Hidden Away (41 page)
In a hushed voice, Jules answered my question. “From what I’ve heard, both the Russians and the Americans are advancing. The camp is sending out some of the new transfers to build a rock wall, and even to the front as fodder. Can you imagine? Forced to defend a camp that’s killing you and defend the regime responsible for it.”
“That’s the word, isn’t it? The word they use? How long before they receive orders to kill us all?”
Jules turned his head as if he was trying to hide the truth. “They’re already planning the marches.”
“Death marches. They’ll tell us that it’s to another camp, but the idea is to exhaust us and kill us walking.”
“Kurt,” he said in the same tone of voice my father would use when I said something wrong as a child. “They won’t take everyone. Not all, but some.”
“Like queers?”
“And Jews and Soviets.”
“Most will stay in the camp. Internationals like myself will likely be handed over to the Red Cross before the camp can be taken.”
We heard shouting behind us, so Jules grabbed my sleeve and tugged me along the path. “The Nazis know it’s over, so they have to play nicer now.”
“Yes. Those treated the worst will be marked for extermination first. There will be trials after all this, for crimes of war, and they will want as few witnesses as possible. I fear for….”
When he did not finish, I reassured him. “The commandant has a sick love for me. He might draw pleasure from my pain, but he won’t want me dead.” I was not lucky enough for death.
“You have to be careful. You know secrets.” “I don’t.”
Important
meetings. You’ll be on the list.”
Good. Dying was preferable to a long life without Peter. It was difficult to remember what he looked like. Sometimes when I dreamed, I remembered his touch so well, but it was his beauty—his smile, eyes that shone, the way his forehead creased as he looked at me—that I struggled to recall.
As we neared the musicians’ barrack, he stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “If I’m given to the Red Cross, I’ll send for you.” The intensity of his eyes meant something, but I was too tired to figure it out. “You’re my brother, Kurt. Remember that.”
Jules’s information proved accurate. Within a week, the size of the camp decreased. It was still overpopulated with most barracks sleeping five to six men per bunk, but there was a noticeable absence of certain groups. The Soviet prisoners of war were gone. Half of the pink triangles had been marched out as well as most Jews. Most disturbingly, Jules and other foreign-born political prisoners were nowhere to be found.
I waited for him in the roll call square. We always walked together. I didn’t move until angry men in uniforms shouted at me, nudging me with the long barrels of their rifles. I could feel the anxious tension in the air. They would shoot me, even if they saw the tattoo on my arm.
A flutter in my belly told me to hurry along. The survival instinct given to humans was difficult to understand. I didn’t care if I died, but for some inexplicable reason, I was running away from it.
It was only a week after Jules’s disappearance when the camp erupted into fullscale panic. Guards rushed everywhere—this way and that. Roll calls were shortened, and no punishment meted out. If you looked at one of them wrong, they shot you between the eyes and left your body where it fell.
When new arrival transports came, the prisoners were either shot as soon as they were through the gates, or shoved into the camp without the proper processing.
Typhus had been a growing problem for many days, long before Jules left, but now inmates were dying at an alarming rate. Alarming for prisoners, not the SS. I was sure it was helpful to them that disease killed us instead of their bullets.
Headquarters was buzzing. People were gathering items, burning others. The commandant kept me locked away from it all almost night and day. He allowed me to be counted in the morning and the evening, but I was in his office all other times.
Two weeks after Jules disappeared, my commandant became unglued. He would make love to me, then weep, then destroy a bit of his office, then beat me, and weep some more. When he left, I was chained to the piano, and I never knew what sort of state he would be in when he returned.
One particular day, the building grew very quiet, and he left me. He was away for several days. I heard commotion outside the window, but I couldn’t move to look out of it. Finally, the door was thrown open. At first, I was grateful because his return meant I could stretch, but as I saw his face, his mussed hair, and disheveled uniform, fear seized me.
He did not answer as he sank down to his knees and unlocked me. I should’ve made a dash for the door, but I was frozen. I couldn’t move.
“I’m leaving with my family. The Allies will be here within days. I can’t take a filthy queer with me, and you know too much.”
Everything stopped when I felt the barrel between my eyes. The commandant had a strange look of determination on his face when he said, “If you were a woman, I could’ve loved you.”
This was it! My final day. A peace settled over me. It was like lying in bed with Peter, his arms around me.
I complied and closed my eyes, but from nowhere my voice sounded. “You say you would love me if I was a woman, but I say you love me now.”
I received a hard smack with the flat handle of the gun, but I kept my cry of pain in, just as I kept my eyes shut. He was taking too long to pull the trigger, so I taunted him again. “You are queer. You have spoken and touched me the way a lover would. As much as you don’t want to admit it, you should wear the pink triangle too.”
“I’ll tell everyone I can when—” My words stopped after he shoved the gun into my mouth. I could hear nothing beyond our breathing and the soft rubbing of his skin on metal as he tightened his hold on the weapon. Tears sprung into my eyes at the thought of the end being so near.
He pushed it farther into my mouth, and he made me gag. The force toppled me backward, and when I opened my eyes again, I could see how frazzled he was.
His body shook as tears leaked from his eyes. The commandant crumpled in front of me, the gun falling away.
Disappointment hit. He wasn’t going to kill me. I eyed the pistol, ready to do it myself, but he saw me looking and quickly snatched it back. The commandant grabbed ahold of me, kissed me, whispered nonsense against my skin.
I didn’t want to have any more sex with him, and to my surprise, he didn’t make me. Instead, he pulled me up by my tunic and shoved me toward the door. “Get away from me, filthy queer. I’m leaving within the hour. Killing you would be too much of a mercy. Not even the Americans like faggots, and you will be arrested again. You will pay for your degradation of your race. You will pay for making me….” He let out a sob, and I thought perhaps I heard him say “Brazil,” but I couldn’t be sure.
I had no idea where to go. My body shook uncontrollably, and I fell into the mud several times before finding a building to hide behind. Though I’d been here for so long, I’d never felt as frightened as I did now. At any moment I could be killed. The commandant could change his mind, other SS could start killing people, me included, or inmates could end my life simply because I was given more than they were.
It was so close to the end of it all, I didn’t want to die now. Jules said he would send for me, and despite the anguish of being alone for the past years, the hope of survival blossomed within my chest. Peter would want me to leave this camp alive. He would want me to go with Jules to France, of all places.
I huddled and hid overnight, burrowing into the warmest spot I could find. In the morning, all of the SS were gone and in their place, old men who were members of the Volkssturm—the People’s Army. All pretenses of this being a functional prison camp stopped. There was no more work; no more roll calls, and with the increased free time, the prisoners were getting bolder.
The camp elder became the commandant of the camp, but prisoners revolted against his rule, even if it was just to keep order until liberation. He represented the worst of the way of prisoner versus prisoner inside the camp. I did not know how he reached his status of highest prisonerguard, but there was no doubt he did it on the backs of his fellow inmates.
Though food had been strictly rationed as the opposing armies advanced, the kitchen seemed open and the food was distributed with care. I was hungry. Being someone’s lover in the camp had meant I ate better than most, but I’d been locked away for uncounted days, and now my stomach clenched and seized. I couldn’t remain hidden any longer.
I could hear the talk of the camp around me. “The prisoner committee is going to kill the kapos. They have some SS who didn’t leave. They will die too.”
As I walked through the chaos of the camp, head down, the mark on my arm burned. I would be judged by these men, both the inmates and the liberators once they entered. There would be no disguising who I was and what I did to survive. My commandant said I would be rearrested for being queer. The tattoo left no chance of just fading into the sea of prisoners.
Before I made it to the kitchen, I found sharp metal surrounded by broken glass and knew what I had to do to become anonymous. Squatting down, I picked up the metal, and without caring about the pain, I dragged it across my skin. Blood seeped, and the breath was stolen from me, but I did it again and again. Over and over until all the ink was gone and nothing but a raw piece of flesh remained.
I didn’t account for how fast I would bleed out, so I took my shirt off, wadded it up, and held it to my wound. Men walked naked around the camp, so there was no shame in being without a shirt, but one couldn’t walk a few feet without coming across a dead body. So I took the clothing of a political. I could no longer be identified by the pink triangle of a homosexual. Now I was a nameless political prisoner.
No words were needed as I stood in line for food. I spoke to no one as I traveled through the camp. That night, I slept huddled inside an overcrowded barrack of Spaniards.
When I woke, I heard the news that the plan had been successful. All remaining members of the SS and the kapos who were the most brutal had been executed in the night.
Our liberators had triangle patches of their own. A third blue, a third orange, and a third red with the number eleven on top. After them, the Red Army came.
I wasn’t in a position to remember the sequence of events after a few days. My body seized, and fiery pain assaulted me. It seemed that I’d survived just long enough to see the camp liberated but would die before I could taste the freedom the Allied troops promised.
I faded into black nothingness. It was glorious, but then I came to in the hospital barrack. My body was stiff but seemed rested. Before I could panic at being in the sick ward—a place of horrors—I heard, “Fournier? Fournier?”
Carefully, I lifted my head and saw a tall man with a large red cross on his clothing. Nothing came from me as I opened my mouth to speak, so I reached out for him. I knew the name Fournier. Jules was a Fournier.
A moan came from my throat and transformed into a louder rumbling wordless voice. I fell back onto the cot when the man neared me. My fingers pinched the cuff of his long sleeve and his eyes narrowed. Immediately, I let go. He did not want a queer to touch him.
But I followed his eyes as they moved to the red triangle on the front of my dirty shirt, then to the stack of papers in his hands. “Kurt Fournier?”
Finally, the man’s eyes softened and the edges of his lips turned up. “Your brother is looking for you.”
Head shaking in confusion, I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. Perhaps he did not understand that I was asking about my former kapo, the prisoner named Jules.
“You are not Kurt Fournier?”
You’re my brother, Kurt. Remember that.
My raspy breath caught as my mind connected my first name with his last. “Jules,” I said between wheezes. “My brother Jules. He is….”
“He is looking for you.” His eyes swept over my body. “Once you are stable enough to transport, we will reunite you.”
One hand pressed me back down, and then he flipped through pages of papers next to my bed. “Mr. Fournier, you had tetanus and nearly died. Please take care and rest. Your brother will be waiting for you.”
I did exactly what the man requested; I relaxed against the thin mattress and waited until the doctors agreed I was fit enough for travel.
As the summer of 1945 began, I was transported away from the hellish world I’d known for far too long. I was no longer Kurt Klein, arrested homosexual. As I rode the train headed west, I began my new life as Kurt Fournier, free man and ex-political prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen.
I knew not what this new life would give me, but the freedom in the air smelled incredibly sweet. So sweet, in fact, that I felt sick and scared. My only solace was thinking of Peter.
