As agreed, I went to visit the great IG Farben factory, known as Buna, the name of the synthetic rubber it was eventually supposed to produce. Construction, apparently, was going forward slowly. Since Faust was busy, he assigned one of his assistants to my visit, an engineer named Schenke, a man about thirty years old, in a gray suit with the Party insignia. This Schenke seemed fascinated by my Iron Cross; while he spoke to me, his eyes kept shifting over to it; finally he asked me, timidly, how I had gotten it. “I was in Stalingrad.”—“Oh! You were lucky.”—“To have gotten out?” I asked, laughing. “Yes, I think so too.” Schenke looked confused: “No, that’s not what I meant. To have been over there, to have been able to fight like that, for the Heimat, against the Bolsheviks.” I looked at him curiously and he blushed. “I have a childhood deformity, in my leg. A bone that broke and didn’t heal well. That prevented me from going to the front. But I would have liked to serve the Reich too.”—“You’re serving it here,” I pointed out.—“Of course. But it’s not the same. All my childhood friends are at the front. One feels…excluded.” Schenke did limp, but it didn’t prevent him from striding along with a nervous, quick step, so that I had to hurry to follow him. As he walked, he explained the factory’s history to me: the leadership of the Reich had insisted that Farben build a factory for Buna—a vital product for armaments—in the East, because of the bombardments that were already ravaging the Ruhr. The site had been chosen by one of the directors of the IG, Dr. Ambros, because of a large number of favorable criteria: the confluence of three rivers providing the considerable quantities of water required by the production of Buna; the existence of a broad plateau that was almost empty (aside from a Polish village that had been razed), geologically ideal since it was elevated; the intersection of several railway lines; and the proximity of many coal mines. The presence of the camp had also been a positive factor: the SS had declared it was delighted to support the project and had promised to provide inmates. But the factory’s construction was dragging, partly because of the difficulties of getting supplies, and partly because the output of the Häftlinge had turned out poor, and management was furious. However often the factory returned to the camp the inmates unable to work and demanded replacements, as the contract allowed, the new ones would arrive in a scarcely better state. “What happens to the ones you send back?” I asked in a neutral tone. Schenke looked at me with surprise: “I have no idea. That’s not my business. I guess they fix them up in the hospital. Don’t you know?” I pensively contemplated this young, motivated engineer: Was it really possible that he didn’t know? The chimneys in Birkenau were smoking daily eight kilometers away, and I knew as well as anyone else how gossip spread. But after all, if he didn’t want to know, it was possible for him not to know. The rules of secrecy and concealment could serve that purpose too.
