“The German air force people are coming to talk to you about shooting down that plane—”
“That ME 262?” His face broke into a great, beautiful smile. “You saw that? Messed up that cat, man. Another jet kill—”
The captain interrupted. “What’s he talking about now?”
There was a look of wonder on the translator’s face as he said, “About the plane he shot down. He shot down one before.”
A growl came from the men in the room.
To Harrison I said, “They won’t let me stay with you till they come, so good luck. Uh—when will it be over?”
He looked sharply at me as though I’d turned suddenly into a spy. He drank and held my eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay. Aybemay ootay, eethray eeksway. Orefay at eethay ostmay. Ancay ooyay akeitmay?”
“Esyay,” I said. I didn’t know I looked that bad, but I nodded and held out my hand. He shook it, then the sergeant took me away.
The Langes were waiting up for me with a piece of sausage and a big glass of schnapps. I told them all about it, answered what questions I could, even the one about when it would be over, and I laughed at them. I felt like Gabriel warming up on his horn. But I wasn’t feeling so good. Had they poisoned me with the schnapps? I drifted downstairs and pulled the blanket over me and curled up. Just tired, I told myself. You hold yourself together for a thousand years with threads and strings of hope, and when somebody who should know tells you it’s going to be all right soon, maybe the strings start breaking, pop, pop, pop.
Thursday, April 19, 1945
Yesterday in broad daylight, they made General Delestraint take off the uniform he insisted on wearing and shot him dead. On the ’Strasse near the Appellplatz. He thought … I don’t know what he thought. But the Family and the International Committee, which have become Resistance Committees, or some jokers who belong to one or the other, or maybe both, say he was told he was going to have a shower and then join the honor prisoners in their Bunker. He must have known that was bullshit, if that’s what they told him.
He was a rigid, proud little man. He once told me in the canteen when he wanted a pack of Bleus (which of course we didn’t have), that the best soldiers he ever commanded were Senegalese during the Great War. (“They had no illusions. They knew they were in France to die for France.”) Thing is, after the SS shot him, they left his body there in the dirt for a couple of hours before they took it away.
I haven’t been in camp since then. It’s getting dangerous, and I still am not well. Neff tells me to get out and stay out because it looks like we’ve got typhus going around again. The SS and their camp police are like kids who must have a last taste of candy, except in this case, it’s not candy, but killing; they can’t seem to stop. “Let the Kuhtreiber come,” they say. “We’ll show them the wild west. Bang! Bang! And we don’t have to worry about Rosenvelt anymore since he died last week.” Roosevelt was a president I never even knew much about.
The prisoners are mainly confined to the blocks. There are too many of them for the SS to guard outside, with the few men they have left. And the SS are afraid of large details because some SS have been murdered. I think of a can of meat left too long in the sun, the way it can swell and then explode.
The airplanes with the red tails—how wonderful yet sad they make me feel, because I don’t know what happened to Captain Harrison—fly over almost every day now. It’s like being greeted by a neighbor from down the street or Loa Aizan looking things over.
Every prisoner with any sense knows, or thinks he knows, that the camps have been liberated in Poland, that Bergen-Belsen is free, and that Buchenwald was liberated ten days ago. The 3,000 prisoners the SS was trying not to be caught with there are all dead on the siding just outside the east wall of this camp, stinking like hell in the fifty boxcars that brought them here, says Bader. Bader’s people do the count. Bader is busy these days, keeping peace and getting some kind of final tally on who is dead and who is alive, block by block. Resistance group people (who announce themselves as such) are coming out of the woodwork now. What or how Werner fits in, I do not know and don’t care too much to know. Prisoners who have lived for months in holes beneath the blocks or in the eaves of the blocks have crept out.
Tuesday, April 24, 1945
Oh, Captain Harrison, your two weeks are up; now we have to work on the next two. Damn!
Nuremberg, Hessenthal, and a dozen camps to the north, including Flossenburg, have been liberated. Next stop, Berlin, where the Russians already are. The news comes in static bursts over the radio. Anna sits blubbering, her legs swollen, her feet puffing out of her shoes. Dieter Lange is in and out. “Yes, it’s typhus,” he announces. “No point running to your father’s farm,” he shouts at Anna. “The Americans will be there in another day or so, if not already.” She cries and holds out her arms to him. He spits.
The compound seems empty. No flower beds turned. Few cars and trucks. Few people out under the gray April sky that often opens and lets loose rain. I think at night the mothers and children go, in trucks if they can, on foot if they can’t, hoping to get into the town and from there as far away from this place as possible.
We don’t sleep, we doze in chairs, coming awake in the night when a truck or car glides down the street with slitted blackout lights. Alarms go on and off, crying down the night like children lost in the darkness. Even in the house, the smell of burning flesh invades through the cracks, and I think of the bodies that have been thrown every whichaway, like store dummies. Nobody cares. Nobody moves them. They are just there, from one end of the camp into the compound.
We have been hearing guns a long way off, soft as though they meant us no harm. Last night they seemed closer, a little louder, a lot meaner. Dieter Lange has been running back and forth to the Jourhaus for orders and news. Like the way he was in the old days, cutting a deal here, a hustle there. Evacuation orders, he says, are coming. The camp will be destroyed.
“What do you mean, ‘destroyed’?” I say. “How can you destroy the camp?”
He does not answer. He tries to look wise, like only he knows the secret.
Anna says it. “You mean kill all the prisoners, leave 30,000 bodies for the Americans to find? Is Commandant Aumeier crazy?”
Dieter Lange shrugs. “I have nothing to do with these things. I run the canteens, and that is all. You know that is all I’ve ever done.”
I laugh and nibble at my boiled potato. The house is silent and cold. No sense listening to the radio. I don’t know about Dieter Lange and Anna, but I can almost see them coming, red tails blazing in the sun, tromping through German farms and along German roads. Out in the street the SS, the old men in and out of uniform, the kids, and the wounded troop by for the changing of the guard, singing the sad “Lili Marlene.” What must the prisoners be thinking to be still singing in the camp?
Saturday, April 28, 1945
It’s hard to find paper. They’re cleaning out everything in the camp, the compound, the factories. Everywhere. And running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Burning records. Every day there are fewer guards; they just seem to vanish. Probably burned their uniforms and slipped away in civilian clothes, which are priceless now. You’d think they were made of gold. They aren’t even trying to feed the prisoners in the camp, Dieter Lange reports. They have to do for themselves for food—buy it, steal it, take it from somebody else. Bodies are stacked up beside the moat, in the ’Platz, in the ’Strasse, along the outside walls of the crematorium, and just inside and outside the electric fence. The SS officers’ wives have all gone, some west to Augsburg to surrender to the Americans, and others south to avoid both the Russians and the Americans.
Americans. Will they be black or white or mixed up? I don’t think mixed. Will white American soldiers look after me the way Negro ones would? And if they don’t, what do I do? Great God Almighty, what if nothing’s changed? C’mon, Cliff, whatever else has changed, you know that ain’t changed. The whole world is lo
oking for Americans to save them, and I don’t know that they will.
I am going south with Anna tomorrow. Dieter Lange has arranged for us to go with a women’s group. We won’t have much food; two boiled potatoes each. Going may be safer than staying around here because there are supposed to be committees in the camp with arms to stop the guards from killing off the prisoners. That will start a war. The SS wants to empty the camp or leave corpses so the Americans can’t know what they really did to us. Dieter Lange thinks the guards are crazy to want to kill more prisoners now, but it doesn’t matter to him, he says. Of course it doesn’t. He’ll be gone. He’s got money, civilian clothes, and papers, and he’s not taking Anna, and certainly not me. Anna’s on her own. She knows and Dieter Lange knows that I’ll leave her as soon as I can. She’s so weak she can hardly walk. We’ll make a good couple for a little while. Me shuffling because of the infection, and her hobbling like some baby elephant. We’ll go with the third group of women prisoners. She should keep her mouth shut and stay with the prisoners, Dieter Lange says, shaking his finger in her face. She’s been crying and pleading with him, saying she can’t walk all the way to Allach. There are no vehicles, Dieter Lange tells her, and besides, Cleef will look after you. Cleef is not my husband, she cries, and he shouts maybe he’s not, but he’s fucked you often enough. I think, why now? Who cares now who she’s fucked or been fucked by? I am mad at Dieter Lange and I wish I was well enough to kill him. Look at him! Thin as a piece of old wire, his face wrinkled and worried and stubbled with a dirty gray beard, his muddy blue eyes sliding back and forth from her to me and to the window …
Yet if not for Dieter Lange, I would be dead, like those other colored men, the Africans from the Cameroons, the Mischlings, like those thousands and thousands of Reds, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, Witnesses, like all those thousands who were in the way. I needed him like God needs the Devil, like Loa Aizan needs Loa Baron Samedi. I would not rather have died. So we used each other, Dieter Lange and me. He liked tight places and a chocolate lollipop and jazz music. I liked living, being alive, and I lived better than the prisoners in the camp and sometimes better than those who worked out here. He could have taken my life as easily as he took me, even if he feared the consequences. If I was made into something less than human, I lived. If he gave me syphilis, I lived. If he enjoyed my humiliation and suffering, I lived. Living is everything. Death is shit. Death is smoke going up the chimney without one single note of sorrow being played or sung to mark your passing. Death in Dachau is rotting in the swamps, flying to the electric fence, bleeding from broken, beaten bones in the Bunker, being mauled by the dogs, shot by the SS, drowned by them, hung by them, beheaded by them, starved by them. And then they pull your gold-filled teeth before they burn you and spread your crushed bones and ashes over the Appellplatz or use them as fertilizer for flowers. In Dachau, death is escape, they always said, and maybe it is. I don’t know. Life will keep me walking until I find the Americans, but I have to rest now. I’m not a youngster anymore, and I don’t know how far we’ll have to walk. I hope it stops raining.
Dear Bounce,
October 18, 1986
It was great talking to you and Justine again! And Liz is in college! Wow! It’s been that long since I saw you? Did you pass along my greetings to my man Tank? I’m sure the teams you’re putting together will do fine. You worry too much. You’re probably secretly glad not having a son who’s an athlete, the way college and pro sports are now. I know I am. But you know more about that than I do.
I’ve now finished reading the diary you sent—some package! I will try my damndest to get it into the right editorial hands, but do understand that we have a severe generic problem in this business. But I won’t quit trying, trust me. I am grateful that you thought to send Clifford’s diary to me. Imagine that old soldier keeping it so long and then giving it to you. During all these years, there must have been many African Americans passing through, not to mention those in the army. He sure has repaid the brothers who didn’t waste him when they could have. He must have seen something in you he had not seen in the others. I can dig that. Strangers trying to pierce the consciences of one another by sight, maybe vibes, in a world stranger than we can begin to imagine.
The diary is a heavy thing, Bounce. Bet you a sideline ticket on the fifty the next Super Bowl that they’ll be celebrating that war from the invasion of Normandy until its end—without looking too hard behind or between the lines. People don’t know, and probably don’t care, about the black people in those camps, not that there’s any honor in having been in one. You wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy. But here it is almost fifty years later and people are just beginning to learn about outfits like the Red Tails, the 2221 Regiment, and dozens of others.
I got real curious and looked up some of the names Clifford mentions. Freddie Johnson did get camped, but he was freed in an exchange in 1944. Willie Lewis got to Switzerland, where he sat out the war. A guy named Arthur Briggs, trumpeter, who Clifford doesn’t mention, played with Johnson and got out of Europe one step ahead of the Germans. He says the International Red Cross may be located in Switzerland, but it was then German from its chitlins out. I heard that Valaida Snow got camped, too. Ruby Mae Richards died in Paris in 1976. Sam Wooding died just last year in New York at ninety. During the Depression, while Clifford was in Dachau, Wooding dropped out of the music scene and went to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1942 and then taught music. One of his students—you guessed it—was Clifford Brown—“Brownie.” Doc Cheatham is still wailing; he was in Wooding’s band, too. His chops gotta be made of titanium. Saw him in New York a few months ago. I think he wears a rug, but there’s nothing phoney about his playing.
I wonder what happened to Clifford. If Cheatham and Wooding lived so long—like so many others who were camped—isn’t it possible that The Cliff could have lived long past his diary? Couldn’t he right now be playing at some tiny little club in one of a dozen European countries? Or could he have gotten back, given up music, and gone into something else? But surely he would have been rediscovered by all those black musicians who’ve been going to and from Europe since the end of the war. And if he came home, I think he loved his music too much to have ever given it up, especially when he could have teamed up with guys like Eubie Blake and Cheatham and become old royalty.
Had to run, but I’m back. This guy Joseph Nassy. I’ve seen some of his paintings in a little synagogue in Philadelphia. He was Jewish, born in Surinam. His father was Dutch. They lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and then Brooklyn, then he moved first to England and after that Belgium, where the war caught up with him. He was a naturalized American and a radio engineer who loved to paint. After the war he managed somehow to gather all the paintings he’d done, so they were available after he died and went on a tour across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. He was in an internment camp, where the Germans tried to live up to international standards.
A friend of mine conducted a search for Ethiopian Jews who were reported to have been in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Some had been taken to Europe for study even before World War I. He checked archives everywhere, including Israel. There he was told by an archivist that the Ethiopians had not become Jews until the 1975 Law of Return, so they wouldn’t have been registered as such in the camps or on the Holocaust lists.
Dr. Nyassa’s buddy, Ernest Just, had a best friend, a German, Dr. Max Hartmann. In 1949, with a couple more good guys, Hartmann compiled a rap sheet on his colleagues who’d worked with the Nazis on all kinds of experiments. What I don’t know is what happened when he turned that list in. (Probably not much.) I’m not sure, but from what I’ve read, it seems that Just was doing work—some of which involved changing the sex of worms, without the DNA charts that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins later came up with. You probably already know that Just’s forebears were German immigrants to the U.S.
I’ve met a lot of guys who were in the army in Germany during the war, and they all say that the
Germans they met wanted them to kill and capture Russians, not them. Hey, if I’d been a German then, I’d probably have said the same thing, given what they did to the Russians.
Getting back to Clifford, I can’t imagine, though I’ve tried to, how I could have survived in that place. He was lucky he had his music, his German, and his body. I thought the Germans would have done things to black people that they would not have done to others. Maybe they did and that’s why there’s no record, so far. It is hard not to think of James Howard Jones’s Bad Blood: The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments, while reading sections of the diary. There wasn’t a lot of fuss when that book came out. How different are we, then, from the Germans from whom we got so much? As you know, one of the German defenses at Nuremburg was that a lot of their crazy experiments were conducted here first.
It’s time for me to quit this letter before I really let loose. I’ll be checking in with you regularly. You and Justine have to settle in for the long haul, because you know no one is going to be eager to hear Clifford play these blues.
—Jayson Jones
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Bar-Zohar, Michael. Arrows of the Almighty. New York: Macmillan, 1984.
Bricktop and James Haskins. Bricktop: The Exuberant Story of a Fabulous Life. New York: Atheneum, 1983.
Chorover, Stephan L. From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Behavior. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.
Davis, B., and P. Turner. German Uniforms of the Third Reich, 1933–1945. Sydney: Blandford Press, 1986.
Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1975.
Delauney, Charles. New Hot Discography: The Standard Dictionary of Recorded Jazz. Edited by Walter Schaap and George Avikian. New York: Criterion, 1948.
Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
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