I myself had almost finished with Lublin. I made a brief round to say goodbye. I went to settle with Horn, for the portfolio, and found him just as depressed and agitated, struggling with his management difficulties, his financial losses, his contradictory instructions. Globocnik received me much more calmly than the first time: we had a brief but serious discussion about the work camps, which Globocnik wanted to develop further: it was just a matter, he explained to me, of liquidating the last ghettos, so that not a single Jew would remain in the Generalgouvernement outside of the camps under SS control; that, he asserted, was the Reichsführer’s inflexible desire. In all of the GG, 130,000 Jews remained, mostly in Lublin, Radom, and Galicia, with Warsaw and Cracow being entirely judenrein, apart from a handful of clandestines. That was still a lot. But the problems would be solved with determination.

I had thought of going to Galicia to inspect a work camp, such as the one run by the unfortunate Lexi; but my time was limited, I had to make choices, and I knew that aside from minor differences due to local conditions or personalities, the problems would be the same. I wanted to concentrate now on the camps in Upper Silesia, the “Ruhr of the East”: the KL Auschwitz and its many annexes. From Lublin, the quickest way was to drive through Kielce and then the industrial region of Kattowitz, a flat, gloomy landscape dotted with pine or birch copses, and disfigured by the tall chimneys of factories and blast furnaces that, standing out against the sky, vomited bitter, sinister smoke. Thirty kilometers before Auschwitz, already, SS checkpoints carefully verified our papers. Then we reached the Vistula, broad and murky. In the distance we could see the white line of the Beskids, pale, shimmering in the summer mist, less spectacular than the Caucasus, but wreathed in a gentle beauty. Chimneys were smoking here too, on the plain, at the foot of the mountains: there was no wind and the smoke rose straight up before bending under its own weight, scarcely disturbing the sky. The road ended at the train station and the Haus der Waffen-SS, where we waited for our quarters. The lobby was almost empty; they showed me to a simple, clean room; I put away my things, washed, and changed my uniform, then went out to present myself at the Kommandantur. The road to the camp ran along the Sola, a tributary of the Vistula; half hidden by dense trees, greener than the broad river into which it ran, it flowed in peaceful twists and meanderings, at the foot of a steep, grassy bank; on the water, pretty ducks with green heads let themselves be carried along by the current, then took off with a tension of their whole bodies, necks stretched out, feet folded in, their wings projecting this mass upward, before lazily dropping down again a little farther on, near the shore. A checkpoint barred the entrance to the Kasernestrasse; beyond, behind a wooden watchtower, stood the long gray cement wall of the camp, topped with barbed wire, behind which the red roofs of the barracks were silhouetted. The Kommandantur occupied the first of three buildings between the street and the wall, a squat stucco building with an entrance reached by a flight of steps, flanked by wrought iron lamps. I was taken immediately to the camp’s Kommandant, Obersturmbannführer Höss. This officer, after the war, acquired a certain notoriety because of the colossal number of people put to death under his command and also because of the frank, lucid memoirs he wrote in prison, during his trial. Yet he was an absolutely typical officer of the IKL, hardworking, stubborn, and of limited abilities, without any whims or imagination, but with just, in his movements and conversation, a little of the virility, already diluted by time, left by a youth rich in Freikorps brawls and cavalry charges. He welcomed me with a German salute and then shook my hand; he didn’t smile, but didn’t seem unhappy to see me. He wore leather riding breeches, which, on him, didn’t seem an officer’s affectation: he kept a stable in the camp and rode often; he could be found, they said in Oranienburg, much more often on horseback than behind his desk. While he spoke, he kept his surprisingly pale, vague eyes—I found them disconcerting, as if he were constantly on the point of grasping something that had just evaded him—fixed on my face. He had gotten a telex about me from the WVHA: “The camp is at your disposal.” The camps, rather, for Höss managed an entire network of KLs: the Stammlager, the main camp behind the Kommandantur, but also Auschwitz II, a camp for war prisoners transformed into a concentration camp and situated a few kilometers past the station in the plain, near the old Polish village of Birkenau; a large work camp beyond the Sola and the town, created to serve the synthetic rubber factory of IG Farben in Dwory; and about a dozen scattered auxiliary camps, or Nebenlager, set up for agricultural projects or for mining or metallurgical enterprises. Höss, as he spoke, showed me all this on a large map pinned to his office wall: and with his finger he traced the camp’s zone of interest, which covered the entire region between the Vistula and the Sola, more than a dozen kilometers to the south, except for some plots of land around the train station, which were controlled by the municipality. “About that,” he explained, “we had a disagreement, last year. The town wanted to build a new neighborhood there, to house the railway workers, whereas we wanted to acquire part of that land in order to create a village for our married SS officers and their families. Finally nothing came of it. But the camp is constantly expanding.”

Höss, when he took a car rather than a horse, liked to drive himself, and he came by to pick me up the next morning, at the door to the Haus. Piontek, seeing I wouldn’t need him, had asked for a day off; he wanted to take the train to go see his family in Tarnowitz; I gave him the night off too. Höss suggested we begin with Auschwitz II: an RSHA convoy was arriving from France, and he wanted to show me the selection process. It took place on the ramp of the freight station, midway between the two camps, under the direction of a garrison doctor, Dr. Thilo. When we arrived, he was waiting at the head of the platform, with Waffen-SS guards and dogs and teams of inmates in striped uniforms, who when they saw us snatched their caps off their shaved heads. The weather was even finer than the previous day, the mountains in the south gleamed in the sun; the train, after passing through the Protektorat and through Slovakia, had arrived from that direction. While we waited, Höss explained the procedure to me. Then the train was brought up and the doors of the cattle cars were opened. I expected a chaotic outburst: despite the shouts and the barking of the dogs, things happened in a relatively orderly way. The newcomers, obviously disoriented and exhausted, poured out of the cars in the midst of an abominable stink of excrement; the Häftlinge of the work Kommando, shouting in a mixture of Polish, Yiddish, and German, made them abandon their luggage and line up in rows, the men to one side, the women and children to the other; and while these lines shuffled toward Thilo, and Thilo separated the men fit for work from the unfit, sending mothers to the same side as their children, toward trucks waiting a little farther away—“I know they could work,” Höss had explained to me, “but trying to separate them from their kids would be exposing ourselves to all kinds of disorder.”—I walked slowly between the rows. Most of the people were talking, in low voices, in French; others, no doubt naturalized Jews or foreigners, in various languages: I listened to the sentences I understood, the questions, the comments; these people had no idea where they were or what was awaiting them. The Kommando Häftlinge, obeying orders, reassured them: “Don’t worry, you’ll see each other afterward, they’ll return your suitcases, tea and soup are waiting for you after the shower.” The columns inched forward. A woman, seeing me, asked me, in bad German, pointing to her child: “Herr Offizier! Can we stay together?”—“Don’t worry, Madame,” I replied politely in French, “you won’t be separated.” Immediately questions rained down from all sides: “Are we going to work? Can families stay together? What will you do with the old people?” Before I could reply, a noncom had rushed forward, flogging people. “That’s enough, Rottenführer!” I shouted. He looked sheepish: “It’s just that we’re not supposed to let them get excited, Sturmbannführer.” Some people were bleeding, children were crying. The smell of filth that emanated from the cars and even from the clothes of the Jews was suffocating me, I felt the old, familiar nausea rise up again and I breathed deeply through my mouth to master it. In the cars, teams of inmates were hurling the abandoned suitcases down onto the ramp; the corpses of people who had died on the way were treated the same way. Some children were playing hide-and-seek: the Waffen-SS let them, but shouted if they got close to the train, for fear they’d slip under the cars. Behind Thilo and Höss, the first trucks were already setting off. I went toward them and watched Thilo at work: for some, a glance was enough; for others, he asked a few questions, made them unbutton their shirts. “In Birkenau, you’ll see,” Höss commented, “we have just two ridiculous delousing stations. On full days, that considerably limits the capacity for admission. But for a single convoy, it’s enough.”—“What do you do if there are several?”—“That depends. We can send some to the admission center in the Stammlager. Otherwise, we have to reduce the quota. We plan on building a new central sauna to remedy this problem. The plans are ready, I’m just waiting for the approval of Amtsgruppe C for the budget. But we constantly have financial problems. They want me to enlarge the camp, accept more inmates, select more, but they make a fuss when money is at stake. I often have to improvise.” I frowned: “What do you mean, ‘improvise’?” He looked at me with his drowned eyes: “All sorts of things. I make agreements with the companies we provide workers to: sometimes they pay me in kind, with construction materials or such things. I’ve even gotten trucks, like that. One company sent me some to transport its workers, but never asked me to return them. You have to know how to get by.” The selection was coming to an end: the whole thing had lasted less than an hour. When the last trucks were loaded, Thilo quickly added up the numbers and showed them to us: out of 1,000 newcomers, he had kept 369 men and 191 women. “Fifty-five percent,” he commented. “With the convoys from the West, we get good averages. But the Polish convoys are a disaster. It never goes beyond twenty-five percent, and sometimes, aside from two or three percent, there’s really nothing to keep.”—“What do you think is the reason for that?”—“Their condition on arrival is deplorable. The Jews in the GG have been living for years in ghettos, they’re malnourished, they have all kinds of diseases. Even among the ones we select, we try to be careful, a lot of them die in quarantine.” I turned to Höss: “Do you get many convoys from the West?”—“From France, this one was the fifty-seventh. We’ve had twenty from Belgium. From Holland, I don’t remember. But these last few months especially we’ve had convoys from Greece. They’re not very good. Come, I’ll show you the process for reception.” I saluted Thilo and got back into the car. Höss drove fast. On the way, he went on explaining his difficulties to me: “Ever since the Reichsführer decided to allocate Auschwitz for the destruction of the Jews, we’ve had nothing but problems. All last year, we were forced to work with improvised installations. A real mess. I was able to begin building permanent installations, with an adequate reception capacity, only in January of this year. But everything still isn’t in perfect running order. There have been delays, especially in the transport of construction materials. And also, because of the haste, there have been manufacturing defects: the oven of Crematorium III cracked two weeks after it was put into service, it overheated. I had to close it down so it could be repaired. But we can’t get worked up about it, we have to remain patient. We’ve been so overwhelmed that we’ve had to divert a large number of convoys to Gruppenführer Globocnik’s camps, where of course no selection is carried out. Now it’s much calmer, but it will start up again in ten days: the GG wants to empty its last ghettos.” In front of us, at the end of the road, stretched a long red brick building, pierced at one end by an arch, and topped with a peaked guard tower; from its sides stretched out cement poles with barbed wire and a series of watchtowers, regularly spaced; and behind, as far as the eye could see, were lined rows of identical wooden barracks. The camp was immense. Groups of inmates in striped uniforms were walking down the lanes, tiny, insects in a colony. Beneath the tower, in front of the gate to the arch, Höss turned right. “The trucks keep going straight ahead. The Kremas and the delousing stations are in the back. But we’ll go to the Kommandantur first.” The car ran alongside the whitewashed poles and watchtowers; the barracks streamed past, and their perfect alignment made long brown perspectives unfurl, fleeting diagonals that opened up and then intersected with the next one. “Are the fences electrified?”—“Recently, yes. That was another problem, but we solved it.” At the end of the camp, Höss was developing another sector. “It will be the Häftlingskrankenbau, an enormous hospital that will serve all the camps in the region.” He had just stopped in front of the Kommandantur and pointed to a vast empty field, surrounded by barbed wire. “Do you mind waiting five minutes for me? I have to have a quick word with the Lagerführer.” I got out of the car and smoked a cigarette. The building that Höss had just entered was also made of red brick, with a steep roof and a three-story tower in the center; beyond, a long road passed in front of the new sector and disappeared toward a birch wood, visible behind the barracks. There was very little noise; just, from time to time, a brief order or a harsh cry. A Waffen-SS on a bicycle came out of one of the sections of the central sector and headed toward me; when he reached me, he saluted without pausing and turned toward the entrance of the camp, pedaling calmly, without hurrying, alongside the barbed wire. The watchtowers were empty: during the day, the guards positioned themselves on a “large chain” around the two camps. I looked distractedly at Höss’s dusty car: didn’t he have anything better to do than to show a visitor around? A subaltern, as in the Lublin KL, could have done the job just as well. But Höss knew that my report would go to the Reichsführer; perhaps he was anxious to make me understand the extent of his accomplishments. When he reappeared, I threw away my cigarette butt and got in next to him; he took the road toward the birch trees, pointing out the “fields,” or subcamps, of the central section as we went along: “We’re in the process of reorganizing everything for the maximum deployment of labor. When it’s done, this whole camp will serve only to supply workers to the industries of the region and even of the Altreich. The only permanent inmates will be the ones who provide for the upkeep and management of the camp. All political inmates, especially the Poles, will stay in the Stammlager. Since February, I also have a family camp for the Gypsies.”—“A family camp?”—“Yes. It’s a directive from the Reichsführer. When he decided to deport the Gypsies from the Reich, he wanted them not to be selected, to remain together, in families, and not to work. But a lot of them are dying of illness. They have no resistance.” We had reached a barrier. Beyond, a long line of trees and bushes hid a barbed-wire fence, isolating two buildings, long, identical, each one with two tall chimneys. Höss parked near the building on the right, in the middle of a sparse pine grove. In front, on a well-kept lawn, Jewish women and children were finishing undressing, supervised by guards and by inmates in striped uniforms. The clothes were piled up pretty much everywhere, properly sorted, with a piece of wood stamped with a number on each pile. One of the inmates shouted: “Go on, quick, quick, to the shower!” The last Jews entered the building; two mischievous kids were playing at switching the numbers on the piles; they ran away when a Waffen-SS raised his club. “It’s like in Treblinka or Sobibor,” Höss commented. “Until the last minute, we make them think they’re going to be deloused. Most of the time, it happens very calmly.” He began explaining the arrangements: “Over there, we have two other crematoriums, but much bigger: the gas chambers are underground and can accommodate up to two thousand people. Here the chambers are smaller and there are two per Krema: it’s much more practical for small convoys.”—“What is the maximum capacity?”—“In terms of gassing, practically unlimited; the major constraint is the capacity of the ovens. They were conceived especially for us by the Topf firm. These officially have a capacity of seven hundred and sixty-eight bodies per installation per twenty-four-hour period. But you can cram in up to a thousand or even fifteen hundred, if you have to.” An ambulance with a red cross on it arrived and parked next to Höss’s car; an SS doctor with a white smock over his uniform came over and saluted us. “This is Hauptsturmführer Dr. Mengele,” Höss said. “He joined us two months ago. He’s the head doctor of the Gypsy camp.” I shook his hand. “Are you supervising, today?” Höss asked him. Mengele nodded. Höss turned to me: “Do you want to observe?”—“That’s all right,” I said. “I know what it’s like.”—“But it’s much more efficient than Wirth’s method.”—“Yes, I know. They explained it to me in the Lublin KL. They adopted your method.” Höss seemed displeased; I asked, to be polite: “How long does it take, in all?” Mengele replied with his melodious, suave voice: “The Sonderkommando opens the doors after half an hour. But we let some time pass so the gas can disperse. In principle, death occurs in less than ten minutes. Fifteen if it’s damp out.”