But perhaps you really don’t care about any of this. Maybe, instead of my unwholesome, abstruse reflections, you would rather have anecdotes, spicy little stories. For my part I don’t know anymore. I’m quite willing to tell you a few stories: but then let me just dig at random among my memories and my notes; I’ve told you, I’m getting tired, I have to start bringing this to an end. And also if I still had to recount the rest of 1944 in detail, a little like I’ve done up to now, I’ll never be done. You see, I’m thinking of you too, not just of me, a little bit in any case, there are limits of course, if I’m putting myself to so much trouble, it’s not to make you happy, I will willingly admit, it’s above all for my own mental hygiene, like when you’ve eaten too much, at some point you have to evacuate the waste, whether or not it smells nice, you don’t always have a choice; but here, you have an irrevocable power, that of closing this book and throwing it in the trash, a final recourse against which I am powerless, so I don’t see why I should wear kid gloves. And that is why, I’ll admit it, if I change my method a little, it’s mostly for me, whether you like it or not, another mark of my boundless selfishness, certainly a fruit of my bad education. Maybe I should have done something else, you’ll tell me, that’s true, maybe I should have done something else, I would have been delighted to play music, if I had known how to put two notes together and recognize a treble clef, but there it is, I’ve already explained my limits in that field, or else painting, why not, that seems a pleasant occupation to me, painting, a quiet occupation, losing yourself that way in forms and colors, but what can I do, in another life maybe, for in this one I never had a choice, maybe a little, of course, a narrow margin for maneuvering, but limited, because of the weight of fate, and lo, we’re back just where we started from. But let us return to Hungary.

About the officers around Eichmann, there’s not much to say. They were, for the most part, peaceable men, good citizens doing their duty, proud and happy bearers of the SS uniform, but timorous, with little initiative, always going “Yes…but,” and admiring their leader as a great genius. The only one who stood out a little was Wisliceny, a Prussian my age, who spoke very good English and had an excellent grasp of history, and with whom I liked to spend my evenings discussing the Thirty Years’ War, the turning point of 1848, or else the moral bankruptcy of the Wilhelmine era. His views weren’t always original, but they were solidly documented and he could work them into a coherent narrative, which is the foremost quality of the historical imagination. He had once been Eichmann’s superior, in 1936 I think, in any case during the time of the SD-Hauptamt, when the Department of Jewish Affairs was still called Abteilung II 112; but his laziness and indolence had quickly led to his being surpassed by his disciple, which he didn’t hold against him, they had remained good friends, Wisliceny was a close family friend, they even publicly called each other by their first names (later on they had a falling-out, for reasons I am unaware of). Wisliceny, a witness at Nuremberg, painted a negative portrait of his old comrade that for a long time helped to distort the image that historians and writers had of Eichmann, some even going so far as to argue in good faith that the poor Obersturmbannführer gave orders to Adolf Hitler. You can’t blame Wisliceny: he was trying to save his neck, and Eichmann had disappeared, at the time it was customary to incriminate the absent, though it didn’t get poor Wisliceny very far; he ended up at the end of a rope in Pressburg, the Bratislava of the Slovaks (and it must have been solid, that rope, to support his corpulence). Another reason that made me appreciate Wisliceny was that he kept a level head, unlike some others, especially the Berlin bureaucrats, who, having been sent to the field for the first time in their lives and seeing themselves suddenly so powerful compared to these Jewish dignitaries, educated men sometimes twice their age, lost all sense of moderation. Some of them insulted the Jews in the coarsest and most unseemly way; others succumbed to the temptation of abusing their position; all of them demonstrated an arrogance that was unbearable and, in my opinion, utterly inappropriate. I remember Hunsche, for example, a Regierungsrat, that is, a career civil servant, a jurist with an accountant’s mentality, the little gray man you never notice behind the desk of a bank where he patiently shuffles paper as he waits till he can draw his pension and go out in a cardigan knitted by his wife and grow Dutch tulips, or else paint Napoleonic lead soldiers, which he will arrange lovingly, in perfect rows, nostalgic for the lost order of his youth, in front of a plaster model of the Brandenburg Gate, what do I know of the dreams that haunt this sort of man? And there, in Budapest, ridiculous in a uniform with an extra-baggy pair of riding breeches, he smoked expensive cigarettes, received Jewish leaders with his dirty boots resting on a velvet armchair, and shamelessly indulged his slightest whims. In the very first few days after our arrival, he had asked the Jews to provide him with a piano, saying negligently to them, “I’ve always dreamed of having a piano”; the Jews, terrified, brought him eight; and Hunsche, right in front of me, planted in his tall boots, reprimanded them in a voice that was trying to sound ironic: “But meine Herren! I don’t want to open a store, I just want to play the piano.” A piano! Germany is groaning under the bombs, our soldiers at the front are fighting with frozen limbs and missing fingers, but Hauptsturmführer Regierungsrat Dr. Hunsche, who has never left his Berlin office, needs a piano, no doubt to calm his frayed nerves. When I watched him prepare orders for the men in the transit camps—the evacuations had begun—I wondered if, as he appended his signature, he didn’t get hard under the table. He was, I’m the first to acknowledge it, a truly poor specimen of the Herrenvolk: and if you are to judge Germany from this kind of man, alas only too common, then, yes, I can’t deny it, we have deserved our fate, the judgment of history, our dikè.

And what, then, is there to say about Obersturmbannführer Eichmann? For as long as I had known him, he had never taken so readily to his role. When he received the Jews, he was the Übermensch from head to foot, he took off his glasses, spoke to them in a brittle, choppy, but polite voice, he had them sit down and called them “meine Herren,” he called Dr. Stern “Herr Hofrat,” and then he would burst into obscenities, deliberately, to shock them, before returning to that icy politeness that seemed to hypnotize them. He was also extremely gifted with the Hungarian authorities, at once friendly and polite, he impressed them and also he had formed solid friendships with some of them, especially Lászlo Endre, who showed him in Budapest a social life till then unknown to him and which ended up dazzling him, inviting him to castles, introducing him to countesses. All this, the fact that everybody merrily let themselves get caught up in the game, Jews and Hungarians, might explain why Eichmann too lapsed into hubris (but never with the stupidity of a Hunsche) and ended up believing he really was der Meister, the Master. He took himself in fact for a condottiere, a von dem Bach-Zelewski, he forgot his deepest nature, that of a bureaucrat of talent, even of great talent in his limited field. Yet as soon as you saw him one-on-one, in his office, or in the evening, if he had had a little to drink, he became the old Eichmann again, the one who scuttled about the offices of the Staatspolizei, respectful, busy, impressed by the slightest stripe superior to his own and at the same time devoured by envy and ambition, the Eichmann who had himself covered, in writing, for each action and each decision, by Müller or Heydrich or Kaltenbrunner, and who kept all these orders in a safe, carefully arranged, the Eichmann who would have been just as happy—and no less efficient—buying and transporting horses or trucks, if that had been his task, as concentrating and evacuating tens of thousands of human beings destined to die. When I came to talk with him about the Arbeitseinsatz, in private, he listened to me, sitting behind his fine desk, in his luxurious room in the Majestic Hotel, with a bored, irritated look, playing with his glasses or with a mechanical pencil he kept pressing, going click-clack, click-clack, compulsively, and before replying, he would rearrange his documents covered with notes and little doodles, blow the dust off his desk, then, scratching his already balding skull, launch into one of his long replies, so muddled that he himself would soon get lost in it. In the beginning, when the Einsatz was finally truly under way, after the Hungarians, around the end of April, had given their consent for the evacuations, he was almost euphoric, seething with energy; at the same time, and even more when the problems piled up, he became more and more difficult, intransigent, even with me, whom he rather liked, he began to see enemies everywhere. Winkelmann, who was his superior only on paper, didn’t like him at all, but in my opinion it was still this severe, gruff policeman, with the innate common sense of an Austrian peasant, who judged him the best. Eichmann’s haughty demeanor, verging on impertinence, drove him into a fury, but he saw right through him: “He has the mentality of a subaltern,” he explained to me when I came to see him once, to ask if he could intervene or at least use his influence to improve the very bad transport conditions of the Jews. “He uses his authority unreservedly, he doesn’t know any moral or mental restraints on the exercise of his power. Nor does he have the slightest scruple about exceeding the limits of his authority, if he believes he’s acting in the spirit of the person giving him his orders and protecting him, as Gruppenführer Müller and Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner do.” That is probably quite right, all the more so since Winkelmann didn’t deny Eichmann’s abilities. Eichmann, at the time, was no longer living at the hotel, but was occupying the beautiful villa of a Jew on Apostol Street, on the Rosenberg, a house with two stories and a tower overlooking the Danube, surrounded by a superb orchard unfortunately disfigured by the trenches dug for the air-raid shelter. He was living it up and spending most of his time with his new Hungarian friends. The evacuations were already well under way, zone by zone according to a very strict plan, and complaints were flowing in from everywhere, from the Jägerstab, from Speer’s offices, from Saur himself, they were flying every which way, at Himmler, Pohl, Kaltenbrunner, but in the end everything came back to me, and indeed, it was a catastrophe, a real scandal, the work-sites were receiving only skinny young girls or men already half dead, whereas they were hoping for an influx of healthy, solid, strapping fellows well used to work, they were outraged, no one understood what was happening. Part of the fault, I’ve already explained, was the Honvéd’s, which despite all our remonstrances jealously kept its labor battalions. But among those who remained there were still some men, who not long before had been living a normal life, eating their fill, they must have been in good health. But it turned out that the conditions of the concentration points, where the Jews sometimes had to wait for days or weeks, barely fed, before being transported, crammed into overloaded cattle cars, without water, without food, with one slop pail per car, these conditions were exhausting their strength, illnesses were spreading, many people died on the way, and those who arrived looked awful, few passed selection, and even these were turned down or else rapidly returned by the factories and work sites, especially the ones run by the Jägerstab, who howled that they were being sent girls incapable of lifting a pickaxe. When I transmitted these complaints to Eichmann, as I’ve said, he rejected them curtly, stating that it wasn’t his responsibility, that only the Hungarians could change anything in these conditions. So I went to see Major Baky, the Secretary of State in charge of the Gendarmerie; Baky swept aside my complaints with a single sentence, “Just take them more quickly,” and sent me to Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenczy, the officer in charge of the technical management of the evacuations, a bitter, closed man, who talked to me for more than an hour to explain that he would be delighted to feed the Jews better, if he were provided with food, and to pack the cars less, if he were sent more trains, but that his main mission consisted of evacuating them, not coddling them. With Wisliceny, I went to one of these “collection points,” I forget where, in the region of Kaschau maybe: it was a depressing sight, the Jews were parked by whole families into an open-air brickworks, under the spring rain, children in shorts were playing in the puddles of water, the adults, apathetic, sat on their suitcases or paced up and down. I was struck by the contrast between these Jews and the ones, the only ones I had really known till then, from Galicia and the Ukraine; these were well-educated people, often middle-class, and even the craftsmen and the farmers, quite numerous, had a proper and dignified bearing, the children were washed, combed, well dressed in spite of the conditions, sometimes wearing the green national costume, with black frogging and little caps. All that made the scene even more oppressive, despite their yellow stars, they could have been German or at least Czech villagers, and it gave me sinister thoughts, I imagined those neat, tidy boys or those young women with their discreet charm being gassed—thoughts that turned my stomach, but there was nothing to be done, I looked at the pregnant women and imagined them in the gas chambers, their hands on their rounded bellies, I wondered with horror what happened to the fetus of a gassed woman, if it died right away with its mother or else survived a little, imprisoned in its dead cocoon, its suffocating paradise, and from that thought memories of the Ukraine flowed in, and for the first time in a long time I wanted to vomit, vomit my powerlessness, my sadness, my useless life. By chance I ran into Dr. Grell there, a Legationsrat appointed by Feine to identify foreign Jews arrested by mistake by the Hungarian police, especially those from allied or neutral countries, and to remove them from the transit centers so that they could eventually be sent back to their own countries. This poor Grell, a wounded veteran of the Great War disfigured by a head wound and horrible burns that terrified the children, who ran away screaming when they saw him, waded through the mud from one group to the other, his hat dripping water, politely asking if there were any holders of foreign passports, examining their papers, ordering the Hungarian gendarmes to take some of them aside. Eichmann and his colleagues hated him, accused him of indulgence, of lack of discernment, and it was true, too, that many Hungarian Jews, for a few thousand pengö, bought foreign passports, Romanian ones especially, the easiest to get, but Grell was just doing his job, it wasn’t up to him to judge whether or not these passports had been obtained legally, and after all, if the Romanian attachés were corrupt, that was the problem of the authorities in Bucharest, not our own, if they wanted to accept or tolerate all these Jews, so much the worse for them. I knew Grell a little, for in Budapest, from time to time, I had a drink or went out to dinner with him; among the German officials, almost everyone avoided him or fled him, even his own colleagues, probably because of his atrocious appearance, but also because of his severe and extremely disconcerting fits of depression; as for me, that didn’t bother me so much, maybe because his wound was in the end rather similar to my own, he too had received a bullet in the head, but with much worse consequences than me, we didn’t talk, by tacit agreement, about the circumstances, but when he had had a little to drink he said I was lucky, and he was right, I was insanely lucky, to have an intact face and a pretty much intact head too, whereas he, if he drank too much, and he often drank too much, exploded into extraordinary fits of rage, almost epileptic attacks, he changed color, began screaming, once, with a café waiter, I even had to restrain him forcibly from breaking all the dishes, he came to apologize the next day, contrite, depressed, and I tried to reassure him, I understood him well. There, in that transit center, he came to see me, looked at Wisliceny, whom he also knew, and just said: “Filthy business, isn’t it?” He was right, but there was worse. To try to understand what happened during the selections, I went to Auschwitz. I arrived at night, by the Vienna-Cracow train; well before the station, to the left of the train, you could see a line of points of white light, the barbed-wire spotlights perched on whitewashed poles, and behind that line, more darkness, an abyss giving off that abominable stench of burned flesh, which wafted through the car. The passengers, mainly soldiers or functionaries returning to their posts, crowded around the windows, often with their wives. Comments flew: “It’s burning nicely,” a civilian said to his wife. At the station, I was welcomed by an Untersturmführer who quartered me in a room at the Haus der Waffen-SS. The next morning I saw Höss again. In the beginning of May, after Eichmann’s inspection, as I said, the WVHA had again drastically modified the organization of the Auschwitz complex. Liebehenschel, certainly the best Kommandant the camp had known, had been replaced by a useless idiot, Sturmbannführer Bär, a former pastry cook who had for a time been Pohl’s adjutant; Hartjenstein, in Birkenau, had swapped places with the Kommandant of Natzweiler, Hauptsturmführer Kramer; and Höss, finally, for the duration of the Hungarian Einsatz, supervised the others. It seemed obvious to me, speaking to him, that he thought his appointment concerned only extermination: while the Jews were arriving at the rate of sometimes four trains of three thousand units each every day, he hadn’t had any new barracks built to receive them, but on the contrary had put all his considerable energy into repairing the crematoriums and extending the tracks into the very midst of Birkenau, of which he was especially proud, so they were able to unload the cars at the foot of the gas chambers. With the first convoy of the day, he took me to watch the selection and the rest of the operations. The new ramp passed under the guard tower of the entrance building to Birkenau and went on, with three branches, to the crematoriums at the rear. A huge crowd was swarming on the dirt platform—noisy, poorer and more colorful than the people I had seen in the transit center, these Jews must have come from Transylvania, the women and girls wore multicolor scarves, the men, still in coats, had big, bushy moustaches and unshaven cheeks. There wasn’t too much disorder; for a long time I observed the doctors who carried out the selection (Wirths wasn’t there), they spent one or two seconds on each case, at the slightest doubt it was no, they seemed also to refuse many women who looked perfectly able-bodied to me; when I pointed this out to him, Höss told me they were following his instructions, the barracks were overcrowded, there wasn’t any more room to put people in, the factories were making a fuss, weren’t taking these Jews fast enough, and the Jews were piling up, epidemics were beginning again, and since Hungary kept sending them every day, he was forced to make room, he had already carried out several selections among the inmates, he had also tried to liquidate the Gypsy camp, but there had been problems and it had been put off till later, he had asked for permission to empty the Theresienstadt “family camp” and hadn’t yet received it, so in the meantime he could really only select the best, in any case if he took any more they would soon die of disease. He explained all this to me calmly, his empty blue eyes aimed at the crowd and the ramp, absent. I felt hopeless, it was even more difficult to talk sense to this man than to Eichmann. He insisted on showing me the killing installations and explaining everything to me: he had increased the Sonderkommandos from 220 to 860 men, but they had overestimated the capacity of the Kremas; it wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded, and to remedy that he had had to have incineration trenches dug, and by driving the Sonderkommandos on, that did the trick, he had reached an average of six thousand units per day, which meant that some had to wait sometimes till the next day, if they were especially overwhelmed. It was appalling, the smoke and the flames in the trenches, fed by gasoline and the fat from the bodies, must have been visible for miles all around, I asked him if he didn’t think it might make trouble: “Oh, the authorities of the Kreis are worried, but that’s not my problem.” To listen to him, nothing of what should have been was his problem. Exasperated, I asked to see the barracks. The new sector, planned originally as a transit camp for Hungarian Jews, was still incomplete; thousands of women, already haggard and thin although they hadn’t been there long, were herded into long, stinking stables; many couldn’t find a place and slept outside, in the mud; even though they didn’t have enough striped uniforms to clothe them, they still didn’t let them keep their own clothes, but dressed them in rags taken from the Kanada; and I saw some women completely naked, or dressed just in a shirt from which two yellow, flabby legs stuck out, sometimes covered in excrement. Hardly surprising that the Jägerstab was complaining! Höss vaguely shifted the blame to the other camps, which according to him were refusing to accept the transports, out of lack of room. All day I surveyed the camp, section by section, barrack after barrack; the men were hardly in better shape than the women. I inspected the registers: no one, of course, had thought to respect the basic rule of warehousing, first in, first out; whereas some arrivals didn’t even spend twenty-four hours in the camp before being sent on, others stagnated there for three weeks, broke down, and often died, which increased the losses even more. But for each problem I pointed out to him, Höss unfailingly found someone else to blame. His mentality, formed by the prewar years, was completely unsuited to the job, that was plain as day; but he wasn’t the only one to blame, it was also the fault of the people who had sent him to replace Liebehenschel, who, from the little I knew of him, would have gone about it completely differently. I continued on till evening. It rained several times during the day, brief and refreshing spring rains, which made the dust die down but also increased the misery of the inmates who stayed out in the open, even if most of them thought above all of collecting a few drops to drink. The entire rear of the camp was dominated by fire and smoke, even beyond the quiet expanse of the Birkenwald. At night, endless columns of women, children, and old people kept coming up from the ramp along a long barbed-wire corridor, toward Kremas III and IV, where they would wait their turn patiently under the birch trees, and the beautiful light of the setting sun skimmed the treetops of the Birkenwald, stretched to infinity the shadows of the rows of barracks, made the dark gray of the smoke gleam with the opalescent yellow of Dutch paintings, cast gentle reflections on the puddles and pools of water, tinted the bricks of the Kommandantur a bright, cheerful orange, and suddenly I had had enough and I ditched Höss there and went back to the Haus, where I spent the night writing a virulent report on the deficiencies of the camp. While I was at it, I wrote another one on the Hungarian part of the operation and, in my anger, didn’t hesitate to describe Eichmann’s attitude as obstructionism. (The negotiations with the Hungarian Jews had already been under way for two months, the offer for the trucks must have taken place a month earlier, for my visit to Auschwitz happened a few days before the Normandy landings; Becher had been complaining for a long time about the uncooperative attitude of Eichmann, who seemed to both of us to be conducting the negotiations only for the sake of form.) Eichmann is clouded by his logistician’s mentality, I wrote. He is incapable of understanding or integrating complex aims into his approach. And I know on good authority that after these reports, which I sent to Brandt for the Reichsführer and directly to Pohl, Pohl summoned Eichmann to the WVHA and reprimanded him in direct and blunt terms about the condition of the consignments and the unacceptable number of dead and sick people; but Eichmann, in his stubbornness, contented himself with replying that that was the jurisdiction of the Hungarians. Against such inertia, there was nothing to be done. I was sinking into depression, and my body felt its effect: I slept badly, a sleep troubled by unpleasant dreams and interrupted three or four times a night by thirst, or else a desire to urinate that turned into insomnia; in the morning, I woke up with splitting headaches, which ruined my concentration for the day, sometimes forcing me to interrupt work and stretch out on a sofa for an hour with a cold compress on my forehead. But no matter how tired I was, I feared the return of night: periods of insomnia during which I vainly went over my problems, or my increasingly anguished dreams, I don’t know what tormented me the most. Here is one of these dreams, which struck me especially: the Rabbi of Bremen had emigrated to Palestine. But when he heard that the Germans were killing the Jews, he refused to believe it. He went to the German consulate and asked for a visa for the Reich, to see for himself if the rumors were justified. Of course, he came to a bad end. In the meantime, the scene changed: I found myself, a specialist in Jewish affairs, waiting for an audience with the Reichsführer, who wants to learn certain things from me. I am quite nervous, for it is obvious that if he is not satisfied with my replies, I am a dead man. This scene takes place in a large, dark castle. I meet Himmler in one room; he shakes my hand, a small, unremarkable, calm man, dressed in a long coat, with his eternal pince-nez with its round lenses. Then I lead him down a long hallway whose walls are covered with books. These books must belong to me, for the Reichsführer seems very impressed by the library and congratulates me on it. Then we find ourselves in another room in the process of discussing things he wants to know. Later on, it seems to me that we are outside, in the midst of a city in flames. My fear of Heinrich Himmler is gone, I feel entirely safe with him, but now I’m afraid of the bombs, of the fire. We have to sprint through the burning courtyard of a building. The Reichsführer takes my hand: “Trust me. Whatever happens, I won’t let you go. We’ll cross together or we’ll fail together.” I don’t understand why he wants to protect the Judelein, the little Jew I am, but I trust him, I know he’s sincere, I could even feel love for this strange man.