“My connection to Topf
is the death of my 49 relatives,
including my parents and my eleven-year-old sister.
They were all incinerated in ovens made by Topf & Sons.
Every year I go to Buchenwald to see an oven,
because it was in an oven of that or a similar kind
that all my family members were incinerated,
and because there are no more ovens of that kind in Auschwitz.”
Those were words Éva Pusztai spoke in 2011
the presentation of a book about the Topf & Sons company.
For us it is inconceivable that
Éva Pusztai doesn’t have a cemetery where she can mourn.
All that remain to her are the ovens in Buchenwald.
The loss of one’s complete family is so incomprehensible to us
that we can hardly find words for it.
Éva describes that time as unbearable.
Nevertheless, until the end, she never gave up hope of returning home.
Despite these occurrences, experiences
and horrible memories,
Éva goes to Buchenwald
every year to commemorate her family.
These ovens at which Éva commemorates her family
were the invention of Kurt Prüfer,
one of many employees at Topf & Sons.
In our opinion, he is nevertheless very much worthy of mention,
because he contributed greatly to – and here I quote
from the exhibition at the Topf & Sons Place of Remembrance –
‘assembly-line work and the smooth progress of the mass murder’.
We found furnace construction engineer Prüfer’s
economic and technical approach to his work horrifying.
To him, the dead of the concentration camps weren’t people
but numbers on paper.
We can conclude this from a telephone memo
he wrote about the conversation with the SS
in which he advertised his eight-muffle oven.
He cited the performance with the mere number 800.
Here the following questions arise for us:
Why doesn’t he ever talk about human corpses?
Was he conscious of his actions and their consequences?
How did Prüfer reconcile his actions with his conscience?
The individuals involved
in the design, production,
all the way to the installation –
they all could have acted differently.
But – would you act differently?
Supposing in the present
one or two schoolmates were being discriminated by a large group.
Would you help them despite your own disadvantage?
Would you just blindly follow the opinions of the others,
just to belong?
Each individual has to keep constant sight of his responsibility,
and should accordingly ask himself
what he contributes to the whole.
And never forget what happened some seventy years ago.