Dossier K: A Memoir Read Free

optimism, they would just dismiss it as “English propaganda.”
    What lay behind that?
    There were many causes, both historical and psychological. There is no question that after the obliteration of the Hungarian Eighth Army on the Don bend—in the course of which countless Jews who had been sent there on labor service, to be used in mine-clearance work on the battlefield, also died—the enthusiasm for war let up. That momentary relief, in 1943, deluded the Jewish population, who believed that they were in a privileged position. Rumours about the shuttlecock diplomacy being conducted by Prime Minister Miklós Kállay went the rounds, with people saying that “a deal” was going to be struck with the Allies behind the backs of the Germans. Then on March 19th, 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary, and at Birkenau they made a start on enlarging the crematoria and laying a new railway track in preparation for the arrival of transports from Hungary. A high-ranking SS officer by the name of Eichmann arrived in Budapest to be greeted with a considerable sum of money from the Jewish Council. At the same time they were given a copy of the so-called “Vrba-Wetzlar Report” or the “Auschwitz Protocols.” Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzlar, a pair of Slovak Jewish prisoners, afterlengthy and very thorough preparatory work, managed to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and to assemble a memorandum in which they gave a precise description of what was happening in that death factory. Considerable space was also devoted to the preparations that were under way to handle the consignments of Jews from Hungary, already then, with the preparations as yet still in progress, anticipating the disastrous fate that would meet those consignments. The Jewish Council in Hungary discussed the report and decided not to make its contents known to the Jewish populace of several hundred thousand, whom the gendarmes had in fact already started to herd together into hastily improvised ghettos.
    How is the Jewish Council’s decision to be explained?
    It is inexplicable in my view. I could perhaps give your question the highly paradoxical answer that they wished to preempt a panic breaking out among the Jewish population.
    A bitter paradox … What is most depressing of all is that, sadly, it is all too near the mark. So, you had no idea either where that train was taking you
.
    Nobody did. There were sixty of us in the cattle truck, and not one of us had heard the name “Auschwitz.”
    That scene in
Fatelessness
when Köves spots a deserted railway station through the wired-over window slot of thecarriage and picks out the name “Auschwitz” from the building—is that fiction, or did it happen in reality?
    As true to life as could be, and yet it also served the novel’s fictional structure superbly.
    So, in relation to that, no worry crossed your mind that it might be anecdotal?
    No, because I couldn’t have dreamed up anything better if I tried. Besides which, I wouldn’t have dared to dream up something like that.
    There, you see
 …
    See what?
    The fact that when it comes down to it you do feel bound by reality; you do set down real life, and lived reality at that. There’s the football pitch, for example. You write in
Galley Boat-Log
that you have a clear recollection of one at Auschwitz
 …
    Birkenau.
    Fair enough! Of the football pitch at Birkenau, and yet you did not dare to write that in your novel until you happened to come across a mention of it by Borowski
.
    In his short story
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
. Tadeusz Borowski is one of those writers youcan count on the fingers of two hands who in the death camps discovered something important about the human condition and were capable of expressing it. He wrote five or six powerful short stories in such a crystal-clear style and in such a brilliant, classical form that almost reminds me of the novellas of Prosper Mérimée. And then he too committed suicide. But