Earthly Powers (80 page)

CHAPTER 56

The percipient reader will have observed the hand of Toomey in the above. The stress of invention is less arduous than the strain of word for word copying. I may be a bad writer, but I am better than Howard Tucker when it comes to fabricating or lying. Being uncommitted to verifiable fact, as his kind of writer is, I can indulge in the free fancy that often turns out to be the truth. The point is, in my chronicle, that Carlo fought the good fight and I didn't.

       That I hadn't fought it, and that I had something to expiate, not quite treason but certainly shamefully unpatriotic, was rubbed in officially when I was ordered by the Prime Minister's office to join the parliamentary delegation that visited Buchenwald on April 21, 1945. Could the head of the executive in fact give such an order? Probably yes: we were still at war, we were all subject to direction. Why the order was given by our Great War Leader, as he was often called, was made clear by Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information, an ebullient youngish man with red hair and bad teeth who was commonly believed to be Winston Churchill's natural son. He telephoned me on April 18 to say that the Prime Minister had remarked in private conversation at a dinner party that the infamy of the Nazzy camps, as he called them, ought to be recorded in a book, and it was probably the duty of a writer like Kenneth M. Toomey, made rich through the purveying of popular fiction but not noticeably inclined to repay the British public who read him by serving his country, to write the book on the camps that His Majesty's Stationery Office ought to publish. Bracken said he was going to send me all available documentation along with photographs which would make me sick to my stomach, and that I was to fly to Weimar on RAF transport along with selected MPs to witness evidence of Nazzy infamy before the Americans cleared it all up. General Eisenhower, he might add, he added, considered, along with the Prime Minister, that it was the job of some writer to do this job and I was probably the writer to do the job.

       "I can't," I said, "be ordered to write a book."

       "Oh, that's taken for granted, old boy," Bracken said, "but it's generally felt that you'd want to do it, all things considered. You don't exactly smell of roses, all said and done. Anyway, that's how the PM feels about it. I'll send that stuff. Somebody will be in touch about times and rendezvous and so on. Have a good trip."

       I knew none of the members who were flying with me. The U.S. Army officers' mess at Weimar gave us a lunch of grilled Spam and fruit jelly and a choice of soft drinks. While we ate a U.S. Army medical officer briefed us with such statistics as would not impair our appetites. Camp started in 1934. Planned to contain about one hundred thousand internees. On April 1, 1945, there were 800,813. Just before the arrival of U.S. forces on April 11 the Germans removed over twenty thousand to make things look less bad than they were. Internees drawn first from German political prisoners and Jews, later as the Reich expanded all sorts, but chiefly Jews, from Czechoslovakia, Poland and so on. Camp ill-planned and illkept. Rough wooden huts with earth floors and no windows, no sanitation. Up to April 1, 1945, total number exterminated: 51,572. Detailed camp records with nominal rolls left behind by Nazis. Squalor and smell still sickening, despite cleaning up in vigorous American progress. For the rest, we would see for ourselves.

       We saw. So did a party of German civilians from the Weimar region. It was the rule to bring such a party every day. This group was drably but warmly clad and none looked ill-fed. None looked much different from the man or woman you would meet on a Number 57 bus. They said schrecklich and entsetzlich and grauenhaft and so on, decent ordinary people responding to the evidence of past horrors perpetrated by others. One woman retched into her handkerchief. They were conducted by a top sergeant who chewed something medicinal and spoke the German of Milwaukee with occasional interpolations in English, such as "you goddam krauts" and "you murdering bastards" and so on. Among the members of Parliament was an overnourished Tory, very big, a former rugger blue, who said "Good God" continually as though he was being forced to sip bad port. Really, there was not much else to say.

       "This," said the colonel who was our guide, "was a brothel for high-grade non-Semitic prisoners. We found fifteen women here when we arrived. Prisoners from women's camps were promised better treatment if they'd take on the job. Lucky not to be killed, all the rest were. We're using it now as a transit hospital for the really bad cases of malnutrition. Like these." The rugger Tory went Good God. They were all children, big-eyed, big-bellied, matchsticks for limbs. "There are over eight hundred kids still in the camp," the colonel said. "You'll see them." We saw them. We saw the sleeping huts, where six men had had, impossibly, to try and sleep together on a kind of wooden shelf six feet deep four feet wide two feet high. The eighty-foot-long hospital hut for sufferers from tuberculosis and dysentery accommodated a regular population of about thirteen hundred. Operations had been performed without anaesthetics and in full view of the other patients. Corpses were flung to the end of the hut and collected by carts in the morning, some for the crematorium, some for the pathological laboratories. In a laboratory we saw shelf after shelf after shelf crammed With dusty glass jars with livers, spleens, kidneys, testicles, eyes in them. "In this place," the colonel said, "the doctors infected Jews with typhus to get serum. They experimented with new techniques of sterilisation. They found castration was the best way. That was in the comparatively humane time before the extermination policy came in. See how the walls have been decorated with death masks. They seem to have been trying to classify Jewish physiognomies." I hardly dared to look among those noble martyred faces; I feared finding Strehier there. Then we saw the trapdoor and the chute to the basement of the mortuary block. They threw the rebellious and the mortally sick down there, ready for execution. We saw the forty gibbets with their forty hooks. There was a bloodstained Herculean club for finishing off the slow to die. Crematorium ovens. Calcined ribs, skulls, spinal columns. "This," the colonel said in the headquarters of Koch, the camp commandant, now reeking of glorious lysol and full of typing clerks, "is a lampshade. It looks like an ordinary lampshade. It was taken from the bedside lamp of Frau Koch. It's genuine human skin." It sounded more gruesome spoken in his diphthongal southern mannerskee-en. "The good Frau Koch had a number of domestic articles made out of human skin." A socialist delegate, member for Coventry South, went out to vomit.

       I was prepared to stand it all, and more. Even the pervading smell that the disinfecting teams had not yet been able to drive out. What was the smell? All too human, no effluvium from diabolic sources. A compound of long-standing urine, diseased faeces, rancid fat, old rags, gums ravaged by trench mouth, cheese. Gorgonzola cheese. I could take it all. It was the smell of myself, of all humanity. What words could I find, what words could Dr. Samuel Johnson have found? Johnson, passing a fishmonger's shop in Fleet Street, saw an eel being skinned alive and heard the skinner curse the eel because it would not lie still. I saw the eel distinctly: it had the head of Oliver Goldsmith. I seemed to catch another vision, that of mild scholarly men in doctoral robes, all Nazis, all gently confirming that man was born, as some Church father taught (was it Tertullian, was it Origen?), inter urinam et faeces. One of my shoes, rather loose-fitting, had caught in mud like red glue; I hopped, shoe in hand, to a patch of dry ground by a wooden wall. A fire had been lighted there and there was a halfburnt piece of printed paper. I learned against the wall and wiped my shoe clean. The paper seemed to have been torn from some Latin textbook. I read: Solitam ... Minotauro ... pro cans corpus ... I threw the scrap away. I could hear behind me the southern voice of the colonel delivering some judgment that the parliamentary delegates were competent to deliver themselves: degradation, lowest point in human history. And, the colonel added, this camp was just one of many and by no means the worst.

       I looked at the sky, rainwashed, pure, and saw an elongated pink cloud like a Picasso angel with trumpet. The Prince of the Power of the Air. No. This was no Luciferian work. The intellectual rebel against God could not stoop to it. This was pure man, pure me. A dwarf with a humped back and a shaven head in shapeless grey clobber went by, muttering. This was Dahlke, who had already been introduced to us, a Communist who had been ten years in the camp and had been given the soft job of firing the ovens. He now had to await his turn for assignment to the world of the living, a world in which he could fire ovens on behalf of some other orthodoxy. He was more man than Michelangelo's David (a disposable Jew anyway). He gave me a pattern for an image of man as very small and humped and ugly, whimpering little songs to himself as he rooted in nameless filth. Man had not been tainted from without by the Prince of the Power of the Air. The evil was all in him and he was beyond hope of redemption. Had I in my recent loneliness nourished fantasies of pure male love set free from biological urges? No, rather of manipulable bodies, often without faces set on them, to be used for careless spasms. And sometimes, when the spasm was hard to attain, the body had to be rent, the antrum amoris burst and disgorged its stored rubbish. We all walked or lay snug with a bloody beechwood in our brains.

       There would be no need for me to pore over the photographs in the parcel from the Ministry of Information that I had not yet opened. There was no ghastliness perpetrated in the real world that a man did not already know from his dreams. Christ on the cross with a hole in his side and the hole used penetrationis causa membrorum virilium centurion urn Rornanorurn. The smashed womb and the filthy slogan written in bits of entrail. No limit. Semen in the skull. The sexual apparatus torn out at the root and stuffed laughingly up the anus. The Nazis had, in a quantitative age, exploited the horror of surfeit: that was their sole new achievement. But meanwhile, and I did not know this yet though our Great War Leader knew it, the guns were being oiled to place in the hands of children to kill the shiploads of returning Russians, victims of Yalta as they were to be called. Human flesh was not precious, plenty more where that came from. Men with nosemasks on tractors would plough it all in for the nourishing of the soil. A ballet of blind beseeching as thin limbs were animated by the advancing engines, then thrust down into the slow economy of Nature. I wanted to have Carlo with me there to smell the ripe Gorgonzola of innate human evil and to dare to say that mankind was God's creation and hence good. Good, that's what I am, sir, it was the devil made me do it. Man was not God's creation, that was certain. God alone knew from what suppurating primordial dungheap man had arisen.

CHAPTER 57

The passport that had been taken from me had, anyway, by now, I knew, expired. And, shortly after YE Day, I had to get to New York. I had received a letter from my niece Ann which contained terrible news. Humbly, disdaining to contact top men, I telephoned the Passport Office, Petty France, and got through to a minor civil servant, a woman with a Middlesex whine. She wanted to know where and why I wished to travel. I told her.

       "My sister. She's terribly ill. She's had a terrible accident."

       "Have you had a passport before?"

       "Yes, but it was destroyed in an air raid. Along with other documents and personal possessions."

       "Did you report this at the time?"

       "Well, no, I didn't think it necessary. And there were other things to think about. What do I do? Fill in a form? Can I come round and see you?"

       "You should always report the loss of a passport. A passport is the property of HMG. It's a valuable document."

       "Do you understand the urgency? My sister. I have a letter here. From my niece. I'll read it out if you like."

       "Even if we issue a passport you have the question of getting special permission to travel. All transport is controlled by the services. You're only supposed to travel on urgent official business."

       "I'm doing official business. I'm writing a book for His Majesty's Stationery Office. On the Prime Minister's orders."

       "What about?"

       "The Nazi concentration camps."

       "There aren't," she said justly, "any concentration camps in America. At least not to my knowledge."

       "How about the passport?"

       "You can't use a passport yet, for a while. There's been a war on, you know. And there's still a war on with the Japanese."

       "I know, for God's sake. I read the bloody newspapers too."

       "There's no call to be offensive. Please remember you're speaking to a civil servant."

       "Well, damn it, wouldn't you get bloody offensive in my situation? My sister's had a terrible accident. She may be dying, for God's sake."

       "You'd better write a letter requesting an official form of application. Then your application will go through the usual channels. You will hear in due course."

       "Thank you for nothing."

       "There's no call to be offensive."

       I telephoned the Foreign Office giving my name and stating that my passport had been withdrawn for the duration of hostilities but now hostilities seemed to be over and—I was put through to a woman with a Middlesex whine. Never mind. I telephoned Brendan Bracken to urge the immediate necessity of my interviewing certain distinguished German refugees in the United States. For the book. All right then, a lecture to stay-at-home Americans on the horrors of Buchenwald. Nothing doing, old boy. Giving my name as Marchal, I went to the consular department of the French Embassy and, in my exquisite French, said that regrettably I had no passport having crossed the Channel in a small boat in 1940 to join the Free French and—I must make application in writing providing high-level testimonies to my identity. I went to the American Embassy, practising on the way a kind of Boston accent, but the consular section was crammed with GI brides seeking visas. I wept.