‘Your pretty town,’ he told them, ‘so clean, so neat, brimming with cultural memories, the heart of classical and enlightened Germany, seems not to have had the slightest qualm about living in the smoke of Nazi crematoria!’
The women (a good number of them at least) were unable to restrain their tears and begged for forgiveness with theatrical gestures. Some of them obligingly went so far as to feel quite faint. The adolescents took refuge in despairing silence. The old men looked away, clearly unwilling to listen to any of this.
The heat of mid-afternoon. Almost out of Weimar. We walk through a light industrial estate on the north-western fringe of the town.
Soon we’re out in the countryside, on a dusty track heading towards the green curve of the Ettersberg. An occasional line of poplars, a dozen or so, the odd house, neatly tiled roofs, dogs come out sleepily to investigate us as we pass their gates. In all probability this is the path that Goethe and his close friend Eckermann would have taken on their regular walks 200 years ago. Their favourite ramble took them out of the hurly-burly of Weimar and onto the Ettersberg, where they would have earnest discussions about the meaning of existence, the origins of language and the nature of religious belief. We skirt a village just below us, and pause by a small stream a little further on, in the shade of some willows to eat. Just the sound of the water, and a distant tractor from the farm on the hillside beyond.
Semprún: With his former professor, as he dies in Block 56, the invalids’ block
Week after week, I’d watched the black light of death dawning in their eyes. We shared it, that certainty, like a morsel of bread. Death was approaching, veiling their eyes, and we shared it like … a sign of brotherhood. The way one shares what remains of one’s life … The only difference among us was the time we still had left, the distance yet to cover.
I placed a hand (lightly, gently) on the emaciated shoulder of Maurice Halbwachs: the bone was almost crumbly, on the verge of breaking. I talked to him about the classes he used to teach at the Sorbonne. In the past, elsewhere, outside, in another life … Dying, he would smile, fixing his eyes on me like a brother. I would have long talks with him about his books.
Those first Sundays, Maurice Halbwachs could still speak. He was anxious to hear how things were going, to have news of the war. He asked me – the last pedagogical concern of the professor whose student I’d been at the Sorbonne – if I was already on the right track, if I’d found my vocation. I replied that history interested me. He nodded; why not? …
Soon, however, he no longer had the strength to utter a single word. He could only listen to me, and only at the cost of superhuman effort.
He listened; I spoke of spring drawing to a close, and passed on good news from the battlefields, and reminded him of what he had written in his books, the lessons of his teaching.
Dying, he would smile, gazing at me like a brother.
On the last Sunday, Maurice Halbwachs did not even have the strength to listen. Barely enough to open his eyes …
I took the hand of the dying man … In answer, I felt only the lightest pressure from his fingers, an almost imperceptible message … Professor Maurice Halbwachs had arrived at the limit of human resistance …
Then, seized with panic, not knowing whether I might call upon some god to accompany Maurice Halbwachs, yet aware of the need for a prayer, trying to control my voice … I recited a few lines by Baudelaire. It was the only thing I could think of.
‘O mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre …’fn5
His eyes brightened slightly, as though with astonishment. I continued to recite. When I reached the line ‘nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis des rayons! …’fn6 a delicate tremor passed over the lips of Maurice Halbwachs. Dying, he smiled, gazing at me like a brother …
We walk on. We turn to the north and start up the gentle hill that is the Ettersberg, climbing towards the thick fringe of dark green trees at the top, into the Buchenwald. Looking back to the east we can see Weimar in the distance, and to the south the plains of Thuringia. Reaching the forest, we take a track westwards which follows the contour of the top of the hill, our eyes now searching for the first signs of the camp, though the trees. Mainly beech, but also oak, they’re so thick it’s hard to see very far ahead. Eventually the track descends to a long, straight road that must have been made when the camp was constructed in 1934, the second concentration camp to be built in Germany, after Dachau in 1933. We’re on the other side of the Ettersberg now, here and there the odd stump of concrete (is this all that remains of what Semprún describes as ‘the Avenue of the Eagles’?). Finally, at the end of this deserted road, just beyond a ruined petrol station, the fence of the camp, and the main gate emerging before us. Flanked by a guardhouse, the gate itself seems strangely small (at variance with Semprún’s memory of passing through ‘the huge gate’), with the mocking message above, which greeted all new prisoners – ‘Jedem Das Seine’.fn7 Semprún and his fellow prisoners had arrived at night, exhausted after days of transportation, greeted by a cacophony of violence: ‘uproar, the dogs, the blows from rifle butts, going through the mud on the double, beneath the harsh glare of searchlights, the entire length of the Avenue of the Eagles.’
Under the gate, and those terrible words still inscribed above us, we pause. The counting is over: 10,166 yards from Goethe’s Gartenhaus to the gates of Buchenwald. A little under six miles separates these two realities – Goethe writing in his Gartenhaus and Semprún arriving at these gates in terror.
*
It is early evening now, and we’re surprised to see that the camp is still open to visitors. But the car park is virtually empty, all the coaches have gone back to the city. We walk through the gate and are astonished by the vast extent of the place, stretching downwards across the hillside. Perhaps the size of half a dozen Trafalgar Squares, yet totally surrounded by the forest, visible only from the air, or the villages dotted on the plains below to the north. In this whole expanse we count only four figures – a mother and two children, and an elderly man walking alone.
Semprún: With his friend Albert – the view from the camp
We froze on the threshold of the hut, just as we were stepping back into the fresh air, Albert and I. Standing stock-still at the boundary between the stinking murkiness inside and the April sunlight outdoors. In front of us, blue sky, faintly streaked with fleecy clouds. Around us, the mostly green mass of the forest, beyond the huts and tents of the Little Camp. Off in the distance, the mountains of Thuringia. In short, the timeless landscape Goethe and Eckermann must have contemplated during their walks on the Ettersberg.
For the first time in my life the natural world, the beauty of trees, seems a mockery. In this place of such brutality, wouldn’t the fact the trees just carried on coming into leaf in the spring have seemed like a savage kind of indifference? The birds, at least, had the decency to disappear from this unnatural place, where smoke from the crematorium ovens choked the air. Today, though, about twenty little finches are chattering away above us. We walk across the camp, pausing here and there, to look at a sign telling us what once existed here. With the exception of the gatehouse, the crematorium and a storage depot, virtually all the former buildings within the camp have been levelled to the ground. But, with precision, the prior position of each hut and building is marked in rectangles of gravel, and named. The power of creating sense from absence.