Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Travellers book 4 - The Grey Zone part 5 - Zvi Spiegel, a "Decent Man"

Viktor Frankl made the point that there are really only two races in the world, the decent people and the indecent people. In the Lager, it was almost impossible to be wholly decent. This is a story of a truly a decent man.

The image above is a staged shot taken by the Russians several days after they arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. The two little girls we see, after the nurse carrying a child, are Eva and Miriam Kor. Twins, they were part of Mengele's group of special twins. On the left is Eva Kor, a great woman, who died just a few months ago. A few days before this picture was taken, a party of 39 boys, mainly twins, had set off from the camp to walk home to Hungary. They were led by a 30 year old twin, Zvi Spiegel. 

The girls hardly knew each other but the boys formed lifetime friendships. Housed in Hut 14 in BfII, the "hospital area of the camp just down from Kanada and Krema IV and V, they lived in a different world from any other group of prisoners. In Hut 14, food had to be shared, comfort and clothes shared.Friendships were encouraged. Hut 14 was an island of community in the shark tank of the Lager. All of this was the work of one man. 

Zvi Spiegel, "Spiegel Bacsi,''or Uncle Spiegel also known as Zwillingsvater, or 'twins father' is I think one of the few who clearly deserve the label of a "decent man".  This is his story.

He and his twin sister, Magda, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 from their hometown Munkács in Sub-Carpathian Rus which was under Hungarian rule at the time. Upon arrival, when Spiegel, aged 29, heard the guards shouting Zwillinge, Zwillinge! (twins, twins), he immediately identified himself as a twin. At that very moment Mengele arrived and saw Spiegel—who had formerly been an officer in the Czechoslovakian army—standing at attention like a soldier. Mengele immediately approached him, asked him about his background and appointed him supervisor of the younger twins in the Birkenau hospital sub-camp, known as Lager BIIf—Häftlingskrankenbau.

From that point, the course of Spiegel’s life changed forever. Beginning as a minor functionary in the camp, he emerged as the guardian of a group of twin boys. His position required him to escort the twins and bring them to the designated place in which the experiments were being conducted, and there to serve as Mengele’s translator. As time went on, Spiegel took on a much more formative role in the camp. He forged the twins into a unified entity, attended to their needs, educated them, comforted them and gave them hope, and on several occasions risked his own life to save theirs. Even though he did not believe that they would live to see liberation, in order to give the twins a spark of hope he promised to take them home one day. (The History of Zvi Spiegel: The Experience of Mengele Twins and Their Protector During the Holocaust and its Aftermath  Yoav Heller PhD Candidate 2013 Department of History Royal Holloway, University of London)

This picture was taken by Allied reconnaissance in September of 1944 as the Hungarian Aktion reached its peak, killing nearly 400,000 people - about 6,000 a day. The picture shows 3 transports. Look at the top left above Krema II (Krema I was in Auschwitz main camp) and you see a plume of smoke. The ovens had a design capacity of a bit more than 1,000 in a 24 hour period. In the Hungarian Aktion, the ovens could not keep up and many bodies were burned on a huge pyre outside. The "hospital" where Spiegel's boys lived, was the area I have marked. One of these huts was Hut 14. It is just back from Kanada, where all the possessions were sorted and stored for shipment back to the Reich. To the right of Kanada are Kremas IV and V. Beyond Kanada is "The Sauna" where prisoners who were selected to work were processed.

Each block of huts is closed off with wire and gates. If you were found trying to get from one block to another you were shot. I tell you this for a reason.

Mengele had a rival, a Dr Thilo. Mengele's wife, Irene, had come to visit him and had fallen critically ill. For a while it seemed that she might die. Mengele put all his attention towards her care. This gave Thilo his chance. He went into Hut 14 in the middle of the night and set up a selection. Tying a string between two bunks, all those who were too small to pass beneath the string, he selected for gassing the next day. This included all the male dwarves of the Ovitz family who also lived in Hut 14. Spiegel could not directly confront Thilo. After all he was himself a Jew and a prisoner. Instead, he climbed out of a window and ran outside for help, calling to a guard on one of the towers. A guard whose standing orders were to shoot a prisoner on site at night. Spiegel and the guard knew each other and the guard called Mengele who came immediately. Mengele cancelled the selection and had Thilo removed from the camp. Such was Mengele's power in the hierarchy. 

Mengele's protection was real and also paradoxical. Though he was only a Captain, he had been a serving officer in the Waffen SS and had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class, equivalent to the MC. He was also the most highly qualified of all the doctors on the SS staff and had a grant from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his research into twins. No one thought of him as a mad scientist but as the only real researcher on staff. He had what the Germans called then, "Vitamin B", or massive support from above that not only included Professor Verschuer at KWI but also Himmler who was fascinated by this research. This and his personal charisma, meant that the senior officers left him alone and also that the NCO's and men on staff were as frightened by him as the prisoners were.

According to Dr. Nyiszli, they trembled at the mention of Mengele’s name, as he discovered when he was challenged by an SS soldier for being in F camp, away from his zone: I answered him in a quiet voice: “I am here because Dr. Mengele sent me.” The name “Mengele” worked like magic. My noncom grew tame in less time than it takes to tell. In an almost fawning manner he asked me how long I intended to stay inside the camp.

The paradox was that if Mengele favoured you, then you had "vitamin B" in the camp. Spiegel, the Ovitz family, the prisoner doctors who worked for him such as Nyiszli and all the twins in his program had his protection. Dr Thile, had no authority to do what he did and was immediately reassigned to another camp. he left within a day. Mengele asserted his authority to the prisoners and to his superiors.

Mengele had been supportive of Spiegel before but now ensured that Hut 14 would be a sanctuary. Spiegel's sister Magda was taken out of the camp population and got a job as Mengele's office cleaner. An inside job with light duties and access to food, clothes and warmth. 

But all of this changed on January 17th 1945 when Mengele left the camp forever. Without his protection, Hut 14 was now seriously at risk. Most of the remaining prisoners, including Magda and Dr Nyiszli, were marched out of the camp on a death march back to Germany. Somehow, Spiegel prevented HUT 14 from joining this. The SS blew up Krema V and set Kanada afire. All assumed that the SS would finish the clean up job by killing all the remaining prisoners. Instead they were marched to the old Auschwitz that now had no power and were dumped there. 

A day later, the Russians arrived. 

Imagine that you are a boy of say 8 years. You are now "free" but all your family is dead and your community at home is gone. What do you do? How are you going to feed yourself? Where will you go? How will you go anywhere? These terrible feelings of emptiness filled all the prisoners. Until then, everyone knew the rules. They were the camp rules. Now there were no rules and nothing could be predicted. 

Full of doubt about whether he could or should do this, Spiegel decides to take the boys of Hut 14 home with him to Hungary. They set off in the snow and the cold of January on a three day, 60 KM, trek to Krakow where they will get passes to go eventually to the Hungarian border (Now part of Romania). The map below shows you his route of over 600 KM. Along the way, Spiegel loses one boy in a traffic accident. 

Eventually Spiegel finds Magda who survived the awful march. His home town, Munkacs, once mainly Jewish, has hardly any Jewish survivors. He moves to Israel where his role as a Kapo puts him under suspicion. Also, like many genuinely good people, he does not think that he has done anything special. It takes decades for people to understand what he did.

In 1985, there was a conference of about 100 surviving twins in Jerusalem. Here is a clip from the New York Times that covered this meeting.

After his story was told, the inquiry board asked all those in the audience that he had taken care of to stand up. One by one various sets of male twins rose, many of them now balding or grey, to hail the man they called in Hungarian ''Spiegel Bacsi,'' or Uncle Spiegel. The audience broke into spontaneous applause. 

Zvi Spiegel a "decent man" 1915 - 1993.

 

 

 

 

 

The Travellers - Book 4 - The Grey Zone Part 4 - The Guards and Us

At first glance, you see a bunch of young people mugging for the camera. Then you see the uniform. What you may not know, and what makes this image so important, is that the women here are office workers at Auschwitz. They are spending a day at the SS Rest Camp a few miles east of the Lager. Who would guess that their business is mass murder? After all, apart from the uniform, they look like any other group of young people having fun. And that is the point of this post. It contains, I think, the central question for us today. How do quite normal people find it "normal" to do terrible things? If we can answer this question, then we can see how easy this is and so guard against this happening again.

How does it become normal to be part of the Holocaust?

I think it becomes normal over time. 

It starts with the inherent human fear and dislike of "The Other". This is not confined to White people and is common in all societies as we see in China or in the Indian subcontinent. In Europe, anti semitism is just under the surface and historic. Fear of the "Other" or "Strangers" is I think hard-wired into humans.

The crucible for all of this is victimization. Germany had lost the war. There was deep seated and general shame. It had to have been someone's fault. Then the middle class had been wiped out in depression. This was as bad as losing the war. It had to be someone's fault. It had to be the fault of an "other". Then along came a man who identified with this shame. Who told Germany that they were indeed victims and that it was someone who was not a real German's fault.

All the wrongs of the host are given to the scapegoat - the scapegoat is the guilty one that allows the "victim" to avoid any thought about their own reasons for failure and to hold onto the simple issue of blame the "other".

The true danger begins when the state begins to play on these inherent and deep-seated fears that exist in all of us. Hitler said that he was going to make Germany Great Again. To do that blame had to placed on the Jews. In Rwanda, the state and the state media had a long campaign that branded the Tutsi as "Cockroaches" that had to be exterminated as vermin. By having a scapegoat, the Hutu elite avoided their own culpability in a failing state.

Once this story is incorporated in the system of a state, then the scapegoat is in real danger. Once the Nazis took power in 1933, they began an ever increasing state-backed onslaught that began with messaging, then with the taking away of rights and property and later with internment and later still with death. Over a decade they conditioned the German people to become willing accomplices to the Final Solution. 

These young women may have been 8-10 years old in 1933. They would have been fed the message that Jews were dangerous enemies that posed a threat to their way of life and future for at least a decade before this picture was taken. 

Victimhood is the culture of our present time. As society fails, it has to be someone's fault. Scapegoating is normal. It's the immigrants. It's old white men. It's gays. It's straight society. It's women. It's even Jews! Take your pick. Today as both the UK and the US face elections, it is normal again to talk about the "other" as being dangerous threats. Violent language towards the other has become "normal" in the political landscape. I fear that this normalization of violent language on both the left and the right is a first step in a pathway to extreme danger. 

People ask, why did not people speak out? How do you speak out against the social trends today? Don't want to vaccinate? You are a murderer. Don't agree with gender fluidity? You are a bigot. Pick your own social death. Speaking out against the mainstream view of victimhood is social suicide. In Germany, in the 1930's, it was even worse. Speak out and your neighbor will inform on you and you will go to a concentration camp. So by 1939 there was total compliance. 

The next step, is when the state itself, and not just competing ideology, takes on the role of persecutor of the "other" or the scapegoat. Now persecution becomes legal. Being the "other" or defending the "other" becomes a crime. We saw this happen once Christianity became state religion after Constantine. The religion of peace and love, that had itself been persecuted, now enforces its position with the full backing of the state. Millenia of sanctioned persecution begins. Do we not see this now with the "Woke" agenda. In many countries it is now a  crime to speak certain things? It's no longer just social suicide today. Increasingly, saying the wrong thing will mean that, at best, you lose your job or worse be fined or end up in jail.

Once the state is involved, then bureaucratic process enters the equation as it did in Germany. Even at the best of times, there is no mercy in a bureaucracy. We all have experienced how heartless a bureaucracy can be. One of the ways that they are so heartless is that one of the features of any bureaucracy is that no one is responsible. So the normal rules of human behavior no longer apply. Everyone simply follows policy and the rules.  "I was only following orders" is how all bureaucrats justify their legal actions. Hoess's memoirs are filled with his bureaucratic fears and issues. It is easy to imagine the pillow talk in the Hoess's comfy home at the Lager.

"How was your day dear?"

"Terrible. We are having problems with those new furnaces. They don't do the volume that they promised. We are falling behind on the quota and unless I can find a solution, I am going to get in trouble with Himmler."

Hoess's fears throughout his time as Kommandant are along these lines and never about what is right or wrong.

Hannah Arendt goes further when pointing to bureaucracy as a danger.

"The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them."

With state sanction comes the issue of putting "little " people into a uniform and giving them power. Again we have all experienced this in airport security. Imagine if such people could also kill you at will and have the sanction of the state behind them? The Camps were the perfect place for these types of people. Imagine having the full power of the state behind you to persecute the people that you had learned to hate. Imagine swapping "war stories" with your colleagues over dinner in the mess about what you had done that day? Imagine, with total power, how your soul would be corroded? 

Another factor is scientific ideology. In the 1930's Eugenics was an established field of science and was especially strong in the US.

The idea of racial differences was at the foundation of science at the time. The common story about Mengele as a doctor in the KZ is that he was some kind of madman doing independent Frankenstein experiments on twins. In fact he was a research subordinate of one of the premier scientists of the time, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was director of the Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene from 1935 to 1942 and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1942 to 1948. Mengele was working for Verschuer and constantly sent him samples and his reports. Verschuer managed to avoid being made complicit in this and continued to hold prestigious scientific appointments after the war. The Institute itself was renamed the Max Planck Institute.

Scientific orthodoxy is a powerful support to any ideology based on "science". It gives comfort to those that act upon it and makes it hard to refute by the layman. There was no scientific institute more prestigious than the KWI. In fact it was so prestigious that one of its major backers was the Rockefeller Foundation. 

In the picture below we see Verschuer examining a pair of twins. The thrust of the research was to find a way of helping Aryan mothers to have twins as a matter of course, thus growing the "Pure Race'. Mengele was part of this program. 

In summary, by mid 1941 and the invasion of the Soviet Union, the German people were ready to take the final step in the Final Solution. They were ready to kill.

Reinforcing this was how a bureaucracy works by taking away personal responsibility and giving the full legal force to whatever a bureaucrat does.

Reinforcing this was the wearing of a uniform in the conduct of these "duties".

Further reinforcing government dogma and permission was that the full weight of the then current scientific beliefs about race were behind this decision as well.

Lastly we come to social pressure.

Here we see members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 marching people to their death in the Soviet Union. These are among the men who shot over a million people in 1941/2. These units were filled with middle-aged policemen. Men who months before were directing traffic and dealing with minor crimes in Germany's cities. Men who returned after the war to the very same jobs. How did they do this?

First of all they were subject to all the forces that I have summarized above. But none of these forces add up to being enough to pull the trigger. 

These men were not forced into this. A tiny few refused and were sent to other units. Peer pressure was the primary force. Most of the men felt that they could not step aside from their peers. And then every time they pulled the trigger it got easier.

So my final point is this. By simply labelling all those who participated in the Holocaust as being "evil", we fail to understand how these people did these things. Yes there were truly evil people involved. Defined as people with no conscience and who enjoyed this. But most were people like you and I who had descended into evil by being manipulated by evil people.

My fear today is that many of the preconditions that enable regular people to make this descent are in place. Victimization is the core of our conversation. As a result, demonizing "The Other" is at the centre of all political life today from both left and right. The state and the supporting bureaucracy has already begun to adopt, of course for the best of reasons, much of this ideology, and so mindlessly is able and does prosecute "the other" in the name of what is best. It's all for the general good. Dissent is social suicide. To dissent is to be a traitor.

I fear that we are not far away from the conditions where taking "Aktion" to deal with the whatever you choose problem.

 Viktor Frankl, a survivor, how I hate the overuse of this word, says in his great book, Man's Search for Meaning, that "...we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two - the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere, they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people......Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their own way were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp."

In my next post we look at a man who in all of this chose to be a force for decency and good. Surprisingly, he is a Kapo.

 

 

 

 

The Travellers - Book 4 - The Grey Zone Part 3 - What is the Grey Zone?

This image is taken from an important movie called The Grey Zone. It shows men of Sonderkommando 12 eating a feast at dinner. In late 1944, S 12 had over 800 men. Their job was to reassure, kill and process the bodies of the people on the transports. They were at the core of the system and so the heart of the moral issue of The Grey Zone. More detail on their role in a later post.

To have any chance of survival, a prisoner had to find a way to get out of the general population. They had to find a job or a role that put them on the side of their oppressors. They had to enter the Grey Zone. In this post I will show you the highlights of this moral landscape. 

If, on arrival, you were selected to live, you were assigned to a hut. Each hut had a Kapo, who lived in their own apartment, who had access to more clothes, heat and food and who had the power of life and death over you. The Kapo also ran the work details. Levi says "There is not a prisoner who does not remember his amazement at the time: the first threats, the first insults, the first blows came not from the SS but from "colleagues", from those mysterious personages who nevertheless wore the same striped tunic that they the new arrivals had just put on."

The Kapo would have lived in the quarters on the top right. They wore a distinctive armband. Most were not Jewish but were from the criminal group. In every hut but one, Hut 14 in BfII, it was every man or woman for themselves. "..the arrival in the Lager was indeed a shock because of the surprise it entailed. ...One entered hoping at least for the solidarity of one's companions in misfortune, but the hoped for allies, except in special cases, were not there; there were instead a thousand sealed off monads, and between them a desperate and continuous struggle." (Levi)

The fact that Kitty Hart-Moxon's mother was with her, saved them both. Often, one would be on the verge of collapse and would be saved by the other. But even more important was mental toughness. The situation in the camp was so dire that only those who were mentally tough had any chance. We see this part of her character when Kitty awoke on her first morning at the camp. The woman next to her was cold. Her bunkmate had died in the night. Kitty, only a teenager, stripped the dead woman, took her clothes and put them on her own body. She also found a piece of bread in the woman's pocket and ate it. Surviving demanded a total focus on survival. Kitty said it was much easier to die. Levi quotes Ella Lingens-Reiner, a doctor who saved many people, who, when asked how she survived, replied, "My principle is: I come first, second and third."

No matter how tough you were, you also had to get indoor work and more food. Outside hard labour was not survivable.

You could not live more than 4 months if assigned to this. You did anything you could to get a better "job". Getting a job cleaning out the latrines was a life-saver for Kitty Hart-Moxon.

The best job of all was to work in Kanada where the job was to sort the personal effects of the dead. Here there was lots of food and clothes. We can see the results in the picture below.

But there was a catch to this job. Because workers in Kanada knew what was really going on, they could never return to the main camp. Kitty was told, on her arrival in Kanada, that the only way out was up the chimney.

Dr Gisella Perl

There were many "Trustee Jobs as well. These included prisoner Doctors and people with special skills that were required. Getting such jobs was often a lottery. A request might be made in a barracks. No one knew if the call for a doctor or a cobbler was just a ruse for selection. Dr Countess Martina Puzyna, was in a rock breaking gang when she contracted typhus and ended up in hospital. Mengele, on his rounds, asked her who she was. When she told him that she was a doctor, he asked where she had trained. Impressed by her answer, he made sure she recovered and added her to his staff as his anthropologist. 

This is the Grey Zone.

Survival was only possible if you chose the Grey Zone. But for many of those, their sense of shame grew year by year after their release. You could not win. You died inside the camp or you died inside later.

In my next post, I wish to explore, the moral issues that confronted the guards. For to dismiss them all as "simply" evil, is to miss the question of "Under what circumstances might you are I be that guard?" For is not that the question today as we make hatred of the "other" paramount in our daily lives?

The Travellers Book 4 - The Grey Zone Part 2 - The Physical Landscape

In this second post in this series, I want to share with you a general landscape of the camp. What you will see is how it has been designed with great care to make it easy to kill up to 6,000 people a day. In this post I will focus on the physical design. In the next post, we will explore the Grey Zone, which is the cultural design or how the SS enlisted the inmates to do most of the work.

The lead picture is of a transport to the "East" from Westerbork, the main transit camp in the Netherlands from 1942/44. Westerbork is about 2 hours by car or train north east from Amsterdam. Anne Frank and her family were on the last transport to leave Westerbork. Here is the manifest that documents the Frank's transport. Note how punctilious the bureaucracy is.

Transports from Westerbork left every Tuesday. From July 1942 until September 3, 1944, the Germans deported 97,776 Jews from Westerbork: 54,930 to Auschwitz in 68 transports, 34,313 to Sobibor in 19 transports, 4,771 to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 7 transports, and 3,762 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 9 transports. Most of those deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor were killed upon arrival.

The tension on the weekends must have been extreme. If you were not on the transport, you had another week of hard but not impossible life. My protagonist, Lev Weissmann was on one of these transports to Birkenau. He left two weeks after his elderly adopted parents in the late spring of 1944 and arrived at night. 

In this scene, recreated in the the movie, Schindler's List, we see a transport arriving at night. It comes through the gates to the new internal ramp constructed by Hoess to facilitate the Hungarian "Aktion". This meant that the "cargo" could be unloaded only a short walk from the Krema's II, III and IV and the entire process could take place within an hour. Before this, prisoners were unloaded at the Juden Ramp on the main railway line about a mile from the camp. Prisoners were trucked into the camp then. 

This is a real photo of "Selection". It is from an album that has the only "official" images from the camp and documents a transport in 1944 from Hungary. The photos were taken at the end of May or beginning of June 1944, either by Ernst Hofmann or by Bernhard Walter, two SS men whose task was to take ID photos and fingerprints of the inmates (not of the Jews who were sent directly to the gas chambers). The photos show the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia. Many of them came from the Berehovo Ghetto, which itself was a collecting point for Jews from several other small towns.

In charge is the smart looking officer in the middle talking to his sergeant. This might be Captain Doctor Mengele but no one can be sure. He certainly fits the bill in terms of Mengele's typical smart turnout. His stature at the camp might also have meant that it was he who was the centrepiece on that day. Mengele worked at Selection more than any other officer at the camp. Note how the women and children are in one line and the men in another. The rule of thumb was that mothers with small children went automatically to the Krema. The age cut off officially for children was 16. Though we know that older looking children often were sent to the right and to work in the camp. The ONLY exception for small children were if you were a twin or a dwarf and then only if Mengele was on duty.

When the Ovitz family arrived that were mainly dwarves but also regular sized people + a couple who claimed to be family members, Mengele spared them all. His interest was genetics.

The Patriarch of the family was Avram, on the far left of the picture. Avram has a leading role in this part of the book.

Lev, aged 16, passes selection. Like Livia Bitton-Jackson and Marc Berkowitz, who is also a twin, Lev is strikingly Aryan in appearance. He also looks astonishingly like the son of Mengele's sponsor. More about that in the next post. We and Mengele discover on the next day that Lev, though only 16, is also an expert diamond sorter. This skill is key to his survival.

Diamonds play a major role in how the money worked in the camps. Easy to hide, many wealthy victims secreted diamonds about their body and their clothes. Few escaped detection after selection when all the clothes and the bodies were examined. The issue that I create, that saves Lev, is that only an expert can tell the value of a stone. With thousands of diamonds coming into the camp, along with other jewels, money and gold, the SS were able to finance much of the costs of the holocaust. In our case, we learn that knowing the true value of diamonds also gave the leadership of the camp an opportunity to obtain their own financial lifeline for when the war was lost.

Lev is sent to a special hut, Hut 14 in BII f in the "hospital area, next to Kanada, for his first night. This is where Mengele housed the male twins and dwarves. In charge of this hut was one of the true heroes of the camp, Zvi Spiegel. Much more on him later. 

This is Birkenau. Birkenau is where the main killing takes place. You can see the railway entering from the bottom left. 

Mengele's Birkenau office, in one of the brown buildings, is only feet away from where selection takes place. You can see how the ramp then leads directly to Krema's II and III. Krema I is in AI and was not a feature in the main "Aktions". In Krema II, is the office and lodgings for Dr Miklos Nyiszli. He is of course a Jew and an inmate and is Mengele's pathologist. Mengele built up quite a staff of Jewish Doctors. Nyiszli's account is my primary source for much of my assessment of Mengele. He met almost daily with him. His book also forms the basis of the film, The Grey Zone. His book and the movie offer a compelling vision of life at the core of the death process at the camp.

Hut 14 is located in the centre of the map in the "Hospital" centre and just down from the 14 huts that make up "Kanada" where the good of all the victims are sorted, stored and sent back to the Reich. This is where Lev will have his office later.

The Women's Camp is above Mengele's office to the left. 

It's a short walk from selection to Kremas II and III.

Here is a larger view of the entire Auschwitz system in mid 1944, at the peak of the Holocaust. Birkenau (AII or BII), is the main killing zone. See how Hoess has constructed a rail spur to enter the camp off the main line. The old Judenramp was a parallel siding to the main line just before the new line peels off. To the right is the old camp, (AI). This is the one in red brick with the gateway that says Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes you Free). The yellow box at the bottom right of AI is Kommandant Hoess' family residence. 

What separates Auschwitz from the other camps is its position in the European railway system.

In the Holocaust, all rails lead to Auschwitz and sending loot back to Berlin is a day trip for a train.

In my next post, we will explore the human process that the SS used to run this factory of death. 

 

The Travellers - Book IV - The Grey Zone - Part 1 Good and Evil explored

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.

 

Vespasian - The Thracian Connection - The Horsemen

 

The Jockey of Artemision ( 150 BC) - The statue is life-size for both horse and rider. The boy is under three feet tall well within the height of a 4 year old. Note that there is no saddle and no one had stirrups in those days. My point is that a boy-rider who had been riding from the age of two can ride a full-sized horse like this.

It had taken them 4 days to travel from the base at Argentoratum (Strasbourg) to Matisco (Macon) where the boy would be met by Leo and the Praetorian escort who would take him back to Rome. They had stretched the journey out because both the man and boy treasured every hour that they spent with each other. With Stallos returning to the Ala Thracum and going on to Britannia, both knew that these days might be their last together. 

Every morning on the march, Stallos would put the boy through his paces for three hours and then the two of them would ride knee to knee. Following behind were the pack mules, the ten men of the escort and Phyllis, his nanny, who rode as well as any of the men. She too was a Thracian. At night, the boy would sit by the fire, leaning against Stallos and listening to the stories and songs of the men. He now spoke Greek better than Latin for, back at the fort, he had spent most of his time in the horse lines. Aged only four, he now rode like a centaur. 

On this, their last day, the two of them rode on ahead. Neither wished to be witnessed as they said farewell.

They stopped at the final ridge. From this point, they could see the town and the dock. The boy swung down from his pony. Stallos dismounted from his stallion.

Stallos handed Titus the reins.

"You cannot go home with only a pony, young man. You need a horse now."

The boy was stunned. Able to be the stoic Roman for only seconds, he launched himself at Stallos who caught him, lifted him into the air and held him hard against his chest. Their tears said everything. When he was calmer, Stallos put the boy down. The two of them stood before, Zeus, the pride of Ala Thracum. The noble stallion bowed his head and allowed Titus to breathe into his nostrils. The boy ran his hand up the horse's head and touched his ears. Zeus whickered in response.

Titus looked back at Stallos.

"Mine, really mine?"

"Yours, really yours."

Titus hugged the man's legs. Stallos kissed the top of his head.

Titus stepped back and looked his friend in the eye.

"Come home safe." the boy said.

"I will."

They hugged again. Stallos boosted Titus onto the saddle. Zeus, settled easily with the tiny weight of the boy. A boy whose confidence was total and whose small legs had the command of a man. Leaning forward, Titus pulled Zeus into a rear of triumph, nudged the horse's head to the right towards the town and, with a yell of joy, galloped down the hill.

Vespasian - Titus, the best son - the early years

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, RA, OM - The Triumph of Titus

It was about 5.30 in the morning (June 24, 79 AD). The Emperor was sitting in his chair, on the balcony at the palace in Rieti, looking out at the valley to the south. He had wanted to see the sun rise. Next to him, on his right, was an empty chair. This was where Caenis always sat. Behind him, with his hand on his father's shoulder, was Titus. Standing to his right was Stallos, his horse master. To his left, stood Epaphroditus and in the background, the doctor and the ever present scribes and household slaves.

The sky in the east was just making that shift from purple to gold and the first streaks of light glimmered on the surface of the sacred lake below.

Vespasian turned to his son and smiled. As he did, a wave of pain roiled through him.

"Get me to the commode, my boy, I don't want to make a mess as I die."

Stallos and Titus picked him up, he was as light as a child, while Epaphroditus brought the commode forward. Titus pulled his father's tunic clear and they sat the Emperor on his last throne. Vespasian groaned. His face was scrunched up with pain and then suddenly relaxed with relief as his bowels emptied for the first time in days.

With that smile, that everyone would miss so much, he joked. "I think I am becoming a god."

His head slumped forward. The doctor gave Titus a beseeching look. Titus nodded. The doctor stepped forward and felt for a pulse in the Emperor's neck. The doctor looked up at Titus and bowed his head. At the back of the room, one of the female slaves began to sob.

With tears in his eyes, Titus leaned forward and kissed his father's cheek. 

His chest heaving with emotion, Stallos kneeled before his dearest friend, the dead Emperor, and in the old Thracian way of honouring a dead chief, kissed Vespasian's feet. No one moved. No one said a word. Steadying himself, Stallos stood up, raised his arm in salute to Titus and shouted, "Hail Augustus."

So, the best prepared new Emperor succeeded his father.

Vespasian - The Familia and the Mafia - a model to understand Rome

Here is the blood side of the Corleone family. This is not the whole picture as we will see in this post.

Today, we will see how the archetypal Corleone "Family" helps us understand how the Roman Familia works.

First of all, a mob Family and a Roman Familia are not only connected by blood - though blood is very important. 

The strongest connections between the Don, or Familia head, are with "Made Men" or "Freedmen" or "Libertae".

Here we see the equivalent of the "Freedmen" in the Familia - the "Made Men". Because the "Made Men" are not family by blood, they can never take over the Family. Freedmen and Libertae are the same. They can never marry into the family or hold power on their own. So, they can be trusted more than blood. For, in the end, because blood can rule, all the blood relations are possible threats.

Most important of all the Made Men in the Godfather is the Tom Hagen character who might be Narcissus or Epaphroditus in our story. They are not blood, but their power is based entirely on the Godfather. Tessio, by the way, would never have betrayed Don Vito. Tom has been adopted by Don Vito. Maybe not in law but in custom. He has no family of his own. Libertae, such as Narcissus or Caenis have the same relationship to Claudius and Antonia. There is no one else that will interfere with this connection. Like Tom, both are sent on the most delicate of missions. Narcissus saves the invasion from Mutiny. It is he and Herod that buy off the Guard and put their man, Claudius in the purple. Caenis and Pallas are the messengers to Tiberius and so bring down Sejanus.

Sons in law are very weak characters and prone to betrayal. Marrying into the family, as Carlo did, is no guarantee that you get good work or that you will not be killed. Nor is there a guarantee that your family widow will never get over your death. In the end, Connie reverts back to blood and finds power by being in effect her brother's woman.

On the whole women, in Rome or in the Mafia, play a supporting role, as does Mrs Corleone senior. Some like Connie, Michael's sister,  grow into real power players. Those that cannot fit, like Kay, get cast aside. Love is not enough in either Rome or the Mafia.

In Rome, as in the Mafia, adoption, or going outside the obvious line of succession happens often. The point for the older leader is to ensure that the best family member gets the job.  Look at Octavian and Caesar. In this case, Michael is the heir supplanting his older brother Fredo. Michael later supports the candidature of Vincent, Sonny's illegitimate son. His own son, though beloved will never make it in the mob. Before her death, you are given the suggestion that Mary was being groomed to play a leading role. But a marriage to Vincent was key to this. Married to Mary gives him the best legitimacy and offers Mary the ability to be a player too. Emperors used marriage all the time to reinforce legitimacy. Nero's marriage to Octavia being a good example. 

Nothing in the Godfather shows how blood can be a problem better than Fredo. As Titus was dying after only two years as Emperor, he says that he only made one mistake. The historians of the time make this to mean that he had not killed his brother Domitian. It's interesting though that Michael waits until his mother dies before killing Fredo. There is a code. 

In the Mafia Family and in the Roman Familia, the size of the group is much larger and more complex than blood and Made Men/Libertae. 

In Roman society, the "Dons" have "Clients". These are people that have obligations to the family head or in the Mafia to the Don. In the Godfather we see the baker in the wedding scene who wants justice for his raped daughter or even more clearly we see how Johnnie Fontaine, the Frank Sinatra figure, is granted a huge favour. In return, the client base owes an obligation to the patron. In the Mafia the head of the family is called often, the Padrone. In Rome, as in modern life, the reality is that most jobs and contracts depend on connections or on the Patron being able to make an offer that cannot be refused. At the death of the family leader the clients in Rome pass to the successor. So Octavian, who had a tiny circle of his own, suddenly has access to a massive network of clients. This is power.

Most Patron's have a particular go-to man for the really hard job, like killing your mother as in Nero's case, or your brother as in Michael's case. For Nero this was Anicetus. Even the name tells us something. Loosely translated it means, "Mr Fixit". Al Neri is this figure in the Godfather. He is the one who kills the top Mafia leader in the climax of G1. In GIII, he kills Fredo.

It's interesting that Anicetus's plan to kill Agrippina was in a boat!

Anicetus could be trusted because he had been Nero's tutor as a boy. Nero had been abandoned as a child as was brought up by his slaves, of which Anicetus and Epaphroditus were the most important. We never know Al Neri's story. But we meet him here in a very favoured position with Michael on the other side of Tom. We are told in this shot that Al is no bit player in Michael's trust. There has to be a story behind this bond. We are never told it but Al could never be just a button man.

Throughout the Godfather films, Michael becomes ever more paranoid and the issues of trust become ever more central. So it was in Rome at the top. But more like Don Vito, Vespasian made great and lasting friends in his life. Men like Tiberius Alexander and Pliny the elder or even Cogidubnus. His son, Titus, was the son that he could trust and he too made life long friends that included Tiberius and extended to Herod and his sister Berenice and Agricola. But as we see with poor Tessio, Michael inspired fear but not friendship. So it was with Domitian whose final mistake was to have Epaphroditus killed. Once the Imperial bureaucracy of Freedman felt that they could be a target for the Emperor's paranoia, Domitian was doomed. He had broken faith with his Made Men.

Why do so many people enjoy Mafia movies? I think that while there is death and betrayal, we are attracted to the idea of personal honour. In a bland corporate world of platitudes and polite meanness, it is refreshing to witness a community that puts honour at the centre and personal courage as the process. They also play for the highest stakes and so, like mountain climbers, experience life at its most precious.

This is how Vespasian and those at the core of power in Rome lived.

Time I think to talk about, Sonny, or Titus. Much later we will talk about Domitian, who is a blend of Michael and Fredo.

 

Vespasian - The Mystery that is Acte

Rosalie Crutchley playing Acte opposite Peter Ustinov as Nero in Quo Vadis

The two women embraced. 

"Welcome to my home, Caenis. I rejoice to see you. We both still live"

Caenis smiled, "May we both live for a long time, my dear Acte."

The two women sat down by a table in the garden at Acte's villa in Villitrae, a day away from Rome. 

"I have to ask you right away, are Epaphroditus and Phaon safe?"

"Yes, my dear, the Emperor will ask them to rejoin the administration. I also have a letter here from Titus for them. They saved his life and he will never forget his debt."

Acte began to weep.

Vespasian - Agrippina and Nero

This is a statue of the new Emperor, Nero aged 16, and his mother Agrippina. It is unique in the history of Rome. Here we see a woman sharing the status of the Emperor. In fact, in the first 2 years of his reign she ruled.

Vespasian was eating dinner with his eldest son, Titus. After the disaster in Greece, when he fell asleep during one of Nero's interminable concerts, Vespasian had been banished from court and told not to return to Rome. He had enjoyed the break from court and hoped that he would never have to return. How he loved the farm at Rieti.

"General," Stallos, his horse master, burst into the dining room, "There is a squad of Praetorians coming up the drive."

Titus gasped. Vespasian went white. 

"Well my boy, it looks as if I didn't get away with it, after all."

Titus stood up, pulled his father to his feet and kissed him.

"They probably want me dead too. Divorcing Marcia was maybe not enough?"

The two men embraced again and stood back, preparing themselves to die like Romans.

"You know what annoys me the most about this, father?" said Titus.

"What?"

"That my brother will outlive me."

Vespasian smiled grimly.