I read in the news today that someone has stolen the famous, or infamous, sign from the gates of Auschwitz that reads “Arbeit macht frei”. “Arbeit macht frei” roughly translates to “work brings freedom” and was the title of a story that I wrote some time ago for a collection of short stories that was never published.
It is a story very much about guilt and today I am dedicating it to the thieves who have profaned a place that should be a marker to us all, a reminder of man’s capacity for inhumanity to man, not the target of petty thievery and greed. May they feel guilty forever more.
WORK BRINGS FREEDOM
Grossmueller straightened his black tie in the cracked mirror above the sink in his bathroom, and hoped that the cut on this chin would stop bleeding before he had to leave for the ceremony. He knew he shouldn’t have tried to use the straight razor, his old hands so unsteady now, but there was something about a straight razor shave, perhaps because nobody did them any more. Like Grossmueller, they were a relic of the past that had not yet quite died, but which were aged beyond repair or redemption.
The knock at the door to Grossmueller’s flat was as hurried as ever. His grandson was always late, a habit he had learnt from his father. Grossmueller had never understood what his daughter saw in the oaf, but accepted that perhaps, like straight razors, tastes in men were destined to inevitable decline as well.
“Coming,” barked Grossmueller, as the knocking started again. He checked his tie once more, picked the patch of tissue from his chin, inspected the cut, and headed for the door.
“Hey Pops,” said Danny, Grossmueller’s grandson. “You’ve cut yourself.”
“Thank you,” said Grossmueller, instinctively fingering the cut. His fingertip came away with the thin veneer of blood. Even my blood is tired and thin, thought Grossmueller.
“We’re running a bit late,” said Danny, helping Grossmueller into this overcoat.
“You’re running late you mean,” corrected Grossmueller.
“Yeah, well, we should be OK for time. It’s not like they can start without you, is it?”
Grossmueller raised an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised at the things that go on when people aren’t there,” he said.
***
The Berlin traffic was a bad as ever, the whole city pumping traffic fitfully through itself like a giant diseased heart. Danny drummed his hands on the steering wheel of his car and checked his watch every few seconds.
“We’ll get there,” he said, reassuring himself for the fourth time that minute.
Grossmueller gazed absent mindedly out of the window.
“There’s no rush,” he said quietly. “They can’t start with me, isn’t that what you said?”
“Hey, yeah, you’re right,” said Danny. “You are the man of the hour after all.”
“Quite,” said Grossmueller.
Danny frowned. “You don’t sound like a man whose about to be given a medal,” he said. “The humanitarian award is a big thing you know.”
“I didn’t do what I did for a medal,” Grossmueller said bitterly. “I just did it.”
“Well, I think you should have gotten a medal for it years ago. It’s an insult, after the lives that you saved, that you’re left living up there in that stinking old flat all alone, with nothing to show for what you did.”
“My flat does not stink,” said Grossmueller indignantly, “And I’m quite happy being alone. Would you prefer that I moved in with you and your mother?”
Danny shrugged in the non-committal way that Grossmueller had noticed that young people did, as if they could literally throw the weight of their troubles and worries off them like a damp coat.
“Whatever, I just think you should have been rewarded.”
“You wouldn’t,” sighed Grossmueller, “Not if you the truth, the way that it all really happened.”
“You’ve told us,” said Danny, his brow furrowed, “You told that story like, a thousand times when I was a kid.”
Grossmueller finally tore his eyes from the road and stared at Danny in a way that Danny had never seen his grandfather stare at anyone before. Behind Grossmueller, on the narrow pavement that ran along the side of the road, Danny could see a young mother with a clutch of children. The mother was fussing and fretting over the children, but they didn’t seem to be paying her any attention at all. Instead, they were all staring straight at Danny’s car, pointing with outstretched hands.
“I lied,” said Grossmueller softly, “I lied about the whole thing.”
***
Danny turned the engine off, and squirmed around in his seat to face his grandfather, but the man was already gone and in his place sat a stranger. The face was his grandfather’s, and his clothes, and even the ramrod straight way that he sat up in his seat belonged to the man that Danny had known all of his life, but the eyes were those of someone very different.
Danny didn’t know it, but that was what eyes that had seen things looked like.
“The traffic might start to move again,” said Grossmueller.
“I don’t care,” said Danny flatly. “Tell me what you meant by that.”
“I mean I lied, what more is there to say than that?”
“What more? There’s a lot more!” spat Danny, his temper flaring. “You’re telling me that all those people you said you’d saved, all those people who you said you got out of …”
Grossmueller looked down at his feet. His polished shoes reflected his gaunt face back at him.
“You can say it,” he said.
“The death-camp,” said Danny quietly, as if the mere mention of the word would bring down some unspeakable fate upon him. “All those people you said that you got out of there …”
“I did get them out,” said Grossmueller, “I just lied when I said that I did it alone.”
Danny let out a sigh of relief. “Well, I had always wondered about that,” he said. “I mean, you were just one guard. I kind of guessed that had a little help from the others.”
“Ah well, that’s the other thing,” said Grossmueller. “I wasn’t a guard.”
The car in front of Danny’s suddenly lurched forward, the traffic serpent awakening briefly and shifting its bulk forward along its course. Danny started the car and crunched it clumsily into gear.
“What were you?” he asked. His voice was low, and Grossmueller wondering if Danny was hoping that the engine would drown it out.
“I was the camp commandant.”
Danny stalled the car before they had moved an inch.
***
Danny pulled the car into the first side-street they reached, a cramped single lane lined with houses that had would once, a long time ago, have been considered quite grand.
“Faded grandeur eh?” said Grossmueller, looking at the house
Danny slipped the car into a space and cut the engine. His face was fixed, as if he lacked the emotions to deal with the information that he had received, and now his mind was racing to keep up.
“Tell me,” he said finally. “Just tell me everything.”
“Aren’t we going to be late?” asked Grossmueller.
“We’ll make it,” replied Danny. “Just tell me what really happened Pops, please.”
“Alright,” said Grossmueller. “I’ll you you secret, my sorrow.”
And, just like that, the secret that had shadowed him for sixty years fell from his lips.
***
I was never a religious man, but I wasn’t an aethiest either. Agnostics you call them nowadays, as if indecision is some kind of choice. I suppose I always believed in something, even if I didn’t know what it was. I just had this inkling that it was … there.
Maybe I was looking for something, something to believe in, something to pin my colours to. A lot of people were back then, you know? There was unrest, real unrest, you could feel it in the air. Every bar, every home, every street, every town. It was everywhere, as if someone had joined up all those little powder keg people and places and then lost the match. It was ready to explode, but no one knew where or how or when.
When He came, well … some people just said it was fate. Some still do.
It wasn’t hard to get involved. For someone like me, it would have been hard not to. I was young, I’d been in a little trouble, I was out of work and running low on luck and hope. He offered me something, something that I thought was real. I know it’s hard for you to understand now, but it was a different time back then. Giving us someone to blame … it was so easy.
By the time any of us began to think that it was going wrong, it was too late.
Far too late.
It was like I was on a train, and my ticket said I should have gotten off three stops ago, and now I didn’t know where the train was going and I didn’t know who I could tell about my ticket, or what they would do if they found out. That was the way that it was, for a lot of us. You just kept your head down, and tried to make it look like you should be there.
Because if you weren’t with them … well, you know what happened to people who weren’t with them.
So, next thing I know I’m in the party, then I’m in the army, and then they’re moving me to this place in Poland. It’s a guard job, they tell me. It’s cold and it’s hard, but it’s important work and they need people they can trust. People like me.
Let me tell you something son; if someone says they need “people like you, who they can trust”, it means that they don’t trust you at all. I knew were I was going, everyone knew something about that place, and I honestly thought that I might end up on the wrong side of the fence after all.
They took us up there by train, the same train they used to move … the others. I remember sitting there, hearing the tracks thunder underneath us, counting the miles. Every click, every clack, every rattle; they all took us closer to the place. Nobody spoke in the truck on the way, I remember that too. Soldiers aren’t quiet by nature you see, especially not when you put them all together. But nobody in that truck said a word the entire way there.
I guess, like me, they were all sizing the others up. I could see the others like me, party men who had gotten not far but far enough, and I could see the young recruits who seemed to have no idea where they were going at all. And I saw the ones that kept checking their watches, and dusting down their uniforms. The ones that hopped from foot to foot like they were waiting for a first date with the girl of their dreams. I realised, sometime during the clicks and the clacks and the rattles, that they were the only ones who had asked to be there.
It was one of them who eventually broke the silence, just as the train stopped for the first and final time.
He said “End of the line.”
***
“You’ve told me all of this,” said Danny, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
“But it’s important Danny,” said Grossmueller, “It’s important you know that I didn’t want to go, that everything I told you about how I ended up in the party, and how I ended up as a solider, they were all true.”
Danny’s hands clamped down on the steering wheel suddenly, his temper flaring up once again. “No! No it’s not important!” he snapped. “What’s important is that you tell how you really got those people out of there, and you tell me why you did it, and you tell me how in hell you were the camp commandant when it all happened!”
Grossmueller rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand. His heart was pounding in his chest, beating harder and faster than it had in many, many years. There was blood on Grossmueller’s hand when he took it away from his chin, and he couldn’t help but smile at the subtle symbolism of it all.
He held his hand up to Danny, showing him the thin streak of scarlet on his crinkled palm.
“Mysterious ways,” he whispered.
***
You asked me how in hell I became the commandant? Well, I suppose that hell must have had something to do with it, because God and heaven certainly didn’t. As I said, I’d always had a belief in something, even if I didn’t know what it was. That was true until I arrived in that place.
I didn’t believe it was the end of the line.
I believed it was the end of the world.
Trust me son, when I tell you that no God, no being who could see us all and see what we were doing could have suffered that place to exist. It was hell, son, I can’t say it any more plainly than that. It was hell, and I was keeping people in just long enough for them to work themselves to death… or worse.
I can’t remember much about those first weeks. I think that might the only blessing given to me in this life, and I can’t say that I deserve more. All I remember is the routine, the orders, the cold, and the smell. You hear people talking about the stench of death, the smell in that place could have convinced you that death had taken up permanent residence in the place.
After a while, it was more than a smell, more than a stench. It became the atmosphere of the place, as if we had quite literally created our own world beneath this thick fog of decay and death and fear. The fear, that was the worst smell of all, because you knew that it was ours just as much as it was theirs, and I can’t tell you the guilt that I felt for that. For me to be afraid … it was disgusting, and greedy, and weak. But it was being all of those things that had brought me there, and in a way once you recognised those things in yourself, the smell began to smell a little like home.
I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d been allowed to sink down into that smell, into that place.
It happened on a Sunday morning. I see the relevance of that now, of course. There had been snow the night before, and the whole place was white for just a few hours. Even the snow couldn’t clean the place though – it was like draping a wedding dress over a corpse. You knew it was under there, its grotesque shape only muted by the crisp white blanket, and the blood already soaking through by the time I took my post.
The commandant was determined to keep the place running, despite the weather. He ran the whole place based on the contents of a little pocket book, like a miser keeping his accounts close to his chest. Those people, all those people, they were just scratches in his book in the end. That was their legacy, a line of lead on a page. They say that, when he filled the book one day, he just rubbed out what he had already written and started again.
I was up in the guard tower, the bitter wind cutting right to my bones. I remember watching them trudging across to the shower block, their footprints in the snow looked so tiny from where I stood. There were children with them, and the snow filled their footprints almost as soon as they made them.
I watched them all go in. They all knew what it meant, why they were being taken there. Some of the others didn’t watch, or couldn’t watch, or wouldn’t watch, but I always did. It wasn’t voyeurism, or ghoulishness though Danny. It was respect.
Everything seemed to be happening as it always had, the mechanism of our great factory moving as precisely as it ever had, a clockwork engine of death in which all the cogs and gears and springs were us. I had turned away, my eyes staring out into the whiteness that remained outside the camp, when I heard the scream.
It was the commandant.
There was panic, and shouting, and running, as if the whole place had suddenly woken up to what it was. I clambered down from the guard tower and ran towards the shower block. We called it that, even amongst ourselves, as if we were the ones who had to be convinced. Maybe we were.
When I reached the door, I saw what had made the commandant scream.
There was a window, so that you could see into the chamber. The commandant used to stand there, and watch them while it … happened. I’d heard a rumour that he kept odds in that little book of his, and you could take a bet with him if you had the stomach for it. I’d never asked if it was true or not, but I’d bet he wouldn’t have given odds on anyone seeing what we all saw that day.
In the centre of the chamber, thigh deep in the dying and dead, was a boy. He didn’t move, not even to blink or to breath. He simply stood, and stared, and pointed at the commandant as if his finger, his very finger, might pierce the man’s soul. Those eyes Danny, I tell you those eyes … there was something so deeply inhuman about them, even in that place they seemed so wrong. We knew, somehow all of us knew, that he was looking at us, and sending us a message.
He was telling us “I’m watching you.”
***
“My God,” said Danny. “My God … what happened?”
Grossmueller ran his hand through his wiry white hair. “The commandant sent in two guards, after the gas had been purged, to shoot the boy and take him to the camp doctor to be …”
“You can say it,” said Danny.
***
Dissection wasn’t an uncommon end for some of the victims of the camp. Science was one of the many excuses we used to help us sleep just a little at night.
The following day, no one was sent to the shower block. For the first day since I had been there, the incinerator fell quiet, and the air cleared just a little. For a while, the only fear I could smell was my own.
The story had gotten around the camp like wildfire, despite the best efforts of the officers to bury it. A place like that thrives on stories. The more unreal the place becomes, you see, the less real the things that you see, and the things that you do, are. Some days, it was the slim hope that the whole thing was just somehow going to end, to stop, to cease to be in any way … that’s what kept me going. There couldn’t be two worlds, could there? And this couldn’t have been Earth, our Earth, the place where we were born. It just … couldn’t.
By the next day though, everything was back to normal. The commandant ordered double shifts on the gas chamber and the incinerator. Extra prisoners were drafted to join those who already worked carrying the bodies from the chamber to the incinerator or emptying the ash from the ass of the great beast.
The camp doctor had come up with some explanation, we all assumed, for how the child had survived the gas chamber.
I was back in the guard tower, once more watching the procession of victims, the march from life to death played before my very eyes. This time, I watched them all the way in, and kept my eyes on the shower block even after the last of them had entered. There was something in the air, something charged, like the moment before lightening strikes.
When the scream came from the chamber, I was already clambering down the stairs.
I pushed my way to the front of the crowd around the commandant. He had his face pressed against the glass, his pudgy cheeks leaving greasy patches on the window as he huffed and puffed.
On the other side of the glass stood the boy, just as he had before.
***
“The same boy?” asked Danny. “How? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sense didn’t come into it,” said Grossmueller. “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying? That place didn’t work like anywhere else on Earth, I’m sure of that now. It was as if we’d put a barbed wire fence and gates around a patch of Hell and pulled it up to us from beneath the world. Don’t you think that’s what Hell is Danny? The absence of logic, sense, reason … a place where things happen just because they can?”
“I don’t know,” said Danny, his voice tired. “You tell me you’ve been lying to me, to everyone, all this time about the way in which you saved all those people, but this story …”
***
“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,” that was all the commandant could say, over and over again. He was as rigid as a board, a talking manikin stuck to the glass of the gas chamber.
I don’t know how long he stood there for, but eventually someone took him by the arm and led him back to his quarters. They say that they had to tip him back onto his bed, his arms and legs locked into place as if he were still at that window.
The rest of us just stood there and watched. Someone went for the doctor, but he was nowhere to be found. They pumped more and more gas into there, until the air was thick with it, and still the child would not fall. He just stood there, naked and silent and pointing at us all with that wicked finger of his, as if damnation itself was at its tip.
Finally, they vented the gas, and someone said “What are we going to do?”
And with that, I opened the door to the chamber, walked inside, put my gun to the child’s head, and fired.
It took four shots to bring him to his knees, and another two to finish the job.
***
“Jesus,” said Danny. His cheeks suddenly drained of colour and, swinging his car door open, he vomited copiously onto the pavement. “I can’t … you …”
“I can’t defend it,” said Grossmueller, “But you have to understand, it wasn’t a human being that I did that to.”
“And was the way that you thought about all of them was it?” spat Danny, bile coating his lips,
“As something subhuman? That was a kid Pops! A kid!”
“No wait, you don’t understand!” said Grossmueller desperately. “Please, let me finish.”
Grossmueller almost couldn’t bear the look of pain, and loss, and disgust in his grandson’s eyes as he watched the boy make his decision.
“Then finish,” said Danny finally, “We’ve got a ceremony to get to.”
“We’ll make it,” said Grossmueller.
***
When I came out the chamber, the others had already gone. Every officer, every guard, even the technicians who operated the chamber. I was alone with the dead.
I summoned the prisoners whose job it was to take the bodies to the incinerator, and left them to their work. It had started to snow again, and until dark I simply walked the boundaries of the camp, as if the answers to all the questions that now haunted me might be found laying there on the hard ground. No matter which way I walked, my shadow seemed to be in front of me, twisting and writhing with my every step.
I don’t remember returned to the barracks, or even falling asleep, but I remember being awoken by one of the other soldiers. Like so many of the men I worked alongside, I had never bothered to ask his name and he had not asked mine. There was comfort in anonymity, I assumed, for all of us.
He told me the commandant had been found dead, and that none of the other officers could be found. Without thinking, I asked him to take me to the body.
We walked out across the camp, towards the shower block. I had begun to become used to moving and to speaking and to acting without thinking, as if I were a tram running along its groove in the road. My path, as wicked, damned, and condemned as it might be, was mapped out before me. Whether it had begun or ended with killing the boy I could not say. Perhaps there was no point in my route any more where I would be allowed to ask such questions.
The solider who had woken me left me at the door to the shower block, and said he would go no further. I entered, and found myself once more alone with the dead.
The commandant stood naked in the centre of the gas chamber, as rigid as when I had last seen him, but this time frozen with his hand outstretched, pointing at the glass. His face was contorted in a callous, evil grin, the same one I had seen him give the few prisoners who inadvertently caught his eye on their way to the chamber. I remember one of the guards, one of the few who did not revile the commandant, saying that it was the smile that the commandant would give to God or the Devil, which ever claimed him first.And of them had claimed him, for certain. He was as dead as anything else that stayed in that room long enough.
I left him where he stood. My path leading inexorably elsewhere.
Outside the shower block, the few remaining guards were waiting for me. I recognised them all, they were the men who had travelled with me here in the train a lifetime or more ago. I wondered if my face had aged in the same way that theirs had. I had long since ceased to look at myself in the mirror.
“We’re the only ones left,” one of them said.
“What are we going to do?”
“Our jobs,” said another, one of the ones I remembered as being anxious to get here, one of the few I suspected had sought out this conscription into hell. “They’ve done this, the prisoners. We should gas ‘em all.
“There’s not enough of us,” said another. “We need to keep them under control until more guards and officers can get here.”
They continued to argue amongst themselves, so easily falling into the normal human patterns of petty bickering and fighting for a position on the pecking order that they might have truly, if only for a moment, forgotten where we were.
As they were all facing me, I was the first one to see the prisoners coming.
They moved slowly, silently, a shuffling army. At their head, leading them step by step through the camp, was the boy.
He didn’t look like the boy any more of course. He was just a … shape, a shade, a patch of blackness. Sometimes it was the shape of the boy, other times the shape of the something else, something tall and dark and powerful.
The thing flowed like ink towards us, as if the whole world were a canvas on which it had drawn itself. I felt sick, dizzy, the more I looked at it, as if were being flattened down by its presence. Do you remember, when you were just a little one, I took you to see that film where we wore the three-dee glasses? I think that is what we looked like to him; two sides that only had depth if you looked at them from the right angle.
I looked away, and the shade became the boy again in my peripheral vision.
I opened my mouth to speak, but no words would come out.
And so, I simply pointed.
And one by one, the others turned and saw what I did.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” I said. “Find tools; hammers, saws, and nails.”
“We have guns,” said the eager guard, shielding his eyes against the terrible presence of the thing. “Why do we need tools?”
“Because we are going to make sledges,” I replied. “For them.”
There was moment, just a moment, between us all, and then they spoke as one.
“Yes Commandant.”
***
“Wait,” said Danny. “You’re telling me what exactly? That the boy you killed wasn’t a boy, that he was something else, and that he made you release all of those prisoners?”
There was disbelief in the boy’s voice, and Grossmueller could hardly blame him. In sixty years, this was the first time that he had told his story to anyone.
“He didn’t make me do it, no,” said Grossmueller, “It’s more complicated than that.”
“And you believe this?” asked Danny. “You think this really happened?”
“Of course, why would I make it up?”
Danny smiled. “You’re getting old Pops, and maybe you’re getting confused. You did an amazing thing, and you did it in the worst place and the worst time. The stress you must have been under … its no wonder that you would want to forget about it. This story of yours …”
“It’s not a story!” shouted Grossmueller. “It’s my life!”
“But how can you be sure?” asked Danny.
“Because I still see him,” said Grossmueller, as it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I see him every night.”
***
I took us just two days and nights to make enough sledges to carry the prisoners into the mountains. No one slept, and no one spoke save to ask for a tool, or to offer someone help. We all worked together, as if there had never been a wall or a fence or a war between us.
The thing watched us every moment, hovering somehow at every shoulder. Our world was small, I suppose, compared to where it came from.
The camp had ample provisions, even spread amongst so many, and on the morning of the third day, the prisoners headed out from the camp, passing under the gates that had once promised no return.
We watched them go; me and the guards and the thing. When they had finally vanished into the endless white, the thing moved between us, stopping at each to bend its huge head and whisper to us. Only one replied, the man who had been so eager to come to this place, the man who had believed in what we doing.
The thing sliced him in two with a flash of gold.
The rest of us went our separate ways, taking what food and equipment we could carry. It would be three days before any soldiers would arrive at the camp.
***
“And that’s the true story about how you freed all of those prisoners?” said Danny. Grossmueller didn’t think it was really a question.
“Yes, son, that’s the truth.”
Danny rested his head for a moment on the steering wheel of the car.
“What did it tell you?” he asked, “The thing?”
“It’s name,” answered Grossmueller, “And a few other things.”
“Such as?”
“How to keep a secret.”
“I’m not sure I believe you Pops, I’m sorry,” said Danny. “Maybe I just don’t want to.”
“It’s alright,” said Grossmueller, “I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to know or because I thought you would understand. I just don’t deserve to be remembered as a hero, at least not by anyone that it might mean something to. This is how my story ends.”
Danny looked at his watch. “I think we’ve missed the ceremony,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to go anyway.”
Grossmueller rubbed his chin again. This time, there was no blood.
“I think I’ll go home and finish off my shave,” he said, “If you don’t mind taking me.”
“Sure,” said Danny, turning over the engine and pulling the car back out onto the narrow side street. “But I do wish you’d use that electric razor I bought you for Christmas. You haven’t exactly got a steady hand, and there’s a reason they call them cut-throat razors you know.”
Grossmueller smiled and gave a shrug that he hoped matched one of Danny’s.
“There are some things you can only do with a good straight razor Danny, trust me on that.”
