Myra Konns ran the morning tours of the museum risen from the ruins of the Topf administration buildings. She guided school-children through the original ISIS drafting tables they had found scattered and vandalised over the years by the transients, guided them through the director’s rooms still furnished with the wide cabinets that once held drafts for cremation ovens. Labels still sitting in their brass handles. The impression of ink soft and leaving. The drawers empty. Yawning only dust and memory. All restored now.
Myra would show them the small canisters with the clay plaques that the factory made to store ashes to be collected by relatives; a legal requirement until someone decided that it was no longer required. Hundreds of them found abandoned and empty in an attic in Buchenwald. These and other smaller items all on the third floor, where the drafting tables were repaired and displayed, where the chief designer’s office had been recreated, where the tours could still see from the window to Ettersberg mountain as the draughtsmen at their tables would have done and Myra would point out that the smoke from the Buchenwald ovens could be seen crawling over the mountain all day. All day.
The oven doors, removed from Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the most sombre items of the tour. No need to highlight the prominence of the company plaque set above them. Topf and Sons exhibited now as the ‘Engineers of the Final Solution’. A brochure saying so.
In one display cabinet Myra would put her hand to a drawing of an experimental oven, never employed; for the allies had closed in before its realisation. Beside it a letter from a director to Berlin explaining the function of the new design. And Myra would always choose her words with care.
‘It works on four levels over two floors, one of which is the basement, where the morgue would traditionally be, replaced by the furnace. The deceased would be put in at the top and a series of rollers over grates would convey them to the furnace. The letter confirms the effectiveness of the design at being able to work continuously. Day and night. Reducing the need for coal as the oven was intended to be fuelled by the deceased themselves. Hundreds, possibly thousands of corpses a day. No intention to distinguish one from the other. A machine. An eradication device criminal in nature and design. Thankfully never introduced. The Allies having liberated Auschwitz some months before.’
A hand went up in the midst of the group. Myra took a breath. An old man. Always a sparse group of old men and women dawdling amongst the children. In her induction, just the month before when the museum opened, Myra had been informed to be especially aware of the aged visitors. The air about the place theirs. The tomb of it theirs.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Excuse me, Fräulein,’ he bowed slightly. White, pomade-brushed hair and grey-blue eyes that smarted from the cold February wind outside, made worse by the radiator warmth of the halls. He wiped his eyes behind his glasses.
‘That correspondence does not refer to the design of the continuous oven. Of that oven.’
Myra’s breath released. Always one.
‘Sir. This letter has been donated from the Russian archives. It has been verified by many experts.’
He moved forward, his age more apparent in his careful step, in his politeness in moving through the young elbows that might bruise him as he passed.
‘Forgive, Fräulein. That oven – the continuous oven – was patented in 1942. That letter was for a circular design. From Herr Prüfer. From one of the engineers.’ He tapped a finger on the glass. ‘This drawing was for a new annotation of the previous patent. Ordered to be redrafted in May 1944.’
Myra looked between him and the glass display. Always one.
‘I’m sure it is not a mistake, sir.’
He wiped his forehead.
‘We have all made mistakes, Fräulein.’
He bent to the cabinet, lifted his glasses to peer at the fading paper within.
‘This is only an error. This article comes from the Americans, does it not?’
‘It is paired with the letter from the Russian archive.’
‘No.’ His lips thinned. ‘I can assure you.’
‘How is that, sir?’ As respectful as she could.
He moved towards her, as if he did not want the children to hear, as if he wished no-one but Myra to collect his whisper. She could smell the pomade in his hair, looked down at the expensive shoes as she moved to not tread on them.
‘Because I gave it to the Americans.’ His hand back to the glass shielding the exhibit. ‘Because I drew it.’
*
Myra found him sat outside. Cap playing in his hands, eyes at the ground. Sat beside him without invite. He began as if the conversation had started minutes before and he finishing it off, rounding it off politely so he could put on his cap and leave.
‘We were married in Switzerland. In ’41. Her parents had moved there. Run there. Etta’s father – Etta was my wife – was wealthy. Wealthy for those days. A property man. I thought I had done well to marry a woman of means. Poor all my life. Where are you from, Fräulein?’
‘Munich.’
‘Ah. Just so. I was born in Erfurt. You know the Merchants’ Bridge? That was my childhood home. An ancient place. The people ancient. Me – a boy – an intruder on the bridge. When my father needed to tan me I would hide all about the stairs and gutters. The little paths. Right under the bridge. He would never find me. Old cities full of hiding places. They are built around the hiding places. Modern cities are not like this. They are built straight and plain. Wide. Open. It is because the people do not need to hide as much. Old cities. They cringe around the churches like children to their mother’s skirts.’
Myra watched him look about the walls. Breathing them.
‘I was grateful to work here. No-one will understand. My Etta did not even understand. And she knew everything.’ The wink of German humour.
Myra leaned closer, had to speak over the noise of a new arrival of children.
‘What happened here?’
He put back his cap. Not to leave. Against the cold.
‘Nothing. Nothing happened here.’ Sat back against the bench. ‘Always the problem.’
He rubbed the salt and pepper grey of his stubble. Grunted at the disapproval of it.
‘Left early,’ he said. ‘To get here. I need a shave.’
Erfurt, Germany,
April 1944
I shave every other day. The new blade already dull when purchased, yet twice as expensive as the year before. Steel for higher order than grooming. But I will shave tomorrow morning as I am not the man I was yesterday. I have work now. My first since I graduated and married.
There is the man you were the last year, without work, and then there is this day. And nothing is the same. The clock ticks down the hours to your first day, not just to the next day. A man has signed your name alongside his own. A contract. Real work.
And you begin.
I always stand by the curtained window looking over the street three floors below when Etta and I have these serious talks. I have a cigarette and she lays on the chaise-longue that her mother gave her for our wedding. The window half-open to exhale my evening smoke and to watch the street pass by and listen to the trains bringing workers home. Our voices never raise. We have become dulled. Like