Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Here lies Fünfeichen, the sanatorium! A long, brown, rectilinear building with its barracks and guardhouse, set in a spacious barren field abundantly equipped with muddy wooden walkways, barbed-wire passages, and squat watchtowers; behind its tar-paper roofs the mountains of Lindental and Tollense Lake tower heavenwards—evergreen, massy, cleft with wooded ravines—and prominent signs on the fence inform the nature lover in Russian and German and English: OFF-LIMITS. ENTRY FORBIDDEN. VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT!

  Now as then the Red Army directs the establishment. Dressed in a belted tunic studded with medals and hanging far down over his baggy breeches, his head held high under the clay-colored cap, automatic rifle at the ready, the soldier herds the prisoner across the camp road; he is a man whom knowledge has hardened, holding his patients in his spell in his curt, reserved, preoccupied way, in amused amazement: all those individuals who, too weak to give and to follow laws unto themselves, put themselves into his hands, body and mind, that his severity may be a shield unto them.

  It took till early summer for Cresspahl to come to; he was furiously intent on concealing this. In all seriousness he considered himself mushy, gamey, plucked out of the world and set to one side somewhere else.

  For one thing, he couldn’t find in his memory how he might have gotten from Malchow Abbey to Fünfeichen. He knew the Red Army from the first postwar autumn—they would have shot him on Wenches Hill if he’d slipped and fallen. He could hardly believe that the people in the transport—strangers—would have dragged him to Waren, Penzlin, Tollense Lake. He’d woken up on a lower bunk in Fünfeichen Camp without any idea how he’d gotten there, as if from nowhere, too weak to eat and too tired to open his eyes and weary of life. For another thing, he kept hearing talk of Neubrandenburg Camp in the tightly packed barracks. But this was Fünfeichen, two and a half miles from the Stargard Gate—as recently as 1944 the British had told him to take a look around this area, both at the Trollenhagen air base and at how the Germans were treating their prisoners of war at Fünfeichen. If he could believe his eyes he was in Fünfeichen’s old south camp, barrack 9S or 10S, next to the barbed wire around the vegetable garden, facing Burg Stargard, and the fenced-in compound of rooms and workshops lay to the north just as it had in his old drawing. He couldn’t be this wrong, could he? Why did everyone else think this was Neubrandenburg, and only he thought Fünfeichen? For a third thing, why, even now, could he not stop hoping for a trial, to get closure? Ending up here was his closure.

  He tried to find the prisoners he’d come from Rabensteinfeld with. He barely knew any of their faces, and it’s hard to find someone out of twelve thousand. The workforce was herded out of the barracks only when the camp command’s Operations group and the German kapos working for them turned up to search the bunks. From this last piece of his past he found no one, for they’d all had more of their journey ahead of them, while he’d been parked here, disposed of for good. The kapos not only rummaged through the rags when they searched the bunks, they tipped over the bed-frames too; the prisoners argued for hours about confiscated or mistakenly switched property. Cresspahl just watched. When the soup was doled out he had to wait until someone shoved him their own bowl, contemptuously, like he was a sick dog, and by that time the tureen was often empty, and still he had to pay for the loan of the bowl by washing it. He would have had his own dish soon enough, except that you also had to pay for permission to work. What he had on his body no longer fell into the category of barterable goods. He volunteered at once when the German kapos needed replacements for latrine duty; he had to march in goose step for ten yards in front of well-nourished representatives of the Soviets, barking in snappy military fashion: I am an old Nazi pig and I want to carry shit! He didn’t get the job though. He tried to look on the bright side—he’d been spared the stink—but soon realized that the other prisoners tended to move away from him, despite there not being much room to move, because he stank. He had lain too long in his own filth, unconscious or asleep or whatever it was. And now he was defenseless against fleas and lice. Hot water had a price, too, he could have paid it by informing on his bunkmates but he had no information. The kapos fetched him from the barracks at night and handed him over to the Soviets for leaving the barracks at night. He’d expected solitary but was only penned up closer to the others than he’d been in the barracks, except now in the dark, and with no food. Because a scarecrow’s clothes were in better shape than his, a kapo reported him (for neglecting his appearance) to the Soviets, from whom he was instantly told to take five steps back. In the clothesroom the kapos had no witnesses and were free to torment him with beatings until he recited what they wanted: As an old Nazi piece of shit / I walk on a cripple’s stave / My pants are full of shit / As I head for a shitty grave. The German personnel also had in mind that they were allowed to hand out clothes only from dead men. But he kept his old shirt and managed to wash the caked pus from the new one and after the third washing he could trade it for the bottom half of a fish can, rusty but with no holes. When the kapos went after a prisoner the others moved aside, uneasily, but it still looked cooperative, as if wanting to let the beaters move comfortably. Whatever he was supposed to learn from the whole process, Cresspahl probably got it wrong.

  So many Mecklenburgers (though hardly any among the kapos), and it was so easy to set them against one another. Was that supposed to be the lesson? The kapos paid in bread, in half cigarettes, and very rarely with a job in the barbershop team: that was enough to break up any solidarity. Cresspahl saw one man (he refused to name him) that the others harassed just to pass the time, or because his scared, weepy carrying-on invited it. They won his confidence with wild stories from the eastern front and appeals to his comradeship, proved their friendship with gifts of soup and promises of a pipeful of tobacco, until finally he trusted them, made them promise not to tell, and told them about his background, being given leave to play the violin at Reich Governor Hildebrandt’s state dinners and other occasions; before long the kapos were making him reenact his ceremonial postures and way of walking, the way you train an animal. Then he did cry, out of exhaustion or lost pride, but his pals didn’t let him run off into the electrified outer fence, they gloomily kept an eye on him, hardly out of guilt or shame but because the Operations Detachment knew all about such deaths and took out their inconvenience on anyone involved in them. The men seemed relieved when the Soviets took their violinist away like a rabid beast; would they have been right if this had gotten them released? Not a single rumor involving release went around. Cresspahl listened in on one of the banned cultural discussion groups, this one about the Hague Convention with respect to War on Land and the illegal incarceration of civilians in a prisoner-of-war camp; he kept close to the speaker until the speaker’s arrest, to avoid any suspicion of having denounced him; he refrained from commenting that Fünfeichen had been a Soviet “special camp” since 1945 under international law. One seventeen-year-old deserter, “also here by mistake,” had confronted his elders, somewhat vehemently, over their shooting of hostages in the Soviet Union; they’d beaten him up for it that night and accidentally strangled him. An orderly who’d studied medicine for three years lectured on the soggy camp bread’s actual caloric content vis-à-vis the calories in the camp administration’s calculations, arriving at the absolutely unintended conclusion that the Soviets must have adopted SS concentration camp calorie charts; this was a student for whom no time of day was too early or too late to clean out a prisoner’s festering sore or give him medical advice, they all listened to him talk, a single word would have been enough to save him from the insulator prisons, and Cresspahl too said nothing. What kind of virtues had he renounced? Or were these new ones? In March new people were still being brought in who didn’t grasp the distance between civilian life and camp life; they blithely rattled off their slogans from Socialist Unity Party election posters, with which they’d opposed the lower allocation of paper to the bourgeois parties, and before you could blink they were in loc
kup and they wouldn’t be coming back out. This process was referred to as “moving on,” a kind of substitute for dying. Cresspahl’s thoughts kept running in circles around the news that the Soviets couldn’t get by without elections, and that paper was used for such things. One new admit called it a war crime that the Soviets had fired on the city of Neubrandenburg until it went up in flames, leaving the whole area ringed by the old walls cleaned out except for Great Woolweavers’ Street, then he moved on; Cresspahl said nothing about the city’s refusal to surrender and tried to mentally sketch out the wiped-out town hall, a cute little boxy building with a ridge turret perched up in the middle of the roof, built like itd been plucked out of a box of Christmas toys many long years ago and set right down in the fore-city of Neubrandenburg’s marketplace for the magistrate and townspeople to play with a little. Now admittedly he’d grown stupid from exhaustion, from sitting in the stench and chatter of the barracks day in and day out; he might be confused, seeing as his thoughts so often slipped right past the others’; can he really have failed to notice that he’d just lost heart? that he no longer did anything from the heart? So how did he act when a new guy was brought to the barracks; only yesterday he’d been sitting down to dinner at his own table in Penzlin and now he was being shoved from bunk to bunk before finding a place on the drafty floor—why did Cresspahl let him discover all by himself that he was in prison, that he would never ever be able to get word to his family, that this rotten dishwater was the very best that morning soup could be, and that the path through the hospital led not to comfort but to a filthy and miserable death? He knew what help the man needed; he hadn’t been given it himself. Was it indifference? What had he chosen to do?

  He occasionally did something for friends. In August 1947 Heinz Mootsaak appeared in the barracks door, in pants and shirtsleeves as if brought in straight from the fields. He looked completely idiotic—after the silence between the barbed-wire fences and the wooden shacks he probably hadn’t expected such a loud group in such close quarters; he was still the shy country boy who’s polite when he enters a room full of other people. For him Cresspahl stood up and turned his back on him, not to betray mutual recognition, but so that they could meet later on by chance without arousing suspicion. Here he miscalculated, exaggerated. Heinz Mootsaak hadn’t had the slightest idea who that decrepit bag of bones in tattered rags of mismatched uniforms might be, and by the next morning he’d already moved on to lockup.

  In October—it was already pretty cold—Cresspahl was drawn into an escape scenario by two prisoners who may have taken his new concept of sociability the wrong way. They could hardly recruit him as a full partner; they were acting charitably. The old Cresspahl wouldn’t have hesitated for a second, he’d have answered clear as day with the look on his face and said out loud just for the record: Nonsense. Don’t be idiots. The one from 1947 did hesitate, to keep up good relations, and then answered helpfully with a Mecklenburg saying: The nobility wont stand for that. He evaded by asking for time to think it over and that was enough to catch him. Meanwhile it had gotten around the room that the glum old sourpuss had finally nibbled the bait, or else that a new trio was up to something. There was positively nothing to deliberate about in the plan. It would take months to pry three adjacent floorboards loose and reattach them so that no accidental footstep would make them pop up and yet so that they could be taken up within a few minutes during the night. They wanted to go under barracks 10S and 11S to the south edge of the camp, then right along the wire and past the middle watchtower, then under the whole length of 18S to the inner ring of barbed wire, under that to the auxiliary power unit, where they’d turn off the power and finally force their way out over the last fence, more or less exactly toward the Soviet staff barracks, behind which ran a road. One of them said he was an electrician. He tried to talk them out of it, out of neither pity nor concern, he just didn’t want to be responsible for anything. He mentioned the Soviet guards’ swivel-mounted searchlights, the quarter mile of crawling and tunneling in a single night, the open space for miles around. To be polite he at least praised the escape route for leading away from the kilometer-long eastern edge of the camp. He warned them of armed patrols in the Forst Rowa woods, the waterlogged fields of Nonnenhof, the Red Army’s large off-limit areas north of Neustrelitz. One of the men pretended to be insulted, maybe he’d been the one who’d come up with the plan. They both thanked him, loud enough to be heard three bunks away, extra noticeable after all the whispering.

  After the second twenty-four hours had passed Cresspahl thought he was out of danger—that’s how long it took for him to be brought before the Soviet administration. At the staff barracks a signed and sworn statement was sitting on the desk: Prisoner C., Incitement to escape, Unscrupulous plot against Soviet People’s property, Slanderous comparison between Red Army and feudal aristocratic caste. Supplemental attachments: sketches of the south camp and the escape route continuation via Nonnenhof and the Lieps Canal, reconstructed on the basis of the accused’s suggestions. Cresspahl now enjoyed another opportunity to appreciate the Soviets more than the German kapos. The Soviets’ Operations Detachment went unarmed down the camp road or into the barracks; they ordered no punishments worse than standing at attention for up to three hours, and if one of them did lash out it was clearly out of a desperation that had once been good-naturedness, which could now no longer put up with a prisoner’s doing whatever it was he was now doing wrong. The worse punishment was the German camp officials accentuating their interrogations by keeping sausage and bread within the prisoner’s reach, pouring coffee into cups before his eyes, ersatz coffee but hot, and with milk; the Soviets treated their interrogation rooms as offices. And it was true, they didn’t beat him. For the Mecklenburg saying about the nobility he had to stand against the stove for an hour and a half, spine pushed back by it, hands firmly on imaginary pants seams. When, even after that, he could only explain the defamatory phrase in terms of the nobility’s dominance in the 1896 Mecklenburg-Schwerin parliament and the remoteness of the Malchow railway station, the gentlemen presented him with a statement to sign. In it he was permitted to deny every accusation except for that first and last conversation, which had been seen by too many people, and he signed. By this point, around four in the morning, the officers were in a convivial mood, though not without contempt for this wreck of a human being. They thanked him for his love of the truth, regretted disturbing his night’s rest, expressed the hope that he might fall back asleep soon. Then they handed him over to the German kapos.

  The kapos held him in a detention cell in the north camp until noon the following day, taking turns in groups of four, using whips. Can someone refuse to speak simply because he’s decided he doesn’t want to speak? How can he know for sure that even shortly after losing consciousness he’s kept silent? Did his lapse warrant them hurting him so badly right away that there was nothing he had to care about anymore but the pain? Can someone refuse to speak a word to others just because he doesn’t understand them?

  When the Soviets had had ample time to observe what Germans are capable of doing to one another, they ordered an end to the questioning. The last shift of kapos resented having to drag the copiously bleeding heap across the camp road themselves. The Soviets didn’t let the regular prisoners help, but they did let them watch. They needed the kapos as sturdy hunting dogs, not gone soft or anything from being liked. Since the Russian guards supervised the whole transport, Cresspahl was laid almost gently on a bunk in the barbers’ quarters in the north camp.

  The wounds took until the following summer to heal; he could walk by early December. At which point he started all over again: food dish, hot water, foot wraps. He was immediately known among the north camp inmates as a crazy man, for when asked why he’d told the kapos nothing he actually had an answer, and it sounded credibly deranged: