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By Root 12439 0

the time that these lines were composed did not, Sophie pointed out to me, make up anything like a record for a continuous act of mass extermination at Auschwitz; the slaughter of the Hungarian Jews in the following year—personally supervised by Höss, who returned to the camp after a number of months’ absence to coordinate the liquidation, so eagerly awaited by Eichmann, in an operation christened Aktion Höss—involved multiple killings of much greater magnitude. But this mass murder was, for its moment in the evolution of Auschwitz-Birkenau, huge, one of the largest yet staged, complicated by logistical problems and considerations of space and disposal not until then encountered at such a complex level. Routinely, it was Höss’s practice to report by military air express letters marked “streng geheim”—“top secret”—to the ReichsFührer SS, Heinrich Himmler, on the general nature, physical condition and statistical composition of the “selections”—an almost daily occurrence (some days there were several) whereby those Jews arriving by train were separated into two categories: the fit, those healthy enough to labor for a while; and the unfit, who were immediately doomed. Because of extreme youth, extreme age, infirmity, the ravages of the journey or the aftereffects of previous sickness, relatively few of the Jews arriving at Auschwitz from any country were deemed able-bodied enough to work; at one point Höss reported to Eichmann that the average of those selected to survive for a time was between twenty-five and thirty percent. But for some reason the Greek Jews fared worse than the Jews from any other national group. Those Jews debarking from trains originating in Athens were found by the SS doctors in charge of the selections to be so debilitated that only a little more than one out of ten were sent to the right-hand side of the station ramp—the side assigned to those who were to live and work.

Höss was puzzled by this phenomenon, deeply puzzled. In a communication addressed to Himmler on that third day of October—a day Sophie remembered as having the first brisk bite of autumn in it, despite the pervasive murky smoke and stench which so blunted one’s perception of the change of season—Höss theorized that there was one of four possible reasons, or perhaps a combination of the four, which caused the Greek Jews to be dragged off the cattle cars and boxcars in such a sorry state of deterioration, indeed with so many of the prisoners already dead or near death: bad nutrition at the point of origin; the extreme length of the journey combined with the poor condition of the railroads in Yugoslavia, through which the deportees had to pass; the abrupt change from the dry, hot Mediterranean climate to the damp and swampy atmosphere around the upper Vistula (although Höss added in an aside, uncharacteristic in its informality, that even this was puzzling, since, in terms of heat, at least in the summer, Auschwitz was “hotter than two hells”); and lastly, a trait of character, Ratlosigkeit, common to people of southern climes and therefore to those of weak moral fiber, which simply caused them to fail to withstand the shock of being uprooted and the attendant journey to an unknown destination. In their slovenliness they reminded him of the Gypsies, who, however, were conditioned to travel. Dictating his thoughts deliberately and slowly to Sophie in a somewhat harsh, flat, sibilant accent which she had earlier recognized as the voice of a North German from the Baltic region, he paused only to light cigarettes (he was a chain-smoker, and she noticed that the fingers of his right hand, small and even pudgy for such a rather gaunt person, were stained the hue of chestnut) and to brood thoughtfully for many seconds with his hand pressed lightly to his brow. He glanced up to ask politely if he was speaking too fast for her. “Nein, mein Kommandant.”

The venerable German shorthand method (Gabelsberger) which she had learned at the age of sixteen in Cracow, and had employed so often in the service of her father, had come back to her with remarkable