Many historical writers come across horrific events from the past during their research, and have to, however temporarily, see the world though the eyes of the perpetrators of atrocities. Douglas Jackson, author of Blood Sacrifice, writes about the mental cost of living in the minds of monsters.
I recently came across a quote from a quite famous author who likened writing a novel to survival training, as if it was some great lung-bursting physical endeavour that left him exhausted and aching. It seemed an odd description for an activity that, in my experience, is more about spending hours in sedentary ease pecking at the keyboard, thoughtfully sipping tea, with the occasional foray to the bookshelf or the kitchen to keep atrophy at bay.
And yet, when I considered the project I’m currently working on, I decided there’s actually a grain of truth in what he said, though the cost is mental rather than corporeal. The Warsaw Quartet is set in the titular city during World War Two, a place, and a time, that witnessed some of the worst atrocities of that terrible conflict.
As writers we have to walk in the footsteps of our characters and witness their world through their eyes. Sometimes that means seeing images that cannot be unseen and reading descriptions of acts so extreme we will carry them to the grave.
The first book of the series, Blood Roses, saw Jan Kalisz, Kriminalpolizei detective, reviled collaborator and Resistance double agent, helping track down a serial killer in the early years of the brutal Nazi occupation of Poland. Warsaw was then part of an entity called the General Government, an SS fiefdom ruled from the governor’s palace in Krakow with the pitiless savagery that characterises Hitler’s Totenkopfverbände – his Death’s Head regiments.
Kalisz operates against a background of sudden disappearances, public executions, and the łapanka, surprise roundups where anyone of any class, sex or age could be swept up to be held in prison until the moment they were required to be shot or hanged in revenge for some insult against the occupying powers. Any act of resistance or display of national pride was punishable by death.
In the years between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis murdered almost six million Poles, and deported another one and a half million to Germany to be used as forced labour in German factories or on farms. Polish culture was to be erased; theatres, cinemas and libraries were closed down, and Polish children were forbidden to attend school or university. Hitler’s long term vision was for the capital to become a German provincial town where the only Poles would be those serving German masters as slaves.
Three million of the Poles killed by the Germans were Jews and 10 per cent of them were held in the Warsaw Ghetto before being transported to their deaths at Treblinka.
Atrocities are common to all conflicts, but World War Two is unique in that it was the first where the mass slaughter of civilians was carried out on an industrial scale.
Around 60,000 of those trapped in the ghetto survived the Great Action of the summer of 1942. Half of them were what the Nazis called ‘wild’, families who had gone into hiding rather than submit to ‘resettlement’ in the east, which everyone now knew mean certain death. The others were slave workers in the German-owned factories within the ghetto which manufactured products for the Wehrmacht. By the start of 1943 all of these people knew their time was running out.
In Blood Sacrifice, the second book of the Warsaw Quartet, Jan Kalisz is investigating the murder of a Gestapo financial expert when he discovers the dead man possessed three separate identities, which, in turn, mask an enormous conspiracy to defraud the Nazi state. The hunt for the killer takes Kalisz inside the walls of the ghetto just as the SS are preparing to wipe it from the map.
On April 19, 1943, SS-Brigadeführer Jurgen Stroop sent 2,000 heavily armed soldiers and security police to clear the ghetto of the last Jewish fugitives and slave workers. They were opposed by a few hundred young fighters from the Jewish Combat Organisation, armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails, who were determined to fight to the last from their secret bunkers.
The fighting lasted almost a month and Stroop was forced to destroy the ghetto building by building and street by street. Some 20,000 Jews died in the fighting, many burned to death or suffocated in underground refuges. The remaining 36,000 were sent to Treblinka to be gassed.
Stroop, a meticulous bureaucrat, was so proud of his achievement that he had a detailed report, complete with photographs, printed and bound for Heinrich Himmler. A copy of the report was used as evidence for his trial and execution in Warsaw in 1952.
Treblinka was a death factory, where every man, woman and child who arrived was destined for the gas chamber. Concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the other hand, had a dual role of mass murder and the provision of slave labour.
In future adventures, Kalisz is destined to renew his acquaintance with his old associate Doctor Josef Mengele.
The horrors of life in the camps are well documented, and can be summed up by the words of former prisoner Stanisław Nogaj, who recorded that there were 80 different kinds of death in his camp. They included “bullets, clubs, ropes, gas, poison, electrical current, hunger, being burned alive, buried alive, stoned to death, falling under trains…”
But of all the murderers in the camps, it is Mengele, Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Angel of Death, who causes the greatest shudder. In Blood Roses we met a young doctor with an interest in genetics, and particularly the genetics of twins, a Nazi to the core and a believer in racial purity. If the inclination and motivation for what happened later existed, what was missing was opportunity.
That only came when he was appointed in May 1943 as a physician at Auschwitz, where one of his main jobs was to select those unfit for work from the endless transports that brought hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe.
Those selected, the old, the sick and the infirm, mothers with young children, were destined for the gas chamber within minutes of their arrival.
Yet Mengele swiftly identified another category for temporary salvation. Now he had a steady supply of twin children, from babies to teenagers, to study, and more importantly, research.
That research involved horrific experiments where the twins were subjected to painful medical procedures without the benefit of anaesthetic, their organs and eyes injected with chemicals and caustic substances. When their reactions to the torment had been recorded Mengele killed most with an injection of phenol to the heart.
To spend any amount of time in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the company of a man like Mengele is unpleasant, but prolonged exposure can be corrosive to the soul. That’s why an integral part of my working day is an hour-long ‘sanity walk’ along the river, where the murmur of the waters, the crispness of the air, and the sights and sounds of the wildlife cleanse the mind in preparation for another visit to the mind of a monster.
Blood Sacrifice by Douglas Jackson is published on 14 November, 2024. It’s the second novel in his Warsaw Quartet.
Find out more about this book.
Douglas is the author of 18 novels across three genres, including the acclaimed nine-book Valerius series set in ancient Rome.
You may also be interested in his feature How I discovered my war hero uncle’s secret, about the Polish man who inspired these books.
Other Historia features related to this topic include:
Three White Pebbles by Wendy Holden on how she came to terms with the horror of what she was writing about
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Elisabeth Gifford
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre by Carolyn Kirby
Carolyn Kirby interviews Clare Mulley, author of Agent Zo
Concentration camps and the politics of memory by Catherine Hokin
Images:
- To the transhipping place — captured Jews are led by Waffen SS soldiers to the assembly point for deportation, between 19 April and 16 May, 1943: Stroop Report, National Archives at College Park via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
- The Warsaw Ghetto — ghetto wall and Lubomirski palace, 24 May, 1941: Deutsches Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-134-0791-29A via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The ‘Great Action’ — deportations of the Jews to Treblinka death camp, 1942: Wikimedia (public domain)
- A German gun crew prepares to shell the ruins of a building during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 19 April to 16 May, 1943: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Forcibly pulled out of bunkers — Polish Jews captured by Germans during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 19 April to 16 May, 1943: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer (behind Höss) and Anton Thumann, July 1944, at the SS resort Solahütte, near Auschwitz: the Höcker Album, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (public domain)
