The druggist of Auschwitz A documentary novel

IF memory serves, the great Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese once made the Archimedean claim that, given a ... to stand and a pivot, he could write about anything. The mediocre German-Romanian poet and novelist Dieter Schlesak (may Pavese's ghost forgive me for mentioning him in the same paragraph) makes the same point ex negativo. To wit, with nowhere to stand and no pivot, he can make nothing happen. "The Druggist of Auschwitz," his so-called documentary novel, is neither document nor novel. It is that depressing thing, a very bad book on a very terrible subject. With its digressions and lacunas, its made-up, superliterary, Celan-quoting, composite survivor-victim Adam Salmen, "the last Jew of Schässburg," its split purpose and its alternate over- and underinvestment on the part of the author, "The Druggist of Auschwitz" is such a ragged piece of work that any summary or description cannot fail to improve it, giving it a coherence and an engineering it doesn't have. It is a repetitious, harrowing and often baffling book; an awful coda and commentary on the limpidity and bravery, the formal brilliance and heroic forbearance of much direct or first-generation or pre"documentary" Holocaust writing: Primo Levi or Tadeusz Borowski or Elie Wiesel or Imre Kertesz or Fred Wander. It took me three days to get through the first page; it took me 150 pages to get a sense of how the book could possibly hang together, and the role of the author; if the book were to be torn from its binding, and its pages (or perhaps just a few of them) randomly rearranged, it would be an improvement. I was kept in such a state of disorientation that I continually referred to the jacket copy for enlightenment. And that in spite of the fact that the narrative itself isn't even difficult. Schlesak, born in 1934 in Sighisoara in Romania (or Schässburg, to give it its German name), remembers being served in the town's principal pharmacy when he was a small boy of 7 or so, by one Dr. Victor Capesius. (This is the book's hook or donnée, and marks Schlesak's point of entry into the story.) This same Capesius, by way of the Romanian Army, shortly afterward entered the Waffen-SS, and by 1943 had made his way to the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he was camp pharmacist with the rank of major. He was on the ramp, where he made "selections," and also helped himself to stolen Jewish property, the gold taken from fillings, etc. etc., in the notorious "Canada" section (in the classic descriptions of Borowski and others). After the war, Capesius stayed out of trouble by the simple expedient of remaining in Germany; under sentence of death in Romania, he remained separated from his wife and daughters back home for 20 years; other than that, he was able to avoid any legal consequences for his actions. A solid, reassuring, provincial bearing - like that of a bank branch manager or a town councilor - largely saw him through; no doubt it was devastatingly effective on the ramp. In the 1950s, Capesius was able to open a new pharmacy in the town of Göppingen in the southwest of Germany, treated himself to regular "hunting safaris in Africa," and had money left over to corrupt potential witnesses against him. It was only in 1965 that he was eventually found guilty of being accessory to murder (but not more), and got off shockingly lightly with a sentence of nine years, of which he had already served all but three. Schlesak - who had uncles in the SS, and who clearly feels that the Transylvanian Saxons have something to answer for, blinded and besotted as they were by their unconditional respect for everything German - gathered materials on him over decades, and interviewed him and his wife (whom he had brought out of Romania) in 1978. Capesius eventually died in 1985. Schlesak published his book, "Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker," with a small German press in 2006. The author of "Danubio," Claudio Magris, gave it an enthusiastic notice, and an Italian translation followed in 2009. The lengthy timeline, I have to say, does little to inspire confidence that this is either a necessary or an integral book. As promised, the summary is far better than the book. Over long stretches Schlesak completely lets go of his story - which he doesn't pursue anyway with any notable diligence or success. Those moments of meeting, of which everything might have been expected, are muddied: no epiphany in the Schässburg drugstore, no burning impressions during the interviews with "Vic" and his wife in Göppingen. (The whole thing is like an exercise in the destruction of material.) The trial is related so poorly that the reader actually begins to question Capesius's guilt; this cannot have been the author's intention. Capesius, like many of the ostensibly second-tier villains, took care not to incriminate himself directly; he got someone else to take on most of the selections; he avoided being seen with the Zyklon B gas and claimed not to know where it was stored. Clinching moments are rarely brought up by the witnesses, which renders their testimony irrelevant; they are written in instead by the author, which is unsatisfactory. For instance, wedged between two long paragraphs from eyewitnesses, one a victim, the other an SS man - neither of whom mentions Capesius -the author inserts this vivid passage of his own: "A truck has driven up, the truck with the red cross on it. The Red Cross? Dr. Capesius and Joseph Klehr get out. Klehr has four green tin canisters in his hand. They both cross over the green strip of grass to the gas chamber, climb up onto the roof, put on their gas masks, and then Klehr lifts up the little trap door, but only after Capesius has given him the order to do so, because it has to be an SS doctor who gives the killing orders. Klehr breaks the seal on the canister and shakes out the coarsely granulated contents, a violetcolored, crumbly mass, into the opening. The Zyklon B." WHAT is the status of this description? Is it documentary or novel? If fact, then how is it that it has not been corroborated, when so much of what we are given to read here is evidence, and so much is known about Auschwitz? How would a judge treat it, in some prosecutor's summing-up? (Capesius, remember, after a lengthy process, was acquitted of murder.) This mixing of forms and standards strikes me as potentially an extremely dangerous development, one that ironically gives succor to the unspeakable deniers of the Holocaust. Occasional outbursts of authorial fury at some of the SS men (especially Schlesak's uncle, the ghastly Roland Albert), while understandable, are deeply unimpressive. Such ex cathedra comments as "And he laughed his castrato laugh" or "This pathetic excuse for a human being!" or "There is a coldness in those fish eyes of his, and in that knowing laugh he lets out after quoting a Hölderlin poem" have no place in either a "novel" or a "document." John Hargraves has given the book a judicious and knowledgeable translation; but one has to wonder why. At Auschwitz, Capesius avoided being seen with the Zyklon B and claimed not to know where it was stored. Michael Hofmann's translation of Joseph Roth's novella "The Leviathan" will be published this week.

Victor Capesius, the Romanian pharmacist who supervised the medical dispensary at Auschwitz, sorted new arrivals at the rail-yard ramp and enriched himself with their belongings, was tried and sentenced to prison by a Frankfurt court in 1965. In interviews and interrogations, he hedges and fudges, obfuscates and whitewashes his past. Roland Albert, a lieutenant in the SS (and Schlesak's mother's favorite brother ), was a guard at the concentration camp but also shows little remorse. This documentary novel contrasts their narratives (and accounts from other perpetrators of the concentration camp) with the vivid and harrowing eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz survivors. Written in a fluid style with little intervening commentary from its Transylvanian-born author (despite his evident personal connection with some of its sources), the result is nothing less than a wandering and minimally guided tour of hell on earth that immerses the reader in the horrors of Auschwitz while continually emphasizing the experiential and moral distance between the prisoners and the imprisoned. It is thus an important if rather unconventionally structured act of witness.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist

Schlesak, in his first book in English translation, is interested in documentation, here achieved through a collage of facts and firsthand narratives of the Holocaust by victims and perpetrators alike. Centering the narrative around the 1964 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt of Victor Capesius, the director of the Auschwitz medical dispensary, who methodically enriched himself with assets stolen from those arriving on the Hungarian transports, Schlesak contrasts the suffering of the camp survivors with the apparently conscience-free lives of those who were "obeying orders." He interviews Roland Albert, an Auschwitz guard and his mother's favorite cousin, who Schlesak knew as a young boy in Germany, and who seems to feel no real sense of responsibility for the Holocaust. To understand the survivors, Schlesak, as author-narrator, talks with Adam Salmen, the so-called "last Jew of Schassburg," whose camp diary is excerpted to heartrending effect as are his struggles with survivor guilt: "And even if you have gotten out, you never really escape..." The way testimony is collected and presented, without real narrative intervention, lends immediacy and veracity, but also feels less novelistic. Schlesak's work is relentless, sometimes too painful to read, testament to the fact that, in describing Auschwitz, no literary consolation is possible. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

We rarely read accounts of the Holocaust now for new information but instead seek to deepen our understanding of this most heinous of crimes-and that is exactly what this extraordinary novel affords. Schlesak, a German Romanian living today in Italy and Germany, has written what he calls a "documentary novel," fluidly translated by Hargraves. Ostensibly revealed through the eyes of Adam-"the last Jew of Schassburg"-the narrative cuts between descriptions of life in the Auschwitz death camp and trial testimony of camp officials and survivors after the war. Interwoven into this appalling tale is the true story of Dr. Victor Capesius, of Romanian German ancestry, the druggist of the title. Though well regarded by his Romanian towns-people, Capesius eventually joins the SS and participates in the selections at Auschwitz for slave labor or extermination. Through deft alternation between fact and fiction, the author enhances our understanding of how otherwise ordinary individuals joined in the mass murder of their fellow beings and, when called to trial, expressed no remorse for their deeds. VERDICT This searing work belongs in every collection on the Holocaust and is highly recommended to all readers struggling to make sense of it.-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

THE EYEWITNESS 1 They are herding us toward the showers. I see a long trench blazing with flames, I hear screams, children crying, dogs barking, gunshots. I see leaping shadows, half hidden behind the high flames. Smoke, ash, and the smell of burnt hair and flesh fill the air. "This cannot be true," cries someone near me. Women, children, and invalids are chased, alive, into the flames by German shepherds. A wave of heat, then shots. A wheelchair carrying an old man plunges into the flames; a shrill cry. Small babies, white as lilies, trace an arc through the air as they are catapulted into the fire. A boy runs for his life, the dogs chasing him; he is pushed into the flames. His scream hangs in the air. A mother nurses her child at her naked breast. She and the baby fall into the inferno. One swallow of mother's milk, for eternity. Adam saw it, Adam knows it, he knows something we do not know, something we will never know. But he survived it. Even he doesn't know what the dead know. He feels the guilt of the survivor. Writing helped him survive. He wrote there , and he wrote in German. Adam: I am a German; it was they who made me a Jew. German is my mother tongue. When I couldn't go on, when it became so unbearable that all I wanted to do was to jump into the fire with my fellow sufferers, into that pit of burning human beings, then I gave it all to German, my mother tongue, as if only she could heal this, she alone. Here, read it: I cannot forget. And he handed me one of his pages, covered with tiny script. But life must go on , he continued. And stared straight ahead. When he enters the room, you feel only him, he fills up the room, the whole house; his presence changes the space around us. No one speaks, everyone is silent, when he enters the room. This is Adam, who was there , a member of the crematorium Sonderkommando, a man who has something within him we cannot comprehend: Adam is alive, he exists, really . I could look him in the eye, touch him, eat and walk and talk with him, feel his silences, his descent into himself, his way of being there and yet not ... not there, like being dead, and yet still living ... at those trenches ... back then. Then? But they are here, now, they will never go away ...     Adam: Then suddenly--I never felt anything like it before, how can I even describe it?--I separated from my conscious self and changed over to the "other" side; I felt a strange sympathy with that SS man performing his difficult, murderous work in that almost unbearable heat ... We looked at each other: this, THIS, it cannot, it must not, be happening. But it is! It's real! So Adam, the last Jew of Schäßburg, wrote. I had visited him at his home, and now, after leaving him, it felt like a final farewell, because he is old and sick. But I can still call him on the telephone, twice a week, and there are numerous letters, actual letters, and he gave me his diary, his "little rolls," just copies, of course; and even though his head is like a death's-head, with black, deep-set eyes, I can still reach him. His heart is damaged, and his broken bones never healed properly; they still ache from the icy winters in the camp (down to minus 37 Celsius), painful rheumatism, pneumothorax, and he has only one lung left (tuberculosis has calcified the other one), but he is alive, not dead like all his friends, his wife, his children, his parents; Adam is alive NOW ...     He embraces his dead wife every day, he says. And there is something that permeates everything, gets into the earth or the floor, the flowers, the grass, the trees, the light gets grayer, still this deep-seated fear, it hollows out everything from inside, this fear: Adam: There are black beasts inside me, I hear their harsh, malicious laughter whenever it is quiet. Grim animals sitting in my rib cage. They crouch there, ominous, their wings folded back, or they cower somewhere hidden in my innards, so I can no longer dare seek refuge inside myself. Something uncanny is there, in the darkness inside me. I seek shelter outside, beside myself with fear. When I take strong pills, the pills themselves settle briefly in the fragile tissues of my brain, and dream my nightmare, until I awake with a start, hunted, chased into another dream ... till suddenly it all dissolves, and then my arms turn black, and my wife who was turned into ashes THERE dissolves into grayness, the room, the walls crumble, not in glowing light, no, but into a gray nothingness, a dreary morning of ashes, everything crumbling into ashes, ashes ... Everything dissolves, the world now just a huge void, a gap ... and then I wake up, as I did every morning at four, with whistles shrieking, commands shouted: Get up, Aufstehen! Fertigmachen!! Get up, you swine, up! And I am back at the camp, as always. And then I know everything else was just a dream, a kind of holiday. All that matters are the people we know and once knew, the living and the dead. And we speak for the dead. We live for them. Perhaps they have opened up a way for us to reenter that realm, a realm whose forgetting made these crimes possible in the first place. They are the only reality left. Those who know it, those who were part of it. For me, everything else is gone. Adam's experiences cannot be told in words: It's like that for us all, Adam says, we who went through it, we come from another world ... An abyss separates us from you, a sort of vacuum of horror, it has to do with naked life itself, and little to do with the abyss between perpetrators and victims; unless, perhaps, everyone who does not know, or still thinks the way they did, is one of the perpetrators! For everything on earth has changed since THAT! And he quoted a poem of Paul Celan, speaking to himself softly, very softly, for now it was the dead speaking, the victims, the murdered ones, it seemed, coming from beyond the border back to us, the living, as if wanting to give us hope and comfort, because everything was different now, because that old death no longer existed, because we didn't need to fear it anymore, for now THEY were actually there, quiet, hopeful, but barely audible: If there can be any sense in the death of millions of victims, it would have to be in the sheer crazy hope that a crossing has opened on the frontier between life and death. Celan: "In the mills of death you grind the white meal of promise, / you set it before our brothers and sisters / we shake out the white hair of time ... and let something now come which never was before! / Let there come a human being from the grave." Adam's tiny rolls of paper, which looked like miniature papyri written in German, contained things that even he had forgotten, indeed, that he had to forget, so he could go on living. He pulled out these rolls, as if they were the witnesses, and not he, as if it had all started with them ... He took them hesitantly from the ancient, beat-up desk, tentatively, as if they didn't belong in the everyday world, things that could not be seen or felt, like copies of burned Torah rolls ... that was how he touched them, these yellowed paper rolls ... lying in his open hands ... He bent over them ... sniffed them ... then held them out to me ... as if he wanted to tell me something that was impossible to impart in any other way ... and no, they didn't smell like old paper ... They still had smoke, ash, and the smell of burnt skin on them ... I hear Adam speaking, I hear his telephone voice, telephone conversations that went on for hours ... I hear his tape recorder voice. And I hear his "real" living voice, slightly nasal, quiet, deliberate. And of course, he always spoke in German, German words, German sentences. Once I had asked him how he could possibly bear speaking German after "that." At this he became very angry, he shouted: But it was these SS guys who wanted to turn me into a Jew, before that I didn't even know I was a Jew--I was a German with this language I had babbled even as a baby. It comforted me, this language, it wept within me, this, my language. I clearly heard its weeping when these human animals--they did come from Germany, yes, they were "Germans," but could not speak proper German--when these animals would shout their false "German" phrases, these analphabetics who could only bark German like dogs. I refused: I was the German, and they were the animals, clearly, and they did not succeed in making me a Jew. I am a German AND a Jew , a gift --he laughed bitterly-- may it remain part of me and all my feelings, my very existence, my poems and diaries, these un-Germans and murderers cannot be allowed to win, even afterward, and claim that THEY stand for what is "German." But where is Adam? Was it a dream, Adam's existence? No, we breathed the same air in his house in Schäßburg, his home, we spoke with each other night after night in this quiet small town. The little "rolls" were there, too, I could touch them, they seemed to glow, to burn up, fire without ash, but I could read what they said, it's right there , forever, the horror of the experience can never be erased, it is burned into us who read it, shuddering; and in none of the documents, none of the other reports, does it reach out to us, as it does here, and become a nightmare. Day after day I read them, but would break off, again and again, would think I was dreaming, and then, after many sleepless nights, I had become someone else, someone who was continuing this writing; it was as if the writer who could put that reality down on paper was only now appearing, as it took shape from behind a thick fog of knowing and forgetting. And now, here it is before you, entire, in your life, but so late ! I kept hearing Adam's warning words: You have to do something, you must help, the world coming after us must know it as exactly as possible. Perhaps the immediacy of the horror in these rolls is because Adam wrote it down while experiencing the horror, he wrote it in THAT unfathomable nightmare that was Auschwitz, in all its inconceivability still THERE, finding direct expression in the German words of a Jew, amplified, still echoing down to us today. The other eyewitnesses did not report their experiences until testifying at the trial twenty years later, often halting, weeping, or writing it down ... This was the painful experience of Ella Salomon, a teacher, and her mother, Gisela Böhm, a pediatrician, both of them from Schäßburg.     Ella Salomon: "We were witnesses in Frankfurt in 1964 at the Auschwitz trial and with the aid of tranquilizers, and with microphones in hand, we testified before a large audience, among them sociologists, students of law and other fields. They got their lecture from living witnesses. "It was very difficult for us to be among the people of this, the enemy's land. Every stone made us weep, every word hurt. We were badly burned children. "The women from the former resistance movement had prepared a reception for us at the airport in Frankfurt. They all embraced us warmly right after we landed. One of them was Emmi Bonhoeffer ... "My interrogation in the courtroom lasted over an hour; my mother's took two hours. Emmi and some of the Marian nuns were present. It was very heartening to see them there, because Attorney Laternser, Capesius's defense lawyer, treated us in a very derogatory fashion. He bombarded us with misleading, confusing questions. When he asked me about my tattoo number and I said I no longer knew it by heart, he gave me a look of scornful disgust. And on top of that, the next morning the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that I had been theatrical." Ella Salomon (left) and Gisela Böhm, at the entrance to the Gallus Court Building, Frankfurt am Main, November 16 or 19, 1964 Or the other witnesses in the chamber during the Auschwitz trial: the audience at the trial sat there, numb and wideeyed with horror, looking at the woman in the witness chair. She had just described in a calm voice the torturing of prisoners in the notorious "Boger swing," and at that point, words failed her. In halting phrases, she told how one day fifty children, aged five to ten, were brought into the camp on a truck. "I remember a four-year-old girl ..." Her voice broke off then, and her shoulders began to heave; as the witness wept despairingly, numb horror spread through the courtroom ...     Adam: You see, although I had been called as a witness, I could not go to Frankfurt because of serious illness and constantly recurring health problems at the time resulting from my experiences in the camp. But others did it for me ... I told Adam what had moved me, and asked him why the horror of reading his ashen script had affected me so deeply, differently than other reports from hell. You know, that's not quite right, he said. I am not talking about feelings, even from the abyss, but about these unimaginable realities, especially at those trenches ... "Small babies, white as lilies, trace an arc through the air as they are catapulted into the fire ..." As I just now read what I had really experienced back then, I was convulsed with horror, and I was back in that very condition that I had, thank God, forgotten about ... But it was that way, just that way ... Many of my fellows have related the same unbelieveable cruelties, just think about Filip Müller, or about Dov Paisikovic in the Sonderkommando, or about Gideon Greif's book, We Wept Without Tears. Or the book by Mengele's assistant, Dr. Miklós Nyiszli. And one thing you mustn't forget: May and June 1944, when our fellow Transylvanian Jews were dying in the gas chambers, the most horrendous May in human history, when up to twenty thousand human beings, not soldiers in huge battles, but month after month, day in day out, from morning to evening to night, girls, women, babies, children, and old people, suffocated screaming in the gas chambers. Even for Auschwitz this was the absolute peak! In a period of about nine hundred days over six hundred death trains arrived at Auschwitz, with over a million Jews, and approximately twenty thousand Sinti and Roma [Gypsies]. Day after day, night and day, the SS was carrying out mass extermination. Most of the victims went straight to the gas chamber. Twenty minutes after the Zyklon B was inserted, the doors were opened, and the prisoners ordered to clear out the bodies found up to two thousand naked corpses all tangled together. Babies, children, sick people, trampled to death on the floor; that's where the gas got to first. Above them the women, and on top the strongest men. To save money, mostly they didn't throw in enough Zyklon B, so that the killing could take as long as twenty minutes while the weakest lay at the bottom in their final agony. For each gas chamber of two thousand people, they used sixteen five-hundred-gram canisters. Each canister cost five reichsmarks. It was the "last hurrah" for these, the greatest executioners of the last thousand years, and it went on till November 1944. Up until March 1944 the Jews of Hungary and Transylvania had lived in a protected enclave. Till March the higher Hungarian military had shielded their Jewish citizens, they called them up as laborers into the army, and even Horthy protected them; there were 795,000 Jews in Hungary and Transylvania. You know, after the Vienna Treaty in 1940, northern Transylvania was declared part of Hungary. So everyone was spared until March 19. But suddenly Hitler no longer trusted Horthy, because he had begun negotiating with the Allies. So on March 19, German troops marched into Hungary. And Eichmann came to Budapest. He decided immediately: all the Jews of Hungary should be exterminated in a Blitzaktion. And on May 4, 1944, they convened a conference in Vienna to set up the schedules for the transport trains ... And from there it just proceeded like clockwork. All you have to do is check out the " Kalendarium " of Auschwitz at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main. Adam showed me the text excerpt from his extensive archives, and read: A conference was convened in Vienna on May 4, 1944, to set up the schedules for the transport trains that were to deport the Jews from Hungary. About 200,000 Jews were to be deported from ten camps in the Carpathians (Zone I); in the Transylvanian Region (Zone II) there were located around 110,000 Jews. From mid May on it was arranged that there would be four transports a day from these regions, with 3,000 Jews each. May 9, 1944: As a result of the speeded-up preparations for beginning the extermination of Hungarian Jews, Rudolf Höß, the highest-ranking officer of the SS garrison at Auschwitz, ordered that the unloading ramp and the rail line into the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, as well as the three train tracks on the ramp inside the camp at Birkenau, be finished as quickly as possible, and to get the as-yet-unused incineration ovens in Crematorium V into working order, and to excavate five trenches (three big ones and two smaller ones) for burning corpses, to renovate Bunker II for use as a gas chamber, and to dig even more incineration trenches by the bunker, and to construct barracks for the prisoners to undress in. In addition, Höß transferred the chief officer of the subcamp Gleiwitz I, Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, back to Auschwitz, and appointed him the commando leader of all the crematoriums, and gave him responsibility for all outdoor incineration of the victims killed in the gas chambers. Höß also ordered reinforcement of the Sonderkommando used in the crematoriums, and also of the "Canada" Sonderkommando, which was to sort through the prisoners' plundered possessions, directing that additional prisoners be assigned to these units. Everything was kept secret. Even the courtyard in Crematorium III was hidden from prying eyes by a screen. Moll also ordered that tables and benches be built in the yard at Crematorium IV, as he realized that it was impossible to fit the masses of condemned human beings into the gas chambers simultaneously. For those waiting victims the tables and benches served as an additional undressing area in the open air, since the locker room inside the crematorium was not big enough for the countless numbers of doomed men, women, and children. In Capesius's documents this description of the extermination process was found: The apparatus of extermination ran smoothly. The staging and running of the transports was carefully prepared. The camp commanders were notified of the arrival of a transport via telegrams and radio messages, and they would then give further instructions to the detention camp leaders, the Political Department, the office of the SS garrison doctor, the truck drivers' unit, the guard detachment, and the work deployment office. Each one of these units involved with the "handling" of a transport had a specific duty roster for its "operation" [ Einsatz ] in "special actions" [ Sonderaktionen ] on the unloading ramp ... Copyright (c) 2006 by Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH Excerpted from The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel by Dieter Schlesak All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.