The
Terminal
|
I show you fear in a
handful of dust.
|
T.S. Eliot
|

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