"Vonnegut, Kurt - Mother Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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.
That fact is the basis for his sympathy with me. 'Tell them the things a man does to stay alive! What's so noble about being a briquet?' he said last night
'Did you ever hear any of my broadcasts?' I asked him. The medium of my war crimes was radio broadcasting. I was a Nazi radio propagandist, a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite.
'No,' he said.
So I showed him a transcript of a broadcast, a transcript furnished to me by the Haifa Institute. 'Read it,' I said.
'I don't have to,' he said. 'Everybody was saying the same things over and over and over in those days.'
'Read it anyway - as a favor,' I said.
So he read it, his face becoming sourer and sourer. He handed it back to me. 'You disappoint me,' he said.
'Oh?' I said.
'It's so weak!' he said. 'It has no body, no paprika, no zest! I thought you were a master of racial invective!'
'I'm not?' I said.
'If any member of my S.S. platoon had spoken in such a friendly way about the Jews,' said Arpad, 'I would have had him shot for treason! Goebbels should have fired you and hired me as the radio scourge of the Jews. I would have raised blisters around the world!'
'You were already doing your part with your S.S. platoon,' I said.
Arpad beamed, remembering his S.S. days. 'What an Aryan I made!' he said.
'Nobody ever suspected you?' I said.
'How would they dare?' he said. 'I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan that they even put me in a special detachment. Its mission was to find out how the Jews always knew what the S.S. was going to do next There was a leak somewhere, and we were out to stop it' He looked bitter and affronted, remembering it, even though he had been that leak.
'Was the detachment successful in its mission?' I said.
'I'm happy to say,' said Arpad, 'that fourteen S.S. men were shot on our recommendation. Adolf Eichmann himself congratulated us.'
'You met him, did you?' I said.
'Yes' said Arpad, 'and I'm sorry I didn't know at the time how important he was.'
'Why?' I said.
'I would have killed him,' said Arpad.

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.'

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.