if the reader is a novice. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘If you can get this done by this afternoon bring it to my office. I have come from Auschwitz with new requests that must be drawn up as soon as possible. Sander is working on them now.’ He pushed his glasses back where sweat had slipped them. I noticed his hands were rubbed almost raw from washing. Sanded almost.
‘Before five, Ernst.’
‘Yes, sir.’ And he left me, as simple as he had appeared. My colleague opposite pretended to hear none of it, as if our desks were in a different universe, and I hummed to myself at his flush of face and set to work.
The new boy taking his work direct to Prüfer’s office.
*
By four-thirty I had finished the annotations. I had started my walk to Prüfer’s office confidently but with each step I realised this was my first completed task.
Suppose I had not done well? Suppose my notes were obtuse? Vague? It was a deconstruction of the plan. We had done such things at the university many times but perhaps I had been too succinct, perhaps not enough. I would be judged by my first work in the real world and I slowed as I passed Klein’s office and onto Prüfer’s, appropriately the door that ended the corridor. I knocked twice, waited. An age. The shutting of filing cabinets echoed through the corridor.
‘Come in, Ernst.’
Prüfer’s office did not have the draughtsman’s board when he had interviewed me. It dominated the room, appeared strange in the room that I remembered. The room that now demanded something of me. He gave me no instruction as he stood beside it and I bowed, automatically, set the plan to the grips and stood back.
He removed his glasses, one hand to his back, a sea captain studying a course, and his spectacles roving across the plan like a magnifying glass.
‘Excellent, Ernst. Excellent.’ His eye moving along the paper from corner to corner and then he stepped aside, his spectacles’ arms pinned with difficulty behind his ears again.
‘This will do well. Sander will be pleased. Well done. Now, tell me what you might think of something.’
He went to his desk and with anything that came to hand weighted down another plan. I crossed the room, looked down at the paper spread as large as a tablecloth, a cog-like mechanism its centrepiece. Prüfer did not wait for any query.
‘The problem with the camp ovens, Ernst, is that they run on coke. It is inefficient to run and damages the ovens quickly. It takes much longer to reduce the matter than our gas ovens – such as your friend probably has in Weimar. One of ours no doubt.’ He was pleased at this. He may have installed them himself.
‘The SS will go for nothing less than coke. For cost. Yet they want more efficient ovens every year. They are wrong of course. Although more expensive to build, a gas oven is more economical. But they think like old men. Coal, coal, coal. Coal is cheap, the oven must be cheap. But now it is not so cheap.’ He tapped the cog on the drawing. ‘But see here, see here. The problem is that an oven must be a regulatory size if it is to work correctly. And they simply do not have the space for anything larger than the eight-door muffle oven in any building in Auschwitz. I know. I built them. If they build another crematoria, again no more than an eight-door, otherwise the heat will be too great. The men operating it would burn. By the end of the year there will be fifty-two ovens in these camps. They don’t listen. That will take enough coal to run a railway. But see here, see here.’
I turned my head to the diagram, like a dog trying to comprehend another’s bark coming from the radio.
‘Is this one of Herr Sander’s designs, sir?’
‘No. It is my own. It is a circular oven.’ He indicated the protrudes of the wheel that made me perceive the drawing as a cog-piece. ‘These are the muffle doors. Instead of having ovens in a line, each creating its own heat, you have a central furnace. Eight doors all around.’
I could see it then. Pictured the special unit of prisoners, a trundle, the sliding bed for the body, for each, standing in front of their oven door, trying not to look at each other across Prüfer’s central furnace as they loaded their burden.
‘They would have to remove the old ovens of course but it would double the capacity and – with a single larger furnace – it would be more efficient. The problem with each muffle having its own furnace is it negates the savings of using coke. If they had gone with gas jets from the start it would be cheaper overall. But they have made their bed.’
I saw the single massive furnace roar before me.
‘But how would you determine the ashes? From each other, sir? To send to their relatives? For interment?’
He stared at me, and then back to his crude design.
‘I don’t think you understand, Ernst. Do you think Kori of Berlin are not working on furnaces to improve efficiency? Marketing such to the SS? How are we to compete if it is not by better design?’
I had disappointed him. Could feel it. All design, all invention falling to the same adage:
Build a better mousetrap. It did not say build a bigger one.
*
‘Thank you for your efforts today, Ernst. Your plans must be brought to my office every night,’ he ordered, ‘for security. One of the reasons for hiring you is that many of the older men are ex-union men. They still hold socialist ideals. And there are many communists amongst them.’
I kept hearing these words. They were being drilled into me from every office in the building. I began to think that I was not so talented or wanted. Just local. And young. New.
‘And we have communists on the factory floor. Sure of it. From our own workforce and from the camps. But without knowing who they are we do not get rid of skilled men when we have need of them. We could not fulfil our contracts without. But we have been instructed by the SS that the men who work on these plans must be totally trustworthy. Must have no communist ties. It is easier to use new men.’ He took the plans from the board and folded them into his safe.
‘The new ovens are … important … to the SS. Not for communist eyes.’ He winked his cherubic smile. ‘You will have them waiting for you every morning. Good night, Ernst.’
I bowed and left, cursed myself. I should not have opinions. A man should admire everything from his superiors, not question. I passed Klein’s office, the sound of him laughing down the telephone at my back as I walked.
My ISIS machine was the last one on my row, no-one behind me to see, my co-worker beside me too engrossed in his own work and I was sure he would not know what I was permitted to do and not do, but still, I waited until he took a pipe break to copy the Auschwitz plan from memory. A scaled version in my pocket. Take it home. To show Paul at the weekend. Working at home a good habit for an ambitious man.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_044be59c-48f7-5fce-b218-07547fdfdadd)
When I first met Etta she was that entrancement of a typical zaftig Austrian woman. Curls and curves. City life and style had near straightened her red curls and she maintained them religiously. I imagined that as a child her auburn hair had set her out when all her classmates would have been as shining blonde as the brass in an orchestra.
Her figure too gone the way of a city girl walking to work, and the privations of war had slimmed her so that her nightwear no longer clung but draped, flowed like water about her. Every year she became a new woman before me. Every year a new bride. I envied even myself over my fortunes with her. We argued because we were so similar. We made up because we were so similar. I had known women before her but all I learned from them was how to erase the errors of arrogant youth so I could correctly love this one. I met her at an Erfurt fair, she had tripped, and I caught her and her soup bowl over my shirt. It was dark, the only light from the bulbs of the market stalls selling pretzels and hot chocolate. I never saw she was a redhead until the next day when we met for lunch. I never looked at another woman after that. My youth had been only training to get to that point, sure that some higher power had closed his book and said, ‘I’m done with this one. Next.’
We married in Switzerland, where her parents had moved to in ’39. We were twenty-one. I was ending my last year at university. Etta had been coming to the library there for years. We had never met.
Her parents had rented her an apartment and I advantaged on that to leave my parents, to leave my small box room where I had grown up. This was not a sudden thing. We had courted for months. Needed more time together. It was like playing at house. Decorated the place like a child’s birthday party. Never made the bed up. No point. Ate meals on our laps. Listened to the radio that grew worse every week. Even the music controlled. Everything on it decades or centuries old or just shrill speeches from names we did not know. They took the long-wave from us, took music from us. We shrugged. The country shrugged.
Etta had married a poor Erfurt boy. No reason to. She could have had anyone. Any of those rich boys her father knew. Sometimes the bafflement of this needed reassurance and she would touch me, would smile as at a child.
‘There’s no such thing as a good rich man, Ernst. No-one ever got rich being a good man. I would rather trust a poor honest one. One without a mistress.’
‘And how do you know I don’t have a mistress?’
‘Because you can’t afford one.’
We moved into that one-room apartment next to the hotel that summer. Her father no longer able to pay for hers from Switzerland as the banks consolidated under government control. Only internal transactions permitted. I signed on for the married man’s subsistence. She took a waitress job. But we were never happier. Until a month became three years. Until the war became three years. People wore it on their faces. The people in their maps that they pushed their tiny markers of planes and battalions over like croupiers dragging away your losses. Thin as paper maps. The bed got made. Ate at table.
Marriage is for the young. Yet the old men you invite to your wedding scoff, the women cry, the divorced drain their glasses, talk behind hands. But there is red hair under a white veil, a boy in a loaned suit and everything is possible. But you have to go home. The larder has to be filled. You take a job drafting ovens for prison camps. The bed got made. Ate at table. Turned off lights only to save the meter. Early. Before the blackout.
When Etta and I returned from our marriage in Switzerland we had a celebration for all our friends which at least my father had got off the bridge to attend. A real Erfurt celebration with Bach and beer. The women in white and the men in green felt and caps. A gloriously ludicrous display. Probably the last time I have been truly drunk. It was Etta’s friends mostly, Paul Reul the only one of mine, the only one we shared, the only one other than my father I let dance with her.
Paul left school at fourteen to work as a stonemason with his father, and from there, from the headstone commissions, he managed to get himself in with the undertakers of Weimar and Erfurt and studied the almost religious sanctity of the crematoria.
Paul had carved his own headstone, as his father had his own. An eerie tradition. The last date missing. He was proud of it, mentioned it to people he had only just met as an ice-breaker after he had introduced himself and his employment and the laughter would come awkwardly as he explained.
‘I won’t get to see it else. And who knows what they will write about me!’
Before ’34 and the Nuremberg laws cremation was not popular, and for Jews it was against their beliefs entirely, but once the deportations began and German families moved into Jewish homes, and the camps began to bring them their trade, business increased from miles around.
The Nuremberg regulations made cremations as religious as burial. For Paul and his colleagues this legitimacy made them as respected as priests. They built chapels of rest, held services, and Topf’s petrol and gas ovens made the process contained, not vulgar, as distinguished as funerals, like the white-smocked clergy by the grave and dust to dust, and no widow would have to brush ash from her black sleeve when she took a walk outside, for a breath of air, for the private dab of tear.
Paul was a close friend at school, he was in classes below me but a good stalwart at play and with an older sister a constant source of female mysteries. He had not attended the university but his profession could aid me in mine I was sure.
Etta had wanted to come but I explained that this was work, not a day-trip. Besides, I could enquire on another matter in Weimar which would be easier without her.
*
It is only fifteen minutes and ten pfennigs to take the train to Weimar. There are five crematoria for the city. Paul owns two of them. He is on the steps of his chapel in Jacob Street in his black suit waiting for me like he must wait for his hearses or the wagons from the camps. He sees me, and his dignified stance changes to an animated rush as he runs to greet me like the boy in school again.
‘Ernst!’ He waves, clasps my hand. ‘So good to see you!’
‘Thank you for seeing me.’
‘Of course, of course! Come. I make you coffee. How is Etta? How can I help you?’
I needed my friend’s advice, his opinion. Colleagues and family, even wives, sometimes reflect only your own.
Old friends the mirror that you cannot see yourself in.
*
‘What is this, Ernst?’ Paul studied the paper, the plans across his coffee-table in his private rooms. A comfortable place. Nicer than my home. Not an office. No paperwork here. If working men had rooms where they could retire to during the day I am sure they were doing well. He had left school at fourteen. I went to university and rent a gas cooker with one working hob.
‘These are replacement ovens for a few of the crematoria at the Auschwitz camps. The place is enormous. Its own city almost.’
Paul sat back to furnish his pipe. I would not show him that I still smoked rolled cigarettes. His speech lisped as the pipe hung from his mouth. He sounded like my father judging my school-work.
‘You know, Ernst, the camp at Buchenwald used to bring wagons of corpses to us for disposal. Not so much the last year. And we used to get deliveries of ashes from the eastern camps to return to families. Not now. The camps have dispensed with formalities. Ignored the laws of their own government. By law the remains are supposed to come to people like myself. We formalised the paperwork and contacted the relatives. We store them here for them if they cannot pay for their release. The SS charge them for the cremation. We have cupboards full of them.’
‘The typhus means they are having to burn more deceased. I suppose in times of emergency laws must be bypassed.’
‘But we get no ashes now. None. They cannot all die of disease. The Party are the ones who regulated. Would you not wonder what hand decided that the rules no longer mattered? That the dead do not matter?’
‘I have been inside Buchenwald,’ I said. ‘There are sixty thousand men there. They have one crematorium. Six ovens. They are overwhelmed. The morgue is below the ovens. The stench was incredible. They cannot cope. Topf is trying to help them. Auschwitz must have the same problems.’
‘And what is so different about this crematoria. What am I looking at?’ He went back to looking at the plan and I pointed the rooms out to him.
‘Instead of the ovens being on the ground floor they will be on the same level as the morgue, the mortuary and pathology. All underground. They use hand-drawn lifts currently.’
‘So do I. And what is this large room between?’
‘The delousing room. This annexe next to it is for the clothes.’
‘They delouse the prisoners next to the mortuary and the ovens?’
‘They delouse,’ I indicated the showers in the ceiling, ‘and then they shower them. This is for the new prisoners. Straight off the train. The track is close by so they do not mingle with the rest of the camp.’
He sucked on his pipe and it rattled on his teeth.
‘And what are these lines here, to the morgue?’
‘Gas pipes.’
‘Gas for what?’
‘I do not know. Exactly. Heating?’
He sat back. ‘You do not heat a morgue, Ernst. You do the opposite.’
‘For the hot water then?’
‘I doubt they give them hot water. What is the building above?’
‘I do not have that plan.’
He studied for three puffs of his pipe.
‘This building makes no sense to me.’
I watched his hands navigate the drawing.
‘You have five triple-muffle ovens behind a delousing room the size of a school hall. The dead would have to be trundled through this hall making it inoperative at those times and – if it is to be as busy as you say it is – that is useless. The morgue and pathology also in this room? There is also only one entrance. These are steps leading to it, yes?’
I agreed, but unsure of it.
‘Well, I do not see any chutes leading to the morgue. So they carry the dead down one by one? By these stairs?’
I looked hard at the plan.
‘There was a chute at Buchenwald. To the morgue.’
