This image is from a model of the "processing" of a transport at Auschwitz Birkenau. (Link here) It takes the viewer all the way from the train's arrival on the ramp, via "Selection" to the gas chambers and beyond. Here we see the first moment of truth, Selection.
Today I move on from Vespasian, I don't want to get ahead of myself, and return to events that unfold in the upcoming Book 4 of the series.
In this the next series of posts of background notes from my books, The Travellers, we discover why a character, Lev Weissmann, the finest diamond cutter in the world, has retired to atone for some unknown sin he committed in the camp. When I created Lev, in Book 3, I had no idea what might have taken place. After months of research, his story and the story of people like him, was seared into my mind and his part of the book just poured out.
Today, nearly all the survivors are dead. But there is a mass of first-hand material written and spoken about this. No one else can know what this was like but I have done my best to immerse myself in these eye witness accounts and I have put nothing in my book that someone did not see or do.
What I have been careful to do however is not to use outrage as my lens. Much of the discussion of the camps is set in the context of evil and outrage. I have instead done my best to use the lens of The Grey Zone.
The late Primo Levi, writes from his soul when he describes what he calls the "Grey Zone". In his book The Drowned and the Saved, he makes the point that we cannot separate the inmates into easy categories of the good and the bad. He instead shows us the Grey Zone. The grey zone is inhabited mostly by people who compromise and collaborate with their oppressors to varying degrees and with varying degrees of freedom of choice in exchange for preferential treatment. The stark reality is that most of those that did not make such concessions died.
Those that lived had to make sense of what they had done. Many could not and in spite of writing so much to understand, Levi himself committed suicide.
In this series we will explore Auschwitz mainly through the experience of those that had a "privileged" existence for one reason or another. All of them inhabited this Grey Zone. Like my true life characters who survived the Great War, the burden of surviving was to cause many great suffering later.
My protagonist, Lev and his two protégés, the twins, Dan and Ben are invented.
Everyone else in Book 4 are historic characters. These range from camp doctors like Dr Nyiszli who was Mengele's pathologist in Krema 2, to members of the Sonderkommando, to a family of dwarves, the Ovitz family, to Jews who were saved because they looked Aryan, like Marc Berkowitz and we end this part of The Travellers with in my mind the hero of the camp, a Kapo, Zhvi Spiegel. Spiegel was in charge of the hut that contained many of the boy twins and the Ovitz family. It was Spiegel that kept the boys alive in the camp and who escorted 39 boys across the battlefields of Europe in 1945 to safety at war's end.
Many then and later have vilified these people for living. I think that we all have to ask ourselves, what would we have done? This question is the paramount one for me.
Central to our story is Dr Mengele. It is he, on the ramp, who sent more people to their deaths than any other but who paradoxically was also responsible for saving some of these people. All our characters have his "protection". This meant that while they survived, they often had very confused feelings about him.
Marc Berkowitz
Marc Berkowitz, was selected to live because he looked so Aryan. He became Mengele's orderly. On January 17, 1945, as Mengele left the camp he made a point of stopping to see Berkowitz and telling him that "You have been a good boy."
Livia Bitton Jackson had a similar story. Tall with long blonde hair, she is stopped by Mengele on the ramp and asked if she is Jewish. She says "Of course I am Jewish". Mengele turns her and her mother to the right but sends her aunt to the left. Just as she stepped off to her second chance for life, he stopped her again. "How old are you?" he asked. "I am thirteen", she replied. "Tell everyone that you are sixteen." Here she tells this story herself.
How do you live with this? She has written a number of fine books that offer us some answers. Here is where to start. She has never been able to reconcile the guilt that she feels at being given this chance of life. Here is a talk she gave at a school. Most touching of all is when she talks about her guilt at being spared. I find that she has an inner beauty that radiates from her and fills the auditorium.
Here is Mengele with his wife Irene.
We also explore the other side. Mengele is the central character in this drama that involves those that he protected. Drawing mainly on Nyiszli's account, who saw Mengele almost daily, we hear about his work in his own words. We meet Irene, his wife who comes up for a quick visit and then falls ill and stays for months. We discover the paradox of his care for certain people coupled with his sense of duty and enjoyment as he sends millions of others to their deaths.
Here are the older Hoess children in the garden of the Kommandant's house in Auschwitz.
We also explore the bizarre world of the Hoess family who raise their children in the Kommandant's house next to the camp. Mrs Hoess insisted in remaining at the house even after, her husband got a promotion and was reposted for a while to Berlin. She found the place idyllic! The issue for me is that their life, feet away from the camp, is so normal. When we merely express outrage and label this as evil, we miss the point.
Like then, our world today has become increasingly binary: good versus bad, Us versus Them. The Holocaust was the result of such a set of values. I think it is important for us all today, when it has become so normal again to see "The Other" everywhere, to dig beneath these labels.
Hannah Arendt warns us that evil appears in practice as banality. What could be more banal than Hedwig Hoess being a proud housekeeper feet away from such crimes? What could be more banal that her husband's memoirs where he rails against the bureaucratic failures of Berlin to meet his needs for more support. Or finally, what could be more banal than Mengele's burning ambition to find the secret of twins so that he might win a Nobel Prize for creating a master race?
In part 2 of this series, we will explore Lev Weissmann's own accommodation with the devil. In later posts we will look at the real people who surround him, both the inmates and Germans who inhabit the camp.
I think that it is in the Grey Zone and in the "Banality of Evil" that we can find the truth of the human condition.
