Clifford's Blues (41 page)

It's yesterday I really want to write about.

Dieter Lange has been away checking the camps at Augsburg, Kaufering, and Allach, so I've spent the time in the canteen. Anything not to be stuck a long time alone with Anna, not that Dieter Lange gives a damn anymore. In fact, it seems to get him hot if he thinks I've been with her.

So I'm at the canteen window when the morning roll call begins, before six, the sun not quite up. I never risk sleeping when roll call starts; never can tell when some guard might take a notion to see what I was up to. I always get up and watch the prisoners march down the 'Strasse with breakfast, see them like chickens without heads, dressing, making their beds, washing, eating, all in half an hour, and then rushing into formation on the Dancing Ground, just row upon row upon row of stiff, striped men in that flat, gray light that everyone hopes to see again tomorrow. The slow-rising sun throws thin shadows from the poplar trees that square the camp. Once they were just sprigs stuck between an occasional white birch tree; now they stand like spears with their handles jabbed into the ground. The count comes in, block after block. Then the details are ordered to march out. The capos wait for their men.

No one moves.

I don't understand what's going on. For a minute, I think maybe I hadn't heard the command. I stare past the backs of thousands of men to see the expression on the face of the
SS
officer in charge. But I can't see it from here because now they have to use all the 'Platz, which covers a large area. So I imagine his face, imagine him looking at the loudspeaker like maybe there was something wrong with it.

“Alles heraus; im Gleichritt … Marsch!”
he calls again. “All out; in step … March!

There is no motion. Every man I can see on the 'Platz this morning looks like something strange growing out of the earth. It is so quiet.

The roll-call officer backs away from the loudspeaker and his assistants huddle around him. The guards on the 'Platz hike their rifles to the ready. The prisoners aren't going to work! The roll-call officer and his men are looking at a group of Russian officers from Block 6; I can barely see them from the right corner of my window. Two or three roll-call clerks scurry back and forth between the Russians, whose spokesman seems to be a ramrod-stiff oldish guy, and a couple of block leaders.

Willy Bader is escorted to the roll-call officer, who is looking mad now, scowling at the Russians. He goes nose to nose with Bader, maybe asking him what the hell is going on. Bader gestures and shrugs and points to the prisoners, then to the Russians. The Russian officer marches out, turns around to face the prisoners, and leans toward the loudspeaker. “Go to work,” he shouts in bad German. His voice carries tough. “Do not sacrifice yourselves for us.”

Later I find out the Family and the International Committee had told the inmates not to fall out for their work details in protest over the rumored plan to shoot ninety-two Russian officers. Thirty thousand for ninety-two.

But still the prisoners don't move. I wonder if they would have done this a year ago. Certainly not two years ago.

The roll-call officer marches off to the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
. He returns within minutes as trucks filled with
SS
from the barracks roar through the guardhouse gate and park with the back ends of the trucks facing the prisoners. There are machine guns in them with men already crouched to fire.

The sun behind the gray lends a kind of silver shimmer to the scene. Is it really happening? Still nobody moves. The
SS
reinforcements, hundreds of them, spread out, ready. The roll-call officer again gives the command to fall out and march away, and as before, there is no movement.

The Russian officer wants to speak to Bader; the roll-call officer agrees. The Russian is insisting, Bader is arguing, but the Russian finally wins. He shouts to the prisoners, “Comrades, march off! Good-bye!” The Russian's name, I find out later, was Lieutenant Colonel Tarassow.

Bader speaks to the roll-call officer's assistants. One of them speaks to the officer, and he gives the order to march out again. This time the striped forest moves, and even as the details march off, singing loud as usual, the
SS
begins to herd the Russian officers into small groups and leads them away. By now the sun is way up. It seems the prisoners have left something behind that took years to grow.

That was yesterday and the rumor was true. The
SS
shot them all.

Wed., May 31, 1944

Dr. Rascher is in the Bunker. His wife's been sent to Ravensbrueck. Because of the experiments? Ah, no. Because they lied about “their” kids. Pacholegg thinks also that with the Russians moving fast out of the East, and the Allies moving up Italy, and with the talk, talk, talk of invasion across the English Channel, maybe somebody wants to close Rascher's mouth. What about the other jokers? Pacholegg provides an answer to why the experiments continue. If the results look good, he says, maybe the American, British, and French pharmaceutical companies will lease the patents. It's all about money, like with the sulfa drugs.

Tuesday, June 6, 1944

The news we've waited so long for … the invasion! It started last night when the Americans landed in France. Rome fell about the same time. Dieter Lange has not left the radio in almost a week.

Sunday, June 11, 1944

Yesterday the bombers hit Munich again. From Italian bases this time. Dieter Lange says he heard on the radio that there were 750 bombers. “That fat-ass, Goering, doesn't fight, doesn't send his men to fight. It's the anti-aircraft guns he wants to use instead. Why does he save the planes?” he whines.

Turns out there was a
Wuwa
, a secret weapon, after all. It's a
Vergeltungswaffen
, a get-even bomb. And they started dropping it on the English last month. Goebbels tells us this, and so does Radio London and Armed Forces Radio. The British call them buzz bombs. Dieter Lange is angry because Germany waited so long to use them.

Thursday, July 20, 1944

We got the news in the darkness in which we sat listening to the radio. This news came from Radio Berlin: Somebody tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. The report said he was alive. Dieter Lange took his mouth off a whiskey glass long enough to say, “You can't trust them. Maybe he's dead, and if he's dead—maybe it's over. But some of the generals don't want it to be. Sometimes I think the goddamn generals are worse than Hitler.” The announcer gave a bunch of names of generals with Hitler who were wounded. Nobody got killed? We'll see. (I'll be glad if you're dead you rascal, you.)

Anna said, “Damn it, they
missed!
”

The Russians are 100 miles from Warsaw. Prisoners again pull out the maps. “The Russians are here.” Pointing. “The Allies will come this way in France.” More pointing. Every prisoner is a general and a prophet. The war will be over in three months, five months, two months, ten months; Germany will quit day after tomorrow, next week, the first of the month—but not before they kill everybody. Some of Werner's people went missing, and while trying to find out where they might be, he ran into this: When the trains come in to the sidings now, the
SS
asks all those who are university graduates or who speak a few languages, to step out. They will act as interpreters. This is an important task, say the
SS
. And of course, always willing to be special, not one of your ordinary people, they rush forward gladly. Then they are marched out to the rifle range (instead of a special campus barracks) and are shot dead. Werner's people saw this, so they, too, were killed.

Bader told me that in addition to “regular” inmates, there are now almost 8,000 women here, nearly half of them Jewish, plus 300 German civilian workers who have been charged with some crime, and 4,000 more from assorted countries. “And,” he said, “You're not the only American anymore. There are nine more down in Block 24. They're American pilots. Shot down. They're to be moved to an officer's
POW
camp. There are 685 other prisoners of war also waiting for transfer, to a
Stalag
. There are only 262 Gypsies left …”

His voice drifted off. It was warm, a nice day with dust floating lightly in the air, kicked up by the marching details, the camp work. Not too much wind, and it was blowing from the east, so the smell from the crematorium wasn't bad. Details were hauling away the bodies outside the
Reviers
and those beside the railroad tracks. You look at the corpses and think of the Americans, British, and Russians coming day by day a step closer, and you wonder if they will arrive soon, or if the Germans with their
Selektions
, which seem to be more frequently random, will succeed in making more prisoners vanish up the chimney, or through the doors of Hartheim Castle in Linz, or out on the rifle ranges. There isn't a prisoner who doesn't wonder about this.

These are the only realities: securing food enough to stay alive, having energy enough to avoid
Selektion
, and doing both successfully enough to enjoy liberation. There persists the fear that for revenge, the
SS
will kill us. They
must
kill us. They exist to kill us. Though there are many thousands more of us to kill, this seems not to be of great concern to them. The machine pistol and the machine gun and the areas in which we are confined make it as easy as shooting a bunch of small animals trapped in a barrel.

But now you see, even in the eyes of the
Muselmänner
, a distant, sharp little light that wasn't there before. The most irreligious pray to somebody, to something.
Heilbare
, “recoverable,” is the way every prisoner wants to appear at
Selektion
or
Taufe
time.
“Weg von heir!”
is the word at the approach of a guard, a capo, or someone you don't know and who might be an informer, a
Zinker
. “Get away from here, out of the way of trouble!” “Not now! Don't fuck up
now!
”

You can almost hear some giant unseen clock ticking to every train that rolls in, to every puff of thick black smoke the wind snatches from the chimney, to every number called at the morning and evening roll call. I keep wondering what the world will be like when this is all over, when the inmates of this great insane asylum get free of their keepers. And what about the rescuers who've waded in blood to save us? The world will be, I think, a very crazy place.

The half-planted and half-tended flower beds have bloomed with their multitude of flowers; how silly they look now.

Sunday, August 6, 1944

Who can believe the stories from the East? We know they want to kill us, but out there the stories describe a symphony of killing—with rhythms and numbers and with the finest industrial instruments—in the killing camps, the
Vernichtungslager:
Treblinka, Belsec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidanek, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen. Oh, there are hundreds; I can't recall all the names people mention. How are they killed, the Gypsies, the Jews, the Russians, Poles, French, Dutch, Italians, Austrians, and so on? Bullets, car gas, and the kind of gas, in more powerful doses, that Pierre used to disinfect clothes, Xyklon B. Five thousand a day, 10,000, 20,000 … off the train and into hell, to music, naked (something queer with these Germans—killing and nakedness together, sex and killing). In a strange way, you get used to what happens here. I mean, that's the plan, to get you used to it. But what happens in the slaughterhouses that brings these men here with a look in their eyes like a bullet just missed their heads, is a thing I can't begin to imagine. Yet they are here, with their stories of digging up bodies to burn or move, or planting seedlings of trees where acres of bodies have been buried. But that means the Germans who did and who do and who order and who allow these things to happen know exactly how murderous they've been. If even Dieter Lange starts shaking when he talks about what he's heard and seen, God help us all. Oh, it'll be quite a world afterward with all the lynchers. They won't get caught; they never get all the lynchers, because they don't want to, because the sheriff protects his deputy, the judge protects the sheriff, and the church-going business people and politicians protect the judge.

How can this meal be served to me? I didn't ask for it. All I
ever
wanted was to play my music and be happy with someone I liked who liked me. Now look at this world these white folks have made. Jeeeee-suss.

Wednesday Night, August 16, 1944

Yesterday morning, on the French Riviera, American, British, and French soldiers landed near Nice and Marseilles. (“I'll Be Seeing You …”)

Saturday, October 21, 1944

Paris was freed in August, and the rest of France is coming loose, too. The Russians are in Prussia. Some of the American cowboys are inside Germany, or what's left of it. Radio London, Armed Forces Radio, the Voice of America, all say the bombers and fighters never stop flying from England, Italy, and now France. And everyone who has been into Munich says it looks like it's been hit by ten earthquakes.

Luxembourg is free and the Germans have been pushed into northern Italy. Was it the accumulation of these things that made me dig up the address of Dr. Nyassa's wife? Did these events force into my hand the name of Mulheim, where Pierre came from and where his mother, bitch that he said she was, may still live?

There must be some connection between the war, the way it is going, and my daydreams of being back with musicians who are exchanging stories about the Club 802, the Clef, the Amsterdam Club in New York; or lying about the Petit Chaut in Constantinople, the Weiburg Bar in Vienna, the Flea Pits, the Paraquet Cabaret, the Casino de Paris, the Tabariss in Holland. They would tell me their stories and I'd tell mine, and we'd laugh and drink and maybe they'd call me Pepper instead of Cliff because I'd lived through this. And we'd talk about the down-deep prejudice of white men everywhere—home, France, Turkey (even if not so white there), Belgium, Italy, Germany (of course!), and how they made Louis work so hard he busted his lip and that changed his sound because he had to play on another part of his lip.…