Experience

by Martin Amis

One has to admit that Auschwitz-Birkenau is very difficult to believe. But the unaverted heart can still feel its fierce rhythms. Auschwitz itself is disgustingly intimate (Hoess’s house nestles in behind the gallows; his wife and children used to play in the garden there), Birkenau disgustingly vast. It is easier to believe in the cruelty than it is to believe in the contempt, the unbelievable contempt. And what about the bottomless literalmindedness of the project (all the Jews in Europe? Even the Jews of Ireland were slated – all the Blooms and Herzogs)? And what about the patina of efficiency and thrift? How efficient is a work camp where the slaves last three months (it was always three months. You were killed immediately, or you organised yourself and survived. Otherwise it was always three months)? How cost-effective were those mounds of toothbrushes, those mad trains full of human hair? During the war there was a meteorology department in the Ahnenerbe dedicated to ‘proving’ that the Aryan race, untainted by evolution, had been preserved in ice from the beginning of time on the lost continent of Atlantis. Ideologically it was all on that level, tubthumping, tabloidal – the world of talking animals, resurrected celebrities, miracle panaceas, alien abductions, two-headed babies. The other end of it, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where ideology becomes action, is like a formal dystopia dramatising the mind of the babbler, the monologuist, the man on the milk-crate with the flic...