The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

it was a mess, genuine havoc, due to which in the end most of the deported Jews died, right away I mean, gassed even before they could be put to work, for very few of those who reached Auschwitz were fit, considerable losses, 70 percent perhaps, no one is really sure, and because of which people after the war believed, and this is understandable, that it was the true aim of the operation, to kill all those Jews, those women, those old people, those chubby healthy children, and thus people couldn’t understand why the Germans, when they were losing the war (though the specter of defeat may not have been so clear, at the time, from the German standpoint at least), still persisted in massacring Jews, in mobilizing considerable resources, men and trains, especially, to exterminate women and children, and thus since people couldn’t understand, they attributed it to the anti-Semitic madness of the Germans, to a delirium of murder that was very remote from the thinking of most of the participants, for in fact, for me as well as for so many other functionaries and specialists, the stakes were essential, crucial, to find labor for our factories, a few hundred thousand workers who might have let us reverse the course of things,