As agreed, I went to visit the great IG Farben factory, known as Buna, the name of the synthetic rubber it was eventually supposed to produce. Construction, apparently, was going forward slowly. Since Faust was busy, he assigned one of his assistants to my visit, an engineer named Schenke, a man about thirty years old, in a gray suit with the Party insignia. This Schenke seemed fascinated by my Iron Cross; while he spoke to me, his eyes kept shifting over to it; finally he asked me, timidly, how I had gotten it. “I was in Stalingrad.”—“Oh! You were lucky.”—“To have gotten out?” I asked, laughing. “Yes, I think so too.” Schenke looked confused: “No, that’s not what I meant. To have been over there, to have been able to fight like that, for the Heimat, against the Bolsheviks.” I looked at him curiously and he blushed. “I have a childhood deformity, in my leg. A bone that broke and didn’t heal well. That prevented me from going to the front. But I would have liked to serve the Reich too.”—“You’re serving it here,” I pointed out.—“Of course. But it’s not the same. All my childhood friends are at the front. One feels…excluded.” Schenke did limp, but it didn’t prevent him from striding along with a nervous, quick step, so that I had to hurry to follow him. As he walked, he explained the factory’s history to me: the leadership of the Reich had insisted that Farben build a factory for Buna—a vital product for armaments—in the East, because of the bombardments that were already ravaging the Ruhr. The site had been chosen by one of the directors of the IG, Dr. Ambros, because of a large number of favorable criteria: the confluence of three rivers providing the considerable quantities of water required by the production of Buna; the existence of a broad plateau that was almost empty (aside from a Polish village that had been razed), geologically ideal since it was elevated; the intersection of several railway lines; and the proximity of many coal mines. The presence of the camp had also been a positive factor: the SS had declared it was delighted to support the project and had promised to provide inmates. But the factory’s construction was dragging, partly because of the difficulties of getting supplies, and partly because the output of the Häftlinge had turned out poor, and management was furious. However often the factory returned to the camp the inmates unable to work and demanded replacements, as the contract allowed, the new ones would arrive in a scarcely better state. “What happens to the ones you send back?” I asked in a neutral tone. Schenke looked at me with surprise: “I have no idea. That’s not my business. I guess they fix them up in the hospital. Don’t you know?” I pensively contemplated this young, motivated engineer: Was it really possible that he didn’t know? The chimneys in Birkenau were smoking daily eight kilometers away, and I knew as well as anyone else how gossip spread. But after all, if he didn’t want to know, it was possible for him not to know. The rules of secrecy and concealment could serve that purpose too.

However, judging from the treatment of the inmates employed, it didn’t seem that their ultimate fate was a major preoccupation for Schenke or his colleagues. In the midst of the immense, muddy construction site that was to become the factory, columns of scrawny Häftlinge in rags carried at a run, under the shouts and cudgel blows of the kapos, beams or bags of cement far too heavy for them. If a worker, in his big wooden clogs, stumbled and let his load fall, or collapsed himself, the blows redoubled, and blood, fresh and red, gushed onto the oily mud. Some never got up again. The din was infernal, everyone was yelling, the SS noncoms, the kapos; the beaten inmates screamed pitifully. Schenke guided me through this Gehenna without paying the slightest attention to it. Here and there, he paused and conversed with other engineers in well-pressed suits, holding yellow folding rulers and little fake-leather notebooks in which they jotted down figures. They commented on the progress of the construction of a wall, then one of them muttered a few words to a Rottenführer, who began to yell and viciously hit the kapo with his boot or rifle butt; the kapo, in turn, dove into the mass of inmates, distributing savage blows with full force, bellowing; and then the Häftlinge attempted a surge of activity, which died down on its own, since they could scarcely stand up. This system seemed to me extremely inefficient, and I said as much to Schenke; he shrugged his shoulders and looked around him as if he were seeing the scene for the first time: “In any case they don’t understand anything but blows. What else can you do with such a workforce?” I looked again at the undernourished Häftlinge, their rags coated in mud, black grease, diarrhea. A Polish ‘red’ stopped for an instant in front of me and I saw a brown stain appear on the back of his pants and the rear of his leg; then he resumed his frenetic run before a kapo could approach. Pointing him out, I said to Schenke: “Don’t you think it’s important to oversee their hygiene better? I’m not just talking about the stench, but it’s dangerous, that’s how epidemics break out.” Schenke replied somewhat haughtily: “All that is the responsibility of the SS. We pay the camp to have inmates fit for work. But it’s up to the camp to wash them, feed them, and take care of them. That’s included in the package.” Another engineer, a thickset Swabian sweating in his twill jacket, let out a coarse guffaw: “Anyway, Jews are like venison, they’re better when they’re a little gamy.” Schenke smiled thinly; I retorted curtly: “Your workers aren’t all Jews.”—“Oh! the others are hardly any better.” Schenke was beginning to grow annoyed: “Herr Sturmbannführer, if you think the condition of the Häftlinge is unsatisfactory, you should complain to the camp, not to us. The camp is responsible for their upkeep, I told you. All that is specified in our contract.”—“I understand very well, believe me.” Schenke was right; even the blows were administered by SS guards and their kapos. “But it seems to me that you could obtain better output by treating them a little better. Don’t you think so?” Schenke shrugged: “Ideally, maybe. And we often complain to the camp about the workers’ condition. But we have other priorities besides constantly splitting hairs.” Behind him, knocked down by a cudgel, an inmate was dying; his bloody head was buried in the thick mud; only the mechanical trembling of his legs showed that he was still alive. Schenke, as we left, stepped over him without looking at him. He was still thinking about my words with irritation: “We can’t have a sentimental attitude, Herr Sturmbannführer. We are at war. Production counts above all else.”—“I’m not saying otherwise. My objective is just to suggest ways to increase production. That should concern you. After all, it’s been, what? Two years now that you’ve been constructing, and you still haven’t produced a kilo of Buna.”—“Yes. But I should point out to you that the methanol factory has been functioning for a month.”

Despite his retort, my last remark must have annoyed Schenke; for the rest of the visit, he confined himself to dry, brief comments. I had myself shown around the KL attached to the factory, a rectangle surrounded by barbed wire, set up south of the complex in fallow fields, on the site of the razed village. I thought the conditions there were deplorable; the Lagerführer seemed to find it normal. “In any case, we send the ones the IG rejects to Birkenau, and they send us fresh ones.” On my way back to the Stammlager, I noticed on a wall in town this surprising inscription: KATYN = AUSCHWITZ. Ever since March, in fact, Goebbels’s press had kept harping about the discovery in Byelorussia of Polish corpses, thousands of officers assassinated by Bolsheviks after 1939. But who, here, could have written that? There weren’t any more Poles in Auschwitz, and no Jews, either, for a long time now. The town itself looked gray, glum, affluent, like all the old German towns in the East, with its market square, its Dominican church with sloping roofs, and, just at the entrance, dominating the bridge over the Sola, the old castle of the duke of the region. For many years, the Reichsführer had promoted plans to enlarge the town and make it a model community of the German East, but with the intensification of the war, these ambitious projects had been put aside, and it remained a sad, dull town, almost forgotten between the camp and the factory, a superfluous appendage.