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. "I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando," he said to me, "when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down." According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia.
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers. That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase. That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony. The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. 'And, before it gets back on the right track,' said Jones, 'some heads are going to roll.' He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. 'This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of wrong people,' said Jones. 'What's so mysterious about that?' said Jones.
'You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes-' said the G-man, 'and yet your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro.' 'The Jews have infiltrated everything!' said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped. 'That proves what I've just been saying!' said Jones. 'For your information,' said the G-man in cool triumph, 'I am a Jew.' 'Haven't you even found that in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don't have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christs and the Jews!' 'Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let's go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!' 'All I've done, 'he said majestically, 'is do what you people should be doing.' Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.ĭr. More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr.
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