Mother Night

4: Leather Straps ...

Bernard Mengel, a Polish Jew who guards me from midnight until six in the morning, is also a man my age. He once saved his own life in the Second World War by playing so dead that a German soldier pulled out three of his teeth without suspecting that Mengel was not a corpse.

The soldier wanted Mengel's three gold inlays.

He got them.

Mengel tells me that I sleep very noisily here in jail, tossing and talking all night

'You are the only man I ever heard of,' Mengel said to me this morning, 'who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way.'

'What makes you think I have a bad conscience?' I said.

'The way you sleep — the way you dream,' he said. 'Even Hoess did not sleep like that. He slept like a saint, right up to the end.'

Mengel was speaking of Rudolf Franz Hoess, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz. In his tender care, literally millions of Jews were gassed. Mengel knew a little about Hoess. Before emigrating to Israel in 1947, Mengel helped to hang Hoess.

And he didn't do it with testimony, either. He did it with his two big hands. 'When Hoess was hanged,' he told me, 'the strap around his ankles — I put that on and made it tight'

'Did that give you a lot of satisfaction?' I said.

'No,' he said, 'I was like almost everybody who came through that war.'

'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.'