'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.'
5: 'Last Full Measure ... '
I, too, knew Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz. I met him at a New Year's Eve party in Warsaw during the war, the start of 1944.
Hoess heard that I was a writer, and he got me to one side at the party, and he said he wished he could write.
'How I envy you creative people — ' he said to me. 'Creativity is a gift from the gods.'
Hoess said he had some marvelous stories to tell. He said they were all true, but that people wouldn't be able to believe them.
Hoess could not tell me the stories, he said, until the war was won. After the war, he said, we might collaborate.
'I can talk it,' he said, 'but I can't write it.' He looked to me for pity. 'When I sit down to write,' he said, 'I freeze.' What was I doing in Warsaw? I had been ordered there by my boss, Reichsleiter Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Head of the German Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. I had a certain amount of skill as a dramatist, and Dr. Goebbels wanted me to use it. Dr. Goebbels wanted me to write a pageant honoring the German soldiers who had given their last full measure of devotion — who had died — that is, in putting down the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Dr. Goebbels had a dream of producing the pageant annually in Warsaw after the war, of letting the ruins of the ghetto stand forever as a setting for it. 'There would be Jews in the pageant?' I asked him.