| “A Human Being in an SS
Uniform”: Ernst B |
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| families of the SS officers and men; she had been placed
there by a noncommissioned officer who made a little business from her
drawings. Having had her make a drawing from a picture of his wife and
children, B. was fascinated by this very “primitive” young person who
was able to alter her drawings from crude ones for crude SS men to
“marvelous” and “tasteful” renditions for more cultivated
SS officers like himself. She was from the nearby Beskid Mountains, and on one
occasion when B. spoke of driving into them she warned him not to because
“there are too many partisans there.” |
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I dreamed that I fled with her into the Beskids
to the partisans …. I'm sure that there was nothing … in any way
erotic …. There are various versions …. [Mostly] we are in a
primitive Beskid house, and then the partisans arrive, and we go with them join
them], and so on …. There are no further details that I can
remember |
He thought the dream might be related to his seeing the
drawing again upon returning to Germany (he had apparently sent it from
Auschwitz to his wife), a drawing he both treasured (keeping it sometimes in
his office and sometimes in their bedroom) and, was made anxious by (taking it
down because “I had too many bad dreams”). The eroticized tie with
this young female prisoner in connection with fleeing to join the Nazis’
enemies suggests an ultimate integration and an image, however fearful, of
transcending and erasing the Auschwitz taint.
Former inmates tended to
exaggerate and simplify Ernst B.’s conflicts, as did one doctor who stated
that Dr. B. “confessed that … he was drinking more and more in order
to react less to what was happening around him.” He was asked whether he
believed Hitler would win the war, and is said to have answered, “If
justice exists on earth, then Hitler should lose the war, but is there really
justice on earth?” — the kind of enigmatic answer that prisoner
doctors could experience as very heartening.
Only one prisoner doctor
noted “emotional problems” in Dr. B., observing that he would at
times become tearful and had a variety of psychosomatic ailments and “the
pattern of a heavy drinker.” While confirming that B. was decent to
individual Jews, this doctor said that he was “hostile to the [Jewish]
population” — the only inmate to make this claim about B.
But
Dr. B.’s conflicts in no way interfered with his fundamental adaptation to
the place. As he said to me, “I must — this now really sounds —
one cannot understand it if I say … I didn't really mind being
there.” For his need for contact was satisfied there. He was “really
touched” by the fact that “as soon as one had a little contact with
an inmate …. the most important thing then was — almost more
important than eating — … that he could talk to someone about his
family.” He even claimed that |
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