Clifford's Blues (39 page)

How did I learn this? From the canteen I watched a
Postenkette
, a ring of guards, empty Block 7 and march the prisoners to the siding where a boxcar waited, empty.

“Russian front,” said a young runner for the
SS
who'd just got some cigarettes. Then he told me who those kids were.

All the Prisoner Company inmates wear the
Himmlerstrasse
haircut—bald except for a strip of hair running from front to back—and have the targets painted on the backs of their jackets.
“Kanone Futter,”
the runner said, jerking his thumb toward the boxcar into which the kids were climbing, the targets on their backs rippling as they moved.
“Wurst Fleisch
. They'll have the Russians in front of them and the
SS
behind them.”

Monday, March 29, 1943

For two weeks they came, day and night, the
RAF
and the Americans. I didn't know there were that many airplanes in the world. Down they came from the northwest, shaking loose clouds in the daytime and stars at night. It was like someone drawing a bow across a tremendous bass fiddle. The target was Munich, of course. We didn't need Radio Berlin to tell us that. I wondered if Schwabing was still there, the university where the students—or some of them—had called for a revolt against the Nazis and were executed for it, the Englischer Garten, the Marienplatz. I just wondered. Didn't matter a piece of shit to me whether they were or not. As for the students, it took them a long, long time to get brave, but maybe they belonged to another generation. Maybe.

From here and Mauthausen, even until now, details were gathered and put on trains, buses, and trucks. Sometimes they marched along Dachauerstrasse all the way into Munich to dig out unexploded bombs and bodies everyone knew were under the bricks and stone because they smelled. Or hauled away the shattered buildings. Or repaired the water and gas lines, the electric wires. Or made it possible for Siemens and
BMW
to continue making stuff for the war. Or laid new track for the trains. Could they say no, these men who were half-starved, who fought off typhus and typhoid, brutality, injustice, bigotry, prejudice? Those who came back said some of the people spat on them, while others offered them crusts of bread or half cups of ersatz coffee.

Many didn't come back; the
Himmelfahrtskommandos
, the bomb disposal details, they went to heaven. In bits and pieces and a loud noise they didn't even hear. And the ones the walls fell on. And the ones who just died in Munich instead of Dachau because that was where their hearts quit. And the ones who walked away, their filthy
Drillich
, striped uniforms, easy targets for the aging
SA
overseers and
SS
, who made believe they were Russians.

Friday, May 14, 1943

The camp is quivering. Everyone wants to talk about the war, the victory, the
Sonnenaufgang
, and
Zukunft
, the time after the liberation. But the guards are touchy and evil. The prisoners who are able, talk of these things in whispers, move away from approaching guards like small, quick waves of water.

As the winter at Stalingrad when the Russians turned back the Germans had been the most fierce in half a century, so this spring has been the coldest in memory. The
Himbeerpfluckerkommandos
haven't been sent out to pick raspberries. These are the sick and weak. Way out among the raspberry bushes, when a decent spring comes, and the earth has been enriched by who knows what, the
SS
orders the shooting of the prisoners and reports they tried to escape. That's the
Kommandoaufgel
. The capos just march out the details to an isolated place, usually north of camp, kill everyone with a shovel, a club, an axe—whatever's handy—and return the report to the
SS
detail officer, “Command dissolved.”

We haven't had anything on our shelves for two weeks. Uhlmer and Lappus have been detailed to rifle the Red Cross packages and whatever else gets into camp. Potato soup and sawdust bread make up dinner. Sawdust bread and hot water passing for coffee are for breakfast.

Wednesday, September 29, 1943

Goddamn, oh, goddamn!

In mid-June the Allies—I think that means mostly Americans—landed in Sicily! And Italy surrendered three weeks ago! Each bit of news like that was like a loaf of fresh, real bread. Speaking of which, Dieter Lange and Anna have been slipping tins of stuff back from her father's farm. And fresh meat.

Oh! I felt like playing the piano and singing, making a joyful noise, but I'd have to fight the Langes. They're drunk most of the time now when he's around. And they spend a lot of time on the farm. Probably getting some hideaway ready. Ha, ha, ha!! Forgive me. It's just too exciting to write sometimes and besides, Dieter Lange and Anna snoop around a lot now. I have a large cracker tin that I store you in, wrapped in a raincoat. There's a corner space in the cellar ceiling where you just fit. Now I have all the pages together. Pardon the crayon.

Back in May there was news of a big fight with the Jews in Warsaw. The grapevine now carries word of riots at a couple of camps in the East where Jews are being killed. They say there are whole towns in Eastern Europe where there are no more Jews; they've all been killed, and they are doomed in Dachau, just like the Gypsies. That's what they say.

The grapevine. Prisoners come here from about thirty-five camps, Dieter Lange says, when he's raving about moving the “pieces,” and inmates are transferred from here—those that live—to about thirty-five other camps. Sometimes they're sent back to the camps they came from. Really moving the pieces.

Sunday, October 17, 1943

“I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you; I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you …”

The tune just climbed into my head a few days ago as I was walking home from camp, just climbed up there, pushed a few things around, and made itself comfortable. It comes in different rhythms: the Dead March, slow and heavy; or the bounce and tinkle of a ragtime piece; or the up and down of a Pine Top Smith boogie-woogie; or some old stiff Paul Whiteman ballroom number where the rhythm is like somebody scared walking on cracking ice; or some banjo or guitar-driven, foot-stomping Dixieland beat.

I see Loa Aizan blinking in time to whatever rhythm “Rascal” plays in. Sometimes I think I hear God humming it to Hitler, then Dieter Lange or Anna will say, “What's that tune you're humming?” And I say, “What tune?” When I catch them looking at each other a certain way, I know I've been humming it and get hold of myself. But it always comes back.

We're down to Greek and Yugoslav cigarettes. Forget the salt and pepper packs. Food is so scarce there's no need for them. One of the priests sells lengths of rope to be used as belts. Does good. Another guy sells little squares of paper to roll straw, potato skins, grass, or anything that will smoke like a cigarette. Dieter Lange and Anna don't care anymore about making cigarettes to sell out of whatever is handy. “Scrip is shit,” Dieter Lange says. “Stop that goddamn humming, Cleef. You're driving me crazy!”

What's doing good is the whorehouse. It's in the storeroom where prisoners' clothes are kept in the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
. There are mountains of shoes there, and pants and jackets and things, and even though they've been disinfected, the place smells like bodies rotting in the shade. Lappus and Uhlmer at first liked taking care of the passes and handling the scrip because they thought they could get a little pussy once in a while, and maybe they did. Now, they don't seem to like it as much. (Not the pussy, the job.)

A good-looking pros is a rare thing. Maybe it's because good-looking women can always find someone to look after them. The times I've been over during the hours of business, it was hard to tell if the women had ever been good-looking. The good lookers are usually snapped up by the
SS
. The so-so by the block seniors, boss capos, straw capos, and on down the line until what we get are what you wouldn't look at twice on your drunkest night, no matter how much you wanted to “jelly-jelly.” Women who were selling before they came to Dachau (and maybe that's why they're here) I guess make up about half those working. The rest just want to stay alive, especially if they are Jews or Russians or Poles or Gypsies.

Women prisoners live outside the wall in a couple of blocks, in another enclosure. Most work for the
SS
officers in their homes, watching kids, cleaning, cooking, and shit like that. Most of the women capos and
SS
guards are dykes, big as men, bass at you in a minute, mustaches creeping on their upper lips. Some of the women inmates brought little kids with them and others have had babies in the camp. Gitzig is the only man I knew in this place who was happy to claim he was a father. I don't think I hum “Rascal” when I see this. And I don't know what happens to those babies and kids. It's only the fucking that people care about, men and women. You would think that would be the last thing the prisoners think of. But it's the first, right up there next to food. I am thinking about every woman I ever heard of who fucked for a drink or a good time or to feed her kids or to keep a job or just to be with a guy.

Sunday, Dec. 19, 1943

Christmas next Saturday. Bitter cold. No wood for the stoves. Now is the time of
Nix Travacho, Nix Camela
. (That's a mix of German and Spanish.) No work, no food. Food? A pig wouldn't touch the shit coming out of the kitchen these days. So the weak get weaker. Now they have wagons to carry the food vats down the 'Strasse. Most prisoners aren't strong enough to carry them anymore. The strongest men are the ones in charge of things. They aren't thin. They look almost as healthy as the guards. Cocksuckers. You notice them right away.

In the canteen, where we burn old cardboard cartons when we have them, you hear again the stories from the blocks of the
Leichenzuchter
, the corpse growers, inmates who don't tell when another prisoner has died so the dead guy's food rations can be used. In winter it takes longer for the dead guys to stink, so you naturally hear more of these stories in cold weather than you ever do in summer.

Good
men who are strong don't last here. I mean jokers who are strong in the usual ways, good fighters, or they have powerful faith, guys you can trust, like that. Once in a while you hear a story of a man who turned on the guards or just plain said no to something that would hurt other prisoners. Of course, the man is killed. The guards wonder how such a person could behave that way, because these camp guards recognize strengths through training and instinct, and maybe they are even jealous or afraid of them. The
KL
s are designed to break strong men like Werner and Bader; they are either broken or bent (in ways that are not obvious), made into capos or block leaders or runners; and they serve the
SS
as sort of “decent” men other prisoners work well for. They are watched very closely.

Then there are the quiet, shuffling, watchful men who never look you in the eye, maybe because they fear what they might see or what might be seen in
their
eyes, who whine and snivel, steal, grow corpses, do almost anything for food—
food
—who know when to work hard and when not to. They move through their days like they are walking through a bayou filled with cottonmouths; they survive the way moles survive, or rats, or anything else that lives in dark, underground holes. These inmates are inconspicuous, which is, for survival, the best way to be here. They grow a toughness I can't describe; it's slow, smooth, and colorless—or colorful if need be, like some lizards. You can't really call them hustlers or operators since you know they want only to live. Their hustle—yes, their lives—depends on not being noticed, on not being seen in uniforms that are too clean or shoes that are too good, on appearing to have become exactly what the Germans (it's easy to forget, and shameful too, that there are many German prisoners here as well) wanted—the hidden, quiet parts of some awful machine. But I'd sure hate to see a world filled with such people when the war is over. People forget pain, laugh at it when it stops hurting. I want them to remember.

There are only a few names for the strong—
stark
, “Kong,”
chlopak
—but a whole bunch for the weak, names that've come since Dr. Nyassa flew to the wire:
Zaramustafa
is what they call Muslims from Yugoslavia, and
Muselmann
is for prisoners so weak that they look like they're praying all the time. Then there is the
Schwimmer
, whose arms float around to help him keep balance as he tries to walk, and
Schmuckstuck
, “a jewel of a guy,” which means he's a goner, he's so weak. There are dozens of names. Everybody jumps on the weak until, finally, the
SS
makes
Selektion
—on the detail, in the blocks, at random—and the shuffling marches begin to the rifle ranges or to the wagons lined up for transport to Hartheim Castle. (I am well-known to the guards; they see my face from a distance, so they know I “belong” to sort of a big shot. This continues to be a good thing, a very good thing, otherwise I would have been fertilizing flowers by now.)

And practically everybody who isn't with those poor bastards feels they deserve to die because they let themselves become weak. What bullshit. And what a bad time to go. The Russians are almost in Poland. The Americans are in Italy. Every night and day when the weather is good, a German city is bombed to hell. So I wonder why aren't these prisoners rising up, like those Jews in Warsaw or some of the other camps we've heard about? I know: Fuck the Jews. They had no choice, like the Gypsies. If the machine does nothing else, it will make Jews and Gypsies disappear as though they never existed in the first place.
We
will wait, though, even if they kill us one by one and empty the whole goddamn place. But each prisoner believes, with all his heart, that
he
will not be on
Selektion
, that he will get by, and that by next Christmas he will be free. Merry Christmas, diary.