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moment that he was reaching out for spiritual salvation. One can only speculate upon Von Niemand’s later career, but if he was at all like his chief, Rudolf Höss, and the SS in general, he had styled himself Gottgläubiger—which is to say, he had rejected Christianity while still outwardly professing faith in God. But how could one believe in God after practicing one’s science for months in such a loathsome environment? Awaiting the arrival of countless trains from every corner of Europe, then winnowing out the fit and the healthy from the pathetic horde of cripples and the toothless and the blind, the feebleminded and the spastic and the unending droves of helpless aged and helpless little children, he surely knew that the slave enterprise he served (itself a mammoth killing machine regurgitating once-human husks) was a mockery and a denial of God. Besides, he was at bottom a vassal of IG Farben. Surely he could not retain belief while passing time in such a place. He had to replace God with a sense of the omnipotence of business. Since the overwhelming number of those upon whom he stood in judgment were Jews, he must have been relieved when once again Himmler’s order arrived directing that all Jews without exception would be exterminated. There would no longer be any need for his selective eye. This would take him away from the horrible ramps, allowing him to pursue more normal medical activities. (It may be hard to believe, but the vastness and complexity of Auschwitz permitted some benign medical work as well as the unspeakable experiments which—given the assumption that Dr. von Niemand was a man of some sensibility—he would have shunned.)

But quickly Himmler’s orders were countermanded. There was a need for flesh to fill IG Farben’s insatiable maw; it was back to the ramps again for the tormented doctor. Selections would begin again. Soon only Jews would go to the gas chambers. But until final orders came, Jews and “Aryans” alike would undergo the selection process. (There would be occasional capricious exceptions, such as the shipment of Jews from Malkinia.) The renewed horror scraped like steel files at the doctor’s soul, threatened to shred his reason. He began to drink, to acquire sloppy eating habits, and to mis God. Wo, wo ist der lebende Gott? Where is the God of my fathers?

But of course the answer finally dawned on him, and one day I suspect the revelation made him radiant with hope. It had to do with the matter of sin, or rather, it had to do with the absence of sin, and his own realization that the absence of sin and the absence of God were inseparably intertwined. No sin! He had suffered boredom and anxiety, and even revulsion, but no sense of sin from the bestial crimes he had been party to, nor had he felt that in sending thousands of the wretched innocent to oblivion he had transgressed against divine law. All had been unutterable monotony. All of his depravity had been enacted in a vacuum of sinless and businesslike godlessness, while his soul thirsted for beatitude.

Was it not supremely simple, then, to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive? Goodness could come later. But first a great sin. One whose glory lay in its subtle magnanimity—a choice. After all, he had the power to take both. This is the only way I have been able to explain what Dr. Jemand von Niemand did to Sophie when she appeared with her two little children on April Fools’ Day, while the wild tango beat of “La Cumparsita” drummed and rattled insistently off-key in the gathering dusk.

Chapter Sixteen

ALL MY LIFE I have retained a streak of uncontrolled didacticism. God knows into what suffocating depths of discomfort I have, over the years, plunged family and friends, who out of love have tolerated my frequent seizures and have more or less successfully concealed yawns, the faint crack of jaw muscles and those telltale drops at the tear ducts signaling a death struggle with tedium. But on rare occasions, when the