The Kindly Ones полностью

I plunged into my work as into an invigorating bath in one of Piatigorsk’s sulfurous springs. For days on end, sitting on the little sofa in my office, I devoured reports, correspondence, orders, and organizational tables, smoking a discreet cigarette from time to time at my window. Fräulein Praxa, a somewhat scatterbrained Sudeten-lander who would obviously have preferred spending her days chattering on the telephone, had to keep going up and down to the archives, and complained that her ankles were swelling. “Thank you,” I said without looking at her when she came into my room with a new bundle. “Put it down there and take these; I’m done with them, you can take them back.” She sighed and left, trying to make as much noise as possible. Frau Gutknecht quickly revealed herself to be an execrable cook, knowing three dishes at most, all with cabbage, which she often spoiled; so at night I got into the habit of dismissing Fräulein Praxa and going down to the mess for a bite, and then to keep working in my office till late at night, returning home only to sleep. So as not to keep Piontek waiting, I took the U-Bahn; at those late hours the C line was almost empty, and I liked observing the rare passengers, their faces worn out, exhausted; it took me out of my work a little. Many times I found myself in a car with the same man, a civil servant who like me must have been working late; he never noticed me, since he was always immersed in a book. This man, otherwise so unremarkable, read in a remarkable way: while his eyes ran over the lines, his lips moved as if he were saying the words, but without any sound that I could hear, not even a whisper; and I felt then something like Augustine’s surprise when he saw for the first time Ambrose of Milan reading silently, with his eyes only—a thing the provincial Augustine didn’t know was possible, since he could only read out loud, listening to himself.

In the course of my own reading, I came upon the report turned in to the Reichsführer at the end of March by Dr. Korherr, the glum statistician who had questioned our figures: his, I have to admit, horrified me. At the end of a statistical argument difficult to follow for a non-specialist, he concluded that by December 31, 1942, 1,873,549 Jews, not including Russia and Serbia, had died, been “transported to the East,” or had been “sluiced through the camps” (durchgeschleust, a curious term imposed, I imagine, by the Reichsführer’s Sprachregelungen). In all, he estimated in conclusion, German influence, since the Seizure of Power, had reduced the Jewish population of Europe by four million—a number including, if I understood correctly, prewar emigration. Even after what I had seen in Russia, this was impressive: we had long since moved beyond the primitive methods of the Einsatzgruppen. Through a whole series of orders and instructions, I was also able to form an idea of the difficult adaptation of the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps to the requirements of total war. Whereas the very formation of the WVHA and its absorption of the IKL, which were supposed to signal and implement a passage to maximal war production, dated back to March 1942, serious measures to reduce the mortality of the inmates and improve their output had not been promulgated until October; in December still, Glücks, the head of the IKL, was ordering doctors in the Konzentrationslager to improve sanitary conditions, lower mortality, and increase productivity, but once again without specifying any concrete measures. According to the statistics of the D II that I consulted, mortality, expressed in monthly percentages, had gone down considerably: the overall rate for all of the KLs had gone from losses of 10 percent in December to 2.8 percent in April. But this reduction was entirely relative, since the population of the camps continued to increase; the net losses hadn’t changed. A semiannual report of the D II indicated that from July to December 1942, 57,503 inmates out of 96,770, or 60 percent of the total, had died; since January, the losses continued to hover at around 6,000 or 7,000 a month. None of the measures taken seemed able to reduce them. What’s more, certain camps appeared clearly worse than others; the mortality rate in March at Auschwitz, a KL in Upper Silesia that I was hearing about for the first time, had been 15.4 percent. I began to see what the Reichsführer was driving at.