Once, in America, I took this shabby piece of paper out and showed it to a Chilean writer I had just met, a burly middle-aged man, bullish, combative. His father, an advisor in one of Allende’s ministries, had been arrested after the coup, was held for days and tortured. The family were given twenty-four hours to leave Chile, but couldn’t stay together – his brothers and sisters were dispersed with distant relatives across France, Germany and the United States. When I gave him the red paper with Allende’s words typed out, he couldn’t believe it that these words had travelled with me for so long. That the suffering of his country thousands of miles away was remembered by a stranger, and recorded (‘recordar’, from the Latin ‘recordis’, to pass back through the heart).fn1 He hugged me and thanked me. Solidarity. In that instant I thought I understood the meaning of the word.
*
My mind is still in Chile tonight. Is it in the numbers killed that we judge a catastrophe? What if the bodies have never been found? The thousands of the ‘disappeared’. And how do we consider the systematic use of torture by the military? And the legacy of this horror in people still alive today; once tortured, how can you ever trust again? More than 30,000 people tortured by the Pinochet regime. Electric shocks to the genitals, rats and dogs let loose on prisoners. And Kissinger, the US Secretary of State at that time, could dare to say, in response to attacks on this regime for their multiple human rights violations: ‘Please, spare us your political science lectures!’3 A remark which no doubt contributed to his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize – one of the greatest acts of (unintentional) satire in the twentieth century.
But perhaps the most shocking element of all: this attack on Chileans did not come out of a blue sky from an enemy living far away, it came from within the society, led by the military – though with the extensive support of the CIA and US and British intelligence. And so the perpetrators of these monstrous crimes were not vaporised, as in New York, in a moment together with their victims, but were treated as part of the ‘international community’ and continued to receive full diplomatic status. Reagan hosting Pinochet in Washington, Thatcher later inviting the mass killer to tea at Downing Street. Even after the return to democracy in Chile, only a tiny minority were ever held accountable for what they’d done. Most of the perpetrators still walk free. The final insult to the relatives of the dead and disappeared – to have to pass the torturers and killers of your children in the streets of Santiago.
2
The Use and Abuse of Words: Jan Karski and Albert Speer
I don’t think Albert and Augusto would have got on, if they’d ever met. Albert probably would have found Augusto uncouth in that military way, perhaps even uncivilised, a bit of a thug. Augusto would have regarded Albert as stuck-up, superior. Yet, curiously, Albert was responsible for a different scale of killing and suffering than Augusto ever achieved. The man in the suit was vastly more dangerous than the man in the uniform. Speer and Pinochet. An unlikely coupling. The only label they share is that unhelpful word ‘perpetrator’ – unhelpful because like so many quasi-scientific labels, the effect is to distance us from the human, and create a flat and unemotional world of facts, of objects, of reports. A world that both Speer, the architect and planner, and Pinochet, the military man, would recognise and feel comfortable in. And there lies the problem, or one of them. It seems to me a mistake to use the language of the perpetrators to try to understand their behaviour.
But to what extent is there a real desire to understand them? Speer was a central figure in the evolution of this work many years ago, yet now I feel an aversion, bordering on repulsion, towards him. I feel a strong disinclination to give him any further attention. Some of this is to do with Speer’s vanity. That behind the supposed humility at the Nuremberg Trials and during his imprisonment at Spandau, behind the charm he displayed towards Gitta Sereny, I have an instinct of a man of almost insatiable ambition and ego. And there is something deeply offensive about the sheer volume of writing, the dozens of books, the millions of words that have been expended trying to unravel the ‘mystery’ of Speer. Especially in relation to the invisibility of the vast majority of his victims. Not to mention the fact that through his writing and media outings he made a significant amount of money, enabling him to live out his days in considerable comfort. It is only in the last couple of years that I have begun to realise how much he revelled in such attention, how much he needed this spotlight.
My anger towards him is accentuated at the moment because I have just finished reading Jan Karski’s remarkable memoir, Story of a Secret State, about his experience in the Polish undergound in the Second World War. Karski and Speer were near contemporaries – Karski born in 1914, Speer born in 1905 – and shared more than their experiences of living through the war. Both came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds: Karski a family of entrepreneurs and merchants, Speer a family of architects and industrialists. Both were somewhat reserved, polite young men, groomed to be part of the ruling classes of their respective countries, Poland and Germany, with bright futures ahead of them by the mid-1930s. The young men, smartly dressed, may even have passed each other on the streets of London in 1936, where Karski was seconded to the Polish Embassy for a year, and where Speer was working on redesigns for the German Embassy in Carlton Terrace. By summer 1939, Karski, with his master’s degree in law and diplomatic science, was already establishing a reputation as a young diplomat, having served in posts in Germany, Switzerland and Britain; Speer, by now Hitler’s architect, was basking in the glory of having just completed the new Chancellery building in Berlin in record time. But after 1 September 1939 and the German invasion of Poland, the shape of their lives, and the moral choices they would now have to make, could not have been more different.
*
By a strange quirk of history, on the day the Germans begin their attack, Karski, a reservist in the Polish cavalry, is stationed in an army barracks in Oświęcim – the same barracks that the Germans later appropriated to become the Auschwitz I concentration camp. Karski is up early on 1 September, preparing for a day’s riding in the local countryside. He is shaving at 5.05 a.m. when two huge explosions shake the barracks – part of the very first wave of bombing of the Second World War. The start of Germany’s first blitzkrieg. The camp is already in chaos, the horses panicking and breaking out of the stables. The Luftwaffe then returns with wave after wave of incendiary bombs. He describes the barracks being evacuated with the German advance imminent. And he gives a remarkable detail here, which goes some way to understanding more about one of the reasons why the Germans chose this town as the centre for their regional concentration-camp system – he explains that as the Polish soldiers approach the station in Oświęcim to retreat, they are shot at from the houses nearby by German settlers living in the buildings opposite the station. As their train eventually pulls out to Krakow, Karski takes one last look at ‘the treacherous windows of Oświęcim’.
After this he is arrested by the Russians, advancing from the east; later he manages to secure his release from a Soviet camp in the Ukraine, avoiding the Katyn massacre by the skin of his teeth, and returns to Poland to work underground in the resistance movement – the most organised and coherent of all such opposition to Nazi occupation in the Second World War. His intelligence, courage and phenomenal memory are soon recognised and he becomes a courier for the Polish government in exile, first taking messages (via extremely hazardous mountain routes) to France, then, after France’s defeat, to Gibraltar, and from there on to Britain and the United States.