About the end of May, I had found my job. During all the eighteen hours in the day when the camp was not asleep, I set myself to fighting panic, the panic of my fellows and my own, for they were inseparable.
I was going to sort out the war news, and that was important. If Germany was victorious, we were done for, all of us. If Germany was beaten, but beaten too late, later than the coming spring, only a handful of survivors would still be alive, and which of us could flatter himself that he would be among them? It was important for another reason, because at Buchenwald everyone lied. False rumors flooded the camp. Since the Allies had landed in Normandy, Paris had fallen once a day; Berlin had been destroyed; Hitler was dead; the Russians were at the gates of Leipzig or Nuremberg; airborne troops had taken over from Southern Germany to Denmark. You could never find the source of such news. You could never find the guilty person who had started it. All were guilty, all were peddling rumors. Shunted from false hopes to denials, from illusions to gossip, all of our hearts were like ships capsized. Doubt and agony were taking root.
We had to make war on the disease. My comrades put me in charge of the news in the “little camp,” in other words a division of about 30,000 prisoners. There was a loudspeaker in each block. Over it the SS command gave its orders from outside the camp. The rest of the time, the loudspeakers were tuned to the German radio, for official broadcasts and bulletins of the German army. Every day I took down the bulletins, all of them, from morning to night. My job was to decipher them. The fact was the army bulletins were not straightforward and not clear. They didn’t describe operations as they were. They spoke by omission. They sketched the war in a void. My work, and it was hard and painstaking, was to redress the balance.
When we came to the middle of August 1944 the name of Paris never appeared in the bulletins. No defeat, no lost city was ever mentioned, you had to fill in the gaps without making mistakes. Still, I announced the fall of Paris on August 26, and that was neither ahead of time nor behind it.
Once the news was picked up and deciphered, it had to be distributed. I went from one block to the next, climbed up on a table or on benches piled on each other, and then made my statement. You must be thinking it would have been easier to write down what I had heard on a slip of paper, then have it translated into five or six different languages and circulated. Unfortunately, I had learned this would not work. Even a crowd that is happy and confident does not welcome the news brought before it. But a crowd enslaved by fear and despair sets itself against news as though it were an attack.
It was not facts, names or figures that all these men wanted. It was certainties, the kind of realities that went straight to the heart. Only a man standing before them could give them that. They needed his calm and his voice, and it was I who had become the voice.
I started by saying I had heard the news myself, and I told them when and where. For one thing I repeated the bulletins of the German High Command word for word. Then I explained what they meant, what I understood them to mean. In German and French I did the talking myself. When it came to Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Dutch, I had found people to help me. I took my band of interpreters with me everywhere I went.
Since we had no maps, every day before speaking I had to find a man who knew the zone of operations at first hand, whether it was in Galicia or in the Ardennes. At all costs, names, positions, distances must be exact, especially the distances, since the war depended on them.
That was only the beginning. I have said that everyone lied at Buchenwald, some from discouragement, some from fear, others from ignorance, and some viciously. I have watched men inventing the bombing of cities, just for the pleasure of torturing a neighbor who had all his dear ones in that place.
Once the news was given out, it had to be kept straight, and that called for unending vigilance. I had put two or three people in charge in each block. Their task was to repeat accurately what I had said, and correct publicly all the crazy and vicious distortions; but, above all, to find and denounce the people who were peddling false rumors.
Some of these people were very hard to hold in check, for they believed in their own inventions. Truth slides over a man, but falsehood fastens on to him like a leech. Often the only way out was a fight. Somebody had to hit one of these characters to make him stop lying. There he was, persuaded of his garbled story, and begging you to let him tell it; like the Pole who, one night, screamed out that there was not one stone left on another in Poznan, that he had found it out, knew it for a certainty, and must tell everyone about it. But that was just the point. Such things were not to be told, absolutely not. For otherwise there would have been murders and suicides among the men of Poznan who could not bear the news.
But how were we to hold on to the remnants of reason in the swirling madness of deportation? How were we to keep some order in the utter confusion of the brain? If we really couldn’t find out what was going on, at least let us not conjure it up!
So much for the official news, now for the inside story. It is hard to believe but true nonetheless. News was coming in to us from France, England and Russia. In one of the blocks set aside for medical experiments, down in the cellars, some prisoners had set up a radio receiving station made with stolen parts, and also a sender as we found out later on. If it had been discovered, this receiving station would surely have cost the lives of several thousand men. But what was to be done with news received through these channels?
Should it be passed on to all the prisoners? After all, wasn’t it theirs by right? Of course it would be done without naming the source, but the risk was too great. The place was swarming with spies. Under the SS system, no one can be trusted. No, we had to keep the news to ourselves, to a little group of us in the know. It was absurd, it was cruel, but it was indispensable.
So each day I knew a little more than I had the right to tell. I was forced to measure my words, to hold everything in control, even a smile. All day long I was busy. I hardly had time to think of myself. I could say to myself that I was a kind of doctor. When I went into a block, I took its pulse. With experience I learned to recognize right away the state of block 55 or block 61 on that day. A barracks was a spirit shared, a collective body. In there men were so packed together they could hardly tell each other apart. When panic started at one end of the block, it reached the other within a few minutes.
I could sense the condition of a block by the noise it made as a body, by its mixture of smells. You can’t imagine how despair smells, or for that matter confidence. They are worlds apart in their odor. So then, according to the state of things, I gave out more news of one kind, or less of another. Morale is so fragile that a word, even an intonation can throw it out of balance.
The remarkable thing was that listening to the fears of others had ended by freeing me almost completely from anxiety. I had become cheerful, and was cheerful almost all the time, without willing it, without even thinking about it. That helped me, naturally, but it also helped the others. They had made such a habit of watching the coming of the little blind Frenchman with his happy face, his reassuring words delivered in a loud voice, and with the news he gave out, that on days when there was no news, they had him visit them just the same.
How well I remember that September night when 1,500 Ukrainians set me down in the middle of their block, made a ring around me, sang, danced, played the accordion, wept, sang again — all this gravely and affectionately without ever shouting — that night I promise you I no longer needed to defend myself against the past or the future. The present was as round and full as a sphere and it warmed me many times over.
And finally, as for those men who were laughing and putting their arms around each other — for they were laughing within an hour — if anyone had told them then that they were unhappy, that they were in a concentration camp, they would not have believed him. They would have chased him away.
WE HAD OUR POOR AND OUR RICH at Buchenwald as they have everywhere. Only you couldn’t recognize t
hem by their clothes or their decorations. For decorations every one of us had a triangle of material sewed onto his jacket, red for the politicals, yellow for the Jews, black for the saboteurs, green for ordinary criminals, pink for the pederasts with records, purple for the enemies of Nazism on religious grounds. And underneath the triangle there was a square of the same stuff with our registration number and the letter indicating our nationality. Last of all, if the records said we were mad, we had the right to wear an armband with three black dots. The clothes we wore were all alike, all rags.
The only distinguishing mark was on the head. Before you had been in camp three days, they shaved your head clean, and since your beard kept on growing, it gave you a fearsome look. During the second three months of your stay, the two sides of your head were shaved, but a mane of hair was left growing in the middle. For the next six months, the two sides were not touched. They grew wild, while the mane was shaved, leaving a large stripe we used to call the expressway. By the end of a year you could do as you liked with your hair. That was your privilege.
All of us were naked, if not literally, to all effects. We had no rank, no dignity, no fortune left … and no face to save. Every man was cut down to himself, to what he really was. And, believe me, that created a real proletariat. Still, there had to be a way of recognizing people in the crowd, of knowing who to speak to. The camp was the witches’ well. They had thrown them all in there together, the Benedictine monk, the Kirghiz shepherd who prayed to Allah three times a day with his face to the ground, the professor from the Sorbonne, the mayor of Warsaw, the Spanish smuggler, the men who had killed their mothers or raped their daughters, the ones who had let themselves be arrested to save twenty others; the wise ones and the fools, the heroes and the cowards, the good and the evil. The only thing was — and you had to get used to it — all these categories were dead and gone, for we had passed over into a different world.
I was lucky enough to be twenty years old and to have no habits except the few that had to do with the mind. I needed no honor except the honor of being alive. So it wasn’t surprising if I was more contented than most of my neighbors.
The religious searched everywhere for their faith. They did not find it again, or else they found it so reduced in force that they couldn’t make use of it. It is a terrifying thing to have called yourself Christian for forty years and then discover that you are not a real one, that your God no longer solves your problems. The people who had been generally respected ran after their lost respect, but there wasn’t anything left of it. And the intellectuals, the cultivated men, the great brains, had great sorrows. They didn’t know what to do with their learning for it didn’t protect them against misfortune. They were submerged in that vast broth of humanity. How many doctors and sociologists, archaeologists and barristers needed comforting. And it wasn’t easy to console them. They could understand anything more readily than the fact that their intelligence was out of season.
Our rich at Buchenwald were the devil and all to find in the crowd, for they had no label. They were neither religious men nor atheists, neither liberals nor communists, neither well nor badly brought up. They were just there, that was all, mixed up with the rest. My one idea was to find them.
Their wealth was not made of courage, for courage is always suspect or a consequence of something else. The rich were the ones who did not think of themselves, or only rarely, for a minute or two in an emergency. They were the ones who had given up the ridiculous notion that the concentration camp was the end of everything, a piece of hell, an unjust punishment, a wrong done them which they had not deserved. They were the ones who were hungry and cold and frightened like all the rest, who didn’t hesitate to say so on occasion — why conceal the real state of things? — but who in the end didn’t care. The rich were the ones who were not really there.
Sometimes they had removed themselves entirely by going crazy. In the Invalids’ Block I had known two or three hundred such, and intimately. We ate, slept, washed together and talked to each other. Most of them were not harmful if you left them alone. They didn’t need to be destructive. For as a rule they were content. But still their contentment was terrifying, a sort of frozen happiness and not communicable. I watched these madmen across the barrier of my reason. There was always something changeless about them which fascinated me. Take Franz, the little Silesian, whose hands never stopped trembling, who talked day and night under his breath, saying over and over that all in all Buchenwald was not a bad spot, and that the misfortunes of the others were only their own hallucinations. Franz looked as though he had the anguish of the world on his shoulders. You couldn’t say just how, but still he was taking it upon himself. Some people said his face had begun to look like the face of Christ.
The feeble-minded, the ones who were short on memory and imagination, also did not suffer. They lived from minute to minute, each day for itself, I suppose as beggars do. The odd thing was that it was comforting to be with them. The tramps, the hoboes, the ones who had never had a place to live, stupid and lazy as they were, had gathered up all kinds of secrets about living. They did not complain. They passed their secrets along. With them I spent many hours.
And then, I mustn’t forget, there were also the Russians; not all the Russians, of course, for among them too there were the dark ones, the burdened, especially the ones who clung to Marx, Lenin or Stalin as though they were life preservers. The ones I mean were the Russian workers and the peasants. They did not act like other Europeans. It was as if there were no intimacies for them, and no individual concerns except for the basic affections for their women and children; and even these were not nearly as strong as with us.
It was as if they were all combined in a single person. If ever you happened to strike a Russian — and it wasn’t easy to avoid, there were so many occasions — in a minute fifty Russians sprang up all over, to right and left, and made you repent it. On the other hand, if you had done a Russian a good turn, and it didn’t take much, just a smile or silence well timed, then all of a sudden too many Russians to count became your ‘“brothers.” They would willingly have let themselves be killed for you, and sometimes they did just that.
I was fortunate enough to be taken into their affections right away. I tried to speak their language. I didn’t talk politics and they didn’t talk about it either. I relied on the strength of their people, a people not composed of individualists like ours, but charged with a current of energy which was directed passionately toward life.
Last of all there were the old men, the old Russians and all the rest, the French, the Poles, the Germans. From them too I always learned something. Because, you see, the bad old men, all those who hadn’t found out how to grow old, had died. At Buchenwald many died between fifty and sixty-five. That was the age for the great slaughter, and almost all the survivors were good men.
As for them, they were no longer there. They were looking at the world, with Buchenwald in the middle of it, from further away. They absorbed Buchenwald as part of the great outpouring of the universe, but already they seemed to belong to a better world. I found nothing but gladness in the men over seventy.
That is what you had to do to live in the camp: be engaged, not live for yourself alone. The self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold on something outside yourself. Never mind how: by prayer if you know how to pray; through another man’s warmth which communicates with yours, or through yours which you pass on to him; or simply by no longer being greedy. Those happy old men were like the hoboes. They asked nothing more for themselves, and that put everything within their reach. Be engaged, no matter how, but be engaged. It was certainly hard, and most men didn’t achieve it.
Of myself I can’t say why I was never entirely bereft of joy. But it was a fact and my solid support. Joy I found even in strange byways, in the midst of fear itself. And fear departed from me, as infection leaves an abscess when it bursts. By the end of a year in Buchenwald I was c
onvinced that life was not at all as I had been taught to believe it, neither life nor society. For example, how could I explain that in block 56, my block, the only man who had volunteered day and night, for months, to watch over the most violent mad, to calm them down and feed them, to care for the ones with cancer, dysentery, typhus, to bathe them and comfort them, was a person of whom everyone said that in ordinary life he was effeminate, a parlor pederast, a man one would hesitate to associate with? But here he was the good angel, frankly the saint, the only saint in Invalids’ Block. How account for the fact that Dietrich, the German criminal, arrested seven years before for strangling his mother and his wife, had turned brave and generous? Why was he sharing his bread with others at the risk of dying sooner? And why, at the same time, did that honest bourgeois from our country, that small tradesman from the Vendée, father of a family, get up in the night to steal the bread of other men?
These shocking things were not what I had read in books. They were there in front of me. I had no way of not seeing them, and they raised all kinds of questions in my mind. And last of all, was it Buchenwald, or was it the everyday world, what we call the normal life, which was topsy-turvy?
An old peasant from Anjou whom I had just met — how strange that he was born only six miles from Juvardeil — insisted that it was the everyday world which was askew. He was convinced of it.
[ 16 ]
MY NEW WORLD
PROGRESSIVELY, FROM DAY TO DAY, the Eastern front and the Western front were closing Germany in a vise between them. The liberation of Europe was approaching, but the more the Allies’ chances of victory grew, the more our chances of survival shrank. We were not ordinary prisoners. There were no codes of international law for us, no humane conventions. We were the hostages of Nazism, the living witnesses of its crimes. If Nazism was going to blow up, it had to blow us up at the same time.
And There Was Light Page 25