‘I was with Herr Klein,’ I said, in exactly the timbre to declare that he was not in such company.
I sat on the edge of the table, slipped off the corner ties and took out the first sheet. A note attached.
‘Furnace designs for Auschwitz – Birkenau II & III. Translate Alphabet with annotation in ink. F. Sander.’
This was a ground plan. An enormous room divided into several others. The ovens in the furthest room, complete with detailed trundles for putting the bodies in. Five triple-muffle ovens. Five in each drawing. Two crematoria. Thirty iron and fire-clay oven doors. For two crematoriums. Thirty doors. And there were still three more crematoria in this prison.
I was incredulous. Voiced it.
‘How many people die here?’
My colleague never stopped scratching his pencil.
‘Hundreds a day. The typhus is everywhere. And they execute criminals all day long. Did you see that fenced area at Buchenwald? By the crematorium?’
I did not know they were aware of my visit. Perhaps nothing to be hidden between floors. I would note that.
‘I smoked there.’
‘The execution yard. That is why the fence is so tall. The prisoners cannot see into it. Beside the morgue so you do not have to drag them too far to the chute.’
Hundreds a day, he said. How many camps the same? Thousands a day. Another front to the war. A war of disease. Did not want to think of it. Pictured the brass band instead. Every camp had a song Klein had said. Think of the better picture.
I took the paper to my board, clipped it up. I would only have to explain the dashes and breaks of line, the shaded areas and what these meant to the viewer in terms of constructing the building. The names of each room plain enough. But I decided that speaking to Paul would help me understand what I was looking at. What if I found a mistake? What if I could help improve? Make an educated difference. To get to the third floor. I would take a trip to Weimar at the weekend.
‘How have you been, Ernst?’
I jumped at the friendly voice. Kurt Prüfer at my shoulder. His smile like a shy boy’s. A chubby face behind round spectacles, grey and white hair cropped close to the bone to camouflage his baldness as men who have a roll of fat above their collar are wont to do. Grey suit to match his hair. He did not seem as moody as Klein warned.
‘Very well, sir.’
‘I see you have Sander’s new designs.’
We looked at the plan side by side.
‘I was wondering, sir – if it should help – I have an old school friend in Weimar who runs two of the crematoria there. I thought I might pay him a visit at the weekend. So that I may better understand our work.’ I thought this would be a good thing to say, to show my interest in the company’s products, and in my own time, but Prüfer’s mouth went thin.
‘The Special Ovens accounts for less than three percent of our output, Ernst. If you want to learn more about Topf the malting equipment and granaries would be a better study for a graduate who wishes to get on.’
‘Yes, sir. It is my ambition to do so.’
He rapped the plan. ‘Can this be done today?’
‘Yes. I understand it.’ I pointed to the stylised sig-rune heading at the top of the print that corresponded to the eagle and stamp in the right corner, signed by Sander. Not a double ‘S’ at all. An ancient Germanic rune reversed. It now stood for ‘victory’ instead of ‘sun’.
‘This is for the camp commander? I am to make it plain, sir?’
The cherub came back. ‘But do not make it look as if the reader is a novice. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘If you can get this done by this afternoon bring it to my office. I have come from Auschwitz with new requests that must be drawn up as soon as possible. Sander is working on them now.’ He pushed his glasses back where sweat had slipped them. I noticed his hands were rubbed almost raw from washing. Sanded almost.
‘Before five, Ernst.’
‘Yes, sir.’ And he left me, as simple as he had appeared. My colleague opposite pretended to hear none of it, as if our desks were in a different universe, and I hummed to myself at his flush of face and set to work.
The new boy taking his work direct to Prüfer’s office.
*
By four-thirty I had finished the annotations. I had started my walk to Prüfer’s office confidently but with each step I realised this was my first completed task.
Suppose I had not done well? Suppose my notes were obtuse? Vague? It was a deconstruction of the plan. We had done such things at the university many times but perhaps I had been too succinct, perhaps not enough. I would be judged by my first work in the real world and I slowed as I passed Klein’s office and onto Prüfer’s, appropriately the door that ended the corridor. I knocked twice, waited. An age. The shutting of filing cabinets echoed through the corridor.
‘Come in, Ernst.’
Prüfer’s office did not have the draughtsman’s board when he had interviewed me. It dominated the room, appeared strange in the room that I remembered. The room that now demanded something of me. He gave me no instruction as he stood beside it and I bowed, automatically, set the plan to the grips and stood back.
He removed his glasses, one hand to his back, a sea captain studying a course, and his spectacles roving across the plan like a magnifying glass.
‘Excellent, Ernst. Excellent.’ His eye moving along the paper from corner to corner and then he stepped aside, his spectacles’ arms pinned with difficulty behind his ears again.
‘This will do well. Sander will be pleased. Well done. Now, tell me what you might think of something.’
He went to his desk and with anything that came to hand weighted down another plan. I crossed the room, looked down at the paper spread as large as a tablecloth, a cog-like mechanism its centrepiece. Prüfer did not wait for any query.
‘The problem with the camp ovens, Ernst, is that they run on coke. It is inefficient to run and damages the ovens quickly. It takes much longer to reduce the matter than our gas ovens – such as your friend probably has in Weimar. One of ours no doubt.’ He was pleased at this. He may have installed them himself.
‘The SS will go for nothing less than coke. For cost. Yet they want more efficient ovens every year. They are wrong of course. Although more expensive to build, a gas oven is more economical. But they think like old men. Coal, coal, coal. Coal is cheap, the oven must be cheap. But now it is not so cheap.’ He tapped the cog on the drawing. ‘But see here, see here. The problem is that an oven must be a regulatory size if it is to work correctly. And they simply do not have the space for anything larger than the eight-door muffle oven in any building in Auschwitz. I know. I built them. If they build another crematoria, again no more than an eight-door, otherwise the heat will be too great. The men operating it would burn. By the end of the year there will be fifty-two ovens in these camps. They don’t listen. That will take enough coal to run a railway. But see here, see here.’
I turned my head to the diagram, like a dog trying to comprehend another’s bark coming from the radio.
‘Is this one of Herr Sander’s designs, sir?’
‘No. It is my own. It is a circular oven.’ He indicated the protrudes of the wheel that made me perceive the drawing as a cog-piece. ‘These are the muffle doors. Instead of having ovens in a line, each creating its own heat, you have a central furnace. Eight doors all around.’
I could see it then. Pictured the special unit of prisoners, a trundle, the sliding bed for the body,