With Dr. Wirths, I had an interesting discussion about precisely this question of physical violence, since to me it evoked problems I had already encountered in the Einsatzgruppen. Wirths agreed with me in saying that even men who, in the beginning, hit only out of obligation ended up developing a taste for it. “Far from correcting hardened criminals,” he passionately affirmed, “we confirm them in their perversity by giving them full rights over the other prisoners. And we’re even creating new ones among our SS. These camps, with the present methods, are a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations; after the war, when these men go back to civilian life, we’ll find ourselves with a considerable problem on our hands.” I explained to him that, according to what I had heard, the decision to transfer the work of extermination to the camps was made partly because of the psychological problems it caused among troops assigned to mass executions. “True,” Wirths replied, “but we’re only shifting the problem, especially by mixing extermination functions with the correctional and economic functions of ordinary camps. The mentality engendered by extermination overpowers and affects all the rest. Even here, in my Reviers, I discovered that some doctors were killing patients, exceeding their instructions. I had a lot of trouble putting a stop to such practices. As for the sadistic tendencies, they are very frequent, especially with the guards, and they’re often connected to sexual troubles.”—“Do you have concrete examples?”—“They rarely come to consult me. But it happens. A month ago, I saw a guard who’s been here for a year. A man from Breslau, thirty-seven years old, married, three children. He confessed to me that he had beaten inmates until he ejaculated, without even touching himself. He no longer had any normal sexual relations; when he had leave, he didn’t go back home, he was so ashamed. But before he came to Auschwitz, he told me, he was perfectly normal.”—“And what did you do for him?”—“In the conditions we have here, there’s not much I can do. He would need extensive psychiatric treatment. I’m trying to have him transferred outside the camp system, but it’s hard: I can’t tell the whole story, or he’d be arrested. But he’s a sick man, he needs to be taken care of.”—“And how do you think this sadism develops?” I asked. “I mean with normal men, without any predisposition that would be revealed under these conditions?” Wirths looked out the window, pensive. He took a long while to reply: “That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, and it’s difficult to answer. An easy solution would be to blame our propaganda, the way for instance it’s taught here to the troops by Oberscharführer Knittel, who heads the Kulturabteilung: the Häftling is subhuman, he’s not even human, so it’s entirely legitimate to hit him. But that’s not the whole of it—after all, animals aren’t human, either, but none of our guards would treat an animal the way they treat the Häftlinge. Propaganda does play a role, but in a more complex way. I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic because he thinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage increases and turns into sadism when he sees that the inmate, far from being a subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all, and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard finds unbearable, this silent persistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to make their shared humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes, the more he’s forced to see that the inmate refuses to recognize himself as a non-human. In the end, no other solution remains for him than to kill him, which is an acknowledgment of complete failure.” Wirths fell silent. He was still looking out the window. I broke the silence: “Can I ask you a personal question, Doktor?” Wirths answered without looking at me; his long, thin fingers tapped the table: “You can ask it.”—“Are you a believer?” He took a while to reply. He was still looking outside, toward the street and the crematorium. “I used to be, yes,” he said finally.

I had left Wirths and was walking up the Kasernestrasse toward the Kommandantur. Just before the checkpoint with its red-and-white barrier, I noticed one of Höss’s children, the oldest one, squatting in the street in front of the gate to their house. I went over and greeted him. The boy raised frank, intelligent eyes to me and stood up: “Hello, Sturmbannführer.”—“What’s your name?”—“Klaus.”—“What are you looking at, Klaus?” Klaus pointed toward the gate: “Look.” The ground in front of the threshold was black with ants, an amazingly dense swarm. Klaus crouched down again to observe them and I bent over beside him. At first sight, these thousands of ants seemed to be running around in the most frenzied, utterly aimless disorder. But then I looked more closely, trying to follow one of them in particular, then another. I noticed then that the disrupted aspect of this swarm came from the fact that each insect kept pausing to touch antennas with every other one it met. Little by little I saw that some of the ants were leaving toward the left while others were arriving, carrying debris or food: an exhausting, vast labor. The ones that were coming must have been using their antennae to inform the others about where the food had come from. The gate to the house opened and a Häftling, the gardener I had seen before, came out. Seeing me, he stiffened and removed his cap. He was a man a little older than me, a Polish political prisoner, according to his triangle. He noticed the anthill and said: “I’ll destroy that, Herr Offizier.”—“Absolutely not! Don’t touch it.”—“Oh yes, Stani,” Klaus gushed, “leave them alone. They haven’t done anything to you.” Klaus turned to me: “Where are they going?”—“I don’t know. We’ll have to look.” The ants were following the garden wall, then hurrying along the curb, passing behind the cars and motorcycles parked opposite the Kommandantur; then they continued straight ahead, a long wavering line, beyond the camp’s administration building. We followed them step-by-step, admiring their indefatigable determination. When we neared the Politische Abteilung, Klaus looked at me nervously: “I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer, but my father doesn’t want me to come this way.”—“Wait for me, then. I’ll tell you.” Behind the barracks of the political department stood the squat mass of the crematorium, a former ammunition bunker covered with earth and vaguely resembling, apart from the chimney, a flattened kurgan. The ants continued toward its somber mass; they climbed up the sloping side, weaving their way through the grass; then they turned and went down a cement section of wall, where the entrance to the bunker formed a recess between the dirt slopes. I kept following them and saw that they went through the half-open door and into the crematorium. I looked around: aside from a guard who was staring at me curiously and a column of inmates pushing wheelbarrows a little farther away, near the extension of the camp, there was no one. I went up to the door, which was bracketed by two frames, like windows; inside, everything was black and silent. The ants were marching over the angle of the doorstep. I turned around and rejoined Klaus. “They’re going that way,” I said vaguely. “They found something to eat.” Followed by the little boy, I returned to the Kommandantur. We separated in front of the entrance. “Are you coming tonight, Sturmbannführer?” Klaus asked. Höss was giving a little reception and had invited me. “Yes.”—“Till tonight, then!” Stepping over the anthill, he went into the garden.

At the end of the day, after stopping by the Haus der Waffen-SS to wash and change, I went back to the Hösses. In front of the gate, there were now only a few dozen ants left, rapidly crisscrossing the surface. The thousands of others must have been underground now, digging, clearing away, shoring up, invisible but continuing their mad labor without respite. Höss welcomed me on the steps, glass of Cognac in hand. He introduced me to his wife, Hedwig, a blond woman with a fixed smile and hard eyes, wearing a becoming evening gown with a lace collar and sleeves, and his two eldest daughters, Kindi and Püppi, also prettily dressed. Klaus shook my hand in a friendly way; he was wearing a tweed jacket of English cut, with suede patches on the elbows and large horn buttons. “That’s a handsome jacket,” I remarked. “Where did you find that?”—“My dad brought it back for me from the camp,” he replied, beaming with pleasure. “The shoes too.” They were polished brown leather ankle boots, with buttons up the side. “Very elegant,” I said. Wirths was there and he introduced me to his wife; the other guests were all camp officers: there were Hartjenstein, the garrison commander; Grabner, the head of the political department; Lagerführer Aumeier, Dr. Caesar, and a few others. The ambiance was somewhat formal, more than at Eichmann’s, in any case, but cordial. Caesar’s wife, a woman still young, laughed a lot; Wirths explained that she had been one of Caesar’s assistants, and he had proposed to her soon after his second wife died of typhus. Conversation turned on Mussolini’s recent fall and arrest, which had made a strong impression on everybody; the protestations of loyalty from Badoglio, the new Prime Minister, didn’t inspire much confidence. Then we discussed the Reichsführer’s plans for developing the German East. All sorts of contradictory ideas flew among the guests; Grabner tried to draw me into a discussion on the Himmlerstadt colonization project, but I replied evasively. One thing remained clear: whatever people’s views were on the future of the region, the camp was an integral part of it. Höss thought it would last at least ten or twenty years. “The extension of the Stammlager has been planned with that in mind,” he explained. “Once we’ve finished with the Jews and the war, Birkenau will disappear, and the land will be given back to agriculture. But the industry of Upper Silesia, especially with the German losses in the East, won’t be able to do without Polish labor; the camp will remain vital for control of these populations, for a long time.” Two inmates, wearing simple but clean dresses made of good material, circulated among the guests with trays; they wore the purple triangle of the IBVs, also known as “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The rooms were nicely furnished, with rugs, leather sofas and armchairs, furniture in rich, well-tooled wood, vases with fresh flowers on lace doilies. The lamps gave off a yellow, discreet, almost subdued light. Signed enlargements of photographs of the Reichsführer visiting the camp with Höss or holding his children on his knees decorated the walls. The brandies and wines were of good quality; Höss also offered his guests fine Yugoslavian cigarettes, Ibars. I contemplated with curiosity this rigid, conscientious man, who dressed his children in the clothes of Jewish children killed under his direction. Did Höss think of that as he looked at them? Probably the idea didn’t even enter his mind. His wife held his elbow and emitted curt, sharp bursts of laughter. I looked at her and thought about her cunt, under her dress, nesting in the lace panties of a pretty young Jewish girl gassed by her husband. The Jewess had long ago been burned along with her own cunt and had gone up in smoke to join the clouds; her expensive panties, which she might have put on especially for her deportation, now adorned and protected the cunt of Hedwig Höss. Did Höss think about that Jewess, when he took off her panties to honor his wife? But maybe he wasn’t much interested anymore in Frau Höss’s cunt, however delicately it was covered: work in the camps, when it didn’t make men insane, often made them impotent. Maybe he kept his own Jewess somewhere in the camp, clean, well fed, a lucky one, the Kommandant’s whore? No, not him: if Höss took a mistress from among the inmates, it would be a German, not a Jew.