Step 12. In February 1942, the ‘euthanasia’ programme at Hartheim is halted and Stangl is given a choice – he can return to Linz or move to a new post near Lublin in Poland. Because he didn’t get on well with his former boss in Linz, he opts for the latter.
Step 13. Stangl visits Lublin for the first time in spring 1942 and meets Odilo Globočnik, the SS and police leader responsible for the extermination camps. Globočnik talks about a new ‘supply camp’ currently being built at Sobibor – would Stangl consider a posting there?
Step 14. He accepts the Sobibor position. On arrival, he recognises a new brick building exactly like the gas chamber at Hartheim. Doubts about the post he’s accepted begin in Stangl’s mind, but it’s too late.
Step 15. Stangl visits Wirth again, this time at Bełżec – he comes across him standing over pits of hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies. Now, seeing the reality of these ‘supply camps’, he tells Wirth he cannot do this job, but Wirth simply sends him back to Sobibor.
Step 16. Although he now realises that what is happening is clearly a crime and discusses it with a colleague, there seems to be no way out – he’s afraid of what would happen to his family if he simply resigns from his post.
Step 17. Wirth comes to Sobibor to complete the building work. When it is finished he gasses twenty-five Jews in front of Stangl’s eyes. Stangl tells himself he’ll try to get a transfer as soon as possible.
Step 18. But as the first transports arrive, in May 1942, Stangl is still at Sobibor. He buys a ‘nice linen, off-white’ suit with a matching white riding jacket to mark the first train’s arrival.
Step 19. In June 1942 his wife and two girls come to visit, staying only 5 km away. His wife has heard the dreadful rumours and confronts him – Stangl evades responsibility by denying being the commandant, his task is only related to construction.
Step 20. Just after this, GloboČnik informs Stangl he’s being transferred to the newly built camp at Treblinka.
Step 21. At 9.30 a.m. on 23 July 1942 the first transport of around 5,000 Jews arrives at Trebilinka. Later in the summer Stangl arrives – by this stage there are 10,000–15,000 Jews being killed every day. He calls it like witnessing ‘the end of the world’ and goes straight back to GloboČnik, saying he cannot do this, but again he is sent back to Treblinka.
Step 22. By the end of 1942, Stangl is promoted to commandant. One of his first actions is the creation of a special garden, an aviary and a small zoo. He also builds a bakery; in his words, ‘we had a wonderful Viennese baker, he made delicious cakes, very good bread’. At the same time, the camp is now operating at full capacity, with up to six transports arriving each day – each train containing more than 3,000 Jews (Treblinka at its peak was killing almost 20,000 Jews every day).
Twenty-two possible steps, each involving numerous smaller decisions. At each stage moral resistance fades, at each stage the level of violence witnessed increases. Each step leading further, incrementally, towards genocide. As Segev says of Stangl: ‘All the assignments he performed prepared him psychologically for what came next.’
Stangl is certainly an extreme example – but in the way that each stage becomes normalised, and then leads to the next, it is probably little different from many career paths. The journey over twenty-five years from idealistic geology student to pragmatic oil industry executive. Or from the school chemistry lab to working on trigger mechanisms for nuclear weapons. Or the career that begins with fascination about Mendel’s experiments and genetics, and ends up in biotech research, genetically engineering a tobacco seed that doubles the addictive nicotine content of tobacco plants.
12
A Pool in East London
I return to that drawing of a face on the back cover of the book. Like opening memory itself. I look more closely and I now see that the face appears to have a trace of a tear on the left cheek. As if Erin, by drawing this in a book of mine, was wanting to communicate something about herself she found hard to express. The photos from that year show two young lovers smiling, looking into the camera – on trains, in cafés – all the usual things. But I’m struck now by a difference between drawing and photography: however ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the drawing is, it is itself. A drawing cannot pose. So this small sketch, probably done in no more than a couple of minutes, seems to express more than all the photographs that were taken that year. We were in our early twenties, Erin escaping the constrictions of the Ireland she’d grown up in, me escaping a decade of extreme Conservatism in Britain. Italy seemed like an answer at the time, and we did explore a lot in that year – learning about another culture that seemed a world away from that we’d experienced before, learning about ourselves, and what it meant to be together. Intense, funny, insecure, passionate, hedonistic, melancholic, turbulent. Sometimes all of those in the same week. Often, looking back on your younger self, you can feel an impatience, even a kind of harshness, at the black-and-whiteness of judgement, the arrogance of youth, the delusions. But today all I feel is a tenderness for two young people, unsure about so much, trying to make sense of a journey that was just beginning.
On the facing page at the back of the book, she’s jotted down, in her sloping handwriting:
Public swimming hours.
Mon–Sat. – 12.40–18.30
Sundays & Holidays – 9.00–18.30
Erin was a passionate swimmer, so these times probably relate to the pool at Abano, which we’d get a bus to on Friday afternoons, when we’d finished teaching. In fact, it was she who really got me into swimming, something that lasted even when our relationship was over. She did it rather cleverly: knowing my weakness for ‘people’s palaces’, whether the Festival Hall or the Moscow metro or the New York Public Library, she took me to the pool at Marshall Street in Soho. I was entranced by the green marble and gold edging; the swimming seemed almost incidental, just to be in that temple made you feel better. And, slowly but surely, swimming became a central part of my life.
*
My local pool in Hackney can’t be compared to Marshall Street in any way. About the only thing they have in common is their Victorian origin. Where Marshall Street is all marble and brass, my pool is pale beige tiling and a functional steel roof. You have no chance of seeing anyone well known popping in here for a dip, whereas in Soho, you couldn’t do a breaststroke without striking actors or TV presenters. They wouldn’t be seen dead in Bethnal Green. It’s about as far from ‘aspirational’ as it’s possible to get. The pool’s edges are worn and cracked, and a kind of green algae sometimes appears on the changing-room walls, because of the damp, presumably. When I was younger such things would have bothered me, but now it just seems ‘lived-in’ – in the way that a lined face shows the humanity of the person. I think I subconsciously identify with the pool as I get older – both of us accepting our imperfections, both of us a little rough around the edges now, showing our age.