I recognized Room 1 from my dreams. The pink rubber apron on its hook, the instrument bowls and thermoses, the bloody cotton, the half-pint hypodermic with its foot-long needle. This is the room, I had thought, where something mortal would be miserably decided. But dreams are playful, and love to tease and poke fun at the truth. . . . Already showing signs of life, patients were brought in one by one from the pile next door and wedged onto the chair in Room 1, which looked like what it was, a laboratory in the Hygienic Institute, a world of bubbles and bottles. With the syringe there were two ways to go, intravenous and cardia ,
“Uncle Pepi” tending to champion the latter as more efficient and humane. We did both. Cardiac: the patient blindfolded with a towel, his right hand placed in the mouth to stifle his own whimpers, the needle eased into the dramatic furrow of the fifth rib space. Intravenous: the patient with his forearm on the support table, the rubber tourniquet, the visible vein, the needle, the judicious dab of alcohol. “Uncle Pepi” was then sometimes obliged to bring them to their senses with a few slaps about the face. The corpses were pink and blue-bruised. Death was pink but yellowish, and contained in a glass cylinder labeled Phenol. A day of that and you stroll out in your white coat and black boots, with the familiar headache and the plangent perfecto and the breakfast tannic gathering in your throat, and the eastward sky looked like phenol.
He led. We followed. Phenol work became absolutely routine. All of us did it the whole time. It wasn’t until later that I saw what “Uncle Pepi” was capable of, in Block 10.
My wife Herta paid her first visit to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, which was perhaps unfortunate: we were then doing the Hungarian Jews, and at an incredible rate, something like ten thousand a day. Unfortunate, because I was on ramp duty practically every night, finding the work somewhat impersonal too, the selections now being made by loudspeaker (such was the weight of traffic), and having little to do but stand there drinking and shouting with my colleagues—thus denying Herta the kind of undivided attention that every young wife craves. . . . Wait. Let me go at this another way.
Everything was ready for her. Thoughtful as ever, Dr. Wirths had made available the annex of his own living quarters— a delightful apartment (with its own kitchen and bathroom) beyond whose patterned lace curtains stood a high whi e
fence. Beyond that, unseen, the benign cacophony of the Kat-Zet . . . Dr. Wirths has his wife and three children with him, at present. I hoped that Herta would spend some of her time playing with the little Wirthses. Though that might touch on a sensitive subject. … I was sitting on the sofa, quietly crying; I think I was wishing that Auschwitz looked better than it did, just now, with its windless heat and plagues of flies homing in on the marshes. As I heard the staff car approach I wandered out into the pale brown of the front garden. What did I expect? The familiar awkwardness, I suppose. Reproaches, accusations, sadness—perhaps even feeble blows from feeble fists. All to be at least partly resolved, that first night, in the act of love. Or certainly the second. That’s how these things usually begin. What I didn’t expect was a statement of truth. The truth was the last thing I was ready for. I should have known. The world, after all, here in Auschwitz, has a new habit. It makes sense.
The driver looked on sentimentally as she alighted from the car and made her way down the path. Then she turned to confront me. She looked nothing like her photograph. The girl in the photograph, whose face was clear.
“You are a stranger to me,” she said. Fremder: stranger.
“Please,” I said. “Please. My darling.” Bitte. Liebling.
“I don’t know you,” she said. Ich kenne dich nicht.
Herta kept her head down as I helped her off with her coat. And something enveloped me, something that was all ready for my measurements, like a suit or a uniform, over and above what I wore, and lined with grief.