Legion of the Damned (2 page)

There was a time when I thought that I should only need to tell about Lengries and people would be filled with the disgust that I felt and set about improving the world, begin building a life in which there was no room for torture. Yet you cannot get people to understand what you mean unless they have themselves experienced what you have experienced, and to those you do not need to tell anything. The others, those who went free, look at me as if they would like to tell me that I must be exaggerating, although they know that I am not, for they have lapped up the reports of the Nuremberg trials. But they shrink from looking the whole thing square in the face, prefer to nail another layer of flooring over the rottenness in the foundations, to burn more incense, to sprinkle more scent around.

Yet perhaps there is one courageous soul who will dare to hear and see without shuddering. I need such a person, for it is so lonely without. I need, too, to tell my tale, to unburden myself; perhaps it is only to do that that I write; perhaps I am just imagining it when I say that I want to give warning lest history repeat itself over here. Perhaps I am just deceiving myself when I wish to cry out from the housetops what I have experienced; that all I want thereby is to attract attention and shuddering admiration, to be the hero who has been through things that not everyone has been allowed to experience.

No, not everybody has had that granted them, but there are enough of them for me to have more sense than to consider myself a phenomenon. Thus, in describing Lengries in the following sketch I cannot say definitely why I do so. Each may attribute to me the motive he or she prefers.

I know, too, that it is those who like to imagine that they cannot believe what I tell who must bear the main burden of guilt that will fall upon every one of us if all Lengrieses are not done away with, wherever they are still to be found.

There is no need to mention places, countries, names--that would merely distract and lead to squabbling and mutual recrimination between opposing sides, between nations, ideas, blocs, each of which is too busy taking offense at what others do to do anything about their own conduct.

This was Lengries:

A youngish Feldwebel, sentenced to thirty years' hard labor for sabotaging the Reich, was caught one day trying to give a neighboring female prisoner a piece of soap. The guard called the section leader, Obersturmfuhrer Stein, a man with a ghastly imagination.

"What the devil is this I hear about you two turtledoves? Have you got engaged? Well, well, this must be celebrated."

The whole floor was ordered down into one of the yards. The two young people were ordered to strip. It was Christmas Eve and snowflakes were swirling round us.

"Now we would like to see a little copulation!" said Stein.

The pickled herrings we were served on rare occasions were unfit for human consumption, but we ate them--head, bones, scales and all. In the cell we were chained with our hands behind our backs. We lay on our bellies and licked up our food like swine. We had three minutes in which to eat it, and often it was scalding hot.

And when prisoners were to be executed:

Such days began with the shrilling of a whistle, while the big bell rang different numbers of times to indicate which floors were to go down. The first time the whistle sounded you stood to attention facing the cell door. At the second whistle you began to mark time: thump, thump, thump. Then a mechanism worked by an SS man flung all the cell doors open at the same time, but you still went on marking time in the cell, till a fresh, piercing whistle rang out.

On one such day there were eighteen to be hanged. Down in the yard we formed a semicircle round the scaffold, a staging ten feet high with eighteen gallowses on it. Eighteen ropes with nooses hung dangling from them. The sight of a dangling rope with a noose has become part of my life, like the Christmas bells. In front of the scaffold stood eighteen coffins of unpianed deal.

The male condemned wore their striped trousers, the women their striped skirts, but nothing else. The adjutant read out the sentences of death, then the eighteen were ordered up the narrow steps onto the scaffold and lined up, each standing by his rope. Two SS men acted as hangmen, their shirt sleeves rolled up well above their elbows.

They were hanged one after the other. When all eighteen were hanging there, with urine and excrement running down their legs, an SS doctor came, threw them an indifferent look and gave the hangmen the sign that all was in order. The bodies were then taken down from the gallowses and flung into the coffins.

I suppose I ought to say a word or two about life and death at this point, but I do not know what I should say. Of hanging I only know that it is quite unromantic.

But if anyone is interested in hearing more about death, there was Sturmbannfuhrer Schendrich. He was quite young, handsome, elegant, always friendly and polite and subdued, but feared even by the SS men under him.

"Now let's see," said he at roll call one Saturday, "if you have understood what I have told you. I will now try giving some of you an easy little order and the rest of us will see if it is carried out properly."

He called five out of the ranks. They were ordered to stand facing the wall that ran around the whole prison. Prisoners were strictly forbidden to approach within five yards of this wall.

"Forward--march!"

Staring straight in front of them, the five marched toward the wall till the guards in the watchtowers shot them down. Schendrich turned to the rest of us.

"That was nice. That's the way to obey an order. Now go down on your knees when I tell you, and repeat after me what I am going to say. On your--knees!"

We dropped to our knees.

"And now say after me, but loudly and distinctly: We are Swine and traitors."

"
We are swine and traitors!
"

"Who are to be destroyed."

"
Who are to be destroyed!
"

"And that's what we deserve."

"
And that's what we deserve!
"

"Tomorrow, Sunday, we will go without our food."

"
Tomorrow, Sunday, we will go without our food!
"

"For when we do not work."

"
For when we do not work!
"

"We do not deserve food."

"
We do not deserve food!
"

Those crazy shouts rang out across the yard every Saturday afternoon, and on Sundays we got no food.

In the cell next to mine was Kathe Ragner. She looked dreadful. Her hair was chalky white. Almost all her teeth had fallen out as a result of vitamin deficiency. Her arms and legs were like long, thin bones. On her body were large, suppurating sores from which matter trickled.

"You're looking at me so," she said to me one evening. "How old do you think I am?" And she gave a dry, mirthless laugh.

I did not reply.

"A good fifty, I expect you would reply. Next month I shall be twenty-four. Twenty months ago a man guessed that I was eighteen."

Kathe had been secretary to a high staff officer in Berlin. She got to know a young captain in the same office and they became engaged. The date for their wedding was fixed, but there was no wedding. Her fiance was arrested, and four days later they came and fetched her as well. The Gestapo had her under treatment for three months, accused of having made copies of certain documents. She did not understand much of any of it. She and another young girl were each sentenced to ten years. Her fiance and two other officers were condemned to death. A fourth was sentenced to hard labor for life. She was made to witness her fiance's execution and was then sent to Lengries.

One morning Kathe and three other women were ordered to crawl down the steep, long flight of stairs that connected all the stories. It was a form of exercise with which the guards liked to treat us. You were put in handcuffs and fetters and thus had to crawl down the stairs head first, and you had to keep going.

I do not know whether Kathe fell, or let herself fall, from the fifth story. She was utterly broken, so it might have been either. I just heard the shriek and then the smack, followed by a few seconds of deathly silence, after which a shrill voice cried from down below:

"The harlot's broken her neck!"

A few days after Kathe's death I and a number of others were transferred to Fagen Concentration Camp near Bremen. They told us that we were detailed for "special work of extraordinary importance."

What this work was did not interest us. None of us believed it would be more pleasant than that to which we were accustomed. We were used to working as draft animals in front of a plow, harrow, roller or wagon, pulling till you dropped dead of it. We were used to working in the quarry, till you dropped dead of that. We also worked in the jute mill, where you dropped dead with hemorrhage of the lungs.

All work was the same: you dropped dead of it.

Fagen worked on two fronts, as it were; it was really a camp for experimental medicine, but there were also the bombs.

The first few days I was put to hard labor. We worked like galley slaves, digging sand from five in the morning till six in the evening on a thin gruel that was served us three times a day. Then came the great opportunity, which I seized at once: the chance of a pardon!

The camp commandant informed us that those who volunteered had a chance of earning a pardon. You had to do fifteen of them for every year of your sentence left to run. That meant that I had to do two hundred and twenty-five.

But I have not explained. You had to dismantle fifteen unexploded bombs for every year of your sentence that you still had to serve. When, as I, you had fifteen years it meant that you had to dismantle two hundred and twenty-five bombs. Then, perhaps, you would be pardoned.

These were not ordinary duds, but the ones neither the civil defense nor the army's units dared touch. Some people had managed to do fifty before they were killed, but I argued that sooner or later someone must get up to two hundred and twenty-five, so I volunteered.

Perhaps that was what decided me, or else the fact that each morning before we went out we were given a quarter of rye bread, a small piece of sausage and three cigarettes as extra rations.

After a short training in dismantling bombs we were driven round by the SS to the various places where there were unexploded bombs. Our guards kept a respectful distance while we dug down to where they lay buried, which could be ten or twenty feet in the ground. Then they had to be freed of earth, a wire had to be placed round them and derricks lowered into the holes and they had to be hoisted a fraction of an inch at a time, until they were upright. As soon as one of these brutes was hanging in its derrick, everyone vanished--carefully so as not to wake it, swiftly so as to get well away and take cover. Only one man kept the bomb company, and that was the prisoner who was to unscrew the fuse. If he bungled it.

We kept a couple of wooden boxes in the workshop truck for those who did bungle, but it was not every day that there was need of them--not that people did not bungle, but because we could not always find anything of them to put in the boxes.

You sit on the bomb while unscrewing the fuse, for that makes it easier to hold the fuse in one position; but I discovered that it was better to lie at the bottom of the hole under the bomb when the dangerous thing had to be eased out, as it was easier to let the tube fall down into your asbestos-gloved hand.

My sixty-eighth bomb was an aerial torpedo, and it took us fifteen hours to dig it free. You do not talk much when you are on such a job. You are on the alert all the time. You dig cautiously, thinking before you exert much force on your spade or with your hands or feet. Your breathing must be calm and even, your movements deliberate and made one at a time. Hands are good to dig with, especially as you must be careful that the earth does not slide. If a torpedo moves a mere fraction of an inch it can mean the end. In its present position it is silent; but no one knows what it would take it into its head to do if it changed position; and it
has
to change position, has to be hoisted up into the derrick; the fuse has to be removed. Before that it is not safe, until then we dare not breathe; so let's get it over--no, not too hastily, slowly does it, every movement deliberate and calm.

Such an aerial torpedo is a cold-blooded opponent; it gives nothing away, absolutely nothing. You cannot play poker with an aerial torpedo.

When we had dug it free we were told that the fuse was not to be removed until the torpedo had been taken out of the town. This, perhaps, meant that it was a new type which no one knew, or that it lay in such a position that it would explode if anyone breathed on the damned fuse, and if a brute like that exploded it would blow up that whole part of the town.

A Krupp-Diesel truck fitted with a derrick arrived and stood waiting for its monstrous load. It took four hours to hoist the bomb up into the derrick, lower it into place and lash it so that it could not move.

That done, we looked at it and felt relieved. But we had forgotten something.

"Who can drive?"

Silence. When there is a snake climbing up your leg you must turn yourself into a pillar of stone, a dead thing that does not interest a snake. We made pillars of ourselves, mentally withdrawing into the depths of the shadows so as not to be seen, while the SS man's gaze traveled from one to the other. None of us looked at him, but we were so keenly aware of him that our hearts pounded and the life in us darted, crablike, sideways, avoiding craters, in and out among the debris.

"You there! Can't you drive?"

I did not dare say no.

"Up with you!"

The route was marked out with flags. One bright spot was that it had been cleared and repaired, so that the surface was fairly level. All for the sake of their blessed houses! I did not see a soul. The other vehicles came crawling along a way behind me. They felt no urge to approach the danger. At one point there was a house in flames, burning in the silence. The smoke from it stung my eyes and I was scarcely able to see, but I did not dare increase speed. It was five agonizing minutes before I was breathing fresh air again.