We are often judged by whom we choose to love, and little merit is assigned to why we love them. And while love might be viewed by many commentators as a mere act of madness, it is essentially the only aspect of our lives that can save us in a world that is truly insane. I came to this conclusion long after my marriage was over, decades after she had died, but one might argue that it is only from the observation tower of celibate solitude that one is able to draw objective conclusions about the true nature of our emotional lives.

When I arrived at the camp at the age of twenty-two, my future wife had not yet been assigned her grisly role in the genocide which would follow. That is not to say, of course, that many of the internees did not die at that time; in the space of my first six months of tenure there were perhaps six hundred prisoners who expired from a panoply of fatal causes ranging from disease to starvation, overwork, labour accidents and outright brutality from my fellow guards. However, when some of our top officials arrived from the capital in the bluster of a snowstorm one icy March day, it was clear that the policy of keeping these men and women alive for the purposes of state servitude was no longer tenable. Alternative plans were drawn up over a weekend of banqueting and carousing, the blueprints of an escalated bloodshed.

Three weeks after this auspicious meeting, orders were sanctioned to dig out the foundations for four new buildings on the eastern perimeter, and two dozen men were put to work to construct the frames for what we were told at the time were to become nothing more than stations for delousing prisoners. A euphemism, of sorts, or nothing more than an ironic joke by a high-ranking officer, given their general opinion that all the inmates were parasites anyhow. I watched as the construction began, and with hindsight would have been able to deduce that these worker-ants were building their own mausoleums, but to have resisted aiding the building work, even if it had  been possible to fathom the true horrific nature of their future use, would have meant an even swifter death.

Once the frames pierced the horizon like representations of diaphanous cathedrals, more men were summoned with bricks and  mortar to construct the sturdy walls which would keep the camp from  becoming spectators to the horror within. The walls on each side were  almost two feet thick, soon to be tattooed on their interior planes by the ragged fingernails and the bloodied knuckles of the dying. The work took two weeks to complete, fourteen days of boredom for myself and the other eight soldiers, who watched over the prisoners for any signs of revolt which never arose.

What did arrive soon after their completion was an increased number of migrant prisoners on overcrowded trains, which overstretched our already meagre resources. It was only when we were able to witness for ourselves the necessity to keep the camp population down to a streamlined minimum that we were informed of the future of our camp and what these four innocuous buildings would actually implement. In some curiously perverse attempt to ameliorate the gravity of their operations, the buildings were each named after a local leader’s wife: Rosie, Eve, Hannah and Josephine. Hannah and Josephine were pseudonyms for the two crematoria, while Rosie and Eve became attached to the twin execution chambers. When the prisoners installed the ovens inside each crematoria, they were told that they were constructing two bakeries for the increased population, but no bread would ever be baked there. And when the men installed the chutes in the roofs of the gas chambers, no comments were made; but some of the wiser survivors must have known that it seemed unnecessary to construct such a conduit if such edifices were to be nothing more than buildings for delousing operations.

It was perhaps only good fortune that I was assigned to Eve, my first wife. We drew lots out of a hat over a minor festivity of vodka, bread and cheese to decide the designation and shift-patterns. Eve would become the first of the execution chambers to be used, and I was there to witness her first operation, a shambolic mixture of chaos and fear, as the worker-ants dropped insufficient levels of rat poison onto their former neighbours, which resulted in prolonging the agony of their inevitable deaths. As the corpses were being carried out of Eve’s posterior end, wheelbarrowed to the hot ovens, we pulled rank to ensure that the next arrivals were already stripped naked and standing at the entrance to Rosie, a breathtaking example of efficient conveyor-belt murder in the wake of a disastrous debut. After the initial teething problems of the maiden event, we learned from our mistakes and honed our techniques over the course of the first two months, which enabled us to slim down the amount of time it took to transport the passengers from the trains to their mass cremation just seven hundred yards from the mock station, evaluating the situation as if we were imitating Henry Ford troubleshooting at a failing automobile factory. It was during this time, as I studied the women, men and children being herded inside through the large barn doors to their final destination, and while I listened to their pitiful screams competing with the blaring megaphones of Wagner and Bach, and while I harassed the workers to move faster with their cartloads of cadavers, that I fell in love with Eve.

Before Eve there had been other lovers, but none had lived up to the paradigm in my head, though I now have to concede that the image I held for her was unrealistic. During my youthful biography there had been a parade of sexual activity with the usual Lolita-styled schoolgirls in my home town, as well as the painted whores of the ports, and an older woman twice my age, who had seduced me at fourteen like a nymphomaniac matron. Yet there was something not quite right about these sexual relationships; in light of Eve’s arrival they would seem like nothing more than prototype thought experiments in search of a watertight theory. Eve was the ultimate silent seductress, undressing the lines of state enemies and serenading the naked towards what we believed to be a deserving justice. In a perverse sense I envied the many thousands I saw disappear within her saintly mouth, engulfed by her love, but I did not wish to be a part of her callous rejection as their limp bodies were excreted from her eastern wall and heaped in slaughterhouse piles ripe for burning.

At night, wrestling with the spectre of insomnia, I lay awake thinking of unwritten love letters for Eve, reams of poetic doggerel and musical sonnets, but I resigned myself to the garish fact that a woman who had chosen the role of a killing machine would not require mawkish sensibilities to be won over. Instead she would be searching for an equal act of brutality to illustrate that I had the mettle to match her psychotic ardour. And so I began to perform my own cruel and violent actions, which would be documented in numerous legal ledgers at the war trials a few years later. I have no desire to repeat them here, but to say only this: Every wound I caused and every trauma I offered up was nothing more than a display of affection toward Eve. I also believed that these moments of viciousness allowed me to hide my secret love from the other guards under a veil of violence. But at night I ventured enough courage to show my true love for Eve by returning to touch and caress her outer carapace under the cover of darkness. It was at some point during these midnight liaisons that a watchtower guard observed these romantic gestures and reported my behaviour to the commandant.

Weeks later, as punishment, I was forced to confess explicit details of my love with the camp’s psychiatrist. Although he was perversely  interested in attempting to bridge a link between hypothetical episodes of sexual abuse from my childhood and my current relationship with Eve, he could find nothing to tie the two ends together. Instead he proceeded onward through my puberty and attempted to probe my first sexual experiences as if they might offer a foundation for my contemporary sexual behaviour. I fed him what he wanted to hear so that he could find a satisfactory conclusion and end these humiliating  sessions where my love was being questioned by an impotent old fool. It was clear that whichever school of thought he followed he would never understand the truth of the matter – that Eve was a perfectly acceptable object of desire.

During this time I was forbidden from working with Eve and was sent to supervise operations at one of the crematoria. I refuse to name which one because I know that Eve was jealous of the work she undertook. I don’t know why; I personally felt that the crematoria were unnecessary and that we should have continued to bury the dead in large excavation areas at the edge of the camp. However, the commandant believed that it was better to immolate the bodies for fear that the buried might be discovered by the enemy if we were ever defeated. I was astonished by this admission of the impossible – that we might lose the war. As a result of this negative philosophy, we were ordered to dig up the ones we had already tossed into the mass graves and cremate them along with the fresher dead. One of my abiding memoriof that time was witnessing a camp member dig up the corpses of his own family and calmly place them on the bed of a truck for transportation to the ovens. As an act of kindness, I gave him five minutes to mourn their passing before sending him back to work, not comprehending that his serenity was numb shock of trying to deal with the incomprehensible. Once he was able to stumble out of the maze of his analgesic mind, he understood there was only one philosophical solution to this madness: Suicide.

I was seconded at the crematorium for several weeks, but every stolen opportunity that I had I would spend staring out of the window at Eve, who was continuing to devour the long rivers of people despatched to her every day, organisms that would soon bloom black in the ovens which surrounded me. The psychiatric sessions continued bi-weekly, and the psychiatrist began to assert ideas which displeased and offended me. He believed that in my personalising Eve as a human being I was attempting to soften the edges of what was happening around me; in a sense she as nothing more than a comfort blanket for the horror show. During a later meeting he also implied that I had unconsciously fallen in love with an inanimate object to avoid expressing empathetic emotions for the human prisoners that I was transporting to a premature death every day, which I took with extreme umbrage and walked out, preferring instead to incur the wrath of my superiors than endure another second of unbearable psychobabble.

That night, furious at the straw man’s words, I went to Eve to express my undying love for her, and did not care about the repercussions if I was caught. I asked Eve what might happen to either of us if the war ended and the camp closed down. I  hoped that if we won the war (as I expected we would) and no one would find out about this glorious chapter of our history, that I would be able to take a section of Eve home with me as a souvenir of our time together, or that it might be possible for me to reconstruct her structure on family farmland I had acquired in my grandfather’s will. I told her not to worry; we would find a way forward together. I would later find out that I had once again been observed by one of the watchtower guards, but his report to the commandant would not  matter, because by now there were more pressing matters: We were doing the impossible and losing the war. To the east, the peasants’ army was advancing like a virulent plague of death, and the situation was deteriorating rapidly in our capital. The following morning we were ordered to destroy all evidence that we were running an extermination camp. Documents were burned in the ovens before the machinery itself was obliterated into manageable shards with cutting tools and railroad hammers.

The final transports which arrived were hurried into makeshift uniforms to give the false presentation that we were nothing more than a location of  internment. Once this was carried out our superiors fled for their  lives, leaving behind their bold talk of fighting until the bitter end. We had always thought that out of chaos we could provide order, but nature had proved that the exact opposite was true. As the enemy was viewed on the hills to our east, officers panicked and attempted to hide among the internees so that their true identities would not be discovered, while some of the healthier prisoners attempted to take charge of the frightened masses and organise an impromptu rebellion. It was in these hours of fevered madness, as we demolished Rosie, the second gas chamber, that I asked a lasting favour of G., one of my closest friends at the camp. I had remembered that in a previous life, before the war had begun in earnest, G. had been a pastor. There had been many nights after a day of terror and bloodshed when we had talked vociferously about God and the problem of evil, of creation and evolution, of nature and nurture, and never ever come to any satisfactory agreement. But on our final day at the camp the one question I asked him to answer was replied with an affirmative.

I stepped inside of Eve for the first and final time. I felt a momentary chill as the doors were slammed shut behind me. As I waited for G. to climb the  ladder to the roof, I was able to see what Eve’s supposedly valiant life had done to her: She was scarred from head to toe with the graffiti of desperate hands trying to claw through her innards; there was abstract-expressionistic slashes and drips of blood across her walls; there was the carved depression of footprints all over her floor where prisoners had walked their terminal steps. G. did not have time for these observations and wished to proceed with the marriage ceremony from the vantage point of the chute, which had once been the entrance point for canisters of death.

As the words floated down from above, I closed my eyes and considered how long this marriage would last for as I knew that Eve was close to death herself, and my own future was gravely uncertain. Once the ceremony was over, I placed a ring on my finger and offered one to Eve, which I placed in the hollow of gouged footprints. The rings had once belonged to two of the final victims to succumb to Eve’s charms, and I  could not help but wonder with a cruel sense of irony that the footprint before me had been created by the ring owner herself. Once G. had ceased speaking I closed my eyes and awaited the finale of the ceremony. But it did not come. I had awaited a final act of love from Eve, but she wanted me to live and understand a life beyond the insanity of the camp. As I opened the exit door and walked away from my wife, I  realised that I was the only person to leave her and still be alive. Two hours later, an enemy soldier took the wedding band from my ring finger, placed my wrists in handcuffs and escorted me out of the war and into the rest of my life.

A life without Eve. Eve would be my first wife, but not my last.  She would, however, be the last I would visit. Two weeks ago, I journeyed  back to my former work place. Some people would not like me calling it that, I know, but that is what it was to me. Now it has become a memorial to the past, a recreated theme park congested with tourists and young people trying to find the names of their ancestors on the wall of  remembrance. Much of what has been destroyed has been recreated as a simulation of what I remembered. Although they have faithfully rendered  the buildings from the original architectural designs and the testimonies of survivors, they do not retain the smells and the atmosphere of their  original purpose, even though the guides, many of whom were interned  here themselves, do their best to describe what happened here. I  wondered, as I walked with the visiting group, if they recognized me,  even though I no longer resemble the man I once was. I also cogitated the  possibilities of what they might do if they knew who I was. In addition I imagined what might happen if there was another war and this entire area would be annihilated: Would they replace what was left of the camp with another replica?

I did not stay long with the tour and soon deviated to the place which had lingered in my mind  for so long. Eve had not been destroyed after my arrest; in fact, given that she was the only surviving relic of our extermination process, her light shone much brighter after the war and she become the star of the show. They never rebuilt the other gas chamber or furnished models of the crematoria out of the rubble and ashes we left behind. Now there were just signs planted beside them in a variety of languages to convey what had taken place in this part of the world. As the tour caught up with me, I could  see them all look at Eve with a sense of awe and silenced reverence. No words could describe her and I, too, was at a loss to say anything to her  during this brief reunion. A young girl grabbed my hand as she cried to  herself, and told me that her grandparents had died here, but apart from  that there was no sound. All I could think about in that moment was the confusion of how she meant so little to me now, but perhaps this was just because of a sad longing – that if we had met in a different time and more peaceful circumstances we would be together today. But of course, the contrary is possible and maybe we would not have met at all. Maybe it was the unusual scenario itself which drew us together. Maybe the doctor was right and that she was the only way I could love in a loveless environment and without her presence I might not have been here today. Whatever the true answers might be, I knew that as I left her life for the second time that I would not see her again. I did not even look back as I passed through the gates and headed towards the parking area. She will always be inside of me, in a small way. My first true love. Every time I heard my prison cell door close, it reminded me of the moment that her own doors closed as she swallowed another community of prisoners and sent them to the slaughterhouse. Every time I observe the cracked and damaged paving stones of the pavements on my way home, they remind me of her desecrated womb carved out by thousands of dying fingers. And every time I stare at the innards of my gas oven, contemplating, as I do now, my own end, I cannot help but see this contraption as the bastard child of our honeymoon night, an evening which never arrived.