BOOK ONE
JOURNEYS INTO THE WORLD OF THE DESK KILLERS
Preface
First Day, White Page
January 2006, Suffolk
Why are we drawn back to particular places?
Since I was a boy I have been returning here. To this unremarkable stretch of shingle on the Suffolk coast – vast grey skies, the sea, usually a darker shade of grey. And undulating waves of pebbles, interrupted only by tussocks of coarse grass, somehow holding on against the bullying winds. We came here to fly kites once, but the wind defeated us, twisting the string into a dozen knots. I’ve brought many friends to this place over the years, trying not to build up expectations, wanting the peculiar force of the landscape to work on them wordlessly.
The twisting road that leads here is part of it. Arriving at night, as I did yesterday, it is like sinking into the beginning of a story, the story that captivated you as a child, that you would read again and again, because the absorption into that world was so entire that, momentarily, all else would fall away. Off the motorway. Over the estuary. Round the town that wants to be a city, with its scatterings of drive-through burger bars and superstores off the ring road. Onto a main road. The white lines finally fade. A long, straight stretch through woods of pine and silver birch. Through a last village. And then the little road, barely signed at all. The road where you never meet another vehicle. Driving in a trance now, slowing to twenty, fifteen miles per hour. A tunnel of trees. The right-angle bend sweeps round. The telegraph pole where the barn owl was. To the left, a final sway the other way, out into the open again, over a small, white bridge. Tall reeds now on both sides. And finally the road becomes a track, and the track ends at the blackness of the sea. As the engine fades the certainty of that soft roar of sea and wind. And a flickering understanding that the end and the beginning are the same.
*
I am sitting in the window of a small cottage that feels more like the cabin of a boat. In front of me a January sea, two upturned dinghies, a flock of birds I cannot identify flitting in crazed gusts, a red and white plastic bag cartwheeling just too fast for me to read the writing on it. Only two figures seen all day – a bearded man walking his dog, and now a distant figure, or rather a head and shoulders above the line of shingle, flying a huge, modern kite, purple and blue, that resembles a parachute. Having more success than we ever did.
And the paradox that despite the buffeting of the winds on all sides, I feel a sense of stillness for the first time in months. I always knew that the writing could only start here, and probably only at this time of year – the emptiness of January. Looking to the east, beyond the grey strip of the North Sea, which used to be known as ‘the German Ocean’. And, in that sea, there still exist, in minuscule particles, the pulverised stones of Spandau prison dumped into these waters after its last prisoner died. All this time trying to understand violence, and its relationship to those who work at their desks, at their computers. Them. Us. You. Me. I reflect on the last decade of journeying and attempting to grapple with this subject. Ten years of visiting archives, walking through sites of extermination, reading interviews with survivors and perpetrators, and thousands of pages of testimony. And yet, as I begin to write, my screen is frozen. A white page. I’m rapidly trying to scan the multiplicity of images and sounds which inhabit me, searching for a way to begin. These understandings and experiences which have haunted me for years … Voices, places, walks and faces jostle for attention as I write these words on a bitingly cold January day:
- ‘It’s hard to recognise, but it was here. They burned people here.’
- Zdzisław in his hut at Chełmno, fighting his personal battle against forgetting with the aid of handwritten pages that few will ever read.
- The minutes of the Wannsee Conference, the miraculous, single surviving document – one copy out of thirty.
- The killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The plumes of fire and smoke that have choked a land for over forty years. And we have all let this continue.
- Maria Saro-Wiwa singing the Ogoni anthem, in a broken voice, to a small crowd gathered by the Thames to remember her husband who died trying to save his land and people from being destroyed by oil.
- Saurer’s corporate communications director protesting from her comfortable office, ‘But we have nothing to do with that company now.’
- Talking to Gitta Sereny about Albert Speer, and that single line: ‘I loved machines more than people.’
- Walking from Goethe’s house, out of Weimar, over the Ettersberg and into the beech forest. ‘Buchen-wald’. You can walk it in an hour and a half.
- And Walter Stier, the railway official who timetabled the trains to Treblinka insists again, ‘I just sat at my desk … I was just a desk man.’1
- Our fingers freezing in the snows of Monowice, trying to read Levi’s words in the dying light.
All of these dancing in my head, defying me to begin without them.
PART ONE
* * *
Mapping the Past
1
Explorations: Maps and the Curiosity of a Child’s Mind
A summer’s evening, I’m five or six years old. It’s terrible to have to go to bed when it’s still light outside. Even more terrible when I can hear waves of music, laughter, the clink of wine glasses and the excited chatter of my parents and their friends, lapping up to the bedroom from below …
I can hold out no longer. I get out of bed, tiptoe out of the room I share with my brother, and go to the top of the stairs, which curve away to the sitting room downstairs. Through the bannisters I can see my father balancing a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, talking to two colleagues from the university – I notice the woman is wearing a long, swirly, purple and black dress, and she’s smiling and smoking too, nodding vigorously. My mother is on the other side of the room, in her summery dress, light greens and blues that shimmer like water, she’s slipping a record out of a paper sleeve, and lowering the needle. More music. This time, a thunderous bass, and drums, reverberating around the room, then African singers chanting. The one we love to dance to. I creep down five stairs, to the little landing. I now can see my glamorous London aunt is here too, and her American husband, pouring drinks. I didn’t even know they were coming tonight. This gives me a chance … if I can just make her see me. But now she’s sitting on the bottom stair, facing away from me, talking to somebody I don’t know, and all I can see is the back of her head, and two, huge circles of silver earrings, which dance as she talks. I bump down the remaining stairs and tap her on the shoulder. I can still see her smile and surprise as she turns, ‘Hello, little one! Up a bit late, aren’t you?’, but it’s spoken softly, almost conspiratorially. ‘I can’t sleep, and … and I, I heard the music and …’ But all of this is unnecessary with my aunt. She still remembers the unfairness of childhood, the restrictions, and she’s always liked breaking the rules. I don’t have to explain anything to her, I don’t have to spell it out.