by Carson, Tom
No guards, no locomotive, no explanation. Just a stench as big as the Prado under a low pewter sky that kept it sealed in over thirty or forty boxcars and flatcars packed with former people, none alive. Preserving my sanity for your benefit, Pam wasn’t Pam either, and when she resurfaced in midafternoon—in a squabble you’d better believe I left out of “The Gates,” and it’s Maggie Higgins who should’ve thanked me for that one—I was aghast. As Tim Cadwaller charitably says, having only appropriate reactions to Dachau would be proof of psychosis.
Even so, it was not-Eddie—not not-Pam—who broke down when he saw the impractical souvenir of life as a human being one claw was guarding: a toothbrush. That was probably the origin of his transformation into “the soldier” in “The Gates of Hell.” Angrily rubbing his jaw and smacking his face, he detached himself from the “we” of the lead, the plural vanishing as mysteriously as the collective narrator who introduces Charles Bovary.
No, daisysdaughter.com readers. I’m not even going to try to describe all we saw. Doing it once in dulcet magazine prose nearly killed me, and I was lots younger and spryer then. Just more game all around, you might say. But as a sample of what doesn’t get in the books and didn’t in Regent’s, I’ll tell you about Eddie’s and my first test—which we passed—in the etiquette of genocide.
Not that the latter term was current back then, just as the former one isn’t today. It was a practical dilemma, because we’d yelled at our driver to stop and scrambled out as soon as we came upon the train some minutes after the Thunderbirds’ leading patrols. (“Thunderbirds” meaning the U.S. 45th Division, oddly enough Bill M.’s old outfit until he’d been detached to Stars and Stripes. They’d been at this since Sicily, too.) Three or four cars down, we saw that it stretched on and on.
Eleven months after D-Day, Eddie and I knew each other best when wordless. Here was the question we asked with our skins: now that we knew, when did this get redundant? The two thousand or so other dead Jews could be not unreasonably assumed to be more of the same. Oh, we might spot one whose specs still encircled his I-was-a-tailor stare at the sky, proof he’d stayed a person until nearly the end. Maybe one ex-little girl would be clutching a doll: human interest at last!
Faced with that much formerly human immobility in closeup, we two felt frantic to reconvert ourselves into mobile, aggressive, not-dead Americans by jogging back to our jeep to barrel by on four wheels. The now aging stink of the former people’s final excretions was still being caught up with by the younger and friskier smell of their corpses, as if they’d expired while trying to write their names on each other in feeble dribbles of pee and crap: nothing else left to communicate, nothing else left to write it on or with. Prim Roy was fretful about letting me say “excretions,” much less the word that in 1945 would’ve shocked printers and made our readers ask what this world was coming to. “let me say shit i was there it was shit it was shit it was shit pam,” I Telexed from Munich in a pointless fury.
More etiquette of genocide: so long as we were on foot, we understood smoking was verboten. By contrast, a jeep’s zip-a-dee-doo-dah air of having somewhere more important to go excuses all kinds of callousness vis-à-vis the scenery. Our nostrils were pining for the fragrance of our future cancer to dull each new intake of feces and carrion.
Etiquette of journalism: the camp lay ahead and it was our story. If we stupidly tramped the whole length of the death train like two amateurs, other reporters might beat us to Dachau. Too well and too wretchedly to say so out loud, we knew how we’d feel if some brisker rival, say the Herald Trib’s Marguerite Higgins—Pam’s ETO doppelganger, younger than me by all of three months—went bucketing by as we trudged alongside the follow-up Thunderbirds who’d unslung their rifles, perhaps for some illusion of potential to affect the situation, back at the first flatcar. Ever since the Russians had come upon Auschwitz and with local urgency once the Brits to our north had found Belsen two weeks ago, being first in on a concentration camp’s liberation had been every war reporter’s new grail.
No fair, I thought: Maggie’d already gotten Buchenwald. Eddie could be on the radio tonight. With Regent’s longer lead time, I’d have to work twice as hard for by Pamela Buchanan’s piece not to sound dead on arrival. And above all, we knew that the farther we walked, the farther we’d have to walk back, plodding past faces we’d now recognize or particularly memorable tesselations of bodies—unless our GI driver, no master of the initiative even when what lay ahead didn’t start him gibbering “Jesus,” trundled up the road on his own. Doubtful, and we’d gone too far to wave.
Well, we paid our respects. Couldn’t see how to avoid it, since neither of us wanted to be the one to bleat “Enough” and bolt jeepward. Of course we were each hoping the other would crack. We’d seen bodies before, but killed soldiers did and no doubt do tend to be reasonably healthy and well-fed and young and clothed. And shod, though I’m not sure why bare feet make such a difference. They do, like bare diarrhea-dribbling gray rumps and shrunken penises and one ex-child’s small nipples, which somehow unlike her eyes struck me as closed.
“And here I was counting on you to be the weaker sex,” a re-Eddified or rather rebenighted Eddie was to say at Nothing’s party. “Why do you think I took you along?”
“I’m sorry: took me along?” I said and his grin lost wattage. We’d both attended enough Royal Navy briefings in England to know that, in that particular ice-cube voice, “I’m sorry” meant “Release the hounds.” When a man’s sense of irony deserts him enough that putting you in your place is his idea of finding common ground, he’s done.
Anyhow, we followed the tracks on into the camp, and if you’ve never visited what’s left of Dachau—never have myself, so don’t know how much has been prettily, tactfully preserved—you should know “camp” is a misnomer. Like the industrial complex it was, Dachau was built to last. Dozens of buildings spilled out over many walled areas as migraine-inducingly as typography in an alien language.
Henry Ford would have felt right at home there, I daresay in more than one sense. Do you know that son of a bitch is the reason we still know a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Talk all you want about Mercedes or Siemens. I’ve never bought one of Ford’s fucking cars in my life.
Posted by:Pam
Neither I nor any elderly Thunderbird could tell you what Dachau looked like, though. We never saw it as a going concern. We saw it in bankruptcy, with all the mess you’d expect when a business goes under: its inventory scattered and suddenly puzzling, its former foremen unemployed. Its product no longer in urgent demand.
In Metro’s 1949 flop The Gal I Left Behind Me, Eddie’s and my trek got telescoped into screen shorthand of wondrous puerility. Once this pause for a world-historical postcard in The Gal’s itinerary had been identified by a sign reading “dachau” over the entrance to what appeared to be a converted cattle ranch—and was, left over from some recent oater; the camp’s real outer wall was brick, its name unproclaimed by any similar logo—a brief but thoughtful reaction shot showed our dismay.
Yes, we frowned at the bad, to quote the children’s book whose pastels kept leaking into daisysdaughter.com’s legitimate recollections of Chignonne’s. dissolve to a Glenn Millerized VE-Day in Hitler’s old Munich apartment, true as to setting but not a lot else. That’s when Eddie “Harting” in his lovably testy way finally explodes: “Will you shut your trap, Peg? I’ve loved you since Normandy.” Me or rather “Peg Kimball,” spunky to the last: “Not London?” the end. Inserted closeup of Adolf’s portrait rolling its eyes no doubt just Pam’s later hallucination.
In the nonhallucination, the tracks didn’t let up once we were inside the grounds, the grounds?, the grounds. With nothing else to guide us, we followed them. The GIs we saw flitting here and there before they melted into or vanished behind one warehouse or workshop or another—if you can’t picture how exhausted men fli
t, it’s the same fast-slow-fast as a firefly’s dusk squiggle, only more unshaven and cantilevered by equipment—might be under orders that would veer us off course.
The earth was vile mud streaked with random silver. Cadaver, face down in puddle: a journalistic detail, should maybe make a note of it before I forget. (I did neither). Brains stove in and showing. Dogs somewhere barked urgently. Clammy rain mugged the air without falling. The fresh batch of cattle cars we saw as we came up to the railhead were empty, but the unscrubbed shit-stains—take that, Roy—and reek told us they hadn’t always been.
Beyond them, past a stubby bridge over an undredged, just as well, canal, a squat guardhouse with a gun tower broke an unending tall shiver of wire fence. Three or four jeeps were already wedged in the badly paved gap between the bridge’s far end and the guardhouse’s archway. In helmeted mottlings of drab coats and grime, a few dozen of our boys clustered around them.
“We guessed right,” someone nearby said exultantly. Unscrambling my mind from not-Pam paralysis, I realized Eddie’s voice had surprised me because I hadn’t heard it or even not-Eddie’s voice since we’d come upon the death train.
And yes, Panama, this was it: the famous encounter between our fabled Wrigley-chewing naivete and the Nazis’ ultimate Gesamkunstwerk. I doubt I’ll get much credit for admitting on daisysdaughter.com that the pajamaed stew of not-quite-former people on the far side of the guardhouse archway’s gate—yes, that gate, with the inset motto, smaller than its iron twin over the aperture of Auschwitz, reading Arbeit Macht Frei—reminded me briefly of Purcey’s during our one night fire drill.
Since I was there, however, I also grow caustic when that moment is depicted as if it resolved much of anything. Let alone rescued any of them or ennobled any of us at the touch of Uncle Sam’s wand. It didn’t, and it wasn’t a moment either. As the rain we never saw falling made us all miserable anyway, the meeting of Wrigley’s and Gesamkunstwerk went on for several chilly, clumsy, crowded and—I’ll say it—tedious hours, because nobody really knew what to do.
In fact, it went on for days, not that I witnessed all of them. By early May, under a sky the plump blue china of an uncomprehending Bavarian barmaid’s eyes, I was in Munich with writer’s block, not Dachau’s begetter’s problem if you’ve ever tried Mein Kampf. Fingering Hitler’s own copy—well, one of many, I suppose—I briefly considered feeling envious, then thought better of it.
The regimental CO had orders to keep the not-quite-former people penned until medicos and documentation crews reached the scene. The only reason things kept happening just the same was that something had to. If you must know, leaving aside the corpses and the clatter of machine-gun fire from behind us on the other side of the canal, the climax of the liberation of Dachau was a lot like being stuck on a mucky outdoor subway platform at rush hour.
Machine-gun fire? Oh, yes. As I may have mentioned, before the officers stopped it, we machine-gunned a few dozen of the camp’s guards out of hand. I didn’t watch it happen, but I later saw their crumpled bodies in an unmistakable, deeply satisfying (“pam have you gone crazy roy”) domino arrangement in front of a wall. True, those who got machine-gunned were unarmed by then. Ethically speaking, we didn’t have any business machine-gunning them. They probably shouldn’t have been machine-gunned until they had no hearts left to speak of.
Most of us had gotten here by walking past the death train. We killed all the dogs too. In my earshot, a light colonel from one outfit got into a shouting match with a brigadier from another over who had responsibility for the camp, ended up pulling a .45 on him; it didn’t seem unreasonable. Nobody got court-martialed over anything at all that happened the day we liberated Dachau.
In the one photograph I’ve seen that I believe shows Pamela Buchanan of Regent’s on the spot on April 29, 1945, just weeks before the birthday that marked my first quarter century as a speck of life on this bloodstained beachball, my head has started to turn away from the Arbeit Macht Frei gate as my blurred paw reaches up to my breast pocket. But if it’s the moment I remember, in fact my would-be grip’s retreating. At a loss, the GIs nearby had started to push cigarettes and candy into too many hands through the bars until some shavetail lieutenant shouted at us to quit.
Unless we had thirty thousand packs of Wrigley’s and Lucky Strikes coming out of our pink assholes, we were fueling a melee. “Lt waving arms—POWs [sic] yelling,” my mud-smudged notebook scrawl reads. Then, amid the cries of resharpened despair from up front—and of indifferent and baying, otherworldly celebration from somewhere farther back in the scrum of not-quite-former people—I heard a croaked summons unmistakably addressed to me.
“Mar-ga-ret Mitchell,” some not-quite-former person was calling. “Margaret Mitchell.”
Posted by: Melanie
I was tentative as I approached. Squeamish? Yes, squeamish. The mob of hands that gripped the gate had knuckles as prominent as buboes. If you weren’t there, you’ll never truly know how the distinctiveness of eyes is that they’re the only part of a human body that doesn’t and can’t get dirty. They all stank like latrines. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said.
“Margaret MIT-chell,” he repeated and I naturally thought Dachau had driven him mad. I couldn’t have gotten it more backwards. Behind me, two more jeeps had wedged their snouts into what was fast becoming Dachau gridlock. I heard some sort of fracas break out: “My orders are to secure this fucking camp. These men aren’t under your command. So help me, sir, if you don’t—”
“What the fuck are you, Colonel? Some kind of guardhouse lawyer?”
“Margaret Mitchell!” my inmate—my, how the proprietary instinct runs deep—raged at seeing my attention divide.
“Yes, yes. Margaret Mitchell,” I tried to reassure him. “Gone with the Wind. Yes, yes, yes. Americans! Statue of Liberty.”
As you may have gathered, my second guess was that he was babbling the only American name he could remember. Again, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Hilfe!” came a wail from deep inside the compound. Automatically, I jerked my eyes to the sound. Dully, I watched what happened next happen. Armed or not, officer or enlisted man, that’s all anybody on our side of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate did. Just before it vanished among scrabbling fists and fingernails, the guard’s face had looked like a turnip that screamed.
“Please! I am Nachum Unger. Nachum Unger, Nachum Unger! We are colleagues. Was it in Technicolor, and did Paulette, Paulette—Paulette Goddard!—play Scarlett? I’m Nachum Unger—Nachum Unger, the poet! My work was as the cinema critic for the Yiddisher Togsblat in Dresden. For the love of God, colleague, tell me! Did Selznick succeed?”
“Does it matter?” I marveled inanely. But it did. His face was fierce with triumph.
“Margaret Mitchell!” Nachum Unger boasted. “David O. Selznick. ‘Scarlett O’Hara she was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarl-ton twins were.’ Eight years I have been in this place. I swore my reason to live would be unique—so unique they’d never guess. Here I am. Please tell me, colleague!”
I gaped. Honestly, Panama, should I have told him—Nachum Unger, Nachum Unger, weighing eighty pounds and reeking like a latrine—that I didn’t know? That GWTW, six incredible years ago, had been infra dig in Pam’s suddenly silly, newly obtuse Manhattan set? My role representing the United States in social situations as your great-grandfather’s wife lay well in the future. But this was its stinking, surreal (“sorry too incongruous roy,” my editor Telexed back, deleting our whole dialogue) prototype.
“It is a cinematic masterpiece, Mr. Unger,” I said formally. “Feel free to tell your surviving readers so.”
Nachum Unger’s chin lifted. “Thank you, colleague.” His unfoulable eyes gleamed.
“No, no.” I reached out a grotesquely healthy and corpuscle-crammed Pam-palm to cover h
is knuckles’ gray stones. (Should never have washed it. Something faint but real about the 20th century could’ve outlived me, could be yours to pass on in fainter and fainter turn.) “Thank you,” I told him, for I did understand I’d just heard a tribute to something about America I’d never held in proper awe.
Brother, was I about to be upstaged. The new female voice that crashed in beside me was so disorienting I thought it must’ve come from inside my own skull: “Put a sock in it, Melly. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’ve got a job to do. Did they really kill that guard with their bare hands?”
“Yes,” I said. “Jesus, what are you doing, Maggie?”
Bewildered, I was staring at compact-mirror range into the determined face of one the greatest war reporters of the atrocious century we shared, ravishing even in the overcoat and oddly earflapped cap she’d scrounged in an apparent bid—hadn’t even crossed my mind, and evidently didn’t need to—to disguise her femininity. Dear, it was sweet of you to say your Gramela should be as celebrated. But if you want to please my lesser ghost, honor Marguerite Higgins’s giant one. Face the ocean when you do.
Friends we weren’t, though, then or ever. “What do you think I’m doing, ‘Pamita’? I’m going in. My God, you don’t even know who’s supposed to be in the VIP hut in there. Von Schussnigg, Léon Blum, Niemoller! I’m sorry for these poor bastards too. But amateur hour is o-vah.”
And she’d already gotten Buchenwald. In my defense, remember that even colonels and generals lost their heads the day we liberated Dachau. Remember that Maggie and I were both twenty-four, and Dachau wasn’t yet, well, Dachau. Given her looks (sexier than mine, no matter her garb) and reputation (ditto), the accusation implied in calling me “Pamita” was an outrage I couldn’t abide.