Reconstructing, piece by piece, the machinery of death
Götz and Meyer
By David Albahari
Translated, from the Serbian, by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Harcourt, 168 pp., $23
''The banality of evil," coined by Hannah Arendt to evoke the impermeable pedantries of the master of Holocaust logistics, Adolf Eichmann, refuses to wear out. Persistently it is reborn: a rending concept that keeps on rending.
That is true of this novella, ''Götz and Meyer," by David Albahari, about two meticulous SS drivers, all of whose thoughts go pridefully, anxiously, to the new truck they have been assigned, and none at all to its cargo. This is not chickens or baling wire but Jews, who, in the course of an hour's drive, and thanks to the clever reattachment of the vehicle's exhaust pipe, are lethally gassed.
At the end of the trip, Serbian prisoners (later to be executed) shovel out the 50 or so cadavers and bury them while the drivers relax, fill out forms, and chat with their colleagues. It is all sheltered and antiseptic; a vast improvement over the mass shootings of earlier days, which could be traumatic for the shooters.
So Reichsführer Himmler concluded, after a visit to one such mass event forced him to throw up and stain his uniform. The truck system was much more satisfactory until it gave way to the total efficiency of the death camps. Götz and Meyer enjoy the breezy drives, sleep well despite an occasional nightmare, and are so devoted to their truck that when an axle breaks it is a grief, a violation, an atrocity, even.
''They were, in fact, the best proof of how advances in technology enhance the stability of the human personality." High-altitude bombing, as against the bayonet charge, comes to mind; or the Yale test that had presumably normal students inflict pain by remote control.
If this brief novel by Albahari, a Serbian, is remarkable, it is because it builds far beyond the acrid satire implied in the previous paragraphs. He writes not from the superior vantage point of the satirist but as one engulfed, held hostage, overcome.
The narrator is a schoolteacher who has searched the archives to find out what became of his Jewish relatives after they were taken to a holding camp on the fairgrounds outside Belgrade. In the thoroughness of Nazi records he was able to trace the truck, the methods, and even the surnames of the two drivers. The rest is reconstruction, nightmarish in its triviality.
Painfully the narrator surmises the thoughts and routines of the drivers. The records don't distinguish them, and so he doesn't either.
Perhaps the single most piercing trope in his story is the persistent repetition of ''Götz or maybe it was Meyer" as each small bit of action is recounted.
As when ''Götz or maybe it was Meyer" hands out chocolates to the children who were to board the truck. Or gets out to reposition the exhaust pipe. Or wistfully imagines being a Luftwaffe pilot. Or -- which of the two? -- cries out in his sleep. (As I say, this is more than satire, and inside ''inhumane" nestle the letters spelling ''human.") The blur of identity conveys atrocity's supreme horror: a specific act without a specific actor.
The narrator, telling all this with superficial calm, cannot bear what he tells. He consults a Holocaust researcher. ''History is a dark land," she warns him; ''you're damned if you venture in and damned if you don't."
But to try to reach, in his own search, the fullness of his dead family, he has to pass through the void of Götz and Meyer. He hallucinates a meeting; they treat him with unruffled courtesy. Sitting on a bench, he holds hands with them.
He plunges into the hubbub of downtown Belgrade, trying to populate the void. ''Nothing helped. Silence was crouching in my ear like a hermit crab in a snail shell." He hires a bus and takes his class for a ride, wondering whether the students can imagine being the Jews in the truck.
They can't. One girl, trying, bursts into tears because the imaginary guards won't let her bring along a pet.
The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote an essay about the persecution of the Albigensian heretics by the Inquisition and King Louis of France. There was atrocious torture, and Herbert, who, like all poets, deals with the concrete, evokes the large horror by small means. He visits a museum and describes a display of thumbscrews, pliers, and straps. ''Examine the tools," he writes.
Examine the truck. And because ''Götz and Meyer" has a resonance beyond its own times, examine: all trucks, airplanes, and bureaucratic memoranda that outline, or that blur, the permissible methods of interrogation. ''The banality of evil" remains a living phrase, if only to call for an enduring vigilance over our own banalities for the evil to be found in them.
Richard Eder reviews books for several publications. 
