The Historiography of the Holocaust

238 Andrew Charlesworth
The connection between the gas chambers and farmhouses is even more
complex. With no budget for mass murder the Germans adapted whatever was
at hand in the landscape. At Birkenau the brick barracks and the gas chamber
complexes were built from the farmhouses that existed in the area prior to the
camp. The final twist in this recycling tale is that after liberation the farmers
returned to Brzezinka and from the camp reclaimed bricks and material,
including from the gas chambers, to rebuild their houses. As Robert Jan van
Pelt has pointed out, the best places to do chemical tests for the presence of
Zyklon B is in these houses. 51
At Chelmno, the first death camp, where improvisation and experimentation
were most marked, a derelict country house was used as the base for the first
stage of the killings by gas van. The vans themselves were adapted from existing
vehicles. The ‘big house’ in Chelmno is often referred to as a castle, which
immediately makes one think of dungeons and torture chambers. The truth is
more prosaic: it had been a country house, possibly on the site of a former castle,
as is clear from photographs taken before it was damaged in the First World
War. 52 It would have larger rooms for the well-to-do upstairs and servants’
quarters below. The present archaeological excavation at the site reinforces the
image of a medieval castle with its barbarity because country houses tend not
to be excavated (figure 18). What the Jews from Lódz and the surrounding
region encountered on arrival was a large country house set behind a fence.
After the conditions in the ghetto, such a house, with its setting overlooking
the beautiful valley of the Narew, and such a place must have lulled them
into thinking things were not so bad, before the awful truth became apparent
to them.
The Auschwitz State Museum would seem to agree that the camp commandant’s
house is a disturbing place because it is not open to visitors. Like other
camp commandants’ houses it stands today as a solid bourgeois house, with
a house number. The commandant’s house at Majdanek has had another house
built around it, so its origins and the nature of the former inhabitant are
literally hidden (figure 19). Are these attempts to conceal who lived here done
so that we will not ponder the connection between the homes and the deeds
done there by the heads of the households? Certainly the home life of Rudolf
Hoess, the camp commandant at Auschwitz, bears some consideration.
As he stepped from his back garden at his home in Auschwitz, Hoess crossed
the boundary between home and work (figure 20). On one side of the line he
was a family man, who played with his children and swam with them in the
Sola river just across the road. On the other side he walked the few steps to his
office and a further few to the gas chamber. At the end of the day, he would
cross the line back to the bosom of his family.
George Steiner, the literary critic, has long wrestled with the fact that the
perpetrators of the Holocaust came from one of the most cultured nations the