I’ve been with Anna. She likes to dress up, put on lipstick and perfume now, and we dance to records. Acts like she’s Brunhild. Cries in bed. Tries to get lost doing it, it seems to me. She’s getting strange. She’ll start a conversation and then break off to stare at something like it will remind her of what she wanted to say. I wait and wait until finally I have to say, “What?” or, “What were you going to say?” That makes her furious. I try to get her to speak English, but that’s a waste of time.
And I’ve been with Dieter Lange. With both it’s like maybe that time will be the last time. But Dieter Lange gets so drunk he’s useless. He’s so busy, busy, busy, brushing off this or that, complaining that things haven’t been cleaned or the figures I give him don’t look right or Anna doesn’t put enough starch in his shirts. He’s like a damned fussy old woman one minute and a drunken pig the next. They drive me crazy, the both of them.
They say Dr. Grawitz is doing new experiments with Gypsies. Pacholegg and Neff say that’s true.
Nobody wants to ask what. Nobody wants to ask why, with all the talk of the Allies landing in France soon.
“Causing new kinds of infections, then trying to cure them,” Pacholegg says.
It’s very muddy outside and the men are strapped to the rollers, crushing gravel into the mud. It is something to do.
“Seeing if people die drinking too much sea water,” Neff says.
Still nobody asks why.
Friday, April 14, 1944
The flower beds are being turned, the earth raked. Suppose the blooms turn out to be little bodies of prisoners, just swaying in the breeze.
During the winter we all noticed that the smoke from the crematorium never stopped coming out. It was like a factory, running all day and all night long. That many people dead, many more gone, yes, Another Man Done Gone, without so much as a good-bye or a prayer.
Anna has noticed that the wives with children seem to be vanishing, leaving. “Running like momma and baby rats together,” she says. If she had kids now, she could use them as a passport out of Dachau to the Black Forest. Or her father’s farm.
Some of the women out here, and there must certainly be some, would have fallen out if they’d known about those eighty Jewish kids who came in last week from France. I heard it from Werner, who now seems to have found the old purpose to his life. The oldest kid, he said, was fifteen, the youngest eight, and they knew they were going to die because their parents had been killed in Buchenwald. They put the kids in Block 7, and a few days later they were transported to Hartheim, and probably were damned glad to go after spending time with some of those hard cases. Eighty kids, eighty small “pieces” Dieter Lange wouldn’t have to worry about. Younger than Pierre.
You would think if a killer was told, “Stop killing, the cops are coming,” the killer would stop. But no. I think this place, Germany, is like a sanctified church, where the spirit takes hold of one person, then two, three, or four catch it, then the whole church, and nothing stops the dancing, singing, and crying until somebody falls out and cracks his head or everyone’s just too exhausted to move any more. Sometimes, even the people who’ve fallen out still quiver and shake on the floor. Never liked sanctified churches. Always scared me.
Friday, May 26, 1944
They’re coming, but it’s taking forever. The days seem like weeks, the weeks like years. We’ve even gotten used to the bombers going and coming. They seem to have little to do with us except for the companies of Himmelfahrtskommandos that march to the trucks to dig bombs out of Munich’s belly (while singing “Lili Marlene,” which they hope will get them some bread with marmalade, maybe a cup of tea or coffee from a civilian). We want the planes to come, not by the thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands—but every time they come, a mess of prisoners goes into Munich to die. Why the hell can’t they bomb this place, bomb all the camps, destroy the factories and rails everywhere, since the prisoners are dying anyway?
My mind seems to be on the Zukunft. This year, God, this year. Loa Aizan, please, now. I’m forty-four, but I feel like ninety-four. Will I still be able to play? I know the music’s changed. I can guess what the colored musicians are doing with the music from what I hear the German bands play on the radio. But how are they doing it? What keys are they playing in, what chord changes are they making, what times are they playing in? Colored folks fuck with white folks’ music, turn it inside out like you do a worn-out collar. But will I be able to do that? Fingers gone all dumb, the piano my enemy, just sitting there all out of tune, daring me to take some licks at it. Mr. Wooding, wonder how he’s doing, if he’s got hold to what’s going on. Instead of whining and carrying on when I was in touch with Willy Lewis, I should’ve been talking about music. I listen to “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “Dear Mom,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “When the Lights Go on Again,” stuff like that and it all sounds soft and tender. Young and sweet. Slow-drag stupid. Stick your head out the door for a minute and smell those human steaks cooking and you know ain’t nobody singing the right songs. Not for this shit.
Thinking like that brought me back to the piano and to some of the things I was doing before I had the band at Lebensborn, when I thought I heard all kinds of things where I hadn’t heard them at all before. I didn’t even ask if I could play. The Langes are always drunk anyway. They just sit there fussing, him saying she took too much of the hooch, or her saying he’s drinking too fast. Just waiting for the news, just waiting to pick up Radio London or Armed Forces Radio on the shortwave. Dieter Lange got him a new set so he could catch it all, including a station called the Voice of America. Said, “Everybody out here has got one or if they haven’t, they know where they can listen to one.” So they can know which way to jump, I think.
The first time in a while back on the box, when I wasn’t feeling so sure of myself, I slid into “Yellow Dog Blues.” Playing was like sticking my fingers in Karo syrup, but the more I played, the more the piano loosened up, the more it became less spongy, kinda friendly, like it knew what I wanted to do. I tried on “Muskrat Ramble” and “Tiger Rag.” “I Ain’t Got Nobody” seemed a natural since I knew that piece backward, forward, and sideways, and then some. I think Dieter Lange and Anna calmed down a little, because I didn’t hear them fussing. I felt old-fashioned, but I just punched the keys and kicked the pedal into “I Surrender Dear,” and then feeling like to hell with it, jumped into “One O’Clock Jump” and “Moon Glow,” but damn, even I didn’t know if it was going to land on its feet. It did. “Body and Soul,” and my skin grew a few goose pimples. That’s a dark number with a lot of addresses on it. Then I did some of the things that came over Armed Forces Radio—“Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You,” done by a pianist I never heard of, Nat Cole, and Ellington’s band (new one, I think), ripping with “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Then a really swinging band doing “Apple Honey.” Woody Herman, I think. Big, big band, lots of brass. They don’t play too many colored bands, and the singers are white, too, folks named Crosby, Sinatra, Haymes, Como, Eberle, women like Jo Stafford, Helen Ward, and Helen Forrest. Not too many vocalists like Jimmy Rushing, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, or Herb Jeffries. It’s a special day when they play those singers.
I tried another number I’d heard, “This Time the Dream’s on Me,” and just to give Anna and Dieter Lange a little something, I threw “Blue Skies” at them. It didn’t take. Besides, it’s not much anyway. Some of these white-boy tunes you just can’t do anything with but let them die, because they aren’t songs, just tunes. Russian white boys are different. On Sundays sometime you hear them singing in Blocks 6, 20, and 22, where most of them are segregated. (It’s funny using that word with white people, Absondern, Rassentrennung.) If you could sing blues in Russian, those jokers got it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like Russia when the band went there with Mr. Wooding—what those people suffered was too close for comfort. In the canteen the Russians are the only ones look like they don’t want to ki
ck my ass at first sight. But then, I got my stare when some of these jokers been pissed on all their lives walk in and right away pull that European-type cracker shit on me. Number one, they haven’t ever had no colored man look at them like that in their life, and number two, they look at number 3003 on my jacket and figure I know something about staying alive, and I see them thinking, If he can do it, so can I. But they don’t know the arrangement for that number. Well, sometimes I wonder about it myself. Anyway, the more I played, the better I felt and the better the piano sounded. To hell with anything else but that.
It’s yesterday I really want to write about.
Dieter Lange has been away checking the camps at Augsburg, Kaufering, and Allach, so I’ve spent the time in the canteen. Anything not to be stuck a long time alone with Anna, not that Dieter Lange gives a damn anymore. In fact, it seems to get him hot if he thinks I’ve been with her.
So I’m at the canteen window when the morning roll call begins, before six, the sun not quite up. I never risk sleeping when roll call starts; never can tell when some guard might take a notion to see what I was up to. I always get up and watch the prisoners march down the ’Strasse with breakfast, see them like chickens without heads, dressing, making their beds, washing, eating, all in half an hour, and then rushing into formation on the Dancing Ground, just row upon row upon row of stiff, striped men in that flat, gray light that everyone hopes to see again tomorrow. The slow-rising sun throws thin shadows from the poplar trees that square the camp. Once they were just sprigs stuck between an occasional white birch tree; now they stand like spears with their handles jabbed into the ground. The count comes in, block after block. Then the details are ordered to march out. The capos wait for their men.
No one moves.
I don’t understand what’s going on. For a minute, I think maybe I hadn’t heard the command. I stare past the backs of thousands of men to see the expression on the face of the SS officer in charge. But I can’t see it from here because now they have to use all the ’Platz, which covers a large area. So I imagine his face, imagine him looking at the loudspeaker like maybe there was something wrong with it.
“Alles heraus; im Gleichritt … Marsch!” he calls again. “All out; in step … March!
There is no motion. Every man I can see on the ’Platz this morning looks like something strange growing out of the earth. It is so quiet.
The roll-call officer backs away from the loudspeaker and his assistants huddle around him. The guards on the ’Platz hike their rifles to the ready. The prisoners aren’t going to work! The roll-call officer and his men are looking at a group of Russian officers from Block 6; I can barely see them from the right corner of my window. Two or three roll-call clerks scurry back and forth between the Russians, whose spokesman seems to be a ramrod-stiff oldish guy, and a couple of block leaders.
Willy Bader is escorted to the roll-call officer, who is looking mad now, scowling at the Russians. He goes nose to nose with Bader, maybe asking him what the hell is going on. Bader gestures and shrugs and points to the prisoners, then to the Russians. The Russian officer marches out, turns around to face the prisoners, and leans toward the loudspeaker. “Go to work,” he shouts in bad German. His voice carries tough. “Do not sacrifice yourselves for us.”
Later I find out the Family and the International Committee had told the inmates not to fall out for their work details in protest over the rumored plan to shoot ninety-two Russian officers. Thirty thousand for ninety-two.
But still the prisoners don’t move. I wonder if they would have done this a year ago. Certainly not two years ago.
The roll-call officer marches off to the Wirtschaftsgebaude. He returns within minutes as trucks filled with SS from the barracks roar through the guardhouse gate and park with the back ends of the trucks facing the prisoners. There are machine guns in them with men already crouched to fire.
The sun behind the gray lends a kind of silver shimmer to the scene. Is it really happening? Still nobody moves. The SS reinforcements, hundreds of them, spread out, ready. The roll-call officer again gives the command to fall out and march away, and as before, there is no movement.
The Russian officer wants to speak to Bader; the roll-call officer agrees. The Russian is insisting, Bader is arguing, but the Russian finally wins. He shouts to the prisoners, “Comrades, march off! Good-bye!” The Russian’s name, I find out later, was Lieutenant Colonel Tarassow.
Bader speaks to the roll-call officer’s assistants. One of them speaks to the officer, and he gives the order to march out again. This time the striped forest moves, and even as the details march off, singing loud as usual, the SS begins to herd the Russian officers into small groups and leads them away. By now the sun is way up. It seems the prisoners have left something behind that took years to grow.
That was yesterday and the rumor was true. The SS shot them all.
Wed., May 31, 1944
Dr. Rascher is in the Bunker. His wife’s been sent to Ravensbrueck. Because of the experiments? Ah, no. Because they lied about “their” kids. Pacholegg thinks also that with the Russians moving fast out of the East, and the Allies moving up Italy, and with the talk, talk, talk of invasion across the English Channel, maybe somebody wants to close Rascher’s mouth. What about the other jokers? Pacholegg provides an answer to why the experiments continue. If the results look good, he says, maybe the American, British, and French pharmaceutical companies will lease the patents. It’s all about money, like with the sulfa drugs.
Tuesday, June 6, 1944
The news we’ve waited so long for … the invasion! It started last night when the Americans landed in France. Rome fell about the same time. Dieter Lange has not left the radio in almost a week.
Sunday, June 11, 1944
Yesterday the bombers hit Munich again. From Italian bases this time. Dieter Lange says he heard on the radio that there were 750 bombers. “That fat-ass, Goering, doesn’t fight, doesn’t send his men to fight. It’s the anti-aircraft guns he wants to use instead. Why does he save the planes?” he whines.
Turns out there was a Wuwa, a secret weapon, after all. It’s a Vergeltungswaffen, a get-even bomb. And they started dropping it on the English last month. Goebbels tells us this, and so does Radio London and Armed Forces Radio. The British call them buzz bombs. Dieter Lange is angry because Germany waited so long to use them.
Thursday, July 20, 1944
We got the news in the darkness in which we sat listening to the radio. This news came from Radio Berlin: Somebody tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. The report said he was alive. Dieter Lange took his mouth off a whiskey glass long enough to say, “You can’t trust them. Maybe he’s dead, and if he’s dead—maybe it’s over. But some of the generals don’t want it to be. Sometimes I think the goddamn generals are worse than Hitler.” The announcer gave a bunch of names of generals with Hitler who were wounded. Nobody got killed? We’ll see. (I’ll be glad if you’re dead you rascal, you.)
Anna said, “Damn it, they missed!”
The Russians are 100 miles from Warsaw. Prisoners again pull out the maps. “The Russians are here.” Pointing. “The Allies will come this way in France.” More pointing. Every prisoner is a general and a prophet. The war will be over in three months, five months, two months, ten months; Germany will quit day after tomorrow, next week, the first of the month—but not before they kill everybody. Some of Werner’s people went missing, and while trying to find out where they might be, he ran into this: When the trains come in to the sidings now, the SS asks all those who are university graduates or who speak a few languages, to step out. They will act as interpreters. This is an important task, say the SS. And of course, always willing to be special, not one of your ordinary people, they rush forward gladly. Then they are marched out to the rifle range (instead of a special campus barracks) and are shot dead. Werner’s people saw this, so they, too, were killed.
Bader told me that in addition to “regular” inmates, there are now almost 8
,000 women here, nearly half of them Jewish, plus 300 German civilian workers who have been charged with some crime, and 4,000 more from assorted countries. “And,” he said, “You’re not the only American anymore. There are nine more down in Block 24. They’re American pilots. Shot down. They’re to be moved to an officer’s POW camp. There are 685 other prisoners of war also waiting for transfer, to a Stalag. There are only 262 Gypsies left …”
His voice drifted off. It was warm, a nice day with dust floating lightly in the air, kicked up by the marching details, the camp work. Not too much wind, and it was blowing from the east, so the smell from the crematorium wasn’t bad. Details were hauling away the bodies outside the Reviers and those beside the railroad tracks. You look at the corpses and think of the Americans, British, and Russians coming day by day a step closer, and you wonder if they will arrive soon, or if the Germans with their Selektions, which seem to be more frequently random, will succeed in making more prisoners vanish up the chimney, or through the doors of Hartheim Castle in Linz, or out on the rifle ranges. There isn’t a prisoner who doesn’t wonder about this.
These are the only realities: securing food enough to stay alive, having energy enough to avoid Selektion, and doing both successfully enough to enjoy liberation. There persists the fear that for revenge, the SS will kill us. They must kill us. They exist to kill us. Though there are many thousands more of us to kill, this seems not to be of great concern to them. The machine pistol and the machine gun and the areas in which we are confined make it as easy as shooting a bunch of small animals trapped in a barrel.
Clifford's Blues Page 31