Mother Night

2: Special Detail ...

The guard who relieves Arnold Marx at noon each day is a man nearly my own age, which at forty-eight He remembers the war, all right, though he doesn't like to.

His name is Andor Gutman. Andor is a sleepy, not very bright Estonian Jew. He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there:

'I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando,' he said to me, 'when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down.'

Sonderkommando means special detail at Auschwitz, it meant a very special detail indeed — one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains.

Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando.

'Why?' I asked him.

If you would write a book about that,' he said, 'and give the answer to that question, that "Why?" — you would have a very great book.'

'Do you know the answer?' I said.

'No,' he said. 'That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it'

'Any guesses?' I said.

'No,' he said, looking me straight in the eye, 'even though I was one of the ones who volunteered.'

He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me:

'There were loudspeakers all over the camp,' he said, 'and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music — sometimes the best.'

'That's interesting,' I said.

'There was no music by Jews,' he said. 'That was forbidden.'

'Naturally,' I said.

'And the music was always stopping in the middle,' he said, 'and then there was an a

'Very modern,' I said.

He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. 'There was one a

'Oh?' I said.

'Leichentriiger zu Wache,' he crooned, his eyes still closed.

Translation: 'Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse.' In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry.

'After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music,' Gutman said to me, 'the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.'

'I can understand that,' I said.

'You can?' he said. He shook his head. 'I can't,' he said. 'I will always be ashamed. Volunteering for the Sonderkommando, it was a very shameful thing to do.'

'I don't think so,' I said.

'I do,' he said. 'Shameful,' he said. 'I never want to talk about it again.'

3: Briquets ...

The guard who relieves Andor Gutman at six each night is Arpad Kovacs. Arpad is a Roman candle of a man, loud and gay.

When Arpad came on duty at six last night, he demanded to see what I'd written so far. I gave him the very few pages, and Arpad walked up and down the corridor, waving and praising the pages extravagantly.

He didn't read them. He praised them for what he imagined to be in them.

'Give it to the complacent bastards!' he said last night 'Tell those smug briquets!'

By briquets he meant people who did nothing to save their own lives or anybody else's life when the Nazis took over, who were willing to go meekly all the way to the gas chambers, if that was where the Nazis wanted them to go. A briquet, of course, is a molded block of coal dust, the soul of convenience where transportation, storage and combustion are concerned.

Arpad, faced with the problem of being a Jew in Nazi Hungary, did not become a briquet. On the contrary, Arpad got himself false papers and joined the Hungarian S.S.

That fact is the basis for his sympathy with me. 'Tell them the things a man does to stay alive! What's so noble about being a briquet?' he said last night

'Did you ever hear any of my broadcasts?' I asked him. The medium of my war crimes was radio broadcasting. I was a Nazi radio propagandist, a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite.

'No,' he said.

So I showed him a transcript of a broadcast, a transcript furnished to me by the Haifa Institute. 'Read it,' I said.

'I don't have to,' he said. 'Everybody was saying the same things over and over and over in those days.'

'Read it anyway — as a favor,' I said.

So he read it, his face becoming sourer and sourer. He handed it back to me. 'You disappoint me,' he said.

'Oh?' I said.

'It's so weak!' he said. 'It has no body, no paprika, no zest! I thought you were a master of racial invective!'

'I'm not?' I said.

'If any member of my S.S. platoon had spoken in such a friendly way about the Jews,' said Arpad, 'I would have had him shot for treason! Goebbels should have fired you and hired me as the radio scourge of the Jews. I would have raised blisters around the world!'

'You were already doing your part with your S.S. platoon,' I said.

Arpad beamed, remembering his S.S. days. 'What an Aryan I made!' he said.

'Nobody ever suspected you?' I said.

'How would they dare?' he said. 'I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan that they even put me in a special detachment. Its mission was to find out how the Jews always knew what the S.S. was going to do next There was a leak somewhere, and we were out to stop it' He looked bitter and affronted, remembering it, even though he had been that leak.

'Was the detachment successful in its mission?' I said.

'I'm happy to say,' said Arpad, 'that fourteen S.S. men were shot on our recommendation. Adolf Eichma

'You met him, did you?' I said.

'Yes' said Arpad, 'and I'm sorry I didn't know at the time how important he was.'

'Why?' I said.

'I would have killed him,' said Arpad.

4: Leather Straps ...

Bernard Mengel, a Polish Jew who guards me from midnight until six in the morning, is also a man my age. He once saved his own life in the Second World War by playing so dead that a German soldier pulled out three of his teeth without suspecting that Mengel was not a corpse.

The soldier wanted Mengel's three gold inlays.

He got them.

Mengel tells me that I sleep very noisily here in jail, tossing and talking all night

'You are the only man I ever heard of,' Mengel said to me this morning, 'who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way.'

'What makes you think I have a bad conscience?' I said.

'The way you sleep — the way you dream,' he said. 'Even Hoess did not sleep like that. He slept like a saint, right up to the end.'

Mengel was speaking of Rudolf Franz Hoess, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz. In his tender care, literally millions of Jews were gassed. Mengel knew a little about Hoess. Before emigrating to Israel in 1947, Mengel helped to hang Hoess.

And he didn't do it with testimony, either. He did it with his two big hands. 'When Hoess was hanged,' he told me, 'the strap around his ankles — I put that on and made it tight'

'Did that give you a lot of satisfaction?' I said.

'No,' he said, 'I was like almost everybody who came through that war.'