Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  Meanwhile, every morning and every evening I washed from head to toe in the lavatory, hastily to avoid the complaints of the women in line at my faucet, yet at the same time I took care to scrub my skin clean with the harsh soap they gave us (I was gripped by the nightmarish fear of being infected by my syphilitic roommates). Then I vigorously rubbed myself with a cloth to make the blood circulate, standing naked among the internees who looked at me as if I were off my rocker.

  “You have energy to spare?”

  “She must want to get noticed for the officers’ brothel.”

  “Take it easy,” I answered.

  “Save your strength while you still have it,” they advised.

  Pay no attention to them, I told myself, keep an eye on them. I practiced giving orders to the German shepherds behind the SS’s backs, mute orders with my eyes, with my little finger, with a minimum of gestures. And I forgot about hunger. But watch out, autumn is coming, with the cold you won’t make it. Get a move on (though I didn’t know what move to make).

  *

  As I obsessively kept repeating “none of this is normal,” I had the chilling sensation that any time now I would lose all hope of being able to make it: the K-Lager’s population only brought the jumble of the outside world to a fever pitch, it was not another reality but merely an extreme form of the same order that existed outside. This feeling grew in me during the hours spent lined up at roll call, at the canteen, all the occasions where they crammed us together on our feet. I forgot about my fatigue in the task I’d assigned myself: to study faces, to ask who are you? where did you come from? what did you do in civilian society? At night I then concentrated on weighing and assembling all the bits of information the way a miser counts his money.

  One constant evolved in my mind: just as in Frankfurt, there were no rich or powerful in Dachau.

  But although it was understandable in the camps connected to industrial plants—a factory requires workers, not upper-class gentlemen—in a K-Lager it was suspicious: Could it be that there were no anti-Nazis in European high society? Or weren’t they persecuted?

  Jews themselves were almost all rounded up in Central European ghettos, a sea of artisans, workers, small merchants, a handful of intellectuals, especially doctors, chemists, and engineers, those who possessed the “mental capital” (as the Nazis called it) that could be useful to the Third Reich. The big financiers, the truly wealthy, were sheltered abroad. Economic discrimination was therefore even stronger than racial discrimination—indeed, wasn’t economic discrimination actually the basis for racial discrimination? Jewish lives as hostages, as flesh to be bartered … In the brief time that I was in the K-Lager I heard whispers, I don’t know how often, of Nazi negotiations with the Swiss government for the sale of a supply of Jews. I don’t think it was just a delusion on the part of the huddled masses we saw passing behind the yard from our barracks—we Untermenschen, that is, we subhumans; though we were still one level higher than them, in part because we belonged to more economically developed countries—we Western Aryan deportees.

  Those most knowledgeable about the subject were the red triangles, because they were the group in which the percentage of Akademiker (as those internees with any academic degree were called) was greater than among the other colors. In large part employed in the registration and administrative offices, and in the infirmaries, they kept a concerned eye out for those like them, whom they assigned to the kitchens. Clerks, accountants, nurses, potato peelers (still subordinate to German internees), these Akademiker were better off than those who worked in the quarries, in the blast furnaces, or tarring the streets. I viewed them critically for that very reason, because their “mental capital,” although unexploited, kept them shielded from much harassment. They could continue to act according to the values they had held in the “civilized” world more easily than the lower grade of inmates could.

  I said as much to a nurse I knew, one of the rare internees who had risen to that position (women were usually excluded from such assignments, considered a lower species even among the deportees): “Why do you beleaguer us with your ideals? You can afford the luxury.”

  I’m unable to think the way I did before I came to know this hell (I thought). And I kept questioning the nurse, a Dutchwoman whom everyone respected for her tireless efforts in the Krankenrevier. Forty years old, a hint of self-sacrifice in the pallid face with its depleted features, she didn’t avoid me like the other red triangles did, but responded patiently to my questions when we met at dawn in the laundry room. Both doggedly rubbing clothes with a sandy soap in the dim grayness of the unlighted room, at times we laughed together over the idiocy of that determined scrubbing. She told me in German about the type of people she had seen file by the day before. We estimated that even among the red triangles the middle classes were a minority. The ones who systematically fell into the hands of the Gestapo were the workers, the unskilled laborers. According to her, this was due to the fact that communist workers were much more numerous than intellectuals of the same beliefs. I, however, saw it as proof that economic discrimination prevailed even over that of ideology:

  “Excuse me, Ellen, but if the Nazis assail the ignorant more in terms of ideas as well, it means that even in politics their first yardstick is money, because the ignorant, we know, are the poor.”

  “You can’t confuse things that way…” the woman replied, slamming a tattered garment against the laundry’s corrugated concrete counter: “Ideas still matter, all the more against savages like the Nazis.”

  “And how they matter!” I argued. “Especially the idea that in this world money matters more than anything.”

  Each passing day strengthened my conviction. Among the Catholics, the internees were all lower-ranking clergymen. Ellen couldn’t bear the thought. One morning she came with news of two deported Polish bishops and a Dutch cardinal.

  “That’s it?” I laughed.

  “An Italian princess too.”

  “Oh!” I scoffed, adding, “How do you explain the fact that even among Italian military prisoners, among the badogliani as they’re called, only soldiers are forced to work, while officers may refuse to do so and the higher grades are actually exempted? You don’t call that class discrimination?”

  The next day I pointed out that the common criminals were all very low-class people, brought up in orphanages, in overpopulated urban fringes. (The criminals answered my questions about their childhoods more willingly than the others, warmed by the thought that someone would recognize that they had once been children.)

  “You’re insulting the poor.” The nurse stopped rinsing. “They’re more moral than the rich.”

  “That’s what I’m saying! An illiterate thief is less despicable than the rich man who sends him to prison.”

  “I don’t care for your way of thinking. Besides which, at your age it’s dangerous. You’re too young to judge. You want to overthrow everything. You make me sorry I gave you so much information.” And, involuntarily, her eyes slid to my black triangle.

  “You too think I’m an asocial,” I said. “Like the Nazis.”

  And so I lost Ellen’s trust. I continued my probing on my own.

  As for the Nazis, even our guards were of the lowest social class. It was almost as though one of them was acknowledging his childhood roots when I asked him: “Where did you live as a child?” and he answered: “In the Black Forest.” He was the son of woodcutters who were driven from their land when it was deforested, and who had moved to the city when he was still a boy. This guard was a stocky man, a drunk, inclined to violence.

  The officers didn’t come around much, but by their strutting ways—my father would have called them “parvenus”—they appeared to be of modest origins. I saw four of them in action during my stay in Dachau, some ordering whipping and solitary confinement for internees who had not responded to roll call, and one who personally shot a runaway, with a slightly annoyed scowl.

  Now I wondered: If I accused
the Nazis of dehumanizing us foreigners, whom should I blame for the dehumanization of the Nazis? To whom are they Untermenschen? They take it out on us because we’ve been allocated to them as subhumans; better yet, they themselves designated us so. But are they free men? Reduced to the low-level jobs of slave drivers, jailers, exterminators, plunderers, torturers, and therefore ultra-subhumans. Acting on whose behalf? There must still be men somewhere who don’t do these things, without necessarily being victims themselves. Or is all of humanity subhuman? Only tyrant-slaves and slave-slaves, the former rounding up and guarding the latter? A universe of victim-slaves and executioner-slaves? Impossible.

  Think about it.

  The war industries are profiting from all this low-cost labor.

  Director Lopp was very refined. He would never have laid a hand on a foreigner on his own. His manner was civilized, humane, forlorn, his voice distressed over the loudspeaker when he talked about the inhumanity of the aerial bombings, of the “Massenarbeit,” the massive air strikes against defenseless populations, women and children, the old and the infirm, Germans and foreigners, enemies and allies, without discrimination. Yet he employed thousands of underpaid, undernourished foreign workers in the plants he managed.

  When I later worked in the sewers, I once found myself lifting a manhole cover with a Warsaw insurgent. He told me how a German industrialist in that city hid the ghetto’s revolutionaries in special shelters, and was paid for his protection in ready labor, day and night, in record numbers. By then I had chosen my path and the Pole’s revelations only strengthened my resolve. Having realized that I was dealing with slaves had given me infinite vigor, a kind of liberation from the need to rebut the Nazis head-on, as if they were individuals who controlled their own actions. They were not. They were the executors of those whose consciences had dissolved, starting in the twenties, with the dizzying collapse of the mark that had bankrupted millions of small savers and reduced millions of German workers to poverty.

  You just couldn’t let the air of authority that the tyrant-slaves put on scare you. It was an empty mask, behind which there was nothing. The point was to nail them to their role of slave.

  I had gone through so much terror and so many bouts of colitis to convince myself that they had no power over me unless I myself gave it to them, that I was truly relieved. It never even crossed my mind that my analysis could be subjective. For me its objectivity was indisputable, proven by the very effect it had on my mind: I no longer felt afraid.

  V

  The German shepherds were the first to notice the change in me. They wagged their tails when they saw me, something unprecedented (evidence for me that my analysis was accurate).

  I made my first attempt with the human dogs on a September evening. I was crouched at the corner of the window with Lulù and, in the twilight, we watched two soldiers out behind the barrack, who had forced the Flemish girl onto the ground. One of them (the guy from the Black Forest) held her legs apart while the other one, from Hamburg, dangled a rat over her belly, the creature squirming in his hand. They laughed, telling her that they would stick it into her vagina. On her back, her body spread open on the ground, the Flemish girl was kicking. I could see the whites of her dilated eyes as she stopped up her mouth with her fist, certainly fearing that if she screamed they would kill her. Now the woodcutter’s son was securing her pants that he’d pulled down around her ankles.

  “Lulù,” I whispered, shaking. “Why don’t you promise to suck them off if they leave her alone? A blow job apiece…”

  “Are you nuts? They’ll get even more excited, worse yet. We have to startle them, that way they’ll drop the rat.”

  “Okay, I’ll try,” I said, and abruptly opening the window, I sang out, “Deutschland über alles,” in a shrill voice, eyes fixed on the sky.

  Caught by surprise, the soldier really did let the rat slip out of his hand. I went on singing, though I hadn’t seen anything of that Germany, “über alles auf der Welt.” But they were stepping over the Flemish girl, coming toward me. I met their grim scowls, one by one, with an icy look (I myself was shivering) and said slowly, softly, in my most polished German:

  “Since when is it forbidden to sing the anthem of the Third Reich?” Then I asked what time it was, sociably, as if I hadn’t seen anything, and I closed the window. Lulù immediately gave me an entire chocolate bar and the Flemish girl ran back to the barrack, where she fainted in my arms, making me slip to the floor. I was so happy and all three of us—Lulù, the Flemish girl, and I—kept kissing one another in the corner below the window.

  I experienced several occasions of contentment during those September days. I had found the tone that disconcerted the low-class SS forces (another proof that my analysis was real). I was very formal in addressing the guards; I approached them indulgently, a distracted firmness in my voice, my body composed, my gaze focused elsewhere. It was a thrill each time. I then confided to Lulù and the Flemish girl, “Remember: treat them like pesky gnats.”

  Lulù had another admirer: the soldier with the rat.

  “I’m his spider,” she said, opening her slit of a mouth, “you’ll see.”

  I must confess that I didn’t even hate them anymore. Instruments of a power they didn’t understand, they deluded themselves into believing that they weren’t automatons by committing cruel acts that no regulation required of them. Nail them to their role of slave. Don’t forget that every time you despair you’re giving them a gift. Just remember that the further into degradation one falls, the more brutality becomes your last glimmer of humanity.

  I had already read and reread, starting at age sixteen, The House of the Dead. It’s just like Dostoyevsky says: in order not to go crazy doing his job, a jailer must really “put himself out,” until he gets to the point of flogging the inmates “for the sake of his art,” and the skill with which he applies the whip makes him feel like a man.

  So you know, let’s not make a song and dance about it. Don’t get taken in by a sense of firmness, sturdiness. The only difference between them and the tsar’s jailers is that these Nazis have put so much of that art into their job that they’ve joined hands with the society that spawned them. That’s all, a quantitative difference.

  So don’t lose heart and think you no longer have any choice. During these weeks you’ve become sufficiently familiar with crime, see what you can get out of what you’ve learned. Being able to keep them at bay isn’t enough.

  *

  It was the beginning of September and I still hadn’t been called to work. This worried me. Had they decided that I was unfit? They could choose not to give me any more subsidized food rations, given the plethora of labor that continued to arrive, one convoy after another. Recent reports spoke of tens of thousands of insurgents from the “Paal republic,” robust Poles, not to mention the Warsaw Jews who kept pouring in—the muscles of warriors, it was said, the resistance of steel; there were also rumors about a new contingent of those virile he-men, the Russians, strapping hunks whom not even a nonstop double workday could fell. What was I in comparison? Wouldn’t it be more economical to incinerate me? If I’d been in their shoes, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

  The very idea that I could die made me a nervous wreck. I’ve never been as terrified of death as in the K-Lager, maybe because hunger and debilitation make you obsess over bodily things; it’s like an intoxication, the desire to sleep that I mentioned earlier, to stuff yourself on scraps.

  The first imperative, therefore: I had to get them to assign me a job. It would also afford me the immediate benefit (besides that of not dying) of coming into contact with more people, maybe with outside workers, thereby escaping the segregation of the K-Lager and of my own Block, which my unemployed status consigned me to—I was the only such case in my barrack.

  I consulted with Lulù and the Flemish girl, both of whom had also worked in the civilian world—one had operated a milling machine and the other was on an assembly line—and I had them teach me about
the equipment you need to handle, what you have to do, so I could apply for work without being immediately exposed. Now that I was no longer scared, it seemed foolish to have waited so long for them to call me. One morning I told Black Forest to take me to the Arbeitsbüro. “Schwarzwald,” I said to him with a smile, “March!”

  But while I was awaiting my turn, a platoon of sewer workers came in. Their guard was saying that he needed more men. Right away I thought I’d found the ideal occupation, hundreds of manholes in the outside world at my disposal, dozens of clogged toilets in the factories, endless possibilities of meeting people with whom to weave a network. Forget about being stuck in a workshop behind a single machine. So I volunteered for the job. In a resigned, impassive tone, I asked the Obersturmführer sitting behind the desk, looking through him; he gave me a quick glance and motioned me to join the pipe-uncloggers, instantly turning his bored face to the internee behind me. It was the end of summer. I had to face the approaching cold.

  For several days I’d been subjecting the Flemish girl (my age) and Lulù (thirty years old) to a flight of fancy that in the early days, during the idle hours, I had projected in my mind like a film, once I’d convinced myself that the Nazi exterminators were a reality. The idea was to make connections with the new arrivals, who were fresher, not yet weakened. Once we’d formed a plan, a few thousand or so of us internees would take a hundred scattered guards by surprise, and knock them out with shovels, tongs, any tool we could get our hands on. Once the SS were disarmed and their guns were in our hands, we would occupy the munitions depository, while deportees working in officers’ private homes saw to killing their families. Then we would incite all the others to attack the offices, storerooms, and garrisons, with a very simple argument (I had repeated it to myself so many times that I still know it by heart):

  “We all know that millions of Jewish and Russian internees, and Westerners as well, have been gassed and machine-gunned while their exterminators have not suffered a single death. So why not revolt en masse, united, tens of thousands of slaves? We certainly can’t lose more men than they have already massacred and that they will go on killing until the end of the war. There will be decimation, true, but think how many of our torturers we can assassinate, just the enjoyment of seeing them piss their pants…” (The final words were not up to the standards of my models—Thucydides, Julius Caesar, and Plutarch—but seemed necessary.)