Half of this week I spent in the canteen going over the stock and records. I can always eat the canteen food, the good stuff that Dieter Lange and me keep hidden from Uhlmer and Lappus. The problem was the bathroom. The Reds didn’t want me to use theirs and neither did the Greens, who weren’t far away. Both thought I should pay—with cigarettes or canned food or sweets—just to take a shit or a piss. They didn’t used to mind so much, but now everything is so crowded.
The nights with their floodlights and train-rolling, the banging sounds, the occasional shot off in the distance, the “sporting” on the ’Platz when the guards made some poor prisoners run around and roll on the ground while dogs snapped at them for hours on end, could not bring deep sleep. I never spent a night in the canteen without thinking of the time they brought in Pierre’s body.
The rest of the week I spent at the house, cleaning, gardening—and playing for hours at a time. The piano is way out of tune; sounds spongy and the pedals are too loose. But I played. Not trying to work out anything. Just keeping close.
Something’s going on. It’s like before the invasion of Poland. No trains have come into camp carrying new prisoners; they arrive empty and go out filled with finished factory work, rifles, and parts for all kinds of things I don’t know a damn thing about. Those trains pull out two and three times a day, and the prisoners who work in the factories go around the clock in three shifts. The guards whisper among themselves. Piles and piles of new prisoner uniforms have been uncrated, so we all know the camp will get even more crowded.
Tuesday, June 24, 1941
Oh, shit!
The Reds are in as much of a stew as they can be without drawing too much attention to themselves. Germany invaded Russia on Sunday and, according to the radio announcer, is roaring unmolested through it like some ancient Teutonic giant. For everybody it must be like doing a crazy solo in a great big band with row upon row of brass, reeds, and sidemen doubled up everywhere. When will this solo end? How many more bars to go? What, another chorus? What, another and another and another …? No coda in sight? Another bar of a melody that none of the prisoners wants to dance to anymore (though they must, of course)? When does this blues piece end? ’Cause that’s what it is, a blues to end all blues, your soul getting soggy and coming apart like bread in water. Can’t put no name on these blues. But the people who ain’t prisoners like it, the SS and the civilians in the factories and warehouses between the compound and the camp. Everywhere you can hear German marches and Germans marching—in the camp, outside it, over the radio and the public address systems. Oompah-bah! Oompah-bah! Crash! Cymbs! A roll of snares! Trumpets! Bugles! Trombones! Kettle drums! Bass drums! The Germans in their various uniforms. Even coal miners have them.
Every prisoner who enters the canteen has a story. “Russia falls in three weeks,” says one, a Green.
“Ah, no,” says an old Red, one who will be going East to help finish some new camps in Poland. “That symphony won’t be played again, not this time.”
German Greens and Blacks stand up the most for the German army, which “drove the English into the sea, trampled the Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Poles, and French. Germany will extend from the Seine past the Volga.”
“And you’ll still be a child-molester!”
Rumor and gossip and argument and sometimes fact meet in the canteen like people in a train station, but the weight of fact shadows the movements of the 20,000 slaves and their 500 SS guards: The French did give up and the English took a helluva bath, and the hope that they together—or singly—would kick Hitler’s ass and see us released just “durch den Kamin fliegen gehen,” just went up the chimney like the smoke from another burning cadaver. For whatever the Reds feel or want, how can the Russians, who so quickly sold out almost two years ago, defeat a blitzkrieging army that at this very moment is practically at the main highways to Moscow and Stalingrad and Leningrad? Never mind that the English are still raiding the north with their planes and bombs.
“Stalin bought time!” some of the Reds now argue.
“And divided the East with Germany! Naive! Crooked! And now the devil’s getting his due!”
“Trotskyite!”
At home they shouted at me for breakfast the other morning, like I was some kind of slave. (As much as we’d done together.) Made me mad, but I brought it on myself; they got used to this old coon doing his Sambo show with the cooking and serving, just to keep his ass out of, if not the oven, another camp or even, if you want to put lick-back-to-lick, this camp, on the other side. I spoiled them, and now they need me. Wasn’t that what the old coon wanted? Yeah, man, it was, and I do live, and not badly, either, while a whole lot of other folks have kicked the bucket, gone up the chimney, got shot while escaping, taken the “Fantomas” to Hartheim. So I don’t complain. I just get mad.
For Dieter Lange the war in the East means problems, complications, the movement once again of the Stücken. But he’s at least in a better mood since he and Anna returned from Paris. I imagined them there: Dieter Lange in his SS black or gray, his black boots and all that pigeon shit they wear on the collars, his cap, his figure tall and getting thick, his hair graying, his faded blue eyes trying to appear nonchalant instead of tired, cunning, and trapped, his stride slow and careful, not calling attention to itself; and Anna in a flowered dress, girdled, her face made ruddy with rouge and powder, those carefully watched haunches rolling against the restraints. How wonderful Paris must have seemed. I’m sure the French hated them.
Dieter Lange brought back news: Ruby Mae is supposed to be in Portugal. Willy Lewis got to Switzerland. Freddie Johnson is in a camp here in Germany. Josephine Baker is still in France. Django Rheinhardt is playing constantly. Bricktop’s been gone since a month after Poland. We laughed because we knew that was the second time the Germans had sent her packing. So, I thought as he was giving me the news, he got around. Probably told Anna he had business. I wonder how she spent her time on this visit.
The “hot” stuff back home, Dieter Lange told me, was “Cotton Tail” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” both Ellington pieces, and “Brazil” and “That Old Black Magic.” For a while, while Anna visited Ursula, we put the Eastern Front on the shelf and played the records he’d brought back and drank and talked of Paris and Berlin, which they’d visited on the way back. There are bomb shelters there now.
He ran up to the attic and came back with a sweet-smelling box. “For you,” he said, and opened it. Lingerie, dangerous-looking stuff, too.
“I never wore that,” I said. I fingered it; it was soft and smooth. It almost whispered.
He smiled, closed up the box. It was clear he was going to keep it hidden upstairs. “First time for everything,” he said.
I said, “Yeah, well, we’ll see, won’t we?”
He acted like he hadn’t heard me.
Sunday, Aug. 3, 1941
I hear Hohenberg got caught with a Junge. In one of the storage rooms in the Wirtschaftsgebaude. Everything works until you get caught at it. Hohenberg had a group of Pinks who worked in his office, and everyone knew why, but enough got to be enough; Hohenberg got to have too much power, even for a German inmate. They say Karlsohn caught them. His name ought to be Hurensohn, whore’s son. Caught them like salamanders riding each other in a pond. Well. I never thought much of Hohenberg after he tried to take advantage of Pierre. Even after he arranged for Pierre to work in the greenhouse I didn’t like him, because Werner was the man who really arranged it. So Hohenberg has the usual six o’clock Kalter Arsch appointment tomorrow with the end of a rope. He will march out to the sad playing of the sorry-assed band to become another cold ass. Dead. They might as well order us to stop breathing as to stop fucking each other. They know that. It’s just that this time Hohenberg is that periodic reminder.
If Uhlmer is supposed to be watching me, he doesn’t have the time, any more than I have to watch him. The war in the East means work: more inventories to keep for the camp and for Dieter Lange;
more timetables to move goods from his storage in Munich and his father-in-law’s farm; more bribes to pay to guards, drivers, and people I don’t even know about; more Krieger products to slip between the approved stuff. The new prisoners from France, Belgium, and Holland haven’t yet grown used to prison food. What money they have they spend for our soups, the salt and pepper bags, the bootleg cookies and candies. When they run out of the packs of cigarettes, they buy the little bags of mixed tobacco and dried lettuce leaves we also sell. Uhlmer must be doing pretty well; his uniform’s always clean and neat, and he always wears socks. But he could say the same for me or for Lappus, who, though not as well turned out as us, certainly doesn’t dress like the average prisoner. Lappus is still nice to people. Uhlmer has been acting like a capo. He will, like Hohenberg, hang himself, and I will be more than happy to help.
More doctors have been sent here. The prisoners have built a foundation for something huge that was rolled up and set between Blocks 3 and 5, and the doctors are recruiting more prisoners to work in the Reviers. At first there were volunteers. I can’t figure what was offered to make anyone here think that volunteering would be good for them. Nobody ever saw the volunteers again. The SS say they were sent home, just like they (the SS) said they’d be. But now everyone who comes into the canteen believes that as far as the doctors and that thing between the blocks are concerned, the air is getting thick, dangerous, Dicke Luft, especially with the rumors of what’s going on with Jews in the East, where more and more of the older prisoners are being sent to work with engineers. Why are only Jews being sent East? Hi-de-hi. If it’s only Jews, then it’s got to be bad. Every prisoner goes the other way when he sees the clerks and doctors from the Infirmary strolling up and down the ’Strasse or the ’Platz.
“Wer ist an unserem Ungluck schuld?” the Jewish capo shouts. “Who caused all our misery?” The guards watch, smiling, as the Jews march out to work, and later march back. The marching call is always the same. The marching Jews, in step, shout back “Die Juden! Die Juden!” (Left, right, left.) Sometimes I think I can hear a strange echo, when the answer could be “The Negro! The Negro!” Then the Jewish columns run into SS guards, whose day isn’t complete until they shout “Dir gefallt es hier? Was?” The guards ask because the Jews have insisted on living. “Do you like it here?” In other words, “Aren’t you dead yet? Damn you, die!” Then I think of a long broken column of men who are Negroes.
Everyone’s saying the doctors working in that thing are doing experiments. Mostly on Jews, Gypsies, Pinks, and Blacks.
Sat., September 13, 1941
So it’s taken longer than three weeks. It’s not over in the East. So what? There’s not a guard or prisoner who doesn’t believe it soon will be. We saw the first Russian prisoners of war this past Monday. (No one knows why they were brought here, but everyone thinks it’s not good for them that they have been.) They say they were marched all the way from Russia after the first battles. They sure looked like it. They didn’t march, they staggered in, dirty, stinking, hungry, thirsty. The guards were hitting them and shouting, in Russian, “Bistro! Bistro! Bistro!” “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” and the Russian soldiers, an ugly shit-colored mass drifting toward quarantine, were calling out to anyone, “Please give me bread, please give me bread,” saying “bread” in both Russian and German so no one would miss the meaning. “Daj chieba, Brot, daj chieba, Brot.”
The prisoners who were on the Dancing Ground as the Russians passed, and who had with them a crust of bread, a cigarette butt, a half-rotten piece of fruit, passed these along as sneakily as they could. Some of them got caught and were hauled off to stand in chains against the Jourhaus wall until their own punishment could be selected.
I have to be more diligent about gathering writing paper. It seems to be getting scarce. Right now there’s plenty of glazed paper the SS sometimes allows prisoners to have for their windows in the winter. Since it’s just the end of summer, I managed to get a few rolls to store.
Dieter Lange came home late and woke me and Anna up and made us sit with him at the kitchen table. He slid some glasses to us and brought from a shelf a bottle of French cognac.
“Well, now we’re in the shit,” he said.
It was about midnight, and through the window I could see the gray mist slowly rolling down the street, blotting out the streetlights every once in a while.
“What’s the matter?” Anna asked.
Dieter Lange sighed. He had been drinking, a lot, before he came home. “We’ve got an SS Colonel and an SS General Major to deal with now. And it’s best you don’t know who they are. In fact, they warned me not to tell who they are.” He poured drinks for us. “They seem to know everything about us and about the business, your father included.” He sighed again.
“They want to—” Anna began.
“Improve things, Anna. That’s what they say.” He stared at her while she twirled her glass on the enamel tabletop. I drank and pushed my glass over for more. Sounded like the way gangsters back home did business. Just muscled their way on in. And the gangsters in Berlin, back in the days when I wouldn’t have looked twice at Dieter Lange, were just as bad. Maybe even worse.
Dieter Lange poured me half a glass and waited for Anna.
“Well …” she said. “Looks like they want to take over. Just how would it work? They’re not going to turn us in? What do they want? How much? When?”
“Starting now,” he said. “What we have we keep. We put back in that souvenir shit, they get us some cheap beer and alcohol, which they will have cut and mixed, and since Himmler’s about to make whorehouses in the KLs legal, we’ll control the Bordellschein. We just tell them what we need and they’ll see we get it.” Dieter Lange turned partly away from us. “They haven’t decided how much money they want from us. They have to look at the figures first.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “There was nothing I could do. These are Nacht und Nebel people; they can make you disappear in the night and fog. They are also Ploetzenee Prison people, where they’re invited to dinner after watching a few people lose their heads.”
“Let them have it all,” Anna said.
“That’s not the way they want it,” Dieter Lange said.
“They need a front,” I said.
Anna said, “How do they know?”
Dieter Lange shrugged.
Bernhardt, I thought. Part of a big plan to squeeze money out of turnips; maybe like Krupp or Siemens, a great big European company store for all the slaves. I didn’t mention this to Dieter Lange because, at least for the time being, he was, deep down, happy that he didn’t have to move the “pieces” by himself or lay his head on the block. And maybe he was already planning to turn over Anna and her father, if push came to shove.
The radio announced that Kiev had fallen with the capture of two-thirds of a million Russian soldiers. I can’t imagine such numbers. The BBC says only that the Russians have suffered heavy losses.
Did I tell you that they call that thing near Block 5 the Himmelwagen? A Dr. Rascher is doing research for the Luftwaffe on high flying. Pacholegg works for Rascher as a ward clerk. He’s an Austrian Red who was in Poland before coming here. Ghosts dance in his eyes. Pacholegg says the rumors about that thing are true. I know just a little about this Rascher. He lives in the SS compound with his wife, Nina, and their three children, all of whom were “born” when she was in her forties. This I told Pacholegg. It is common knowledge among the SS wives, Anna says, because half of them don’t want or can’t have kids. So they kidnap them or make deals through Lebensborn. A lot of these bitches can’t afford to point the finger at anyone else.
Pacholegg may let the ghosts dance in his eyes only when he talks to me, the way Gitzig used to, spilling out all his secrets. I don’t know why people do this with me. Is it because I’m an American, even if a Negro? Or do they look at me and see a witness? How can they know? Anyway, the Himmelwagen is a decompression chamber. The TPs, as Pacholegg calls them, are strapped into a parachut
e harness. “They give them a helmet, sometimes, so they feel like a pilot. Then they vacuum the air out of the chamber.” Pacholegg talks in a plain, low voice without emotion, as though from memory. “Then the Test Persons die. Horribly. While we watch and take notes. The TPs beat and tear at themselves, you know, pound on the walls and shout and scream. The pressure on the ear drums must be terrible. And their lungs are ruptured, you know. At 30,000 feet of pressure, they last thirty minutes; it’s clear that for only ten minutes are they functioning anywhere near normal.”
Pacholegg blinks, but the ghosts remain. “Once Rascher did an autopsy on a guy whose heart was still beating. He’d passed out from the pressure. That prick Rascher examined him quick, said he was almost dead, took him down, and cut him open. And watched the heart beat. I looked in there, too. It was like a wiggly little animal without skin.”
Pacholegg shudders. “Well, I’ve had it worse, you know, in the East, with Russian POWs, near Minsk.” He had been arrested in Vienna, then sent East to help build more camps. He says he knows nothing about the rumors of the shooting of thousands of Jews in Treblinka.
I light another cigarette for him, a real one, rich in dark tobacco, a French cigarette. Pacholegg tells how much the Germans hated the Russian soldiers for putting up such a fight, even as they were being defeated, and how the order came down to execute every Russian captured—as quietly as possible.
There was a large stone house in the woods—“a white birch forest,” says Pacholegg. It was an examination-interrogation center, they told the Russians. One by one the soldiers were led into a room—there were four rooms with high ceilings in the house. The soldiers were led forward to booths for questioning by German soldiers who asked the Russians their names, and as the Russians gave them, they were shot through the head by riflemen concealed in the ceiling. Each room was soundproof, so there were four at a time. Name? Bang! And ten minutes to clean up before the next group of four Russians came in for “questioning.”
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