'Oh?' I said.
'Leichentriiger zu Wache,' he crooned, his eyes still closed.
Translation: 'Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse.' In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry.
'After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music,' Gutman said to me, 'the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.'
'I can understand that,' I said.
'You can?' he said. He shook his head. 'I can't,' he said. 'I will always be ashamed. Volunteering for the Sonderkommando, it was a very shameful thing to do.'
'I don't think so,' I said.
'I do,' he said. 'Shameful,' he said. 'I never want to talk about it again.'
3: Briquets ...
The guard who relieves Andor Gutman at six each night is Arpad Kovacs. Arpad is a Roman candle of a man, loud and gay.
When Arpad came on duty at six last night, he demanded to see what I'd written so far. I gave him the very few pages, and Arpad walked up and down the corridor, waving and praising the pages extravagantly.
He didn't read them. He praised them for what he imagined to be in them.
'Give it to the complacent bastards!' he said last night 'Tell those smug briquets!'
By briquets he meant people who did nothing to save their own lives or anybody else's life when the Nazis took over, who were willing to go meekly all the way to the gas chambers, if that was where the Nazis wanted them to go. A briquet, of course, is a molded block of coal dust, the soul of convenience where transportation, storage and combustion are concerned.
Arpad, faced with the problem of being a Jew in Nazi Hungary, did not become a briquet. On the contrary, Arpad got himself false papers and joined the Hungarian S.S.