Out on the ramp beneath the lights and the arrows of rain and the madhouse tannoy squawking links and rechts: fathers, mothers, children, the old, scattered like leaves in the wind. Die . . . die Auseinandergeschrieben. And I had a thought that made my whole body thrill with shame. Because the trains are endless and infernal, and because the wind feels like the wind of death, and because life is life (and love is love) but no one said it was easy.
I thought: It’s all right for some.
With the war going so well now, and with the perceptible decline in the workload after the feats of ’44, and with the general burgeoning of confidence and well-being, why, your camp doctor is agreeably surprised to find time and leisure to pursue his hobbies. The troglodytic Soviets have been driven back into their frozen potholes: the camp doctor steadies his monocle and reaches for his mustiest textbook. Or his binoculars and shooting stick. Whatever. Depending on natural bent. Winter was cold but autumn is come—the stubble fields, and so on. The simpering Vistula. Never before have I seen lice by the bushel. Some of the patients look as though they have been showered with poppy seeds. Good morning to you, Scheissminister! In one of her baffling letters Herta goes so far as to question the legality of the work we are doing here. Well. Let me see … I suppose you could say that there are one or two “gray areas.” Block 11, the Black Wall, the measures of the Political Unit: these excite lively controversy. And there’s certainly no end of a palaver when a patient “takes matters into his own hands,”
with the electrified fence, for example. We all hate that . . . I am famed for my quiet dedication. The other doctors disappear for weeks on end; but in the summer air of the Kat-Zet I have no need of Sommerfrische. I do love the feel of the sun on my face, it’s true. “Uncle Pepi” has surpassed himself with his new laboratory: the marble table, the nickel taps, the bloodstained porcelain sinks. Provincial: that’s the word for Herta. You know, of course, that she doesn’t shave her legs? It’s true. About the armpits one can eternally argue, but the legs—surely!—the legs … In this new lab of his he can knock together a human being out of the unlikeliest odds and ends. On his desk he had a box full of eyes. It was not uncommon to see him slipping out of his darkroom carrying a head partly wrapped in old newspaper: evidently, we now rule Rome. The next thing you knew, there’d be, oh, I don’t know, a fifteen-year-old Pole sliding off the table and rubbing his eyes and sauntering back to work, accompanied by an orderly and his understanding smile. We measure twins together, “Uncle Pepi” and I, for hours and hours: measure measure measure. Even the most skeletal patients thrust their chests out for medical inspection in the last block on the right: a scant fifteen minutes earlier they were flat on the floor of the Inhalationsraume. It would be criminal—it would be criminal to neglect the opportunity that Auschwitz affords for the furtherance … I see him at the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz, on the day the gypsy camp was established, personally ferrying the children from “the central hospital.” The gypsy camp, its rosy pinks, its dirty prettiness. ” ‘Uncle Pepi’!” ” ‘Uncle Pepi’!” the children cried. When was that? When did we do the gypsy camp? Before the Czech family camp? Yes. Oh, long ago. Herta came again. Her second visit could not be accounted a complete success, though we were much more intimate than before, and wept a l t
together about the baby. As to the so-called “experimental” operations of “Uncle Pepi”: he had a success rate that approached—and quite possibly attained—100 percent. A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place. Women went out of that lab looking twenty years younger. We can make another baby, Herta and I. If I wept copiously both before and after, she let me do it, or try it, but I am impotent and don’t even go to the whores anymore. I have no power. I am completely helpless. The sweet smell here, the sweet smell, and the dazzled Jews. “Uncle Pepi” never left any scars. You know, it isn’t all sweetness and light here, not by any manner of means. Some of the patients were doctors. And it wasn’t long before they were up to their old tricks. I am prominent in the campaign against this filth. The baby will be here soon and I feel very concerned. “Uncle Pepi” is right: I do need a holiday. But my visit to Berlin for the funeral turns out be mercifully brief: I only remember the drizzling parquetry of the streets, the shop-lights like the valves of an old radio, the drenched churchyard, the skin and weight problems of the young cleric, Herta’s parents, Herta’s hideous face. There is a war on, I keep telling everyone. We are in the front line. What are we fighting? Phenol? On my return from Berlin to the light and space of the KZ, what should await me but a telegram. The baby is very weak, and the doctors have done all they can. The casket was about fifteen by twenty inches. I am fighting the phenol war, and thanklessly. No one shows me any gratitude. I seem to have developed a respiratory difficulty— stress asthma, perhaps—particularly when I am shouting. I have to shout. The pits are bursting. In the Sprinkleroom, when the guards touch the young girls, and I repeatedly register my objections, the men mime the playing of violins.