I placed a hand on Thomas’s shoulder, as though calling him to witness in his turn. A day would come, relatively soon, when there would no longer be a single survivor of Buchenwald left. There would be no more immediate memory of Buchenwald. No longer would anyone be able to say, with words springing from physical recollection and not some theoretical reconstruction, what it was like: the hunger, the exhaustion, the anguish, the blinding presence of absolute Evil – precisely insofar as it lies hidden in all of us, as the condition of our freedom. No longer would anyone be indelibly marked, body and soul, by the smell of burning flesh from the crematory ovens …
I reflected that my most personal memory, the one kept most to myself … the one that makes me what I am … that distinguishes me from other people, at least, from everyone else … that cuts me off from the human race – with a few hundred exceptions – even as it establishes my identity … that burns in my memory with a flame of abject horror … and pride too … is the undying, stifling memory of the smell from the crematory: stale, nauseating … the odour of burned flesh on the Ettersberg hill.
A day is coming, though, when no one will actually remember this smell: it will be nothing more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of an odour. Odourless therefore.
*
As we’re heading out of the main gate – we’re the last to leave and a security guard is waiting, ironically, to lock us out of this prison camp – J. calls us over to the gatehouse. It’s past 8 p.m. now, and we agree, through a series of signals, to end our silence – it’s been over seven hours now. Kay has found the place where the SS had their little zoo, just outside the perimeter fence, and J. has discovered something else, inside the gatehouse, but just visible. We peer through a window to a model of the camp that J. has spotted, and soon realise another reality of Buchenwald – the industrial section of the camp was originally massive, as large as the whole of this barracks zone. Yet, as we walk to where this area was marked on the model, all we can find is one small notice showing where the DAW factory once stood – Deutsche Ausrustungswerke, where prisoners worked as slave labourers making equipment for the German war machine. Three hundred yards further south was the Gustloff armaments plant where even more Buchenwald prisoners were forced to work. Again, just as at Auschwitz-Buna, the SS saw the prisoners at the adjacent camps as expendable objects to be used in war production – whether armaments and equipment here (joint ventures in collaboration with DAW and Gustloff), or synthetic fuel and rubber at Buna-Monowitz (a joint venture with IG Farben). In both cases the genocidal and the corporate working hand in hand.
Yet, this key component of what Buchenwald was – the corporate/industrial side – is not memorialised at all. The vast majority of the factories have disappeared under the forest, without so much as a sign. Again, as at Auschwitz, it’s as if this central part of the Holocaust – the collusion of the SS and corporations – is not part of the desired narrative. The camps where prisoners slept are remembered; the places where they worked, often until death, are forgotten. The fact that these ‘workplaces’ were funded, constructed, run and insured by companies that are still part of our economies and societies – Bayer, Agfa, BASF, Hoechst, Siemens, Allianz, Deutsche Bank – probably tells us all we need to know about the political convenience of selective remembering, and selective forgetting. Was this why, I wonder, Primo Levi, that most morally indefatigable of men, was working on precisely this subject at the time of his death? The sequel to The Drowned and the Saved was going to ‘investigate the German industries (BASF, Siemens, Bayer) involved in the Nazi camps’.4
Levi followed IG Farben’s post-war developments closely, and was shocked by the supposed ‘rehabilitation’ of many of the senior figures in the company. In 1953 he and 10,000 other former slave labourers started a claim for damages from the company (in liquidation). In 1959 the German courts awarded damages – the princely sum of 122.70 Deutschmarks to each survivor. We also learn that in his post-war role as head of varnish production and a buyer at Siva, his chemical company, Levi, from time to time, met former representatives of IG Farben and other German companies who had operated at Auschwitz. He had dealings with Hoechst and Siemens, and in July 1954 he met managers from Bayer (also formerly part of IG Farben) at their headquarters in Leverkusen near Cologne. On this first occasion he deliberately confronted these men with the past of their company – this longed-for encounter he later called ‘the hour of colloquy’:
Levi went out of his way to ruffle sensitivities at Bayer by introducing himself to former IG Farben industrialists, ‘Levi, how do you do’, articulating the words carefully, the Jewish surname first … When a Bayer director observed that it was ‘most unusual’ for an Italian to speak German, Levi countered: ‘My name is Levi. I am a Jew, and I learned your language at Auschwitz’. A stuttering apology was followed by a silence.fn8
The heat of the day is still with us as we retrace our steps out of the forest to the brow of the Ettersberg. We decide to make a short detour here, down to the looming grey tower of a memorial we’d seen on the way up – when we get closer we see a huge bronze sculpture of figures representing the liberated prisoners of Buchenwald. It’s done in full socialist-realist mode, with raised fists and flags, completed, we later discover, in 1958 by the then East German government to celebrate resistance against fascism. It is impossible to look at this monument now without a bitter taste of irony, because the ‘liberation’ of the Nazi camp in 1945 was not the end of Buchenwald. After the war, when Germany was split into the four military occupation zones – Britain in the north-west, France in the south-west, the United States in the south, and the Soviet Union in the east – the Soviet NKVD established ‘Special Camp No. 2’ at Buchenwald for their political prisoners, using much of the surviving camp infrastructure. According to Soviet records, over 7,000 prisoners died here between 1945 and 1950 when the camp was closed, but the likely death toll is much higher. There can be no more graphic example in Europe of the commonalities between Nazism and Stalinism than the continuation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1950.
We walk down the hill to the little village of Gaberndorf, which we’d skirted on the way here. J. says how powerful the coincidental conjunctions of readings and places were today – for instance, watching shoppers in the suburbs as we heard about the inhabitants of Weimar being taken to Buchenwald at the end of the war. As we get to the village we can hear the muffled sound of a brass band coming down from the church. We find a little bar and soon are downing large beers and pickled herring rolls. The brass band gets louder, villagers come out of their houses to applaud, there’s a jovial, but also slightly strange, atmosphere, and of course, we stick out like sore thumbs here. A teenager approaches us and asks us where we’re from – ‘Englanders, ja?!’ – and then mimes shooting a gun at us. We laugh, rather nervously, pay for our beers and head back towards Weimar.
Weimar looks somehow different when we get back. After all we have experienced today it would be surprising if it didn’t. We’re exhausted, not so much by the walking – it’s only been eleven miles or so – but by the intensity of hearing what we’ve heard, and seeing what we’ve seen. We rest at the gasthaus, then have a late supper at another restaurant, sitting outside again, in a little square. We reflect more on the day, we talk about the strangeness of our generation being the first for centuries that has not been tested by war. Of course we’re grateful for this, but wonder if anything is lost in not having been through this kind of process. Over grappas we plan our route on to Sofia tomorrow. Kay is tired and heads back to the gasthaus, J. and I find another bar for a late drink, and wish that we’d built in a rest day tomorrow, so we could have a bit of time to digest before moving on.