‘Well,’ he replied, ‘have you forgotten the mass of riff-raff and delinquents that embarked with us on our first Exodus?’
‘But Raymond, that was three thousand years ago!’
‘They say that weeds outlive the grass.’
We were assigned to a gang charged with pushing out the stones and rubble from the side-tipping wagonettes that came rumbling out of the tunnels carved into the mountains. It seemed to us that the idea of escaping underground had become our masters’ obsession. ‘Beelzebub began in the dark, and will finally end there,’ Raymond prophesied.
During the first week of November it snowed at daybreak. Our world dropped into a frozen silence. As the hollow rhythmic thud of our wooden clogs came to a blunt halt, our foreman’s rasping nasal voice rang out: ‘Gang 17 — you’ve been promoted to tunnelling duty!’
And so we were driven into the domain of rock and black dust.
Although both slaves and masters knew that the war was coming to an end, life in the camp went on as before. Our guards’ conviction that their work was of paramount importance made them impervious not only to our sufferings but even to the slaughter of their own brethren. (Every day we saw trucks rumble past carrying wounded German soldiers from the front.) The guards considered themselves a special breed, entitled to sleep in warm, secure quarters and to eat handsomely.
As the year slid towards Christmas, a huge pine-tree was erected in the guards’ mess-hall; and while the trucks of wounded soldiers from the front streamed past our campworld, these well-protected heroes of Wolfsburg zealously downed schnapps after schnapps until their ‘Silent Night’ had evaporated into a foggy nightmare.
A week later, at evening roll-call, as the temperature fell to 15 below zero while the white unchanging mountains maintained their brooding indifference, our Lagerführer — whom we had dubbed ‘Cyclops’ for the black patch over his left eye, and for his craftiness at setting prisoner against prisoner — stood up to make an announcement. Accompanied by his swaggering young deputy Henk, he surveyed us with a reptile smile twisting his thin lips, and declared: ‘Men, I have been ordered to announce that tomorrow morning you are to embark on a new and life-saving journey.’
And so, harbouring a deep apprehension in our cold and empty stomachs, we prepared to rejoin the roads, paved with frozen fire and death, an Exodus that would lead into the very heart of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Pepper
A few days before our departure from Wolfsburg, there had been an incident involving our Meister — our overseer on work sorties — who because of his diminutive size was nick-named ‘Pepper’. He had a nondescript face, with blue eyes like dull watery puddles, and he walked with a mountaineer’s stick in his fist and a foolish smile on his lips. According to his own story, before the war Pepper had owned a shoe shop in Hamburg, yet he had also been a member of the Communist Party. When the political wind changed he bent with it, joining the Todt construction and engineering organization in the service of the new state.
Camp inmates felt reasonably safe under Pepper’s supervision. He seldom resorted to brutal force, and sometimes, unnoticed by his colleagues, would leave a slice of bread where a starving prisoner might find it. But from the moment he was appointed to oversee our work commando, Pepper took a peculiar interest in Raymond. On one occasion he motioned my friend aside and harangued him on Germany’s unconquerable superiority and the Führer’s genius. Raymond stood to attention while the tiny Pepper imparted this philosophy, and then responded cautiously with vaguely approving words wrapped in riddles. Pepper listened with a great deal of suspicion before dismissing his student with a kick in the pants.
Winter, January 1945. Pepper’s superior unconquerable Germany was holding on by a thread; but the frost, conscripted by our enemy, still maintained a hardy nelson on our lives. Our commando was in a nearby village digging channels for the laying of sewerage pipes. The digging was difficult, the earth was ungiving — we worked ankle-deep in frozen mud and slush, and our frostbitten hands kept losing their grip on the pickaxes. It was forbidden for Jewish prisoners to wear gloves. Needless to say, the task was beyond our strength.
Suddenly, out of the blue, Pepper swooped upon the scene. He was like a drunkard in a rage. Without any preliminaries he shouted that there would be no bread for the next two days. He let his mountaineer’s stick fly — left, right, left, right. Then he reached up and grabbed Raymond by the throat, screaming: ‘Rapists! Degenerates! I’ll teach you all some decency! I’ll teach you!’
In our barrack that night, still stunned, we tried to find some reason for Pepper’s uncharacteristic outburst of madness. Naturally all eyes were on Raymond, but he sat on his bunk like a stone dummy. It took us a few days to learn the truth of why our Meister had snapped. Pepper’s breakdown had been caused by news of the Soviet invasion of East Prussia, the slaughter and devastation there, and the rape of defenceless women and girls of all ages.
‘There were no Russians at hand,’ Raymond said afterwards, ‘but we were. Stupidity is not necessarily evil. Evil is necessarily stupid.’
Pyrrhic Victors
The waking gong sounded at midnight. It was pitch-dark, even the searchlights were off, and the thunder of heavy artillery in the dead of night heralded the coming of our liberators. ‘That’s why the sudden departure,’ said Raymond. ‘Obviously they’ve been forced to liquidate the camp. The Valhalla warriors are finally trapped, though they once believed there was nothing on earth through which the German sword could not cleave a way. What amazes me most,’ he added, ‘is that they can’t do without us.’
It was on a dark, wintry dawn that five hundred emaciated, starving, tongueless men took to the road that had run out of roads.
Perhaps to combat the numbness, the nagging hunger and the misery, I pondered the scene I had witnessed the previous evening. Our Stubendienst had watched, for the third time in his two years of captivity, as the flames in the barrack’s little iron stove mercilessly devoured the remnants of his bunk; and while they danced a fiery nocturnal jig on his despondent face, he sang an old folktale which, at least for a few moments, cradled to sleep the dread we were all facing:
Why do you look so sullen?
Why is your face so long?
Let me tell of your noble roots,
Sing you a homely song.
Your father was a wagon-greaser,
Your mother stole fish at first light,
Your brother was a famous pickpocket,
And your sister walks the street at night.
After marching from daybreak to sunset for two days on empty stomachs, except for the snow we licked from each other’s sleeves, we stopped for the night at a small barn on the outskirts of a village. Here some of our weary men, able to abide such torment no longer, quietly lay down, to smile up at their frightened God who gazed down numbly as His chosen children ceased to be. Yet there were others who grew delirious, wild. Needless to say, the guards marching with us knew how to deal with such rebels; and to make sure they were really dead they put a bullet through the head of each corpse.
Suddenly a revelation! A true miracle, an angel from heaven — in the form of a cauldron of hot soup! Like a surging river, hundreds of men rushed forward. Cyclops, our Lagerführer from Wolfsburg, stood calmly beside this unexpected treasure, his rifle trained on the sea of famished prisoners. We knew that this trigger-happy vandal, who was content to shoot anyone unable to keep up with the pace he set, was capable of letting a volley loose on us without blinking an eye, but the aroma rising from the belly of the steaming magic cauldron was too much for us to maintain decorum.
The self-assured Lagerführer — begetter of malevolent scenarios among the prisoners, provoker of suspicions and animosities designed to set us against each other — turned away nonchalantly as if to walk towards his quarters. Then, abruptly, he leapt back and with a single kick capsized the cauldron, tipping our coveted meal into the dirty snow. He stood there waiting to see our reaction, but t
o his disappointment none of us moved: everyone remained frozen to the spot. At the time I didn’t really know why this was so — was it his gun we feared? Only much later did I come to understand that somehow, from deep within ourselves, we had unanimously chosen to refuse to validate his delusions — the conviction that his Herrenvolk, his Master Race, had succeeded in completely dehumanizing the children of the Hebrew Bible.
Our Cyclops lost his cool. ‘Judenschwein!’ he screeched. ‘That’s your dinner! Fress, or I’ll kill you all!’
But to his and our own astonishment, no one bent down, no one scrambled to grovel and lick at the sullied snow. And he did not shoot. As Raymond put it later, he realized that we were his last chance: without us, he would have been an unemployed soldier in a land that was still at war.
At dawn, beneath a lamentable, constantly snowing sky, we dug a large hole behind the barn for some twenty more of our men. Raymond, dumping the first shovelful of earth back into the grave, whispered: ‘Farewell, my friends, sleep well. Victors in our everlasting Pyrrhic war.’
The Prophetic Flame
They marched us to a railway siding and shoved us into open wagons. It didn’t stop snowing, and the flakes were unusually large. Raymond immediately coined the phrase ‘white curse’, though the snow was our only source of liquid. The slice of bread we had each been given earlier quickly disappeared into our empty bellies. Many days went by without food, and as the train pulled into Pilsen in western Bohemia we began to scream, ‘Bread, bread! Water! Please!’ The locals were ready to respond with generosity, but our guards pointed their guns at these benefactors. I recall a little woman running towards our wagon with two huge loaves of bread, and a guard warning her: ‘One more step and I’ll shoot.’ When she pointed to the wedding-ring on her finger, he told her to come forward. But she just took off the ring and placed it on a stone lying on the ground where she stood. ‘Come and get it,’ she shouted, ‘while I deliver the bread.’
There were thirty men and four corpses in our wagon, and as Raymond divided up the bread into thirty equal portions, he blinked back tears. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, as if addressing our deceased comrades. ‘Justice belongs to the living.’
‘You shouldn’t say that,’ I protested.
‘I am a Bible teacher,’ Raymond replied. ‘Interpreting the scriptures is my elixir for survival. It says in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, verse 2: The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living.’
‘I was under the impression that you’re not a believer.’
‘Maybe not. But as long as conflict, war and fratricide dominate our lives, our Bible will remain my most trusted companion.’
One of our fellow prisoners, a battered man whose end was nearly upon him, stood up suddenly and with a failing voice called out the blessing for bread: ‘Baruch atah Adonai, eloheynu melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz.’ As he was about to sink his eager teeth into the morsel, he collapsed, never to get up again.
We endured many air-raids during this train journey, but one of them gave us the closest of shaves. A squadron of Spitfires swooped down on us, coming so low that we could read the insignias. We waved at them and they took off, but reappeared within seconds. They bombed everything around us, yet not a splinter fell into our open wagons.
Our Lagerführer became enraged and, like Cyclops after Ulysses had gouged out his only eye, ran from wagon to wagon raving and snarling, shaking his impotent fist at the sky. Then, unexpectedly, he scaled the side of our wagon and jumped in. He may not have been too clever, but he was cunning enough to know that, for most dangerous contingencies in war, cowardice was a truly valuable commodity.
The day waned. Towards evening it grew freezing cold, and the white curse wouldn’t stop falling. In response to orders from two officers who came alongside in a motor-cycle and sidecar, our train was forced to move onto a sidetrack — apparently some army units had to be shipped through in a hurry. I lay next to Raymond, watching the round face of the full moon. The old yellow whore is eyeing me, I thought — and all at once I began to ponder the meaning of the little woman’s noble deed. For our sake, for the benefit of complete strangers, she had been willing to part with her precious wedding-ring.
Raymond broke in upon my silence; he seemed determined to keep my spirit alive. ‘I once read a story,’ he said, ‘about a man who undertook, at dusk, to walk towards the day. But for each step he took, the night took two, so darkness was always ahead of him. His task had become insurmountable, it made him weep. Then, as in a mirage, he spotted a house. It had one tiny window where the flame of a small candle flickered. When he came closer the flame spoke to him. “Child of man,” it said, “do not despair. The night will pass, and daylight will surely come.”’
Gehenna
After a long journey over the pretty Tyrolese landscape, our locomotive came to a halt at the deceptively sleepy-looking station of Ebensee. The welcoming committee consisted of three men dressed in black uniforms. One of them, obviously the others’ superior, whose footfall resounded with an empty arrogance, wore a monocle and a well-cultivated Führer moustache. Within the long sheepskin coat thrown over his shoulders dangled the tell-tale hollow sleeve of a military jacket. He glanced us over. ‘More fuel for the furnace,’ he said bluntly. Fortunately the backlog of corpses in front of the crematorium saved us from this immediate fate.
Ebensee, sister or perhaps daughter camp of Mauthausen, and code-named Zement, had been created mainly for the purpose of providing labour for construction of the enormous underground tunnels in which the armament works producing the V-2 rockets would be housed. It was established in a valley surrounded by impassable mountains and its barracks were placed in a thickly wooded area — not only to make the camp impervious to air-raids, but maybe to prevent the prisoners from seeing too much daylight. Winters here were long and hard, with the roads buried under more than a metre of snow in places.
As we lined up naked in front of Block 22, a kapo malignantly interrogated every face. Fronting one young man he asked, ‘Do you speak German?’ ‘No, sir, I am Russian,’ the other answered, perhaps a little too resolutely. ‘You’re Dreck! You’re a piece of vomit, that’s what you are!’ the kapo retorted. ‘I’m handing you over to the fucker in charge of the latrine. He’ll soon teach you some German.’
As Raymond later remarked, language is the first victim of obscenity. Here more than in most other concentration camps they destroyed the common word for the sake of an anti-language, to serve the underbelly’s needs. Here language didn’t need to be manipulated, nothing needed to be glossed over. Here cruelty walked naked.
With a hail of cudgels and insults we were roused at 4.30 a.m., and our twelve-hour working day — under the supervision of degenerate kapos and trigger-happy SS — began at 6 a.m. What with the little food we received (150 grams of bread and three-quarters of a litre of soup), the flimsy striped uniforms we wore (winter temperatures dropped to 30 below zero), and the cracked wooden clogs to which the snow stuck with every step, the angel of death was kept extremely busy.
Sons of Valhalla
Not long after our arrival at Ebensee, an inmate told us in hushed tones about Georg Bachmayer. Known among the prisoners as King of the Hounds, he had been undisputed ruler of the camp for some time. Bachmayer’s constant companion and sworn partner in crime was a huge Alsatian named Lord. To the last day of its existence, the camp was awash with gruesome stories of the duet’s despicable behaviour. Bachmayer would organize orgies in which Lord and the top SS men took leading roles. After one night of heavy bingeing he had gunned down a whole column of prisoners who had just returned from work; then the well-trained Lord finished off those among the victims still writhing on the ground in agony.
The chronicler of this tale (whose name I never learnt) went on to relate how, in February 1944, Bachmayer had withheld bread from the camp’s populace for an entire week. ‘Dea
th had a ball,’ he told me. In desperation, a Polish kapo had bravely taken it upon himself to intercede on behalf of his work detachment, pleading that the labour they were performing was highly strenuous and that they must be fed. Bachmayer, exploring the frightened face of the Pole, feigned readiness to cooperate. Then he turned, drew his revolver and shot the daring man.
In May 1944 an Italian prisoner, just eighteen years old, had escaped from the camp. He was soon caught, brought back and interrogated brutally. Bachmayer, in order to endow the spectacle with mythological status, erected a podium for himself and his cronies. He took centre-stage amid a bunch of select SS, they drank each other’s health, and then, screeching with laughter, Bachmayer unleashed his Lord on the exhausted boy, who tried in vain to defend himself against the savage beast. His cries — Pietà, Pietà, Comandante! — tore the skies asunder. But our Valhalla Knights, enthused by the dog’s good work, swayed merrily from side to side, their hands on each other’s shoulders, singing the camp version of ‘Lili Marlene’:
Heute keine Arbeit,
Maschine kaput,
Morgen meine Fräulein
Ficken will ich gut;
Morgen früh Morgen Sonnenschein
Wir muss in Wald spazieren geh’n,
Mit dir, Lili Marleen,
Mit dir, Lili Marleen.
‘Yes,’ said our underground barrack historian, whose ebony eyes stood out like burning coals against his cadaverous white face, ‘some of the things that happened here sound more like nightmares.’ A strange air of foreboding shadowed his voice, as if he was fearful of disembodied ears floating in the gloom to betray him. ‘But what nightmare could equal the realities of life in camp? That boy’s death was registered as suicide by electrocution.’
Sunrise West Page 3