The Draughtsman

I opened my mouth to speak but he anticipated.

‘You need not know anything about crematoria. I just need you to replicate the drafts from the designs. For SS approval. Any aspect you do not understand can be put to Herr Klein or Herr Keller on the third floor for annotation. The designs are to be as clear as possible for a layman.’

I had prepared questions as I slept, in my dreams. Questions that an ambitious man might ask.

‘These new designs will improve the process, sir?’

His eyes now smaller through his glasses.

‘How do you mean?’

‘That Topf is superior throughout the world for crematoria. I’m sure we are improving all the while. I am honoured to be a part of such endeavour.’

Sander half-turned, hands opening and closing at his back.

‘These contracts were won on price not quality.’ He turned back to me sharply. ‘You know our closest competitor?’

‘Kori of Berlin, sir.’

‘Quite so. We beat a Berlin company because of our price and location.’

Klein lifted his hand for my attention. Spoke proudly.

‘And that when the call came we installed mobile systems into Mauthausen within a day. That is service,’ he said.

‘Mobile systems, sir?’ I had heard this word previously, jumped on it now.

‘Stock items,’ Klein said. ‘For farmers, small abattoirs and such, who do not need their own scale furnace. Petrol fired. The incinerators had broken and they needed an emergency replacement. We fulfilled where Berlin could not.’

Sander raised a finger to me and then to Klein. ‘That reminds. Herr Klein is going to Buchenwald. A site visit. Monday. It would be useful for you to attend.’

I inhaled, stalled.

‘To the prison?’

‘We are measuring for new muffles,’ Sander said as reply. ‘It would be useful for you to see our work first hand. It is important for an architect to see the fulfilment of his task. You will learn much.’

I would like to say that I feigned enthusiasm. But I was curious in that pedestrian way people stare at accidents or listen to a neighbour’s fight or as a child you try to peek a look into the butcher’s back room as he emerges when his bell rings, wiping his hands and beaming at your mother.

And this my work after all.

‘That would be most interesting, sir.’

‘Good,’ Sander nodded again. ‘Be sure to bring your identification.’

Chapter 5

Before supper Etta and I went for a walk. The early evening dry and warm, my coat only a little still damp from the morning’s rain. We went arm in arm by the river, towards the bridges and the old quarter. Etta had asked what Sander was like, how my day had been. I volunteered the walk. Easier to tell her outside.

‘The camp!’ Etta stopped walking, pulled her arm away. Stragglers coming home scowled from beneath their caps.

‘The prison, Etta. Buchenwald is well established. Topf has hundreds of workers from the place in the factory.’

‘Slaves you mean.’

‘Labour for their crimes.’

‘But Ernst, it is a camp. People die there. There is disease. Dangerous men.’

I took her arm again and strolled slower.

‘Klein and the engineers go there often. I am sure it is safe.’

‘I don’t like it. Why did you say you would go?’

‘I could hardly refuse on my second day.’ We walked into the cobbled streets, a walk around the block to take us back to Station Street. Quiet here. The Jewish businesses closed and sold to develop into apartments, but that had stopped. The developers no doubt waiting for the war to end any month now and the prices to rise. But even with the boarded-up windows a nice peaceful stroll in April.

‘Do you like this Herr Klein?’

‘I do not know him. Does it matter? He’s the head of the floor. When the war ends a few of those who used to work there may come back. Part of their service is to retain their old jobs. I must do well before then. Everything I can.’

‘Will you have to join the Party?’

‘No-one has mentioned. Prüfer wears a pin. A standard one. Herr Sander did not. Nor Klein.’

‘Would you? Would you join?’

I do not know why I did not think before answering. It seemed natural to say it.

‘If it helped my career. For you. For us. All other business ties are gone. No Freemasons or Rotaries. How else do you get on?’

We said no more on this.

If you live near to your parents you walk slower to meet them for Sunday lunch than if you had to get on a train where at least you can pretend that something enjoyable is happening. The slow walk, lingering around shop windows, all to avoid the dreaded hour. The walk enlivened by the Sunday street all looking to the sky as a squadron of Heinkels flew west overhead. Our skies normally silent.

Etta shielded her eyes to watch.

‘Where do you think they are going?’

‘I don’t know. England? Early for a raid. Where from is more interesting. I did not know we had bases in the east.’

‘Perhaps the Russians have surrendered. And we have taken their bases.’

‘Do they even have bases to take? I thought them all farmers?’

She slapped my arm. ‘Ernst. They are an army. I’m sure they have planes.’

‘We conquered France didn’t we? And they have toilets inside their homes. The Russians?’ I cocked my thumb over my shoulder. ‘Toilet behind the house with chickens in it. That is all you need to know.’

The streets animated again and we came to the old bridge. You may know the Merchants’ Bridge from songs or pictures from a Christmas butter-biscuit box. A fairytale place. One of the last medieval bridges in Europe that still had the colourful houses and shops built right on its stone. Paris and London had lost theirs hundreds of years ago. Erfurt maintained. We know our history. It is still here. England does not know us to bomb. Their bridge fell down, as the song would have it. Because they did not care enough for history.

I was born on this bridge. The vaults and steps above the Breitstrom waters were my hiding places as a boy or where I crouched concealed from the wrath of my father’s open hand.

I thought we were poor to live here, our house so small and ancient, but no, despite the small leaning buildings looking into each other’s lives we were privileged. I would be happy to inherit it, as my father had from his father, if only to sell it and buy a proper home for Etta and our children. My son would not live in a box of a room with straw-packed walls and no window. Our front door would not open onto stairs to take him to a floor above a camera shop.

My father opened the door, his once blond hair now yellow and grey but still thick with vitality, like the whole of him.

‘Ernst! Etta!’ He hugged Etta and scolded me. ‘Why did you not let us know you were coming? What boy does this?’ Neither of us had a telephone. I suppose he wanted me to shout from our window. ‘We have nothing in.’ This my fault, and not true. When my parents died there would be two small plots for them and a mausoleum for their food. They were of the great war. When there were real shortages not just rationed ones. The habit of hoarding jars and cans, pickling everything, not given up. Just in case. I was born the year my father came back from the war. I stacked tins like other children stacked blocks.

The creaking stairs, my mother’s voice howling from the kitchen.

‘Etta! Ernst! Why you not let us know! My hair, Willi! My hair!’ She clutched at her head. It was in exactly the same clipped bun it had been since my youth.

I took off my hat and Etta’s coat as my mother fussed and my father reminded me that I had not joined the church football club for yet another year.

‘I am hoping I won’t have time for football soon enough.’

My mother clasped her face. ‘Oh Willi! She is pregnant! She is pregnant!’

Etta waved her down. ‘No, no, Frau Beck! The news is all for Ernst.’

‘Let them sit, Mila,’ my father pulling out glasses and Madeira. ‘What is it, Ernst? You have not signed for the army?’

The glasses to the white paper tablecloth with the cherries decoration. The same tablecloth as when I lived here. My crayon marks still on it.

‘No, Papa. Better. I have a job.’

He took our coats. ‘A draughtsman? A real job. You hear this, Mama?’

Her hands had not left her face. ‘Oh, Ernst! My boy!’ And then the hands were on my face. ‘My clever boy! When did this happen? How?’

My father poured wine. The Madeira meant it was Mama’s pickled pot roast for dinner. I cannot drink more than one glass of the sickly stuff but I would wait to see if a beer would come. Sunday after all.

‘So, you can start paying me back at last!’

‘Willi!’ My mother dropped my face. ‘Let the boy sit. Give them some wine. Let him talk.’

The wine in the thin glasses was already in our hands, Etta’s knees against mine on the small sofa, the same seat where I once put my little cars to bed before myself.

‘Topf and Sons were hiring. A junior position but—’

‘Of course. Why not?’ My father lifted his hands as if bargaining for a rug in a bazaar. ‘That is how men start. A year or two and you will have your own department.’ He slapped my knee.

My mother sat and tightened her shawl. ‘Topf, you say? My, my. Such a fine company.’

Father saluted his glass.

‘The oldest firm. The proudest. The world will open to you now. What are you working at, Ernst? Or is it secret?’ Eyed me in a way I had not seen before.

‘Why would it be secret?’

He shrugged.

‘Maybe they have some war works or such.’

I drank my syrupy wine.

‘They have contracts with the prisons. And for military parts.’

Etta touched my hand. Patted it.

‘Ernst is, unfortunately, only working on new oven designs for the camps.’ Not looking at me. At my mother. I took my hand away. ‘Unfortunately,’ she had said.

My mother’s shawl tighter.

‘The camps?’ Her voice as a whisper. ‘Buchenwald?’

‘All of them,’ I said, let Etta’s disparaging of me pass. She had suggested this visit. I thought because of pride in her husband. Maybe she had hoped a different reaction from my parents about the camp. ‘I am to work on new patents.’

‘New?’ My father nodded sagely over his glass. ‘You see, Mama? They give him new projects to work on.’ And then straight to it. ‘How much does it pay? Salary? Not week?’

‘Forty marks a week. No trial. I have already started. May I smoke, Mama?’

She stood. ‘I must get to my roast.’ I took that as yes and brought out my tobacco, and father’s pipe came from the drawer by his chair.

Etta stood.

‘Let me help you, Mila.’ And the men were alone.

An age for my father to suck his pipe into life. The sound of my childhood.

‘Ernst.’ He shook out his match into the glazed ashtray I made him at school. ‘Tell me about the ovens?’

I exhaled with him.

‘Topf created crem—’ Etta’s ear turned. ‘Created ovens for use in chapel, in ceremony. They invented the petrol oven and the gas fuelled. They export all over the world. But the prisons use coke for cost. As such I understand they need repairs. Often.’

‘Why so?’

I watched the cloud of him reach to the yellow-stained ceiling.

‘Overuse. Brick ovens. Typhus is in the prisons. Coke ovens and brick are not able to cope with the demand.’

‘So why use coke?’

‘Cost. Petrol is too expensive. Too crucial to waste on ovens. The SS are all about cost I gather.’

He leant forward.

‘The SS?’

‘You know they run the camps?’

‘I did not think they bought the ovens?’

I drew long on my cigarette. ‘Nor did I. I have learnt that much already.’

‘That is what you must do. Learn every day. Ask everything. Show that it is more than just a job. And then when they are looking for the next top man they will look for the one who shows the most interest in the company. He drummed his words out on the arm of his chair. ‘That is the way.’

‘I am doing something on that tomorrow. I am going to Buchenwald with my department head to inspect for a new oven.’ I looked to Etta not smiling at me from the kitchen.

He put his pipe on his knee.

‘You are going inside the camp?’

My mother’s voice. ‘Who is? Who is going to the camp?’

‘Ernst is, Mama,’ my father called over his shoulder. ‘Ernst is going to Buchenwald. Tomorrow.’

She came into the room, drying her hands. Always drying her hands.

‘Why? Do you have to work in the camps? That is not so good, Ernst.’

Erfurt not far from Buchenwald. The prison almost ten years old but known for disease now, for more than criminals. To my mother even the air of the place would be corrupt.

‘No, Mama. It is just to view on-site the work that we do. It will be good experience.’

Etta gone from the kitchen doorway. I heard the tap running. Running louder as my father spoke. His pipe neck pointing at me.

‘And it will show how keen you are to learn. When I worked for Littman, at the pharmacy, that man would teach me nothing. Nothing I tell you. Everything was a secret to him. I was too old to apprentice so to him I was worthless. When Quermann took it over, when a German took it over, he showed me true respect. A gentile cannot work for a Jew. You just become their chattel. I have always said it. Now it is Germany for the Germans we all look after each other. Nothing to gain but a better country for us all. Working together for the good. Not for the purse.’

Mother slapped him with her cloth that was always attached about her.

‘It was Littman who gave you that job, you old fool! Me running around scrubbing floors with Ernst in my belly and you with holes in your pockets. Quermann did not hire you. You were stolen.’ She groaned back to the kitchen. ‘That man, that man.’

I finished my wine and the bottle came back, which was a first for him.

‘All the same,’ he went on. ‘You learn from these men, Ernst. They are doing well. Government contracts. Always there is work there. When we conquer Stalin think how much work will be needed.’

‘The ovens is a small department, Papa. But they design silos and malting equipment. And gas jets and aeroplane parts. That is what I want to do.’

‘And why not? Mercedes you could work for. Build me a car for my old age. This country is for the young now. My war gave us a broken country. The Bolsheviks and the Jews conspiring to destroy us. Nothing but unemployment unless you were in their families. And now it is Germany for the Germans, the best men for the jobs, not just for the good connections. And my son has a career with one of the largest companies in the land.’ He thumped his chair. ‘This is how good life begins. I am proud of you, Ernst.’

He had not said these words since I had graduated.

Women were laughing in the kitchen, and the waft of steaming food came from rattling pots, and I would not have to ask awkwardly to borrow ten marks. I realised it could be good to visit parents.

*

We walked home arm in arm through afternoon light burnishing the wet cobblestones. I waited until the river’s rushing was behind us to ask Etta why she had called my work ‘unfortunate’.

‘I only meant that you should be doing higher things. Not drafting ovens. For the SS.’ Her head down now, moved close into me. ‘Not what I want for you.’

‘I’m sure it will not be for long.’

She stopped, looked about and took my hand.

‘But what if it is? What if it is for long? Do you not think of the ovens, Ernst? Why they need so many?’

‘The typhus. The disease. The sick. Prisons need ovens, Etta. I’ve told you this. It is unpleasant but it is fact. Would you question Paul buying a new oven?’

‘Coal ovens. Yet you tell me they order gas jets from Topf. What are they for if not for the ovens, Ernst? Do they not heat with coal?’

‘I don’t know. It is not just Topf, Etta. What company does not work with the SS now? Would you be concerned if a hospital wanted gas jets?’

She dropped my hand, put hers to my back as Klein did when he wanted me to understand something, guided me along.

‘But hospitals aren’t run by the SS, Ernst. Why are the camps run by them? Shouldn’t that be a government thing?’

The beer and wine flushed on me. A temper at defending my work. Now. Before my first pay.

‘Do you not want me to work? You were the one who wanted to go to my parents to celebrate. Now you want to deride my employers? Nothing happens in this world, Etta, unless someone sells something to someone else. Nothing.’ I walked on, left her behind me until her voice came.

‘I’m sorry, Ernst,’ she said. ‘Ernst?’ Like a charm. Holding me to the street.

I turned back to look at her framed in the sun. She walked out of it to me. Took my arm again.

‘I’m very proud of you. For you. Maybe it’s that you are going to the camp tomorrow. I’m worried. For you. I am being foolish.’

We walked on.

‘I promise you,’ I said, calm now, ‘I won’t do anything for you to worry.’

Chapter 6

‘Here. Put this on.’

Monday morning. We were in Hans Klein’s black Opel on the main road outside Kleinmolsen, the groan of the wipers unable to cope with the sheets of rain but Klein did not slow his speed. I could feel the water on the road hitting the panelling like waves. The tyres almost skating along. He had taken his hand off the wheel to pass me a Party pin.

It was plain tin, not enamelled. I did not question and put it on my lapel. His was enamelled and, again, as we slid along the road, he put it on with one hand.

‘It does not hurt to wear it,’ he said. ‘Gives a good impression. I am personally not political. Yourself?’

‘No, sir. I have not given it much thought.’

‘Prüfer is of course. And the Topfs. But then they would have to be dealing with the SS. Are you a union man?’

My interview had contained this question. The usual standard. ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party?’

Who would say, ‘yes’?

‘Are not unions banned?’

He nodded, managed to light a cigarette with one hand.

‘I’m sure that some of our workers are members of the KPD. Communists. And the SDP. There was a faction of them at the factory in the 30s. I think the Buchenwald workers are influencing ours. The camp is nothing but communists. I’m sure Sander is on top of it. But keep your own ear out and let me know if you hear anything. I will make you my top boy on the floor!’ He shifted a gear down at last. ‘I cannot trust the old ones.’

The countryside blurred past. Twenty minutes in the roaring car, a super-six, and Klein showed it off. Twenty minutes. A camp a short drive from Erfurt and Weimar. I had only been in taxis before and probably only half a dozen times in my life. I did not appreciate cars, or watches, shoes and suits, but I was beginning to think that Klein thought such things impressive.

‘It is a nice car, Herr Klein.’ I looked around as if it was the Sistine Chapel, trying to admire it as we rolled across the railway line, the rail that led to the camp.

‘Twenty-five hundred marks,’ he said for reply. I imagine that is how he judged the world. The price of things. He pivoted the car between a gap in the forest with just a gear change, no brakes, and I was braced against the door.

A good gravelled road, the beech forest cut back from it with maintained grass all along. Buchenwald. Beech Tree Forest. A name for holidays. As the camp came in sight, set in a clear plain, the rain slowed, I wiped the condensation from the window, sure that I had seen men outside, outside on the grass. They were cutting the grass, had stopped to watch the car. Mowing in the rain. Their garb unmistakeable.

‘There are prisoners out there?’ I looked at him. My professor now. ‘Outside the prison?’

Klein did not even check.

‘Of course. Why not?’

‘But might they not escape?’

‘Where would they go? What would they do? Escape to starve? To be shot? Not everyone is the Count of Monte Cristo, Ernst. Some men know they belong in prison. Some men know they do not like work. Career criminals. Why escape one prison for another? Why buy your own bed and food when we can buy it for them.’ He put his arm across me to point to an outcrop of rocks not far from the barbed fence. ‘They even have a zoo. Bears, monkeys, birds of prey. You could take kids here. Although the zoo is for the guards of course. The prisoners have a cinema and theatre. A brothel for the non-Jews.’

He closed the car down the gears as we approached the gated walls. All the roads leading off the main marked by decorative wooden signs, this one, the road to the main gate designated ‘Caracho Road’ – Caracho Spanish for ‘double-time’ – decorated with four swarthy-looking men hunched and hurrying close together in prison clothes. Some of the prisoners here would have been from the Spanish war. The building like a factory except for barbed wire instead of walls. A red-timbered building like a Swiss chalet sat atop the entrance, a balcony all around, a clock above, a flagpole rising out of it. The flag just a red swathe. Beaten by the rain. Taller than this I could see the square tower of the crematoria, to the right of the gate, almost opposite the odd zoo. Not far from the main building. Good. We would not have to go deep into the camp.

Klein reached to the back seat, passed me his briefcase as we waited for the guards to come.

‘You take the notes. I will measure and photograph. I have my own Leica. Better than Sander’s Zeiss he would have you use. One hundred it cost me.’

The latticed door in the gate opened. Words were written in the iron tops but I could not make them out. They were reversed. To be read from the other side only. A black-painted slogan on the stucco wall above the gate read to those who approached:

‘RIGHT OR WRONG THIS IS MY COUNTRY.’

A grey uniform and box-cap stepped through, his jacket instantly dappled with the rain.

Klein stubbed out his cigarette.

‘You have your identification, Ernst?’ His window opened. I passed the card and Klein gave the guard his grin with our papers.

‘Good to see you again, Simon. Pity about the rain, eh?’

Simon smiled back but became stern when he looked at our cards. This was his purpose. His moment. It would be his hand that waved the gate open.

‘We are here to meet the Senior-Colonel,’ Klein said without being asked. ‘About new ovens. Another breakdown, eh?’

‘All the time.’ Simon handed back our cards. ‘Build a better one for us.’

‘Pay us more money, eh?’ Klein winked.

A circus going on around me. A joviality incongruous to what was about to happen. I was outside a prison. About to go within. I had never handed a soldier my identification before. I could only see his holster from my view in the car, another guard watching from the gate with a rifle slung. To see them so close. The shape of a gun hidden by leather a few feet from my eyes. I was in a dream. Klein knew an SS soldier’s name and had asked him for more money. An anxious dream. A little nausea, from this scene or the chicory coffee of my breakfast. Not even an oat biscuit in the house to settle my stomach.

Klein’s window closed and the gates opened. The Opel into gear. As usual he noticed or sensed everything.

‘Don’t worry, Ernst. It is quite natural to be nervous around soldiers. And prisons. You will get used to it.’ He leaned over, grinned. ‘As long as you are not forced to get used to it, eh?’

We parked on the left. There were trucks beyond the gate, waiting for their work detail and then another strange sight to add to my dream.

There was a full band in the courtyard, an orchestra almost, dressed in red trousers and green vests. Tubas and horns, even a man with a great drum on his chest like a circus parade. We got out and Klein grinned at me over the roof of the car.