The Terminal

 

Like quite a few in the top echelons of the party, including his superior Heinrich Himmler, Rudolph Höss had a strict catholic upbringing, was even expected to become a man of the cloth. He served with distinction in the last year of the Great War and was no stranger to the penal system; before 1933 he voluntarily had taken the fall for two members of Hitler’s party, doing hard time on accounts of manslaughter. His diary is written in a neat and utterly matter of fact hand with no squiggles and embellishments. He had no illusions about the ugly nature of what he was doing, even expressed interest and compassion for a tribe of gypsies deported to his camp. In the end he had them gassed all the same. The truly sinister aspect here is not the monster in uniform. What is really disturbing is the perfectly humdrum persona of a committed and efficient executive manager and devoted family man, somebody who in different circumstances easily could be your next door neighbor, or partner on the golf course.

One of his victims was born in 1881 to a Jewish family, who had moved from an obscure place, called Birkenau, to Oldenburg in Prussia. Herr Cohn was an enthusiastic believer in assimilation, and was convinced that eventually it would remove what he felt as the “stigma” of his Jewishness. His wife, I am told, was a great fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They christened their oldest son "Emil." At the age of nineteen the young man graduated from grammar school, but to his parent’s dismay, decided against an academic career.

The money his parents had saved to pay his University fees, he spent on one of those high-wheeled velocipedes and pedaled all the way to London. There he rented a two room basement flat in Tottenham Court Road, hung up his vehicle in the window and opened a bicycle shop. A few years later we find him associating with a group of enterprising gentlemen who recently had broken Brazil's latex monopoly. Acting for the British Government in 1876, Henry Wickham had smuggled rubber seeds out of the Mato Grosso. The seeds germinated at the Tropical Herbarium in Kew Gardens, London, and the shoots then traveled to a more agreeable environment in Ceylon and Singapore. For my grandfather this meant, that with the arrival of the motorcar he was going to do well in the tire business. He made a fortune from latex factories at the Pondicherry region in India.

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. 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. Because after the assassinations in Sarajevo, Emil Cohn chose to be a patriot. 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 and subsequently the fatherland simply lacked the means to repay, or at least acknowledge, the services of old Cohn. His only son, who at seven had been fluent in five languages, died of the great influenza epidemic in 1918. Fortunately there was still enough of Cohn's former fortunes on Swiss accounts; he needn’t worry about retirement and old age. He thought he could rest assured that his family was provided for. That was before the ominous events of 1933. Suddenly the respected war veteran was a target of the Nazis. Well before Crystal Night any association with him had already exposed his family to the occasional discrimination, after Crystal night the prospect became life threatening. But since there had never been papers filed with German authorities, Emil’s crafty Aryan wife dissociated herself from her husband saving the three daughters – “fathers unknown.”

But for old Cohn there was a boxcar waiting, which in 1942 shipped him back to his place of birth, Birkenau. The German Reichsbahn (imperial railway) debited the fare to Adolf Eichmann’s "resettlement department" (Referat IV B44). The office squared accounts by extorting funds from Jewish emigrants and from the gold-fillings in the teeth of murdered victims in the death camps.

After the war 1,200,000 railway personal and their friends and families would claim to have been oblivious to the nocturnal transmigrations of the rolling stock in their charge. On arrival one of the camp’s four SS physicians was already waiting on the ramp to sort apart men and women, the firm and the infirm, the children and the adults.  A man of failing health in his early sixties – what chance did my grandfather have? He was ordered to fall in to the left and his column was marched to a barrack. Somebody had drawn images of butterflies on the bunks. The guards rushed him to undress and he was told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that “later he could find it again.” Stark naked the men fell in formation outside of the compound and the shouting guards whipped them into a frantic run for the phony shower rooms.

© – 4/6/2009 – copyright by michael sympson, 900 words, all rights reserved