Point of No Return

by Gellhorn, Martha;

  “Dachau,” the tall one with glasses said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Listen, brother,” the tall one said with slow carefulness, “That’s hell, that’s where that is.”

  “We threw those S.S. bastards over the wire and we let the prisoners tear them apart,” his friend said, swaying a little. “That’s what we did. I seen one of our fellows kill one of them S.S. bastards just beating his brains out.”

  “Say, what is this?” Bert Hammer said. What kind of talk was this, for a night when you were supposed to be happy and dance in the streets and have a good time?

  “It’s about twelve miles from here,” the man with glasses explained.

  “It’s the biggest one of these kraut death prisons,” the other one said. “Believe me, you’re goddam lucky you’re here, is what I mean.”

  “And smell,” the tall soldier said, “I still smell it.”

  Bert Hammer pulled at Jacob Levy’s arm. This was not the way he intended to spend the first night of peace, glooming with two drunks who didn’t have a cheerful word to say.

  “Be seeing you guys,” he said. Jacob Levy, who had scarcely listened to the conversation, followed him. He was willing to do whatever anyone wanted.

  Bert Hammer found an empty space against the wall which was almost as good as finding a table.

  “What’s the matter with everybody?” Bert Hammer asked. “You’d think this was a funeral.”

  Even Jake wasn’t behaving right; why didn’t somebody get up enough pep to start something? He wished Marv Busch was here; he’d eat glass; Marv was the best one to have on a party. Suddenly Bert Hammer thought, with real surprise: Marv is dead. Goddamit, Marv was dead and Dan and Roy were shot up bad and the Sarge didn’t have any legs.

  “Here’s to Victory,” he said, without conviction.

  “Here’s to going home,” Jacob Levy said.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Bert Hammer finished his drink and shuddered. It was the worst cognac yet. Marv’s dead, he thought. It counts now. We might as well go to our place and hit the sack. This is the most disappointing peace I ever saw.

  Jacob Levy did not propose his last toast aloud. Here’s to Kathe, he said, and our life. Then he drank his cognac as if it were good.

  22

  “It’s about twelve miles from here. Seems it’s the biggest concentration camp the krauts had. You hear a lot of talk about it,” Jacob Levy said. “It won’t take more than a couple of hours, sir.”

  He wanted to be alone so he could talk with Kathe. And he wanted to be out in the country, to remind himself of what spring would be like by his stream. But he could not suggest to the Colonel that he be given time off for these purposes. He had been trying to invent some reasonable excuse for two days, when he remembered the 12th Division soldiers and their death camp. The Battalion had not liberated any such place; a death camp was legitimate business; everybody talked about them; you had a right to be curious. Anyhow it was the best scheme he could think of and he watched to see how the Colonel took it.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was not permitting his men to get the idea they were civilians, just because the war was over. He had tightened up on discipline the day after the celebration of victory, and he meant to keep them working until their backs broke, so they’d be too busy and tired to get in trouble. The war had only been over three days, and it felt like three months, or three years, and that was the way everybody acted. He did not know Levy was crazy about prisons, but everybody was coming up with cockeyed notions. He’d make an exception once, because Levy had earned a morning off and it wouldn’t do any harm.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll want you here at twelve.”

  “Thank you, sir. I could stop to see the Motor Sergeant on the way back.” This would show the Colonel he had his mind on his work. “They didn’t have time to go over the jeep right the other day. He says maybe it needs new pins.”

  This was the first time, since coming to Europe, that he had had a chance to get in the jeep and go off for his own pleasure. It was almost like getting into the car at home and going for a drive. I guess I ought to go to Dachau, he thought, the Colonel might ask me about it; he was tempted to take a risk and just mooch out into the country and lie under a tree. But he decided he better not pull a fast one like that on the Colonel.

  Once he was out of Munich the road was nice, not crowded and with a respectable hard surface. This was sweet country, rolling away in cultivated fields. I got to learn a lot, Jacob Levy thought, about crops and vegetables and all. High lacy trees, whose names he did not know, stood up from the green fields. The farmers must have thought they were too pretty to cut down. The wind blew them about gently, as he remembered the wind blowing his silver-leafed trees by the stream. And there were flowers growing in the fields, round fresh specks of pink and white and yellow. The farmhouses looked very fine to him; his own shack wouldn’t be a big white place with a red tile roof. For a moment he resented these krauts who had better houses than he had, then he forgot this. Let them have their houses; he had plenty of luck of his own.

  I’d like to stop right here, Jacob Levy thought, and the hell with Dachau. Across a green wheat field, he saw a double row of poplars and sun shone on the narrow band of water flowing between them. He wanted to make himself comfortable under those trees and think of home. If I hurry, he decided, I bet I can see plenty in a half hour to tell the Colonel about it and afterwards I could come back. He located the poplars in his memory because there was a building here with Gasthaus in gold letters over the door. Then he pushed the jeep to an almost legal forty, so he could get to Dachau quickly and finish with it.

  It was no distance at all. He had been wondering whether you had to go to school to learn about farming and fish hatcheries, or maybe you picked it up as you went, like combat, and suddenly there was a big black and white placard at the side of the road, saying Dachau. He had imagined something like Sing Sing in the movies, but Dachau was a little village with sharp-roofed houses, and the krauts all leaning over their front gates and gossiping together in the sun. The women looked clean and bright, compared to the tattered women of Italy and the dingy women in the villages of France. Of course it was spring and that made a difference, but these women wore good clothes, for Europe.

  The houses had window boxes with flowers, and flowers in the yards, and the windows shone like diamonds, with starched curtains behind the polished glass. The bombers had not troubled this place: it didn’t seem as if the war had bothered them any way. They were well-off, lucky people; they’d had it easy. He could not speak German and he did not know how to ask for this prison but he thought if it was so big it would show up by itself. Then he saw, from the main road, a group of buildings and a high wall and he turned his jeep from the sunlit prosperous street, and found himself driving alongside the wall.

  Behind the wall were square cement houses, painted grey. They looked very pleasant with trees all around them, and Jacob Levy thought: I don’t figure that’s a bad prison. Farther on, there was a gate and much traffic milling about the sentry box. There were too many officers. He parked his jeep opposite a red brick apartment which was full of soldiers, and hoped he would see his 12th Division friends of V-E night coming out of the building. He waited a few minutes and decided this would not get him anywhere. He was wasting time; the morning would not last forever; so he walked across the street and opened conversation with the sentry, standing outside the arched prison gate.

  “How about getting in here, Mac?” he asked. He had noticed a great deal of paper being flourished around: passes. The army couldn’t do a thing without a ton of papers. Behind the gate he saw a sunny yard, a big white stone building, and trees. It looked like a pretty good prison to him; those 12th Division guys were just drunk and shooting a line.

  “Wait a sec,” the sentry said. Jacob Levy moved off and lighted a cigarette.

  Presently the sentry beckoned to him and he came over and the se
ntry said, “That slob of a Major we got is running this place like he was working for the Nazis. Two days ago he turned away some correspondents. The war’s over, for Christ’s sake, and anyhow they ought to let people go in there.” The sentry seemed like the serious type, pretty old too, maybe thirty. “They ought to see what the krauts did to those Jews.”

  Jacob Levy’s eyelids flickered; he looked at the sentry and saw he was not a Jew. “Is that what they got in there?”

  “Jews? Sure, I guess so. That’s what they look like. That’s who Hitler wanted to bump off.”

  Jacob Levy stood aside as the sentry saluted two captains, walking past with brief cases under their arms. These captains carried more fat and had smoother faces than Jacob Levy was accustomed to seeing on officers. They must be that new kind, the military government ones.

  “You want to get in?”

  “Yeh,” Jacob Levy said. He felt nervous now, and strange. He did want to get in and he would have given anything never to have come here. This was what he had heard about, and now he was going to see it: what Hitler did to the Jews.

  “Wait till these guys get through.”

  The place was overrun with indoor officers. He certainly didn’t want to tangle with them about not having a pass.

  “Now get on in, and turn to your right the other side of a big brick building. You’ll see the barbed wire. They stop you and dust you for typhus first but the soldiers there’ll let you in allright. If you run into some snoopy officer, say you have a message for Sergeant Sweeny, he’s inside there somewhere. Tell him Harold sent you. The Sarge is okay.”

  “Thanks, Mac.” Jacob Levy walked fast across the prison yard, keeping his eye out for brief-case captains. Above all, he didn’t want to get in trouble and be delayed, and lose his morning under the trees. He turned right as instructed and saw at the end of the prison street the high barbed wire fence, and behind it, dimly, a mass of greyish people. Then he was at the gate, beneath a watch tower, opening his shirt and unbuttoning the top of his trousers, and getting sprayed with DDT against typhus.

  “This’ll give you a nice itch later on, when you start to sweat,” the soldier with the spray-gun said. “But don’t let it worry you. If you get any lice, after what I’ve done to you, I hear you don’t take more’n three days to die.”

  “Thanks, pal,” Jacob Levy said. Then he was through the gate.

  He started to turn and go back. But the entry in the barbed wire was blocked with a bunch of medics getting the DDT treatment and he couldn’t push past them without calling attention to himself and probably being asked for his pass. Maybe it was the feeling of the barbed wire, the prison feeling, that alarmed him; maybe it was the thought of typhus; and maybe it was the prisoners. Either their faces were floating before him in the sun, or he could not force himself to look straight at them. They moved about in a way that was almost like crawling even if they were walking, slow and aimless and sick. Their eyes were all the same: too big, black and empty. There was no recognition or curiosity or anything in those eyes, just sick dead eyes in yellow or grey faces. Their bodies moved, without reason, as there was nowhere to go; and they stared at him. He had never imagined people could look like this.

  They were all bald, too. No, their heads were shaved and the skin was so tight on the bone they seemed like bare skulls. Their teeth were rotten, with black holes where teeth were missing. You almost saw the grey striped rags that covered them, creeping with lice. Jesus, their hands were enormous too, or maybe it was only because their wrists were thin as sticks. Jacob Levy stood, feeling the sweat come out on his face, and stared back at them: thousands of starved mindless men, weaving in the sunshine. Some of them sat on the ground and from time to time scratched themselves.

  He had no pity for these men: he had only fear. He was afraid of them, afraid of everything they showed in their eyes and their dragging bodies. He was paralyzed with fear.

  A little grey man drifted up to Jacob Levy, like a piece of paper blowing along a gutter. The little man did not seem to have a body; he was a bundle of rags that walked. His eyes had a look of intelligence in them: the intelligence was bitter and cold and not at all human.

  “Shall I help you please?” he said.

  Jacob Levy wanted to brush this man away, he did not want to stay here talking with anyone. He could not think of an answer. Help me how? he wondered.

  “Shall I show you? At your service, sir.” He had a muted soft voice. Perhaps people talked like that in their sleep.

  Jacob Levy followed the little man; at least he had a plan, this place did not freeze him to one spot. They passed through the still or swaying bodies; and Jacob Levy did not look at them. He looked at his feet. The crowded prison yard was as quiet as if it were empty; occasional voices seemed to come from some other place. They were American voices.

  “My name is Heinrich, sir,” the little man said, stopping at the door of a long discolored wood building.

  “Levy,” he murmured and shook hands. He supposed it was the right thing to do. The little man’s hand was as small as a child’s, and bony and cold.

  “This is the infirmary of the prison,” Heinrich announced. They went into a hallway that was fairly clean to look at and smelled more horrible than any place Jacob Levy had yet been. The smell of these bodies was not dirt, it was decay. Down the hallway, in silent patience, the prisoners sat waiting to see the doctor. No doctor could do anything for them. Jacob Levy held his breath to keep out this smell.

  Heinrich led him into what looked like a doctor’s office; there were cabinets against the walls and a few medical instruments. You could guess anyhow what the place was meant for. A doctor in a white jacket was bending over a man, seated on a chair. The man himself did not look at the doctor; he seemed to be absent. There were great sores on the man’s legs. The doctor said something and the man rose, slowly, and shuffled away.

  Heinrich effected the introductions. The doctor smiled politely. His smile amazed Jacob Levy as if the man had hit him. A smile seemed impossible here. The doctor too had intelligent eyes; like Heinrich’s, his intelligence had grown so bitter and so weary that it made his eyes cold.

  “The doctors here are all Polish,” Heinrich explained. “The Nazis put them here because they wish to finish the Pole peoples. They attacked the educated mens.”

  The doctor did not look like a Jew, but how did he know what a Polish Jewish doctor would look like. The doctor was a little fatter than the others; in ordinary life, the doctor would have seemed a very thin man. Anyhow, there were not cavities like wounds where his cheeks were meant to be; his hands did not strike you as deformed. He had more hair on his head; it was grey as his skin was. Something about the way the doctor held himself impressed Jacob Levy. He took off his cap and stretched out his hand.

  “Glad to meet you, Doctor.”

  “I speak not so much English,” the doctor said.

  “You would like to know of the experiments, sir?” Heinrich asked.

  The door opened and a man came in; he was as tall as Jacob Levy, and weighed possibly ninety pounds; his knees, showing in the gaps of a khaki blanket, looked big and gnarled on the dirty stalks of his legs. He wore, as clothing, this blanket like a shawl, and a pair of unlaced black boots. He stood staring about him with wild reddened eyes, and then he began to cry. He babbled something, and clutched his blanket around him. The doctor smiled. My God, Jacob Levy thought, the doctor’s crazy. The doctor smiled with a remote hopeless indifference, and spoke to the man. The man went on crying. The doctor called some words in Polish, and turned back to Jacob Levy.

  “Aren’t you going to do something for him?” Jacob Levy asked. They could give this awful thing a chair to sit on, before he died standing there.

  “He will be fine,” the doctor said and responded to the anger in Jacob Levy’s face by making some explanation in German to Heinrich.

  “The doctor says this one comes from the last death transport. You know the Americans dug these p
eoples out. It was on the tracks for the peoples to die. This one lived. Now his brain is not very good. The doctor says in two or three weeks he will be better.”

  Jacob Levy heard the words without understanding them. “How old is he?”

  Another doctor or assistant in a white jacket had come in, received orders in Polish, and was now leading the blanket-draped man away. Heinrich asked a question; the Polish assistant repeated it; the man in the blanket mumbled something. He had stopped crying; his voice sounded so weak that Jacob Levy was sure he would faint before he crossed the room.

  “Twenty-two,” Heinrich said. “If you come in the operating room, the doctor will show you.”

  Twenty-two, Jacob Levy thought. He had thought it was an old man of sixty. His hair was matted and filthy but there was grey in it; his beard had hardly grown on the waxen skin of the face; it looked like the wispy hair of the very old. Jacob Levy followed the doctor and Heinrich into an operating room. In his experience of hospitals, he had never seen an operating room as bare as this. They kept it clean, but they had nothing to work with. There was a table, and some cabinets, almost empty. Where was the lamp, where was all the stuff he remembered? He waited for the smell of ether. There was no smell of ether. He needed to sit down, and when Heinrich saw him looking for a chair, he brought one. The others stood. I can’t sit down if they’re standing, Jacob Levy thought.

  “Here is where they do the castrations,” Heinrich stated in his amiable dead voice. He sounded like a guide, too. “All who touch German womens, gypsies, Polish priests and Jews.”

  What’s he talking about, Jacob Levy thought, does he mean on live men? It couldn’t be; he didn’t believe it.

  “These Polish doctors do not make such operations. But they have the record.”

  A big book was thrust before Jacob Levy. They pulled his chair to the operating table and made inviting gestures for him to sit down. They opened the book and gathered around the table to watch him; Heinrich and the doctor and the two younger men, also Polish it would seem from their talk, also in white coats, also with inquisitive yet lifeless faces. The book appeared to be a neat accountant’s ledger. It was full of the names and ages of men whom the German doctors had mutilated.