See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

a new life, the old life is a burden as it is; for instance, one night Neigel shot twenty-five Jewish prisoners.

In the middle of September of ’43, says a book written by one of the inmates, a prisoner made an escape. He was the first prisoner to escape since Neigel had taken over as commander of the camp. He hid, it seems, in a quarry, in the space between two huge boulders, and the guards didn’t notice anything. During the night they dragged all the prisoners out to the parade ground in front of the commander’s barracks. It would be reasonable to suppose that Wasserman woke up from a light sleep and peeked fearfully out of a hole in his attic. Down below he saw Obersturmbannführer Neigel walking between the rows of prisoners. Oh, Lord, thought Wasserman then. This is the man who sits with me every night and listens to my story, and tells me about his wife and children, and I have even wrenched a chord of pain and laughter from his heart …

Neigel pronounces the verdict. Every tenth prisoner in the row is tobe put to death. Twenty-five prisoners in all. Staukeh approaches him and says something in a whisper. Neigel refuses. Staukeh repeats himself and raises a hand in argument. Twenty-five dead are probably not enough to ease his mind. For a moment it looks as though a real fight is going on out there. But Neigel controls himself. Staukeh steps back in place. He looks furious. His thin, gold-rimmed glasses flash angrily in the cold glint of the searchlights. Neigel chooses the victims with a wave of his finger. He squints, reviewing them with utrnost care. Some of the prisoners later swore that he made the selection with his eyes shut.

The Ukrainians segregate the condemned men, two of whom faint with fear. They are carried away. Everything happens in silence. Someday the episode will be described in a book: “Silence. The moon shone above, and the searchlights below. Commander Neigel executed the condemned men. He shot them each through the head. After the third shot, he was covered with blood. Then he leaned down and shot the two men lying in a faint. Did they know? And did the others, the living beings standing in line, know?”

With that it ended. Neigel turned and disappeared into his barracks. When he passed outside the attic, Wasserman could see that his face was rigid and his eyes appeared to be closed. Wasserman curled up between the two supply cupboards. He wanted to say something—even to himself—in memory of the dead. But there was nothing really to say. He hadn’t known them. And even if he had, quite possibly he would not have had any special feeling for them. It had been like that serving with Zalmanson and the dentists for three months. Wasserman: “Everything that had once been between us was extinguished. There was friendship, but it was different. It would be impossible to describe it in words. We were not fond of each other, nor did we hate each other very much. Perhaps because being here, we were already dead in everyone’s eyes, even we began to see ourselves and our friends as dead.”

Neigel, meanwhile, is showering in the little stall in his barracks under Wasserman’s attic. He howls something, and I am shocked to think he might be singing to himself in the shower. But he isn’t singing. He’s talking. He’s saying something out loud. And even though the water’s running, I know exactly what he’s saying. He’s talking to me. He’s reproving me for “negligence.” “Isn’t it true,” he asks contentiously, “that writers are supposed to enter all the way into their characters?”But I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet to “enter all the way.” That is, I needn’t tell Neigel that. I can just pretend and let him dictate a few autobiographical details so he won’t feel I’m neglecting him. A list of facts, common to thousands of SS officers like him, and that’s all.

So: he was born forty-six years ago in Bavaria, in the small village of Fissan at the foot of the Zugspitze. By the age of ten he knew how to lead mountain climbers up the most dangerous paths of the Alps. He had one brother, Heinz, who died in childhood of tuberculosis. His mother, raised in Poland, came to Germany at a relatively late age and married his father just after his army service. She was a milkmaid, and Neigel remembers—while soaping his broad chest—how he used to ride with her in the cart, early in the morning, along the lake. She was, he says, “a good, simple woman. She knew her place.” His father, like Neigel, had been a soldier in his youth (“The truth is, though, that the Kaiser’s soldiers were mere children compared to us”), and after his release from a long term of service, he became a carpenter in Fissan. As a soldier he had served in East Africa, and Neigel recalls “the wonderful stories he used to tell about Africa. They seemed to come from a different world.” And since Neigel does not descend to particulars, I quote similar disclosures by Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, in his diary (The Commandant of Auschwitz Testifies), about the exciting stories his father used to tell him in his childhood: “They described battles with the rebellious children, and told about their customs and way of life and their benighted pagan rites. I listened with fervor and enthusiasm to Father’s tales about the blessed civilizing efforts of the missionaries in Africa. For Father they were as great as kings. We wanted to be missionaries too, to explore darkest Africa, deep in the jungle.”

And Rudolf Hoess continues to transfuse biographical data into Neigel’s transparent veins: “Whenever my father’s old friends, the mis-sionarics, visited us, it was always a real treat for me. They were bearded old men … I hung on to their every word … Sometimes Father would take