Briquets…
- Guard number three is Arpad Kovacs. He shows up at 6pm.
- Kovacs is always excited to read what Campbell wrote that day, exclaiming things like, Yeah, sock it to those briquets!
- Umm what?
- Okay, first off, Campbell tells us, Kovacs doesn't really read his stuff. He just makes assumptions about what Campbell is writing.
- Clarification numero dos: briquets are compact coal pieces that are easy to carry and burn. Kovacs is calling those who went quietly to the concentration camps briquets. Jeez.
- Turns out Kovacs sympathizes with Campbell's position because when the Nazis came for him, he fled and—gulp—joined the S.S. in Hungary.
- Campbell asks Kovacs if he ever heard Campbell's anti-Semitic radio broadcasts. (Campbell was a propagandist for the Nazis.) Kovacs hasn't, so Campbell gives him a transcript to read.
- Kovacs is disappointed in Campbell: he thinks the hate-speech he used was weak-sauce. He tells Campbell that in his division of the S.S. this tripe would have got Campbell killed as almost Jew-friendly.
- Kovacs is complicated. He was feared as a super-scary Aryan leader, was never found out to be an undercover Jew leaking information, and was even congratulated by Adolf Eichmann for sending 14 S.S. officers suspected for said leaks of information to execution.
- The biggest regret Kovacs has? Not knowing how important Eichmann was to the Nazis.
- Why? Because he would have killed him.