children. The strangeness, my clothes even out of place against the stripes of prison suits, stripes of barbed wire and the gates. No walls, electric wired fences. Green freedom just beyond, in sight all around. Bears tumbling each other in a zoo. My first day.
Senior-Colonel Pister opened the chalet door himself. I did not know what I expected but not the portly, white-haired man in red sweater and red braces above his SS trousers. If it were not April, if not for his lack of beard, I might have just met St Nick.
A wood stove, the smell of coffee and bacon warming the room. I was jarred for a moment, almost hiding behind Klein as Pister welcomed us against the sound of names being barked in the square below.
Pister’s arms opened wide as if to embrace.
‘How are you, Hans?’
‘Very well, Colonel.’
Klein negated, defeated, Pister’s open arms with a handshake, his left hand on Pister’s arm, drawing Pister’s hand into the shake. ‘I am so glad we managed to catch the song.’
The ‘we’ directed to me and that was how I was introduced and how I realised Klein controlled rooms. He did not wait for Pister to ask who he had brought, he did not reciprocate Pister’s embrace but initiated his own and I tried to recall if he had done the same to me, and then I saw that his hand was on Pister’s back, gently, and this I recalled, and the pace up the stairs on my first day. Keep up, keep up.
Keep up. Klein’s way. Keep up with me. Or I will leave you all behind. A trick. You could not keep up. He would not let you, and he did it so naturally you would never notice. My only insight. Seeing him do it to someone else.
Pister took my hand. ‘Welcome to Buchenwald, Herr Beck.’
Klein spoke for me.
‘Herr Beck is new to Topf. Our new draughtsman. He has never seen a prison before. I am pleased he can see it under your command, Colonel. Rather than before.’
Pister’s face saddened.
‘Ah, yes, Herr Beck. I inherited a sorry place I can tell you. Now, to business, gentlemen.’ He bid us to sit, offered the percolated coffee. Klein had told me in his office that he did not drink coffee, and, in truth, he did not touch it other than to dip a biscuit Pister had given as the names still came loudly from outside and men with guns walked past the windows.
Pister bemoaned the ovens.
He wanted a six-muffle oven, six doors, to increase capacity. The reduction of matter too much for the old set. A new oven. The old three-door model broke down too often. Was never meant to work so hard. It would have to be replaced.
‘I will not return to using just pits like my predecessor. That is animal work.’
I was taking the notes. Needed clarification. Klein’s jaw clenched when I spoke.
‘Why do the ovens break, Colonel?’
Pister sat back in his red leather armchair. With his black boots and red sweater his Christmas look almost completed. I waited for him to pat his knee for me to sit upon.
‘We have a high death rate here. The other camps send only their sick and old to us. We are more morgue than prison. The healthy stock comes from the Sinti and Roma, and the POWs. When I can get them.’
Klein snapped his biscuit.
‘Building a new oven, Colonel, will take a month. Herr Prüfer will have to build it and Herr Sander would have to sign it off. And I can tell you, Colonel, that Prüfer will not build a new oven for less than sixty thousand marks.’
‘That is preposterous,’ Pister said. ‘Nonsense.’ Christmas no more.
‘Nevertheless. We could replace some of the bricks in the existing oven, add one more three-muffle, which would only take two weeks, and provide you with mobile ovens in the meantime to maintain your conversion rates. That we could do for forty thousand marks.’
‘Bah!’ Pister shooed his arm at Klein. ‘I have had these mobile ovens before. They are too slow in the open. I am not burning pigs.’ He leaned forward. ‘I do not think any of you ever understand. There are more than sixty thousand prisoners here. A third of them are sick.’ He raised a finger.
‘And do not forget this is a prison. We have thousands of criminals here. Real criminals. This is where the murderers come. They are controlled by the ovens.’
‘How are they controlled by the ovens?’ I spoke without thinking. Idiot. Fool. Pretended not to see Klein’s glare.
Pister tapped his temple.
‘In the head, Herr Beck. You control them in the head. When you have broken ovens they know they cannot be shot. They see no smoke. Or even if only one is working they know you are not going to add to the pile of dead you already have with a couple more. So, murders and thefts increase. Every day the ovens are broken there is more crime, more disorder. And when they rob, they kill, because again that will add to the pile that they know you will not add them to. It is exasperating.’ He looked hard at Klein.
‘That is why I need a six-door oven. But, reluctantly, I will take the mobile units. To suffice. They have good presence. In the fields. The prisoners can see them.’
‘Excellent.’ Klein gave his grin, kept it going. ‘We can install three mobile units tomorrow. I will take your concerns to Herr Sander personally, Colonel. He will telephone you direct. We will measure for the six-muffle and I will inspect the others. See if they can be repaired quickly. As I said, the difference between building new or adding two more will be twenty thousand marks and two more weeks. By what you have said I understand that is unacceptable. I will advise Herr Sander that we need a better price and I will send out a repair team today. So as you may reduce your crimes.’ He smiled broader, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘By reducing your criminals, eh?’
He stood, his hand out, and I followed. ‘Thank you so much for the coffee, Colonel, and for your valuable time.’ He declined an escort and, as we stepped the stairs, handed me a surgical mask from his pocket.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You will need this.’ He stopped on the last step, blocking me. ‘And I would think it better if you did not speak directly to men like the colonel again. You are new. You could make unintentional mistakes. You understand, Ernst?’
‘Yes, Herr Klein. I am sorry.’
‘No, no. No need to apologise. It is my fault for not helping you. Come now.’
We passed the gatehouse again to reach the crematoria, the trucks being loaded with the prisoner work details behind us. Some of them for our factory, for Topf. To work to make the muffles that would find their way back here.
*
We smoked outside the crematoria beside a wooden fenced area taller than us. A cigarette for the work finished. The smell. The mask not helping, but I had expected it, readied for it.
‘It must be full,’ Klein said. ‘That stench. The morgue is below the ovens. They used to use pits.’ He waved towards the forest. ‘They still do. But the land is too marshy. The bodies rot into the water table. They discovered that early. It is the same problem at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The ground is like a swamp half the year. But good for us, eh? Less pits means more ovens, no?’
All this a revelation to me. Perhaps bringing me here my induction.
‘How will he react to speaking about bodies as commodities?’
‘He must understand we furnish ovens for the camps. Must have the aptitude. The attitude.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘Plenty of unemployed men.’