Despite his retort, my last remark must have annoyed Schenke; for the rest of the visit, he confined himself to dry, brief comments. I had myself shown around the KL attached to the factory, a rectangle surrounded by barbed wire, set up south of the complex in fallow fields, on the site of the razed village. I thought the conditions there were deplorable; the Lagerführer seemed to find it normal. “In any case, we send the ones the IG rejects to Birkenau, and they send us fresh ones.” On my way back to the Stammlager, I noticed on a wall in town this surprising inscription: KATYN = AUSCHWITZ. Ever since March, in fact, Goebbels’s press had kept harping about the discovery in Byelorussia of Polish corpses, thousands of officers assassinated by Bolsheviks after 1939. But who, here, could have written that? There weren’t any more Poles in Auschwitz, and no Jews, either, for a long time now. The town itself looked gray, glum, affluent, like all the old German towns in the East, with its market square, its Dominican church with sloping roofs, and, just at the entrance, dominating the bridge over the Sola, the old castle of the duke of the region. For many years, the Reichsführer had promoted plans to enlarge the town and make it a model community of the German East, but with the intensification of the war, these ambitious projects had been put aside, and it remained a sad, dull town, almost forgotten between the camp and the factory, a superfluous appendage.
As for the life of the camp, it was turning out to be full of unusual phenomena. Piontek had dropped me off in front of the Kommandantur and backed up to park the Opel; I was about to go in when my attention was drawn by some noise in the garden of the Hösses’ house. I lit a cigarette and discreetly approached: through the gate, I saw children playing Häftlinge. The biggest one, who had his back to me, wore an armband marked KAPO and was shrilly shouting the standardized commands: “Ach…tung! Mützen…auf! Mützen…ab! Zu fünf!” The other four, three little girls, one of them very young, and a boy, were standing in a row facing me and were clumsily trying to obey; each one wore a triangle, sewn on their chests, of a different color: green, red, black, purple. Höss’s voice resounded behind me: “Hello, Sturmbannführer! What are you watching?” I turned around: Höss was coming toward me, his hand outstretched; near the barrier, an orderly was holding his horse’s lead. I saluted him, shook his hand, and without a word pointed to the garden. Höss blushed suddenly, passed through the gate, and hurried toward the children. Without saying anything, without slapping them, he tore the triangles and the armband off and sent them inside. Then he came back to me, still red, holding the pieces of cloth. He looked at me, looked at the badges, looked at me again, and then, still silent, walked past me and into the Kommandantur, tossing the badges into a metal trash can near the door. I picked up my cigarette, which I had dropped to salute him and which was still smoking. An inmate gardener, in a clean, well-pressed striped uniform, holding a rake, came out, removing his cap as he passed me, went to get the trash-can, and emptied it into the basket he was carrying; then he went back into the garden.
