The Terminus
|
I had not thought death had
undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man
fixed his eyes before his feet. I will show you fear in a handful of
dust.
|
T.S. Eliot
|
Rudolph Höss (1901 – 1947), the commandant of Auschwitz, had a
strict catholic upbringing, was even expected to take the canonicals.
Aged fourteen, he enlisted and served with distinction in the Great
War. He was no stranger to the penal system; in 1923 he voluntarily
took the fall for two Nazi paramilitaries, doing hard time on account
of manslaughter. His diary is written in a neat and matter of fact hand
with no squiggles and embellishments. Höss had no illusions about
the nature of what he was doing, even expressed interest and compassion
for a tribe of gypsies in his camp. In the end he had them gassed all
the same. Auschwitz was a killing factory, murdering a little less than
6,000 people on an average day, and on “a good day” pushing the figure up
to 9,000, the people simply worked to death not counted. The camp was
in operation from September 1941 until January 1945; you do the math.
The
truly sinister aspect here is the perfectly humdrum persona of Höss, a man who would pass in any other
circumstance as an efficient
executive manager and devoted family man, somebody who could be your
next-door
neighbor, or partner on the golf course.
One of the victims of Rudolf Höss was
born in 1881 to a family of assimilated Jews. The parents had moved to
Oldenburg in Prussia from an obscure place, called Birkenau. Frau Cohn,
I was told, was a great admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The oldest
son was christened "Emil." He graduated from grammar school and to his
parent’s dismay, decided against an academic career. The money his
parents had saved for University he spent on one of those high-wheeled
velocipedes, pedaled all the way to Calais, took the ferry to Dover and
from Dover pedaled all the way to London, where he rented a two room
basement flat in Tottenham Court Road. He hung up his vehicle in the
window and opened a bicycle shop.
A few years later he associated with a
group of enterprising gentlemen who previously had broken Brazil's
latex monopoly. Acting on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, Henry
Wickham had smuggled rubber
plants from the Mato Grosso
past Brazil's armed border controls. The shoots were submitted to the
Tropical Herbarium in Kew Gardens, London, before finding a more
suitable home in Ceylon and Malaya. For my grandfather this meant, that
with the arrival of the motorcar he was going to do well in the tire
business. He opened a factory in the Pondicherry region in India and
made a fortune.
An early widower, he employed a
mail-dating agency to find him a wife in Germany, and in 1911 he
married my grandmother at a registrar's office of His Majesty, King
George V, in India. The British Raj is now a mere footnote to history,
but the
paperwork is still housed at the Indian Office in London. Had this been
made available to German authorities I probably wouldn't be around.
After the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in
Sarajevo, Emil Cohn was smart enough to anticipate where this
was going to and he was stupid enough to let himself carried away by an
ill-advised
surge of patriotism. He sold his possessions and expatriated himself
and his family to Germany, just in time to enlist in the reserve. The
Germans lost the War. Old Cohn's only
son, a gifted boy, fluent in
five languages at the age of
seven, died in the year of
the great flu epidemic, in 1918. Fortunately old Cohn had not
deposited all
his eggs in the same basket; there was a Swiss account to cushion the
worries of old age. Despite the economical turmoils of the Weimar
Republic he thought his family was provided for. Then Hitler came to
power. Suddenly the respected war veteran found himself on the sharp
end of the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws. Well before Crystal Night in 1938,
any association with him exposed his family to discrimination; my
mother and her siblings were classified as “mischlinge,” mixed blood.
Emil’s crafty Aryan wife dissociated herself from her husband and at
the birth registrar declared the three daughters as births out of
wedlock, each under the name of a different father. Since the couple
had never filed their marriage papers with the German authorities, the
registrar only raised an eyebrow about the apparently scandalous morals
of my granny.
As for old Cohn, in 1942, there was a boxcar waiting, the same
they use for the transport of cattle. The national railway debited the
fare to Adolf Eichmann’s "resettlement
department" (Referat IV B44). Accounts were squared from the
extorted funds of Jewish visa applicants and from the gold in the
tooth-fillings of those murdered in the camps. After the war 1,200,000
railway personnel and their familiars denied any knowledge about the
nocturnal transmigrations of the rolling stock in their charge.
In Auschwitz they had installed new
facilities: “Cyclon B” was tested the first time on the mentally ill in
the euthanasia units of German institutions.
On arrival one of the camp’s SS-physicians was already waiting on the
ramp to separate men and women, the firm and the infirm, children and
adults. Old Cohn was ordered to fall in to the left, and his column was
marched to a barrack full of empty bunks on which somebody had drawn
images of butterflies. The guards told my grandfather to undress and to
deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that “later he could find it again.”
Stark naked the men were ordered out and to fall in into formation. It
was cold and the guards whipped the men into a frantic run for the
phony shower rooms.
©
– 4/6/2009 – copyright by michael sympson,
1,000 words, all rights reserved
