The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,51

happened like this: one day she looked at the group, looked into their faces, and instead of saying what she had planned to say, something new came out of her mouth, something more pleasing. Because we are creatures of routine and the lie usually went over well (she had only gone over the limit of her customers’ credulity once or twice), on the next occasion it came out reflexively again. She had a guilty conscience about it, but at a certain point it became physically difficult to say anything else—as difficult as doing a backbend after years of stiffness. Then too, it hadn’t started as artlessly as she made herself believe. It had begun because she couldn’t bear the discomfort of trying to tell things in an unshaped way. How much better to make a good tour of it.

Today she started out well enough. She talked about the Jewish children who were deliberately infected with hepatitis. She talked about the SS doctor, Aribert Heim, who pumped gasoline into the veins of inmates to see how quickly they would die, the same Aribert Heim who was sighted not long ago on a Spanish beach, allegedly having lived out his postwar years in South America. She showed the customers where there had been forced sterilizations; she took them to the mortuary and told them that it was here that doctors gave lethal injections to healthy young men who had a complete set of white teeth, so that their flesh could be stripped away and skeletons sold to the universities, the universities who desired perfect specimens; the living humans murdered for the sake of an academic model. Had there ever been—before this—such a motive for murder? She asked this question out loud. She talked about how the prisoners helped one another—when a new arrival came to the camp, a young man who perhaps had a complete set of teeth in his mouth, the old boys knocked out a few incisors, so the man would have a better chance.

All this was true.

But then the next part: “And there was also—” she would start to say. “At the infirmary, there was also—” she would begin. She had tried sometimes like that, early on.

It was not such a big thing. There had been a brothel here. That was all. There was a brothel in the infirmary for the prisoners’ use. She had seen the photographs of the women in narrow beds.

But who would want to know about Himmler’s incentive plan? About the stamps received for efficient labor—the point system—these points that could be traded for the use of a body. Who would like to hear about the young women from Ravensbrück held here in captivity as sex slaves?

Yes, there were some who would. Some had come to learn the truth about the concentration camp. The picture it would have made, however, as far as Margaret was concerned, both for her tour and for her own sake, would be impossible, and that was the central point. What kind of unity would the tour have, what were the people to think? If concentration camp victims raped their fellow victims under the point system, what was that for a story? The women were given a lethal injection after a few months of “service” or whenever they showed signs of venereal disease, and the male prisoners who made use of them knew that.

How was Margaret to continue the tour? Instead of giving Margaret their pious, sympathetic glances, the customers would look about the camp cockeyed. She herself, formerly priestess, would become a rogue. The camp was a temple. Certain things were a desecration. The only thing that belonged here was piety.

She had learned early on: too many tales of horror and she began to think that her piety sounded propagandistic, like a tabloid television show. On the other hand, it clearly would not do to talk excessively of the camaraderie among the Communist inmates, the evenings of “Bella Ciao,” and the radio hidden in the laundry that picked up the BBC; of the “kindness” of certain SS men who had shared whiskey with the prisoners, helped others escape. All in all, then, Margaret was also guilty of omitting “happy” stories, of how, for some, it had not been so bad at Sachsenhausen, because these, too, went against the grain.

And Margaret had noticed something: the ratio between the uplifting stories and dystopian stories became the basis for the customers’ conclusions about the camp, later their conclusions about the concentration camp system