Cimmerian: A Novel of the Holocaust (3 page)

Finally, Peter watched the train back off, slowly leaving them all behind.

The konzentrationslager was a small camp. Throughout Germany and the Occupied Territories there were several thousand very much like it. It housed a complement of sixty resident SS guards including officers and NCOs.

The KZ had been established at this location because of the quarry only three kilometers up the railroad spur that had brought them in. The KZ held about one thousand inmates on average, though that number fluctuated appreciably depending on typhus, the volume of new arrivals and frigid weather that always killed in large numbers.

In addition to the railroad spur that ended at the granite quarry, a dirt road cut through the forest of the valley to the KZ.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Hoffmann was the Kommandant. He lived in a pleasant cottage half a kilometer from the KZ with his plump wife and four blond-haired children. His house, garden and yard were maintained in perfect condition by trustees. One trustee, a mischling, even served as tutor to the children.

Herr Kommandant Hoffmann was an intellectual of sorts and a man of culture. Peter had seen others of his type, and his uncle said the SS was filled with them. The Kommandant was seeped in the quasi-religious dogma of the SS and was an ardent spokesman for all its causes. The SS officers met at his home once each week to discuss Aryan supremacy, horticulture, philosophy, and the politics of almost everything, and to be entertained by the camp quartet.

This was the same group Peter heard at the station. The Kommandant believed that music soothed the new arrivals and made them easier to handle. It was incongruous to hear the classics in this place. It gave the illusion, impossible to hold more than an instant, that there must be some humanity here. There was also a band that played martial music as the Kommandos left each morning for work. Sometimes instead of the quartet at the Judenrampe a lone gypsy violinist played poignant tunes, swaying with the rhythm, his eyes closed against the horror.

The Kommandant was always immaculately dressed in black and shiny leather. He carried a riding crop that he slapped against his boot from time to time. He considered the selection process his duty, and only in the case of extreme illness or his absence did someone else perform it. In the months to come, this was arduous work when more than one trainload in a single day arrived and the weather was foul.

Peter’s first sight of Kommandant Hoffmann was that day they arrived. As SS-Unterscharführer Koch moved them off to the SS enlisted barracks outside the KZ where the dirt road ended, he spotted the Kommandant standing erect behind the Block. The new arrivals shuffled out and formed a slow queue that ran directly to the Kommandant. Each arrival approached to within two or three feet of the Kommandant. Dutiful inmate clerks marked the selection. Children, the old, sick or injured, women with children to the right with a flip of his leather crop. Most women, even healthy ones, also went to the right since the quarry required strong men. These went to the left, depending on the camp needs. The most attractive were culled by others. A few had been given badges by the clerks of the Political Section to indicate a skill they needed. These mostly went to the left, but not always.

Nine of every ten in most cases, indeed nineteen of every twenty, went to the right for their ‘shower.’ The rest went to the left to the sauna, as it was called, where they were stripped, shaven, given a uniform and a number, and assigned duties and a Block.

This was the Kommandant's sacred calling and he stood erect, an Aryan god, making his instant life-and-death decisions.

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The enlisted barracks was much the same as in training for the Wehrmacht and SS. They were fed at the mess and Peter found the food quite good. The sausage came from their own SS factory as did the mineral water. Most of the delicacies came from the luggage the Canada searched. Depending on who they were gassing, the food varied. More than one guard was corpulent. This meal was a feast for Peter. Wartime rationing had put all of Germany on a strict diet, yet the soldiers at the Front went without food often for as many days as they had it.

But the SS guards were the elite, nothing was too good for them.

The NCOs had their own barracks and mess, as did the dozen officers. Only the Kommandant had private quarters.

The Lagarstrasse ran several hundred meters from the Judenrampe to the KZ's arched entrance. On one side was the Disrobing Block in front of the shower for those to be gassed. The crematorium burned for three days or more after a trainload of "material" was located behind it. The single square chimney for the two ovens rose, Peter thought, ominously.

The KZ itself was of standard SS design. It was rectangular with an outer barbed wire fence and an electrified inner fence with periodic signs that proclaimed in several languages: “Attention! Death Zone!” At night, following curfew, dogs roamed the space between the fences. The Death Zone extended five meters beside the inner fence inside the KZ. Every day found the bodies of those who could take no more and had “gone to the fence”or had been shot from a tower for violating the zone. The sound of the generator beat day and night to supply the fence and camp with electricity. There were six guard towers with machine guns and searchlights.

The SonderKommando, which saw to the gassing, was kept carefully segregated in their own Block with kitchen and attached brothel. These men led a privileged existence for the duration of the Mayfly life they were permitted.

The kennels were outside the KZ. There was a large complement of dogs, over twenty. Peter avoided the kennel completely, and was not the only guard who did. The handlers relished their dogs and delighted in their violence.

In the three years of the KZ's existence the quarry had been its primary purpose. Aktionen, the killing, had been incidental. Entire trainloads arrived perhaps only twice a month and the undesirables in them were killed off.

Primarily the trains brought fresh men to replace the dying and to haul the granite off. By fall and as winter enveloped the valley, the main work of the KZ turned to extermination. Kommandos left every day for the quarry, but as the trains were unable to return the granite to the Reich, the SteinbruchKommandos were fewer and fewer. By year's end, they ceased altogether.

A tremendous push to get the killing done was well underway when Peter arrived. Even when the primary vernichtungslagers, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Birkinau, built with slaughter in mind were running wide open, they still could not keep pace and the overflow had been scattered to labor camps such as this. In the fall, the gas chambers and crematoriums at Birkinau were dismantled as the Russians approached. They, like many of the KZs designed for other purposes, were required to continue the killing as whole ghettos were liquidated, and to do so with inadequate equipment and manpower. A trainload a week had been average by late summer but now two and three a week, nearly more than the camp could handle, became routine.

The guards were harangued by the officers at weekly political meetings that they were engaged in a sacred calling of the Third Reich to insure the future purity of the Aryan race. They were reminded repeatedly that their special duty here was Geheime Reichssache, a secret matter of the State.

Though it had not been built as a vernichtungslager, even in the beginning most arrivals were exterminated, and they had the shower and crematorium to process the bodies. Those who were not killed outright died in incredible numbers of disease, shooting, hanging, beating, suicide or starvation. The average worker consumed six hundred calories a day and worked twelve hours. The average life expectancy was three months.

In the early years of the KZ a fair number of prisoners had been required for building the camp. The rest were used at the quarry. Only a small number were needed to haul bodies and bag the ashes to be shipped, as fertilizer, along with the stark gray granite slabs. Some inmates were required to cook, serve as clerks to maintain the detailed records all SS operations demanded, and as Konzentrationslager Polizei, the inmate guards known as kapos.

KZs, even small ones such as this, were a tremendous source of wealth to the SS, who maintained their own accounts and banks. Other KZs manned factories or rented the inmates out to farmers for six marks a day, or were built near factories to sell the manpower to industry. Their exports were the granite and ashes, hair, and gold ingots, formed from the teeth of the thousands they killed. All this income went to the SS.

But constant bombing inhibited these shipments west, and though Germany was being leveled by day and night bombing, most construction had come to a standstill. All their efforts were devoted to killing, and the Kommandant lived in fear, Peter understood, of ever falling behind. The KZ received regular visitors from the Totenkopfverbande Inspection Corps in Berlin. So they were all pushed to exhaustion after the trains arrived to clear the way for the next batch. They never knew in advance when that would be or how many. Depending on the numbers, it took the KZ twelve to thirty-six hours to process the material, as they called the arrivals murdered in the shower.

The killing of so many hundreds, two thousand or more in a busy week, nothing like the vernichtlungslagers designed for the purpose, was not easy and not possible without tremendous organization. The material had to be processed in an orderly fashion to get the job done at all. The least sign of hysteria or hesitation was dealt with ruthlessly to prevent its spread. There had been inmate riots in other KZs with terrible consequences for the guards.

The veterans told Peter that in the beginning the fiction of the shower worked, but now the arrivals knew, or at least sensed, what was in store for them. They used the Alsatians, terror and confusion to keep them in queue and get the job done. Before the average arrival could even comprehend the shouting and scene around him he was already stripped naked and crammed into the shower without the drain.

The valley where the KZ was located was small, no more than fifteen kilometers in length and two in width. A brackish stream cut through it and ran just beside the camp. The spur crossed two bridges, one just up from the Judenrampe towards the quarry. The quarry itself was located at the head of the valley and in its existence had carved stark cliffs from the heavily forested hills.

The dark forest occupied most of the small valley except for patches of marsh and damp meadow. There was a small field beside the KZ but except for it, and where the trees had been cleared, the forest surrounded the camp.

The valley was much like the others they had traveled through along the main line except for its size and lack of open space. It was in a remote corner of Poland, on a spur that ran from the distant main line.

In other regards, however, the valley was quite unlike all the others. Other than the quarry and KZ it was uninhabited. The land was unfit for farming, inadequate for grazing and generally inaccessible. Though the surrounding hills were not imposing, they were well sheltered by them, by the trees and by a nearby range that blocked the wind. The air was remarkably still. Even without the smoke a mist hung heavily over the stagnant ground. In summer the mosquitos, Peter was told, were unbearable.

But the smoke could not be dismissed so easily. It was a sweet sickness that covered and permeated everything. Though the men adjusted to it, they never knew the absence of the smell as long as the bodies burned. The sun rarely penetrated the smoke and mist. The heavy winter clouds were nearly constant. Guards went months and never saw the stars or moon. The sun was a hazy spot of brightness in the cover overhead.

Peter decided that this had been a forbidding place long before the KZ had been constructed. The quarry had broken two attempts at development despite the lure of its granite. If ever a place had been created to be a burial ground this was it.

And over the KZ, day and night in the still, dark valley, the smoke from the burning bodies lay like a nauseous pall.

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After eating, the new guards stowed their gear. All sixty enlisted men were quartered in the same barracks. More than half were on duty at any time so the barracks always had an empty look to it. Most of the guards were either showering or sleeping when they were there. The mess ran regular meals to coordinate with the shifts, but the emaciated inmate cooks had hot food ready around the clock. In this regard the guards were pampered.

Once their bunk was assigned and gear stowed the new SS arrivals were paired with an experienced guard and given their immediate assignment. Karl was sent to supervise the HimmelKommando, which burned the bodies of those who had arrived with them. The fires burned all night and through the following day.

Karl was a quiet sort, younger by a year than Peter. He was small and very slender. He had not been to the Front and was just a youngster. The older guards said the same thing about Peter. But Karl had not frozen in the Russian winter, been at death's door or shot hostages. He had. Karl told him more than once that he did not think he could make it. He was more frightened of letting his SS brother down than of the consequences for himself, though Peter often reminded him of them.

While Karl supervised the prisoners dragging bodies to burn and the burning itself, Peter was assigned that first night to a guard tower with SS-Oberschutze Kraas, who was from southern Bavaria. The curfew siren sounded at six, the usual hour this time of year, and the KZ settled into quiet.

Kraas said he had been at the camp for two years, and was perhaps twenty years older than Peter. He was not surprised Kraas was still a private. He was a vulgar man with piggish eyes and a slow wit. He drank Schnapps, fearful SS-Unterscharführer Koch would discover it, while he passed the spotlight over the darkened camp. The last of that day's material was gassed by midnight. Peter could see the steady glow from the crematorium's chimney.

Around the fence and strung in an irregular pattern, Block to Block inside the KZ, were bare lights. In the mist and smoke they burned with a halo and gave the darkened KZ a striking appearance of blackness broken by a quilt of lights.