We find the outline of the infirmary block, no buildings remain, but it’s totally vivid in my mind’s eye – the place where Semprún and his comrades listened to the Sonderkommando survivor on that wintry Sunday, bringing a message from Auschwitz which they could not comprehend. I walk down some steps, surprised to see some of the original floor tiles and stones of the infirmary, wondering where the isolation compound would have been. And then I look down, suddenly assaulted by an object I cannot believe I’m seeing. To the right of where the doorway would have been, on the ground, there’s a heavily rusted metal boot-scraper, almost horseshoe-shaped – and I realise it’s the same iron scraper which Sempruún used to get the snow off his boots on that day. The smallest thing, and yet the force of transmission over fifty-five years halts me in my tracks. As if, in the middle of this emptiness, Semprún is suddenly there, at my shoulder, gesturing. At a moment like this the past and present become a single, fused reality.
Semprún: His return to Buchenwald in 1992 – a discovery
Semprún only went back to Buchenwald once, in March 1992, as part of a German television documentary on the camp made by Peter Merseburger. Semprún was accompanied by his two grandsons, Thomas and Mathieu Landman. They meet a guide at the camp, a ‘taciturn and bearded’ forty-year-old man. Semprún is describing his arrival at the camp and the moment when his profession is registered – a moment of critical importance, which the young Semprún doesn’t realise at the time. The German prisoner who registers him (a communist like himself, Semprún guessed) doesn’t want to put him down as a ‘student’. Semprún continues with his story, explaining to his grandsons and the guide:
‘Then, probably fed up with my stubbornness, he waved me aside, to make way for the next in line … And he wrote “student” on my card, rather angrily I think.’
That was when the guide spoke up, calmly, evenly, but firmly.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not what he wrote!’
We turned toward him, transfixed.
‘He didn’t write down “student” but something completely different!’
The man reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.
‘I’ve read your books,’ he told me … ‘So, knowing that you were coming today, I went looking for your registration card in the Buchenwald files.’
He smiled briefly.
‘You know how Germans love order! So I found your card, just as it was filled out on the night you arrived.’
He held the piece of paper out to me.
‘Here’s a photocopy of it! You can see for yourself that the German comrade did not write down “student”!’
I took the paper with trembling hands. No, he hadn’t written Student, the unknown German comrade. No doubt guided by some phonetic association, he’d written Stukkateur. I looked at my card, my hands were shaking.
44904
Semprún, George Polit.
10.12.23 Madrid Span.
Stukkateur
29th Jan. 1944
That’s what was on my registration card, filled out the night I arrived in Buchenwald … The simple fact of having been registered as a stucco worker probably saved me from the massive transports being sent at that time to Dora, the construction site of an underground factory where the V-1 and V-2 rockets were to be assembled. A hellish place … I held my registration form in my hand, a half-century later. I was shaking. The Merseburgers, Thomas and Mathieu Landman, they’d all come over to me. Dumbfounded by this unexpected final twist to my story, they stared at that absurd and magical word, Stukkateur, which had quite possibly saved my life. I remembered the look in the German Communist’s eyes – a look from the far side of death – as he’d tried to explain why it was better to be a skilled worker in Buchenwald.
Semprún’s memory is reliable. In January and February 1944 the Dora plant (only forty miles north-west of Buchenwald in the Thuringian mountains) was working at the height of its capacity, and with a staggeringly high level of deaths. Albert Speer, by this time the minister for armaments and weapons production, had visited the underground site only seven weeks before Semprún’s arrival, and had found the conditions ‘barbarous’ for the prisoners working there and that the ‘mortality among them was extraordinarily high’.3 It was one of the only moments in Speer’s life when he, momentarily, seems to have understood the human cost of the abstract and technocratic world he ran from his office in Berlin. It triggered a physical and emotional breakdown that put him in hospital in January 1944 – the same month that Semprún’s anonymous registrar saved him from transportation to Dora.
It’s time for us to leave. We find the site where ‘Goethe’s Oak’ once stood, where he supposedly not only walked with Eckermann but also met his lover Carlotta von Stein. We read that Himmler deliberately sited the camp here because of these associations, as if to taunt the intellectual descendants of Goethe, who would inhabit this place of madness – ‘You see where your Enlightenment got you! All your brilliant international ideas, your philosophers, how will they help you now?’ I later find out that less than a mile away, hidden by the forest to the east, is the grand hunting lodge Schloss Ettersburg (today a hotel), built for Duke Wilhelm Ernst in the early 1700s, and a place where Bach would regularly organise concerts for his patron. On the way back to the main gate, we skirt the dark grey crematorium building with its towering chimney still there. Incomprehension, still. We may know in our minds what happened, but it is another thing to see the chimney here on this summer’s day, starkly etched against the blue sky – another level of knowing. We take a last look over the distant plains of Thuringia on this summer’s evening, and I read a final passage from Semprún.
Semprún: Coming home
The same wind, the everlasting wind, was blowing across the eternity of the Ettersberg.
We had arrived by car, with Sabine and Peter Merseburger, to find the televison crew waiting for us. We walked down the Avenue of the Eagles that leads to the entrance of Buchenwald. But there were no more Hitlerian eagles, no more tall columns lofting them into the sky once darkened by smoke from the crematory. There was the road, and a few barracks remained in the SS quarters. The massive entrance stood still, surmounted by the watchtower. We walked through the gate, accompanied by the bearded guide who has awaited us there. I brushed my hand across the letters of the wrought-iron inscription on the gate, JEDEM DAS SEINE: to each his due.
I cannot say that I was moved; that word is not strong enough. I realised I was coming home. It was not hope I had to abandon, at the gate to that hell; on the contrary. I was abandoning my old age, my disappointments, the mistakes and failures of life. I was coming home. What I mean is, home to my world when I was twenty: its angers, passions, laughter, curiosity. Above all, its hope. I was abandoning all the deadly despair that accumulates in the soul, throughout a lifetime, to rediscover the hopefulness I knew at twenty, surrounded by death.
We had stepped through the gate; the wind on the Ettersberg hit me full in the face. Unable to speak I felt like running madly at full tilt across the square, rushing down to the Little Camp, to the site of Block 56, where Maurice Halbwachs had died, to the infirmary hut where I’d closed the eyes of Diego Morales. I couldn’t say a word, I stood motionless, struck by the dramatic beauty of the open space spread out before me. I placed a hand on the shoulder of Thomas Landman, who was by my side. I had dedicated ‘Quel beau dimanche!’ to him so that later, after my death, he might remember my memories of Buchenwald. It would be easier for him now. Harder, too, probably, because less abstract.