Sunrise West (6 page)

But to his and our own astonishment, no one bent down, no one scrambled to grovel and lick at the sullied snow. And he did not shoot. As Raymond put it later, he realized that we were his last chance: without us, he would have been an unemployed soldier in a land that was still at war.

At dawn, beneath a lamentable, constantly snowing sky, we dug a large hole behind the barn for some twenty more of our men. Raymond, dumping the first shovelful of earth back into the grave, whispered: ‘Farewell, my friends, sleep well. Victors in our everlasting Pyrrhic war.'

 

 
The Prophetic Flame
 

They marched us to a railway siding and shoved us into open wagons. It didn't stop snowing, and the flakes were
unusually large. Raymond immediately coined the phrase ‘white curse', though the snow was our only source of liquid. The slice of bread we had each been given earlier quickly disappeared into our empty bellies. Many days went by without food, and as the train pulled into Pilsen in western Bohemia we began to scream, ‘Bread, bread! Water! Please!' The locals were ready to respond with generosity, but our guards pointed their guns at these benefactors. I recall a little woman running towards our wagon with two huge loaves of bread, and a guard warning her: ‘One more step and I'll shoot.' When she pointed to the wedding-ring on her finger, he told her to come forward. But she just took off the ring and placed it on a stone lying on the ground where she stood. ‘Come and get it,' she shouted, ‘while I deliver the bread.'

There were thirty men and four corpses in our wagon, and as Raymond divided up the bread into thirty equal portions, he blinked back tears. ‘Sorry,' he muttered, as if addressing our deceased comrades. ‘Justice belongs to the living.'

‘You shouldn't say that,' I protested.

‘I am a Bible teacher,' Raymond replied. ‘Interpreting the scriptures is my elixir for survival. It says in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, verse 2:
The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living.'

‘I was under the impression that you're not a believer.'

‘Maybe not. But as long as conflict, war and fratricide dominate our lives, our Bible will remain my most trusted companion.'

One of our fellow prisoners, a battered man whose end was nearly upon him, stood up suddenly and with a failing voice called out the blessing for bread: ‘
Baruch atah Adonai, eloheynu melech ha'olam, hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz.
' As he was about to sink his eager teeth into the morsel, he collapsed, never to get up again.

We endured many air-raids during this train journey, but one of them gave us the closest of shaves. A squadron of Spitfires swooped down on us, coming so low that we could read the insignias. We waved at them and they took off, but reappeared within seconds. They bombed everything around us, yet not a splinter fell into our open wagons.

Our
Lagerführer
became enraged and, like Cyclops after Ulysses had gouged out his only eye, ran from wagon to wagon raving and snarling, shaking his impotent fist at the sky. Then, unexpectedly, he scaled the side of our wagon and jumped in. He may not have been too clever, but he was cunning enough to know that, for most dangerous contingencies in war, cowardice was a truly valuable commodity.

The day waned. Towards evening it grew freezing cold, and the white curse wouldn't stop falling. In response to orders from two officers who came alongside in a motor-cycle and sidecar, our train was forced to move onto a sidetrack — apparently some army units had to be shipped through in a hurry. I lay next to Raymond, watching the round face of the full moon. The old yellow whore is eyeing me, I thought — and all at once I began to ponder the meaning of the little woman's noble deed. For our sake, for the benefit of complete strangers, she had been willing to part with her precious wedding-ring.

Raymond broke in upon my silence; he seemed determined to keep my spirit alive. ‘I once read a story,' he said, ‘about a man who undertook, at dusk, to walk towards the day. But for each step he took, the night took two, so darkness was always ahead of him. His task had become insurmountable, it made him weep. Then, as in a mirage, he spotted a house. It had one tiny window where the flame of a small candle flickered. When he came closer the flame spoke to him. “Child of man,” it said, “do not despair. The night will pass, and daylight will surely come.”'

 

 
Gehenna
 

After a long journey over the pretty Tyrolese landscape, our locomotive came to a halt at the deceptively sleepy-looking station of Ebensee. The welcoming committee consisted of three men dressed in black uniforms. One of them, obviously the others' superior, whose footfall resounded with an empty arrogance, wore a monocle and a well-cultivated
Führer
moustache. Within the long sheepskin coat thrown over his shoulders dangled the tell-tale hollow sleeve of a military jacket. He glanced us over. ‘More fuel for the furnace,' he said bluntly. Fortunately the backlog of corpses in front of the crematorium saved us from this immediate fate.

Ebensee, sister or perhaps daughter camp of Mauthausen, and code-named
Zement
, had been created mainly for the purpose of providing labour for construction of the enormous underground tunnels in which the armament
works producing the V-2 rockets would be housed. It was established in a valley surrounded by impassable mountains and its barracks were placed in a thickly wooded area — not only to make the camp impervious to air-raids, but maybe to prevent the prisoners from seeing too much daylight. Winters here were long and hard, with the roads buried under more than a metre of snow in places.

As we lined up naked in front of Block 22, a
kapo
malignantly interrogated every face. Fronting one young man he asked, ‘Do you speak German?' ‘No, sir, I am Russian,' the other answered, perhaps a little too resolutely. ‘You're
Dreck
! You're a piece of vomit, that's what you are!' the
kapo
retorted. ‘I'm handing you over to the fucker in charge of the latrine. He'll soon teach you some German.'

As Raymond later remarked, language is the first victim of obscenity. Here more than in most other concentration camps they destroyed the common word for the sake of an anti-language, to serve the underbelly's needs. Here language didn't need to be manipulated, nothing needed to be glossed over. Here cruelty walked naked.

With a hail of cudgels and insults we were roused at 4.30 a.m., and our twelve-hour working day — under the supervision of degenerate
kapos
and trigger-happy SS — began at 6 a.m. What with the little food we received (150 grams of bread and three-quarters of a litre of soup), the flimsy striped uniforms we wore (winter temperatures dropped to 30 below zero), and the cracked wooden clogs to which the snow stuck with every step, the angel of death was kept extremely busy.

 

 
Sons of Valhalla
 

Not long after our arrival at Ebensee, an inmate told us in hushed tones about Georg Bachmayer. Known among the prisoners as King of the Hounds, he had been undisputed ruler of the camp for some time. Bachmayer's constant companion and sworn partner in crime was a huge Alsatian named Lord. To the last day of its existence, the camp was awash with gruesome stories of the duet's despicable behaviour. Bachmayer would organize orgies in which Lord and the top SS men took leading roles. After one night of heavy bingeing he had gunned down a whole column of prisoners who had just returned from work; then the well-trained Lord finished off those among the victims still writhing on the ground in agony.

The chronicler of this tale (whose name I never learnt) went on to relate how, in February 1944, Bachmayer had withheld bread from the camp's populace for an entire week. ‘Death had a ball,' he told me. In desperation, a Polish
kapo
had bravely taken it upon himself to intercede on behalf of his work detachment, pleading that the labour they were performing was highly strenuous and that they must be fed. Bachmayer, exploring the frightened face of the Pole, feigned readiness to cooperate. Then he turned, drew his revolver and shot the daring man.