Thursday, Aug. 18, 1938
There are now two more men who work with me in the canteen. Dieter Lange says before the year is over there will be 20,000 prisoners in Dachau, so more help is needed. I guess I should say I work with the two new men, since Dieter Lange told me it was now important that Germans seem to be in charge. One is Lappus, a Green, and the other is Huebner, a Witness. I check in the stock; they place it on the shelves and do most of the selling. I make sure the place is as clean as possible, but I also do the books for Dieter Lange to make sure these guys haven’t got their hands in the till. But they make a nice balance; Huebner seems to be about as honest as a man can be. If Lappus has any desire to be another Baum, I don’t think Huebner will let him.
There are exactly ten Africans in camp now. I’ve spoken to some of them. They aren’t very friendly because they’re scared. They’ve all had the operation that Dr. Nyassa had. Maybe they’re more sad than unfriendly. Some I can’t speak to because they don’t speak anything but African. The guards call their speech “Chinese.” The Africans were part of an English circus that went bust in Germany. The German women thought them exotic, the Africans thought they were something hot, and boom! Before they knew it, they were enemies of the state, violators of the “blood and honor” laws out of Nuremberg. They all wear the black triangle on their knees and chests. I wrote down some things in German for them to learn. I know they need the German and, I think, down deep, they know they need it, too. Huebner is very good with them when they come into the canteen, which is not often.
If I am to bear witness like it says in Revelation, I have to say that what the Jews are going through is unbearable. Since I last wrote here, they’ve had to register whatever they own. Down to the toothbrush, the shoelaces. The Jews have had to register their businesses, no matter how small, and any Jew who has a police record, no matter how insignificant, is picked up. Can there be any Jews left? Have they been blind? By the first of the year they are to have their names changed officially to “Sarah” or “Israel.” That will be like having a different color skin. Did they think this wasn’t real? And now, just yesterday, Werner tells me, in Evian, France, a conference ended. It was about the Jews and which countries would take them in from Germany and Austria: not a single country, including the United States; not a country, not one. And in they come. Not only here, but all over Germany where there are camps; the tailors are still busy making six-pointed gold stars and triangles.
Monday, October 3, 1938
Last Friday at The Nest I found Moritz in a closet playing “Deutschland Über Alles.” I was surprised at how sweet it sounded on the violin; it was very nice, and I told him so. He said it was by Haydn, from a piece he wrote for a string quartet. I said he must have been a patriotic cat. He laughed. Haydn, he told me, died in 1809, before Germany was a whole country or, he whispered, a Reich. During some of the rehearsal time now, we listen to the records that Dieter Lange and Bernhardt collect on their travels because, Dieter Lange says, “You can’t get German Brunswick, HMV, Telefunken, Odeon, Imperial—they aren’t recording jazz music anymore.”
All the labels are from America, Holland, France, Switzerland, Sweden, or England. Now we have the Benny Goodman band, quartet, and trio. I read in an old British paper that he has colored—Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Lester Young, Walter Page—playing with him. Also some new Lunceford and Ellington, Red Allen, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Barnet, Coleman Hawkins, Erskine Hawkins, Woody Herman, Billie Holiday, Santo Pecora, Louis Prima, Don Redman, Gene Sedric (from the Wooding band), Willie “The Lion” Smith, Art Tatum, and Jess Stacy.
After listening to Sedric’s “The Joint Is Jumpin’” and “Off Time,” everybody in the band had something to say about The Nest “jumpin’” or not “jumpin’.” “Off Time” is interesting because, while the tempo is fast, you can cut it in half, but Germans don’t know how to “Lindy,” so the side is more for learning for us than for anything we can cop and play. I can do a pretty good copy of Jimmy Rushing on “Shoe Shine Swing,” and, naturally, the people love to hear me do renditions of Louis Armstrong’s “Pennies from Heaven” and “Confessin’.” In other words, the music keeps us from going crazy, because, with each passing day, it looks like the situation in Germany isn’t going to get any better, but worse, as Ulrich said, as Werner said before him. Last week the British and the French agreed to let the Germans take part of Czechoslovakia. The problem is when. Old Gitzig was right.
Lily Bernhardt is pregnant. I’m surprised she’s alive at all, with all that piss in the tea and snot in the pudding that Gitzig served her. Now that Gitzig spends more time in camp, and gets him a little now and then, I suppose he’s not doing it anymore; too risky. Besides, he’s getting plenty of pretty good stuff in Bernhardt’s basement to keep account of, and, if I know Gitzig, he’s managing something himself. He told me, “This stuff is shit. You should see what we got in the warehouse in Munich. Bernhardt has already made a lot, believe me.” He supposed Dieter Lange was doing okay, too, and he’s right. His storeroom in the basement is crammed full; he’s also been storing stuff in the attic, including two suitcases filled with reichsmarks and food from Anna’s visits to her parents’ farm. I guess there’s a stash out there, too.
There are railroad tracks going into the camp now, and tracks to the factories and sheds just west. Details working there. Armaments, Werner tells me, what else? I keep saying there can’t be a war, and Werner keeps looking at me, like I’m a dummy. “You know who the prisoners work for over in those sheds? Messerschmidt, Dornier, BMW, I.G. Farben …”
Of all the different groups in camp, the Reds remain the best organized; nobody fucks with them, and everybody does what they say. They know what’s going on. They try to get their people into the important jobs, but the SS prefers the Greens and the Blacks; they seem to have a lot in common and they recognize each other, the way we do.
The good jobs are in the camp kitchens (which ensure a lot more, if not better, food, naturally), supply depot, laundry, bath house, property room, shoe repair shop, tailor shop (includes sock darning), carpentry shop, machine shop (in some of the rebuilt factories), lumber yard, infirmaries, library (they call it), photo shop, and paint shop. Also gardening and tending rabbits, serving in the SS houses, and, yes, playing in the camp band. The prisoners who work the details in the sheds have it easier than those who work in camp; they have contact with civilians, and the SS guards don’t want to act like the shits they are when the civilians are around. Hohenberg and some of the others in the Labor Office do the best they can for the Reds, but they can only do so much. They also have some people in the Records Office. The camp police are prisoners who work under the SS; no one likes them, no one trusts them. Back home we called them stool pigeons.
Friday, Nov. 11, 1938
I’ve shut the door. I’m in this tiny room (the canteen has been partitioned off again) where I do the books. But now I’m writing to you. Those prisoners with the soft jobs, who have time on their hands and run in and out of here, are in the main section talking about the past two days, Wednesday and Thursday. I can hear their laughter and loud, boasting voices. I never had the experience, but I’ve heard about times like these. The crackers back home would say Moses did this and that, and old Moses would run because he knew if they caught him he’d hang. Moses could be the name of any colored man. Whether they caught him or not, the crackers would come into the colored neighborhoods and burn houses, beat up people, shit, kill them if they couldn’t find Moses to kill instead. People ran to church or hid in the woods. People would pray the crackers would catch Moses and leave them alone; they hadn’t done anything. It didn’t matter to them that maybe Moses hadn’t done anything, either. They just didn’t want the crackers to burn their homes or to kill them. The one or two colored men who thought the people ought to fight back, quickly found themselves all alone.
The prisoners outside are talking about something like what happens back home, but inst
ead of a lynch mob they’re calling it Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass. All of Germany was like the booby hatch, the ones who went nuts and the ones who watched them. They burned or tore up and looted almost 8,000 shops owned by Jews, killed 35 Jews, burned about 200 synagogues; some Jewish women were raped; nobody knows how many Jews were hurt. The papers say the Jews will be fined a billion marks for causing the disturbance.
Some say there was altogether 25 million marks worth of damage. And they are already making more room here in camp for guess who? Every Jew who can run is running, or packing up to leave. But to where?
Bernhardt’s little Einsatztrupp, with Gitzig working the books, is already having a profitable time in Munich; they may even need another storehouse now. If Bernhardt’s doing so well, I can’t imagine how Goering’s doing.
Anna and Dieter Lange think they’re slick. I’ve heard them talking about how they got the doctor to sign her “can’t have babies” paper. So they’re getting away with it, not having kids at all. She’s dumping the pad and claiming a miscarriage. A lot of times they talk right out in the open, like I was still a piece of furniture; some of the important stuff I hear through the furnace flues that come down from their room into the cellar. They talk about money all the time, where to put it. Anna thinks they should help her folks buy more land and livestock, little by little. Dieter Lange wants to make safe and secret investments, get the money to Switzerland, but he’s afraid he might get caught. He’s told me sometimes in his room, or down in mine, when Anna’s out—when I learn the most important stuff—that he wishes all this business would settle down, maybe even that Hitler would get put out, so he could leave the SS and open a nice, fancy club in Berlin. Dieter Lange has done what he set out to do—make money. He used the SS to do it, but the SS is using him, too. He’s got to be careful. So they make money on rake-offs, but can’t do anything with it. Bernhardt’s in the same fix, except he’s a state security officer. Wouldn’t be the first cop to have sticky fingers. He has valuables that Goering doesn’t want or maybe doesn’t even know about. Besides, Goering’s a very busy man, according to the papers. No, never knew a cop who wasn’t crooked in some way—stealing sex or goods or money. Saw too much of it working clubs back home and here in Germany where the uniform, the flag, the slogans, the marching, only cover it up. Sure, the German folk this, and the German folk that. Fuck the folk. These camps wouldn’t be here if the folk didn’t want them. And there’ll be new camps in Czechoslovakia, because the Germans won’t be happy with just the Sudetenland; they want the whole place.
Anna surprises me with her temper, her sex, her drinking. And her English. Only rarely now does she ask me to explain a word she may hear over the radio during a BBC broadcast. She loves to read about Hollywood movie stars in American magazines, especially Marlene Dietrich who became a U.S. citizen last year. “German movies,” she says, “are all about being a good German, not romance, you know.” She’s come a long way from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I did it. Everybody looks down on me, but I taught her English; everybody laughs at me, but they love my singing and playing; everybody despises me for being a faggot, but everybody wants to do it to me or have me do it to them. I wish I could lay this burden down, but on clear days when we can just see the mountains to the south, I remind myself how close I came, so I wait, just as Dieter Lange and Anna wait. When they’re together they talk about “afterward.” When Dieter Lange’s with me, “afterward” is without Anna. I think Anna, too, thinks about “afterward” without him. Me, when I think “afterward” it’s without either of them. Everybody’s waiting for something, yet I don’t think anybody can help believing that things are just beginning.
Thursday, Dec. 29, 1938
Of course, we’ve had Christmas: big dances at The Nest, and even a party here, for the first time in a long while. I’ll remember that party, because there were a couple of doctors who came; one was the man who was doing the tests on Dr. Nyassa. Recognized him right away.
Ursula Winkelmann and her husband have been feted all over the SS compound. Her pad is off! The baby is here! I can’t imagine what this Winkelmann is like that he went along. There are a bunch of strange saps in the SS! Ursula went to Momma’s a few days before the “baby” was expected, and when she returned to the compound, she had this baby all wrapped in pink. And her and Anna have been cooing over that little bastard like it was really her own! (Will she pad out four times for the bronze Honor Cross of German Motherhood, or six times for the silver, or eight times for the gold?) Who knows about this? Me, Anna, Dieter Lange, Ursula, naturally, and her husband, and maybe two or three people at Lebensborn.
There’s a big Christmas tree in the room where the piano is. I love the smell of it, and the decorations and lights and candles. The Winkelmanns, the Bernhardts, the Langes, and me sang Christmas carols, me playing the piano, last Thursday. Bernhardt gave me a carton of Players and a bottle of Scotch and patted me on the back as if to say, “Everything’s all right now,” but it isn’t. I’ve often wondered if he watched while they cut off Ulrich’s and Maria’s heads. (Or could he have done it himself?) Dieter Lange gave me some socks and handkerchiefs, but he had already slipped me a bit of that darling white powder. He once said, “If that fat-assed faggot Goering can use it, why can’t we?” Anna gave me a book that bored me after the first page. I put it away.
I spent Christmas alone with a goose, which I didn’t eat but left in the oven for Anna and Dieter Lange, some liquor, which I drank, and the piano, which I didn’t play. I don’t mind when I’m by myself, which is something most prisoners never get to enjoy; you’re alone if they put you in the Bunker, but that’s hell. This is more like heaven. You relax when you’re alone; you don’t have to be watching what you do or say, or watching, period. I sat at the piano. The truth is, I’m not happy like I used to be with the music. I haven’t found my real self in it since May. Just ricky-tick, tinky-tank stuff. My fingers don’t play what I think I hear. I can’t seem to make music out of the way I feel. I keep thinking there’s got to be a new kind of music to explain this shit I’m in, because music expresses every kind of experience one can imagine, but I can’t pump it out of myself, and that makes me afraid; if I don’t have my music, really don’t have it, then I don’t have anything. It’s bad not to have anything. You wind up doing what Dr. Nyassa did. Please, God. Help me.
Monday, January 9, 1939
Typhoid epidemic.
Typhoid, and everybody’s scared, so The Nest has been without inperson music for a couple of weeks, to make sure none of us brings to it what’s been knocking off prisoners in the blocks. The doctors and nurses from the Reviers have been giving shots and medicine day and night. Inmates lined up in the cold. Rivers of snot, shit, and saliva. Prisoners working on the sewers. Clean! Clean! the guards shout. Wash! Cleanliness is next to godliness. Wash! Don’t drink from here! Don’t drink from there! Smoke—black, oily, smelly—boiling out of the crematorium. In the SS compound, where the sewer system is good—except where some prisoners may have sabotaged it—everyone is boiling water; everyone is checking for the red spots and the runny bowels, waiting for the weariness that doesn’t end. There’s not a lot of running from bed to bed right now out here, let me tell you. Over in camp, those that’re well have to help those who aren’t, and prisoners are being switched from their regular details to the mess, cleanup, and crematorium details. If this is with less than a good heart, it is nevertheless good insurance; you never know when you might get sick and need help. From one end of the camp to the other, the smell of shit and burning bodies seems to have frozen right in the air.
When we’re not boiling water and scrubbing the house from top to bottom, me and Anna are smearing alcohol and disinfectant over everything. The house smells like a vat of chlorine, and I’m sure every house out here smells just the same. I think the smell of vinegar and dill is better. Dieter Lange is off on another trip, but one I think he went to, instead of being sent on. Maybe he’s hoping Ann
a will get sick and kick the bucket, maybe that I will, too. Anna needs me to help clean, and the canteen’s closed, anyway. Anna’s as strong as one of her father’s plough horses, and I’m in pretty good shape myself. Nobody’s visiting these days, either. Afraid of catching something. (Which is why Anna hasn’t been fucking with me. She’s afraid she might catch something from me, and I’m afraid I could catch something from her. I’d punch her in the jaw if she tried anything funny right now.)
Well. All this gives me time at the piano, and that’s good because I don’t have to go over scores. Instead, I’m trying to think up new music and find new ways to make it work, like planting the rhythm in space instead of leaving it alone. It’s nice, playing while Anna sews upstairs or sleeps. (Sometimes when she comes down she says, “That was nice. What was it?” Or, “That sounded like glass breaking in the middle of winter. What was that supposed to be?”) Being alone gives me a chance to think about things, too, like when I told Werner about Ulrich and Maria. He just shook his head, and asked if Maria had given her last name or where she was from. I told him I didn’t know. Then he wanted the exact date, which I gave him. I still think he’s writing things down for later. Funny how we all think there will be a “later.” He told me that some of the colored men had died, some more had come in, and all were put in the same block with the Jews. All had been sterilized, he told me, by X-ray; two, he believed, had been castrated. The thought of that made me shiver. He said they just slit the sacks and take out the nuts, sew up the sacks, and you sing alto instead of like Paul Robeson—unless they.… Then he asked if I understood all that was going on. Before I could answer, he started to give me a lesson in civics. Another one.
Things were very bad in France, he said, where fascist Frenchmen were exerting more and more power, which the working people could hold in check for just so long. (I wondered if there weren’t fascists everywhere; there seemed to be a lot of them in Germany, so I thought it’d be only natural for them to be all over.) When the French and English backed down over Czechoslovakia, a lot of French officers resigned, and so did some people in the British parliament. Werner called the French “shits who can’t be trusted”; they managed to drag the Americans into their front in the last war because they couldn’t handle it themselves, but that’s the way they are, he said, good in the kitchen, superb in bed, and cowards on the battlefield. I asked him, “Even the workers?” and he stopped short for a second, and then went on like he hadn’t heard me. Werner was mad that day, last week, the first of the new year. What a way to start it.
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