Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  I had soon abandoned that pipe dream. The new arrivals at the K-Lager were already crushed, dazed, ready to fall in line to avoid being kicked, or to be able to cradle a bowl of soup. I was aware of the perfect rationality, from the Nazi point of view, of those transports in freight trains or cattle cars, idling and interminable, the victims without food or water, crammed together in the airless darkness. Once they reached the K-Lager, the daily spectacle of the death of the frailest of them would do the rest. In fact, everyone (including me) became inured to his neighbor’s agony, his mind focused on his own survival, reduced to being alone in order to stay alive.

  But when I started working in the sewers, that old daydream took shape again in a plan that Lulù, the Flemish girl, and I honed at night (whispering in French). I had also built up my strength by learning to rummage through the garbage bins in the streets when they unloaded us at dawn in Munich or in the villages: I always found extraordinary prizes, like cheese, fruit, potato peelings, boiled meat bones with tendons and cartilage, even crusts of bread. The technique I used was simple: I would distractedly sing a Nazi anthem to myself with perfect Hochdeutsch pronunciation.

  “Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen festgeschlossen,” I sang, lifting the lid of a garbage can, “SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt,”* I went on as my hands felt around among the scraps, “Die Knechtschaft dauert noch nur kurzer Zeit.” This last line I sang with particular conviction: slavery won’t last long.

  The illiterate soldiers of the SS followed me with uncertain eyes. I gave them a friendly nod every so often, to get them used to me, so they wouldn’t be alarmed when I moved on.

  I caught mange but I put on some weight again. I shared the yield of my raids with the Polish insurgent and brought whole handfuls of vegetable peelings back to the barrack. “It’s full of vitamins,” Lulù said happily.

  Then an incident occurred that upset my plans.

  One evening in the toilet, between the rows of toilet bowls, as I was pulling down the pants of my coverall, about a dozen internees came at me. I wasn’t expecting it and found myself on the ground, my lowered pants immobilizing my legs. The women scratched me and beat me black and blue; trying to protect my head with my arms, I couldn’t fight back. With each hail of blows they taunted:

  “This is for people who sing Nazi anthems.”

  “This is for the apple of the SS’s eye.”

  “This is for the Dachau bitch.”

  More than anything, I was paralyzed by the inability to believe what was happening to me. That my devious singing was our ultimate weapon against the Nazis seemed categorically evident to me, a method anyone could use. I didn’t realize that I had always thought about it alone and that what I assumed was clear was plain only to me. I was so crushed by the injustice I was suffering that I even stopped trying to defend myself.

  I must have lost consciousness, due more to moral than to physical pain.

  I don’t know what time of night I returned to the barrack.

  Lulù, sitting on my pallet, occasionally changed the damp cloths on my face. “They did it to me too last winter,” she said in a toothless mumble, exhaling cigarette smoke, “because I suck the Nazis, they said. They didn’t try it again. The ones I recognized…” she explained, pretending to inject something into the vein of her arm. In the dimness I thought I hadn’t seen her clearly, that I’d misunderstood what she meant. But the next day, at the first light of dawn, she repeated the gesture, saying, “Anyone who lays a hand on Lulù,” as her hand slashed the air.

  So she had denounced the women who had attacked her. And, to hear her tell it, they had been “gespritzt,” so to speak: intravenously eliminated.

  I’d been working in the sewers for about three weeks, but that day the Polish insurgent wasn’t part of my all-Western squad. It was the first time we were going to spread manure in the fields, and I didn’t know whom to ask for advice. After the beating, every move was a stabbing pain; hot tears flew like sparks.

  On the way back, trudging along a trail in the woods, I was tempted to hide behind some bushes until our platoon moved on and then make a run for it; after all, the K-Lager was a good distance away, there were no German shepherds for a number of kilometers, I could always find a hayloft in which to wait for the already approaching night. In the dark I could keep going and put hours of walking between me and my pursuers. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Come to think of it, the job I’d chosen didn’t present as many opportunities for meeting people as I’d thought it would, but it did offer prospects for escape.

  That would teach them to malign me. Hadn’t they left me unconscious in the toilet? At the mercy of the dogs … Was I supposed to worry about the reprisals they would suffer for my escape? One injustice deserved another. Club-wielding bitches, degenerate lowlifes, Dachau’s Fascist squad. I slogged along, dragging my aching body, one eye swollen, my lip split by a canine tooth that had broken. Okay then.

  But don’t act impulsively, this time you can’t make any mistakes. Every move must be calculated, every risk assessed down to the least foreseeable. So I began testing the waters.

  *

  I was at that stage of my preparations when I ran into my freight car companion on line in front of the infirmary, as recounted earlier. It was toward the end of October (I can’t remember the exact date).

  My facial swelling had almost disappeared and my bitterness toward him must have subsided due to the thrashing I’d received in the toilet. Seeing him so wasted away, I don’t know what I would have done to again inspire in him the cruelty that he had shown me during the journey, which for months I had held against him in my heart and which now seemed to have deserted him. Just now when he understood me.

  As I lowered myself into a dark cesspit, I was sure that he too was going over our meeting, wondering what I meant to communicate to him by the way I handled the jailers, since he no longer trusted me (I had sensed that). Perhaps something could still be done.

  If what Lulù had told me about her own retaliation was true, my enemies had attacked me with the certainty that I would then report them. Day after day they must have been surprised when no one summoned them to the camp office.

  The nurse from Holland, who had long since stopped talking to me, approached me one morning in the laundry room: “Is it true they beat you up?”

  “Who?”

  “Some internees, they say.”

  “Bullshit. No one ever touched me. Why would they beat me?” There you go, I thought, if they sent you on ahead to feel me out, they’ll be left empty-handed.

  That night, on the way back from the toilet, I skirted the barracks until I slipped into one belonging to the red triangles. I woke up a woman.

  “I came to talk.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The apple of the SS’s eye, the Dachau bitch.”

  I realize now that I hadn’t chosen the best opening for a peace talk.

  “Wait, I’ll call the others,” the shape whispered to me in the darkness.

  I wanted us to return to the toilet, but it was clear that they were afraid of an ambush. We crammed into the tight space behind the door.

  There were a half dozen of us, our faces close together, pale spots over bodies crouching in a circle. I kept repeating the same thing in French, German, and Italian: that our jailers were slaves, that we had to bury them using their own practices, wage psychological warfare, and so on.

  “Why are we here?” jeered a voice in broken German (which meant she didn’t want to reveal her nationality). “If all we wanted was to applaud the Nazis, we could have done it when we were free!”

  “I didn’t say applaud.”

  “Singing their anthems is the same thing.”

  “Would you rather die?” I said.

  “Rather than debase myself, sure.”

  “It would debase me more if I didn’t try to find a way out.”

  “Become a savage like them and you’ve found your way out,” the same voice sai
d.

  A form was rising to her feet and another leaned on her to pull herself up.

  “Anyone who separates men into savages and non-savages is already a Nazi,” I said quickly, before they moved away. “If you can suggest another explanation for what we’re experiencing, I’m ready to listen to you. I told you what I think, now it’s your turn.” I held them back. “We can’t let ourselves be completely dominated.”

  “You’re the one who’s dominated. Even if they torture me, in here I remain free,” she said, and I saw that she was pointing her finger at her chest.

  “And they remain masters of the camp.”

  “But they know I despise them.”

  “They don’t give a damn.”

  By now we were talking by ourselves, at the same time, the mysterious voice and I; the other figures had melted away, denser shadows in the darkness that enveloped us.

  “I’m only suggesting a tactic to confuse them,” I persisted. “We have to disorient them, all of us together, so as to attack them when they feel most secure. Deluded into thinking they’ve morally subdued us, they’ll relax their vigilance.” I translated my words for the shadowy forms around me (some others had sat up on their pallets).

  “You’re the one who’s deluded,” said the only voice that responded.

  “And you’re all slaves, schiave, esclaves, Sklaven.”

  “You’re wrong.” The voice seemed to have joined the figures rustling in their bunks and from a corner spoke distinctly: “You’re the slave, that’s why you know such a lot about slavery.”

  I raised my voice; I sensed the forms stumbling about, bumping into one another, as I said, “You don’t want to fight, that’s the truth, you’re too scared, cowards is what you are, attacking a poor scarred cocksucker for political reasons.” (Repeated in three languages.) “You can’t get more debased than that!” My hands were itching with fury; I was breathing hard. Okay, I told myself, that’s enough. I left with a sense of theatricality that shamed me.

  Today I couldn’t say whether in my distress I wasn’t also buoyed up by murmuring I’ll escape, I’ll escape, as I ran along hugging the barracks, breathing in the scent of snow in the air on that late October night.

  “Work sets you free,” I laughed to myself the next day, reading the slogan on the K-Lager entrance. However, I didn’t want to compromise my Jewish or Slavic comrades. I waited to find myself back on the squad made up of Western Aryans only. Meanwhile, I was so hardworking and disciplined that the guards neglected to stick by my side. As a result, it was easy for me to escape. I didn’t write about all this in “Thomasbräu,” but I will now.

  VI

  When I wrote those accounts in ’53–’54 I remembered myself as being a lot more idealistic than I had been. There was also my memory block, due to incredulity about the past, to the fear that I might seem to be exaggerating, and to still more that I will later try to clarify.

  For now I will only say that the facts described in those pages are accurate, but that there are omissions. The most yawning omission stems from not having understood back in the fifties, when I was recalling those events, that the experience in Dachau had plunged me back into the mind-set that I’d had in Höchst, before I joined the French partisans and the Soviet prisoners, when for me everything was a question of courage, of individual morality: of responding with the truths of one’s own convictions.

  In Höchst we all worked together in the same factory; there were objective conditions so that I too could acquire a social conscience.

  But in Dachau … Even when it did not kill individual people, the concentration camp managed to achieve its real purpose: to destroy the social conscience of the internees. What is most certain is that while in the outside world the Nazis tried to present an impeccable image of themselves, in the K-camps they did everything they could to be hated, so as to terrify most unprepared inmates and arouse such moral repugnance in the more combative ones that they were too sickened to fight their tormentors. In a word, the Nazis duped them. In fact, hatred of the Nazis became an exclusive passion that did not socially unite the inmates. Already cunningly divided into arbitrary communities of yellow, red, green, pink, and black, the deportees felt threatened not so much as unified members of dominated classes, which they were, but as individuals. And along with his physical existence, each one fought tooth and nail to defend his personal identity. Hence the fever pitch at which we enacted our eccentric behaviors, each individual’s uniqueness making effective cohesion among the internees that much more impossible. And there you had it. I experienced it firsthand. Though believing I’d understood it, convinced to the last that I was thinking in collective terms, I was unaware of having isolated myself in the strategy that I thought I was formulating for my fellow internees. To the point of not seeing that my conduct was creating real problems, especially for those who now found themselves in a K-Lager precisely for having refused to adopt that strategy when in the free world.

  Only today am I capable of gauging the solitariness that Dachau imparted to my thinking, driving me into a conceptual impasse (the effects of which lasted well beyond the collapse of Fascism). Further and further back, to a mentality stolen from the adversary: it was only a matter of cunning, of quick reflexes, of skill.

  *

  That was one of the reasons why I became really attached to Louis, whose toughness and solitude I admired—I don’t know if it comes through in “Thomasbräu.” It was he who kept me at a distance, having been made antisocial by a society that had trampled him since he was a child. He wanted me to be unreachable; too absorbed in his breakins and robberies by then to turn back, only by denying his affections could he put his life on the line with no regrets. And ultimately it was fine with me, because I was afraid of plunging into the desire for self-destruction that had already seized me at Höchst, in Dachau. After all the mental machinations in the K-Lager, I took pleasure in not thinking, in gorging myself thanks to the ration cards, the money, and the provisions that Louis passed on to me. But his death left me drained. This too I did not write. As I slept, someone stole the money that the Sicilian had delivered to me and that I’d sewn into a breast pocket inside a pullover I’d bought at Sendlingertorplatz. Light hands, which had snipped my sweater without waking me.

  But the fact remained that in the outside world it was much easier to get by than any of us had ever imagined in the K-Lager. How to let those inside know that? In the continuous flow of convoys that kept arriving …

  I didn’t say that I went back to Dachau to try to communicate with my friend-ex-enemy and give him all the advice for escaping that would have saved him.

  I walked all night, a long December night from the time the sun set at five in the afternoon until dawn broke around seven, when I saw a wire mesh fence come into sight. Since I didn’t know of the existence of a transit camp in the area, I mistook it for an extension of my deadly Lager. And suddenly I was afraid. I feared the internees’ revenge for the reprisals that I had caused them. I dropped to the ground, covering myself with fresh snow to camouflage myself. I shivered thinking about the German shepherds: Would the dogs recognize their atavistic mistress in this creature flattened on the ground, soaked? They would swoop down, leaping at me before I could pull myself up. Anyway, if they were already sniffing the air, they’d also sensed my fear by now.

  But how would I locate that gaunt partisan, which barrack was he in, whom could I ask about him, where would I find him? Why did I always put myself in untenable situations, each time because of that damned mania of rushing to somebody’s aid, of anxiously putting myself out for someone, to share a discovery, a hope? Lying in the snow, numb with cold, expecting to see the dogs bound out at me—there was an entire pack of them at the K-Lager—I no longer had any desire to save myself.

  Until I rubbed my eyes. Was it possible? Men and women in civilian clothes were coming out of the barracks in ones and twos, not hurrying; casually wandering about here and there, they formed little cl
usters, then separated. Some even leaned against the fence. My heart skipped: Was I seeing things or was it real? Two guys appeared at the gate. This is no time to lose your head, I told myself; wait a moment and watch.

  They stood at the entrance, foreigners to all appearances.

  I’ll try them. I stood up, brushing off the snow with my hands as I continued staring at the two figures. There was no doubt about it, they were flesh and blood.

  Racing over, I joined the idling groups and little by little blended in with them, as I read the happy inscription on the gate: DURCHGANGSLAGER (transit camp).

  *

  But no escapee could feel safe in such close proximity to his certain death. So I fled again, always moving alone, filling the need for companionship by engaging in solitary dialogues with friends who’d been lost: Martine, Grùscenka, Alain, Johann, Jacqueline, the Flemish girl, Lulù, my human backrest from the freight car without fingernails in Dachau, Dunja, the Sicilian, Jeanine, Benito, Polò, all of them, squabbling back and forth with myself in a foreign voice, in German, in a kind of insane assembly, with Louis’s spirit suggesting thefts for me to attempt, places in which to spend the night. Instead of going to Switzerland, which was closer and was a much safer haven, I retraced the route of my repatriation, back toward Frankfurt-Höchst. The patent absurdity is that, even as I returned to the first comrades I’d ever had, I was actually isolating myself mentally, becoming more locked in my solitude each day. Until the paralysis, which stripped me of any illusion that a person can ever really escape.