Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed—one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains.

Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando. “Why?” I asked him. “If you would write a book about that,” he said, “and give the answer to that question, that ‘Why?’—you would have a very great book.” “Do you know the answer?” I said. “No,” he said. “That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it.” “Any guesses?” I said. “No,” he said, looking me straight in the eye, “even though I was one of the ones who volunteered.”

“You are the only man I ever heard of,” Mengel said to me this morning, “who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way.”

“When Hoess was hanged,” he told me, “the strap around his ankles—I put that on and made it tight.” “Did that give you a lot of satisfaction?” I said. “No,” he said. “I was like almost everybody who came through that war.” “What do you mean?” I said. “I got so I couldn’t feel anything,” said Mengel. “Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other.

“After we finished hanging Hoess,” Mengel said to me, “I packed up my clothes to go home. The catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice within an hour I did the very same job—once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the same.”

It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived. They were people. Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.

“If you imagine that I’m going home to think it over,” I said, “you’re mistaken. When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep like a log. I’m not a soldier, not a political man. I’m an artist. If war comes, I won’t do anything to help it along. If war comes, it’ll find me still working at my peaceful trade.”

No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord—as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.

We didn’t listen to each other’s words. We heard only the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats. If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been! Away from the sovereign territory of our nation of two, we talked like the patriotic lunatics all around us.

“To do your job right,” my Blue Fairy Godmother told me, “you’ll have to commit high treason, have to serve the enemy well. You won’t ever be forgiven for that, because there isn’t any legal device by which you can be forgiven. “The most that will be done for you,” he said, “is that your neck will be saved. But there will be no magic time when you will be cleared, when America will call you out of hiding with a cheerful: Olly-olly-ox-in-free.”

My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing—my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved. And so, with my Helga presumed dead, I became a death-worshipper, as content as any narrow-minded religious nut anywhere. Always alone, I drank toasts to her, said good morning to her, said good night to her, played music for her, and didn’t give a damn for one thing else.

Kraft and I played at least three games a day, every day for a year. And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of. We began tasting our food again, making little discoveries in grocery stores, bringing them home to share. When strawberries came in season, I remember, Kraft and I whooped it up as though Jesus had returned.

He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, had been for sixteen years. While he used A.A. meetings as spy drops, his appetite for what the meetings offered spiritually was real. He once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A. It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he would use an institution he so admired for purposes of espionage. It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he should also be a true friend of mine, and that he should eventually think of a way to use me cruelly in advancing the Russian cause.

The syndrome of his failure was anything but simple. His examination papers were quite probably the longest such papers ever written in the history of dental education, and probably the most irrelevant as well. They began, sanely enough, with whatever subject the examination required Jones to discuss. But, regardless of that subject, Jones managed to go from it to a theory that was all his own—that the teeth of Jews and Negroes proved beyond question that both groups were degenerate.

In order to contrast with myself a race-baiter who is ignorant and insane. I am neither ignorant nor insane. Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it. God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.

If Helga had survived the Russian attack on the Crimea, had eluded all the crawling, booming, whistling, buzzing, creeping, clanking, bounding, chattering toys of war that killed quickly, a slower doom, a doom that killed like leprosy, had surely awaited her. There was no need for me to guess at the doom. It was well-known, uniformly applied to all women prisoners on the Russian front—was part of the ghastly routine of any thoroughly modern, thoroughly scientific, thoroughly asexual nation at thoroughly modern war.

The Free American Corps was a Nazi daydream—a daydream of a fighting unit composed mainly of American prisoners of war. It was to be a volunteer organization. It was to fight only on the Russian front. It was to be a high-morale fighting machine, motivated by a love of western civilization and a dread of the Mongol hordes. When I call this unit a Nazi daydream, incidentally, I am suffering an attack of schizophrenia—because the idea of the Free American Corps began with me. I suggested its creation, designed its uniforms and insignia, wrote its creed.

I played a game, counting the ways in which the magazine cover had lied. For one thing, the women weren’t doing the hanging. Three scrawny men in rags were doing it. For another thing, the women in the photograph weren’t beautiful, and the hangwomen on the cover were. The hangwomen on the cover had breasts like cantaloupes, hips like horse collars, and their rags were the pathetic remains of nightgowns by Schiaparelli. The women in the photograph were as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress-ticking.

“All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

I knew her only slightly, though I saw her fairly often. She was a nonstop talker, which made her hard to know, and her theme was always the same: successful people who saw opportunities and grasped them firmly, people who, unlike her husband, were important and rich.

one thing she did to me was made me deaf to all success stories. The people she saw as succeeding in a brave new world were, after all, being rewarded as specialists in slavery, destruction, and death. I don’t consider people who work in those fields successful.

“It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”

how simple, how sublimely familiar was the tale her … body told! … It was like the breeze’s tale of what a breeze is, like the rose’s tale of what the rose is. …

The city sky was clean and hard and bright the next morning, looking like an enchanted dome that would shatter at a tap or ring like a great glass bell.

“You hate America, don’t you?” she said. “That would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”

And not only did the window show that Wagnerian bed, it showed a reflection of Resi and me, too, ghostlike, and with a ghostly parade behind us. The pale wraiths and the substantial bed formed an unsettling composition. It seemed to be an allegory in the Victorian manner, a pretty good barroom painting, actually, with the passing banners and the golden bed and the male and female ghosts. What the allegory was, I cannot say. But I can offer a few more clues. The male ghost looked God-awful old and starved and moth-eaten. The female ghost looked young enough to be his daughter, sleek, bouncy, and full of hell.

“It takes a heap of living,” I said, “to make a house a home.”

Watching Kraft pop away at that target, I understood its popularity for the first time. The amateurishness of it made it look like something drawn on the wall of a public lavatory; it recalled the stink, diseased twilight, humid resonance, and vile privacy of a stall in a public lavatory—echoed exactly the soul’s condition in a man at war.

That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me! Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

The New York Times said that tolerating and even protecting vermin like me was one of the maddening necessities in the life of a truly free society.

This man actually believed that he had invented his own trite defense, though a whole nation of ninety some-odd million had made the same defense before him. Such was his paltry understanding of the God-like human act of invention.

Man, I think, is an infantry animal.