Wayne was again brought to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation and escorted back into the infamous Hall of Justice. More torture was to follow. Wayne was terrified that after this session of torture, he would be shot dead — if he even survived the torture.
Wayne, again stripped down, was tied securely to a dunking chair suspended on a hoist above a large filled pallet of sludge. The foul stench of the sludge was enough to make a man crazy. Once again, SS Captain Von Helldorf and his obedient men tried to drag information out of their prisoner, but it was all in vain. Wayne was slowly lowered into the sludge, and then completely submerged for a full minute, which the Gestapo men found hilarious.
Wayne told Von Helldorf whatever he thought the Captain would want to hear. He made up stories that he was with an underground. He was asked about his involvement with Dr. Hoffmann, but kept silent about that. Wayne did not want to get Dr. Hoffmann in any more trouble than she might already be in. Besides, whatever he said would not be believed. And nothing Wayne said satisfied those bastards anyway.
Wayne, looking as if he had just crawled out of a sewer, was untied from the dunking chair. With his hands secured together with rope, he was then suspended from a rack with his body hanging upside down.
“Clean him up,” Von Helldorf ordered.
The two Gestapo men picked up a hose that had been hanging on the wall, and proceeded to hose their prisoner down with ice-cold water. The water pressure was so strong that Wayne thought it might as well have been bullets instead of water hitting his body. He was glad, though, to have the sludge off of him.
With a rag, the Captain personally smeared a sweet, sticky substance all over Wayne’s upper body. Wayne was perplexed. What were these sadists up to?
“I could kill you now,” Von Helldorf stated. “But no — that would be too easy. Though it would give me great pleasure. I have other plans for you. I hope you have enjoyed our time together as much as I have, my friend. Here is a little something to remember me by.” The Captain gave Wayne a final dropkick in the stomach before he and his men left the room.
Wayne, strung upside down like a prize fish that had just been reeled in, wondered what was going to happen next to him. He did not need to wonder long.
Behind Wayne, a screen window built into the wall slid open. Wayne heard this and tried to look behind him, but was not able to twist his body around enough to be able to do so. He did, however, hear the small swarm of bees that flew out from behind the screen. The bees, attracted to the sweet, sticky substance that had been smeared on his body, were instantly attracted to Wayne and began to cover his body.
Sometimes things will pop into someone’s head at the strangest times. Things that a person would never in a million years think about unless that person happened to be in a bizarre situation where that though could come in handy. Such was the case with Wayne at that moment in time. A television show he had seen at least twelve years earlier all of a sudden popped into his mind. It was a weekly show about all kinds of wacky, unusual people and the things they would do, such as eat glass or bicycle across the country. Wayne recalled seeing one particular episode in which a man let himself be covered from head to toe with bees and how he subsequently never got stung. Wayne remembered the bee guy explaining why the bees never stung him. The guy said, “The most critical thing was to stand motionless.” Wayne took the advice of that guy on the long ago seen television show. As he felt the insects crawl all over him, Wayne hung motionless. He was not stung once.
Shortly thereafter, two Gestapo Nazis, whom Wayne had not seen prior to his interrogation, entered the room wearing protective bee clothing and took Wayne down from the uncomfortable position he had been subjected to by hanging from the rack.
Wayne was shackled together at the hands and feet and put into a prisoner transport van. He was not the only prisoner there — he counted four other prisoners in the transport van. They were all men: two young, one middle-aged, and one who appeared to be in his sixties. They all wore the same emotionless look on their faces and remained silent.
The cargo van started to move. Wayne had no idea where they were being taken. It was pitch black inside, the windows having been blacked out. Wayne breathed a little easier. He knew that if he were going to be executed, it would have been done back at Gestapo headquarters. He also knew that he was being transported somewhere for a reason.
The van drove for twenty minutes before it came to a stop in a dreary, industrial section of New Berlin City. An electrified barbed wire fence and armed Nazi guards surrounded the prisoner holding area. Nearby, the smokestacks from various factories spit out a steady stream of pollution and toxic substances into the atmosphere.
The back of the transport van was unlocked and the five prisoners were removed from it under the watchful eyes of armed guards. They were led through a small guarded entrance and into the prisoner holding area.
The Gestapo private who had driven the transport van approached SS Lieutenant Kramer with papers that needed to be signed. It was a routine that both men had been through many times.
“How many this time?” Kramer asked and then took a deep drag on his cigarette.
“Six,” the Gestapo private answered. He held out a clipboard with official Reich sealed papers attached to it.
“What the hell is happening?” Kramer wanted to know. “I’m receiving twice as many as I usually do.” He snatched the clipboard from the Gestapo Private and signed the papers.
The Private said, “The Reich Defense Council ordered that the camps be filled to capacity so there will be enough labor to work in the armaments plants to prepare for Japanese aggression.”
“Those damn Japs. They think they own the world. They already have some of the most productive land around.” Kramer took another drag on his cigarette. “I say we blow up the slant-eyed fuckers.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” the Gestapo Private agreed. “It should be done for the good of the Reich.” He then asked, “Where are these prisoners being sent to?”
“Hollenburg.”
The Gestapo private boisterously laughed,
“I would not want to be in their shoes.”
The compact prisoner holding area was crowded with an uncomfortably large number of prisoners, most of whom appeared to be thin and weary looking men and women. A small number of children were also present.
Once inside with the other prisoners, Wayne’s feet and hands were unshackled. If a prisoner did attempt to escape, he or she would make good target practice for any one of the numerous armed guards keeping watch on the compound.
A female prisoner, Linda, watched Wayne curiously. Linda was in her late twenties and had black hair that ran down to her shoulders and dark brown eyes. She wore ragged clothes and no makeup, but was an attractive woman anyway.
Wayne noticed Linda and glanced back at her. He had sensed that she was glaring at him, but he also felt that everybody else in the compound was optically checking out the newest prisoners who had arrived on that night.
The expression on Linda’s face, though, was what made her stand out to Wayne more than anybody else on that miserable day. She had a look of possessing a great emotional strength and an “I’ll beat any situation attitude”. Wayne observed that the other inmates all had a blank and sad defeated look on their faces.
Wayne found a vacant spot on the hard concrete ground and sat down. He could do nothing but wait. He closed his eyes and, surprisingly, considering where he was, fell asleep.
Except for a rotating searchlight, the night was dark and quiet, until the sound of a child’s wails broke the silence.
Wayne awoke to the sound of the crying three-year-old girl. It was an awful, hysterical cry that pierced the still night. Wayne got up in the dark and walked towards the crying child. It only took Wayne a few seconds to reach the source of the cries. The child was being held by her mother, a frail woman in her thirties.
Wayne kneeled down and asked the mother, “Is the child sick?”
The mother, with worriment, responded, “For three days now, Jessica has been with high fever. She’s been shaking and vomiting.” She began to sob. “I don’t know what to do. They’re going to take Jessica away from me; I know it. They’re going to take my daughter from me.”
“Nobody is going to take your daughter. Everything is going to be fine,” Wayne tried to reassure her. He said out loud to the other prisoners, most of who had been awaken by the child’s persistent wails, “Does anyone have any penicillin? Or some water at least?”
None of the other prisoners answered. Wayne, in fact, seemed to be the only person who bothered to try and help the situation. From the dark shadows where she sat, Linda watched what Wayne strove to do. The child’s wails became unbearably louder.
The mother hugged Jessica and stroked the child’s back. Jessica continued her crying.
“Jessica, you are going to be okay.” Wayne said to the child. “All you have is a little fever. You just have to rid it…”
The brilliant searchlight froze on the three of them.
Without Wayne seeing, the mother placed her hand tightly over Jessica’s nose and mouth, suffocating the innocent, beautiful child. Jessica stopped breathing.
An SS guard came to see what the noise was about. He was not happy about having to take the trouble to leave his guard post. He warned, “One more cry out of the child and I will personally take care of it myself.” He headed back to his post.
The searchlight was shifted to a different area.
Wayne looked into Jessica’s face. The child was dead. He put an index finger up to her tiny nose to make sure. He verified the young girl’s condition. Wayne looked into the mother’s eyes. The mother wore such a hollow, blank stare that Wayne knew from his gut feelings that she did. Wayne could not look at the small corpse again. He turned and walked away.
Wayne sat down alone in the darkness and wept.
Linda approached him. “You going to be okay?”
“For God’s sake, she was only a child,” Wayne spoke with tears rolling down his cheeks.
Linda sat down next to him and put her arm around him in a supportive gesture.
Wayne cried, “A poor, defenseless, little girl. What happened? What the hell did she die for?”
Linda had already been incarcerated in the prisoner holding area for four days. She said, “Two days ago another child, an infant, was ill and wouldn’t stop crying. An SS man came for the baby and its mother. And then, a few minutes later, from the other side of the fence, two gun shots were heard.”
“It’s so horrible,” Wayne said. “How can humans be so inhumane to one another?”
“They’re not human. They don’t have normal human feelings. They’re trained to be Nazis, not boy scouts,” Linda said. “I haven’t introduced myself.” She put her hand out. “I’m Linda.”
“Wayne,” he shook her hand. He had stopped weeping and regained some of his composure.
“So, what’s your story, Wayne? Where’d you get picked up?”
The last thing Wayne wanted to do was make small talk with another prisoner.
“I’d rather be by myself right now,” he said sheepishly.
“I think it would make you feel better if you had somebody to talk to,” Linda said compassionately. He didn’t respond.
“Well, if you need an open ear…” she got up to leave.
Wayne rapidly sifted his situation through his mind. This woman might be of help to him, he thought. A feeling of loneliness overcame him, in addition to the feeling of desperation that already accompanied him. Wayne had a feeling as if he was the last sane person left on the planet. “I’m sorry, Linda. Please sit down. I can sure use that open ear,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Linda sat down again close beside Wayne. It was a very cold night. She put her arm around Wayne. “Do you mind?” she asked him.
Her body heat felt good to him too. “No, I never mind when a pretty girl wants to put an arm around me,” he said with a slight chuckle, but it was impossible for him to feel any tinge of elation being in the situation that he was currently in.
Linda asked him once again, “So, where did they pick you up?”
“NYU.”
“NYU?”
“Or the Center of Aryan Studies. Whatever the hell they call it now,” he said.
“What were you doing down there?”
“I’d rather not get into that now,” Wayne said irritably. The lack of sleep was also taking its toll on Wayne’s mood.
“I didn’t mean for you to jump down my throat,” Linda said.
“Sorry about that,” Wayne apologized. “I’ve been through a hell of a lot lately.” He then asked, “Where are you from, Linda?”
She replied, “The ghetto. Need I say more?”
“Where was your ghetto?”
“Does it matter where any of them are? Mine was not too far from here.” Linda had grown up in and had always lived in a ghetto because she was of Polish blood.
“Why did you leave your home?”
“Home?” Linda said. “Is that what you would call that rat hole? The Germans live in homes, not us. Four days ago, I was picked up in a Gestapo raid on the ghetto. The same with most of the other people in here.”
In the Reich, persons with unpure Germanic bloodlines or other subhumans like homosexuals or disabled people were obliged to live in ghettos. The ghettos were bleak and dispiriting sites. The ghettos contained no luxuries or necessities of twentieth-century life. No running water. No plumbing. No electricity. No sanitary conditions. Tuberculosis was wide spread. Some of the ghettos were relatively small, with populations of fewer than 50,000. Others were in themselves the size of small cities, with populations swelled above half a million. No ghettos, however, were located on pre-war native German soil. The Reich Ministry of the Interior decided long ago that such a thing would be undignified for Germany.
Wayne questioned, “Do you know what’s going to happen to us?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Linda said. “The rumor is that the Germans need more slave labor and that’s where we come in. That is probably why they continue to let us live.” She removed a stale piece of bread from her pocket and whispered to Wayne, “I have bread with me. You want to share it?”
“No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” Linda bit into the hard bread. “But it ain’t going to last.”
Wayne fell asleep before Linda finished consuming the bread, using her shoulder as a pillow. Linda soon also dozed off as well.
That night, Wayne dreamed of happier times in his life. He dreamed of Camp Summit where he spend his childhood summers. He and his bunkmates went kayaking and got into trouble for tipping over the boats. Those days in Camp Summit were some of the happiest days of Wayne’s life.
Wayne has jolted back to reality as morning set in. At dawn, a loud siren pierced the air, waking up the sleeping inmates of the prisoner holding area.
SS men entered the compound, followed by SS Lieutenant Kramer, who carried a megaphone with him. The SS men went around and kicked or hit with a club any prisoners whom had not yet woken up to their satisfaction, which meant standing in place at attention.
SS Lieutenant Kramer put the megaphone up to his mouth. He said, with his gravelly voice amplified, “All you swine, up! Form two columns. Now.”
The prisoners dutifully followed Kramer’s instructions, helped along by the numerous SS men present. Linda got in line behind Wayne.
“Swine, march out!” Kramer ordered the prisoners.
The men, women, and children that made up the prisoner population walked in measured steps out of the holding area. They were led about half a kilometer by SS men to a train station and given the command to halt in front of an old German passenger train.
The train doors were opened and Wayne could see that it was already crowded. Those people appeared to Wayne to be much like the people he had spent the night with in the prisoner holding area; they wore the same blank and sad defeated look on their faces.
SS men directed the prisoners into the train cars in no apparent order, but did keep them moving as rapidly as they could. When a woman, as she was about to step up onto the train, slipped, an SS man picked her up and shoved her into the train compartment.
The musty, old train had been gutted of any seats or railings. The windows had been blackened. The Gestapo made sure the prisoners received no amenities at all, including breathing space. The prisoners had been packed on the train like sardines in a can. The train doors were closed and locked and the train began to move.
Wayne and Linda sat on the floor next to each other. Everyone was strangely quiet, even the children. Jessica’s mother, who was present in the same compartment as Wayne, sat there, with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring blankly into space. After about half an hour into their journey, something must have snapped in her head.
Suddenly, she cried out, “My baby! Where is my baby! Jessica! Please someone help me find my baby…”
The persons in the woman’s train compartment originally tried to ignore her, as people usually do on the streets when they happen upon a drunkard mumbling to himself. The prisoners looked the other way.
The woman’s frantic cries became louder and louder, turning into screams. “SOMEONE’S TAKEN MY BABY, SOMEONE’S TAKEN MY BABY! DEAR GOD, WHERE IS MY BABY? PLEASE SOMEONE, HELP ME FIND…”
Something had to be done for the sanity of all of the people on that train compartment. A tall, burly prisoner, who looked better fed than any of the other prisoners, removed his shoes from his feet, as well as his socks. He got up, and clumsily stepped over the passengers, until he was at the hysterical woman. He proceeded to gag the woman’s mouth with one of his socks and bind her hands together with his other sock. The train compartment became silent once again. The burly prisoner went back to his cramped corner and put back on his shoes.
Wayne felt sorry for the woman, but had agreed with the actions taken by the burly prisoner. It was too crowded, hot, and uncomfortable on that train, and to let that woman rant on would have surely made the other passengers go insane also. Wayne felt as if he was almost at that point himself.
The train stopped two more times to pick up more prisoners, who were crammed into the already much too tiny space for the passengers who had been present on the train to begin with. It took hours for the train to reach its destination. The wheels of the train squealed as the air brakes were applied. Wayne nudged Linda awake.
The train doors opened up to reveal armed SS men standing on the platform.
“Unload the train,” an SS Captain yelled into a megaphone. He looked so proper in his shiny black polished boots and black cap and black uniform with the SS insignia on his collar. He carried a leather crop in his hand for good measure.
The prisoners began disembarking from the train. Wayne made it a point to pause to ungag and untie Jessica’s mother. She had sat placidly since being restrained and Wayne felt that she had been through enough.
The SS Captain yelled instructions to the newly arrived prisoners via his megaphone. “Form two lines,” he directed. “One male, one female. Males to the left. Females to the right. Anyone who causes a problem or delay will be shot like the dog they are.” With their kicks and other coercions, the SS men made sure the prisoners obeyed the SS Captain’s command without the slightest procrastination.
Wayne and Linda were forced to separate. “I will get in touch with you as soon as I can,” Wayne promised her. “Do the same?”
“I will,” Linda said. An SS man came and pushed her into the female line before she could say anything else.
With the two long lines formed, the SS Captain commanded, through his megaphone, “Females, march out left. Move it.”
The women began to move. As Linda passed Wayne, she gave him a long stare goodbye. Wayne had a feeling that she was growing attached to him in a way that he was not quite comfortable with. That would be the least of his problems.
“Males, march out right,” the SS Captain ordered.
The men moved out in the opposite direction of the females did. As they moved out the SS men struck and belittled the men.
Wayne was still not aware of where he was being taken. He had the feeling it was going to be some kind of prison, but when he saw what it actually turned out to be, his jaw dropped.
The male prisoners reached the big iron gates of their destiny, Hollenburg. Wayne had seen enough pictures and documentaries in history classes to know what the place that stood before him was.
Hollenburg was a concentration camp.
Wayne thought about how from the outside, where he was standing, the camp looked like it was straight out of the 1940’s. Just like the ones he had seen in the black and white footage in those World War Two documentaries. As Wayne had always pictured a concentration camp, Hollenburg appeared no different. A barbed wire fence encircled the camp. Catwalks connected tower posts that contained armed SS men. A large sign at the entrance read: Hollenburg. Another sign at the entrance also contained a favorite Nazi lie: “Work liberates”. Wayne thought about the lunacy of a concentration camp in 1995 on what should have been American soil. And he was about to enter it.
As the prisoners neared the entrance of the camp, they were made to stop at a large table set up with files and typewriters on it. SS clerks sat behind the table, busily shouting and pecking away at their manual typewriters at the same time. Wayne’s turn came to step up to the table.
“Name?” a shifty-eyed SS clerk shouted with intimidation.
“Wayne.”
“Wayne what?”
Wayne had to think fast about what to say next. If he gave his real last name, then the SS would know he was Jewish, if they did not know already. Should he try and hide that fact? Where he was being admitted, would it make any difference anyway? Wayne decided not to take the chance of being caught fibbing. He answered, “Goldberg.”
“Height?”
“Five foot, eight inches.”
The SS clerk typed Wayne’s information onto a file card. “Weight?”
“A hundred and seventy-five.”
“Hair color?”
“Black.”
“Eye color?”
“Brown.”
“The name of the whore that spat you into the world?” the clerk wanted to know of Wayne.
With that question, Wayne wanted to punch the clerk. It was part of the Nazi strategy to demoralize the prisoners, Wayne knew. He would have to bear it, at least for the time being. He responded to the clerk, “Phyllis.”
“The agency that arrested you and the other scum?”
“The Gestapo.”
The SS clerk put a pen and the file card he had just been typing on in front of Wayne and told him, “Sign it.”
Wayne signed his signature on the bottom of the card. To the SS, that served to certify the accuracy of his statements.
After all of the prisoners had their information writen down and their photographs taken, they were then admitted to the camp center.
As Wayne walked through the camp’s main gate, he felt like crying. How could he have screwed up the world so badly? He thought of Dr. Hoffmann and her time machine. He wished he had never enrolled at New York University. Never had met Dr. Hoffmann. Never had let himself get talked into doing something so stupid as going back in time and killing Hitler.
Once inside the camp, the newly arrived prisoners, lined up in columns, were forced to stand at attention. The seconds turned into minutes, the minutes into hours. Every time a prisoner would move so much as a fraction of an inch to scratch himself or wave a mosquito away, one of the always watchful SS men would waste no time in lashing out a blow with a club to the unfortunate man.
Two hours into the torturous time the prisoners had been forced to stand motionless at attention, a prisoner sneezed loudly. A sneeze, usually a normal human function, was but one more excuse for the SS men to dish out inhuman pain and humiliation.
An SS Noncom pointed his rifle at the poor man, who was in his fifties, who had sneezed. “Get down on the ground, as the dog you are,” he ordered.
The prisoner looked at the SS Noncom with a pleading desperation in his eyes. The prisoner was the recipient of only a shine of hatred from the SS Noncom, who pushed his rifle barrel into the man’s temple. The prisoner obeyed the order and got down on all his fours on the muddy ground.
The SS Noncom purposely kicked the man so hard in the gut that he fell over in pain. He said, “Roll around, you swine.”
The prisoner abased himself by rolling around in the mud, getting his body and his clothes all dirty.
With his rifle pointed at the man, the SS Noncom commanded the muddy prisoner, “Oink as the pig you are. Oink.”
The prisoner further degraded himself by oinking.
“Louder, you dirty pig. Louder,” the SS Noncom directed.
“Oink, oink, oink…” the man blurted out at a higher volume.
The SS Noncom and the other SS men watching had a huge laugh at the sight. No matter how many times they had seen a prisoner, whether a new arrival or an old timer, do the pig routine, it never lost its charm.
Wayne thought to himself how demeaning it was, not only to the man down on the ground, but to the other prisoners who were witnessing what was occurring. Wayne, and the other prisoners, knew well that it just as likely could have been any one of them that was being degraded like the man in front of their eyes.
Hollenburg Concentration Camp had been constructed in the same manner as the other Reich camps had shortly after the War. As with the other Reich camps, Hollenburg had three main, distinct areas: headquarters area, the SS residential settlements, and the main compound.
The SS residential settlements were placed around the outskirts of the headquarters area and consisted of handsome houses, each with its own garden and terrace. A guard tower was evenly spread out every 250 feet inside the main compound. Around the clock, each guard tower contained an SS man with a high-powered machine gun directed at a specific area of the compound. From the main gate, a great bare space extended into the main compound. This was the all-important roll call area.
It was into the roll call area that the prisoners were led. In the center of this large square space, stood a gallows.
The gallows served as a constant reminder to the prisoners of what would await them should any one of them get out of line.
The prisoners again were directed to stand at attention.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Himmelmann rode into the roll call area on a handsome white horse. The horse, Snowflake, had become his trademark. From his position on the horse, brandishing a whip, Captain Himmelmann would tour and inspect the camp on a daily basis. When prisoners would see the tall, lanky camp commandant approaching on horseback, they knew to keep their eyes focused on whatever work they were doing at the moment. If a prisoner, even for a second, looked up towards the Captain or in any way removed his eyes from his workstation, the punishment was an immediate twenty lashes.
The camp Commandant was there to personally give the indoctrination lecture to the prisoners. He dismounted his horse beside the gallows in front of the hundreds of new male arrivals.
“Do not be so foolish as to delude your feeble minds as to why you were brought to Hollenburg,” he spoke coldly. “You were brought here for one reason. You are here to serve the Reich. Your type has been permitted to exist to serve the Reich. You should all be honored. If you do what you are supposed to, work hard and follow orders, you will be fed and will stay alive. For those of you that do not like to work hard or have trouble obeying orders, I can find a special place for you.” Himmelmann grabbed the noose hanging from the gallows' pole, and ran his long fingers up and down the length of the rope.
“It is a place, I guarantee, where you will be able to get all the rest you desire.” He let out a short perverse laugh, and then continued his speech to the prisoners in the icy tone. “At Hollenburg I have rules that must be followed. The penalty for a violation of any rule is death. There are procedures at Hollenburg that must be carefully obeyed too. The penalty for the violation of a procedure is twenty-five lashes or perhaps a week in the underground isolation chamber without food. Rule number one: each morning at roll call, every prisoner…”
Wayne watched the Commandant speaking next to the gallows and thought how fitting the Captain would look with the noose wrapped around his scrawny neck. Wayne pictured the scene over and over in his mind as he stood standing there motionless. On more than one occasion, he also pictured himself as the person who would be the one to kick out the bucket from underneath the Captain’s feet, sending the Nazi dangling to his death.
SS Captain Himmelmann’s speech tediously crept on. He threatened the death penalty over thirty times for an endless series of offenses, some of which included stealing bread, attempting to escape, sabotage, not working hard enough, and being absent from roll call. Himmelmann did not mention a single permissible act. Hard work and serving the Reich was a recurring theme of the Captain’s speech. At no time, during the forty minutes that he talked, did he mention any chance of the prisoners being released from the camp.
When Captain Himmelmann was finished with his longwinded orientation speech, the prisoners, in groups of thirty, were led into the bathhouse building. Wayne was part of the third group brought in.
Once inside the bathhouse, the prisoners, in assembly line fashion, had their heads shaved by a team of six resident prisoners. Lice had at times been a problem at Hollenburg. The SS was not so concerned with the prisoners whom provided a home for the winged insects on their head. Since the lice, though, were not able to distinguish between the body of a lowly prisoner or the body of a superior SS man, and the SS often had contracted the pests from the prisoners, the SS was insistent that prisoners hair always be kept as short as possible. That meant, for the prisoners, getting the heads shaved routinely every three weeks.
After each group of prisoners received their “haircut”, they next had to completely strip down. The other prisoners working in the bathhouse collected their clothes and put them into large trash bags. Wayne wondered what the Nazis did with all their clothes, most of which were little more than rags. He would later find out from the prisoners who had been at the camp for a while that the clothes were incinerated.
The prisoners, in their groups of thirty and stark naked, entered the shower room. The prisoner orderlies tossed them soap. Cold water flowed down from the showerheads. With only ten showerheads for each thirty prisoners, all of the men were required to share shower space. The new prisoners had exactly two minutes to cleanse themselves. They were given recently used, damp towels. Wayne thought about how the last groups of prisoners to pass through the bathhouse were going to get drenched towels to try and dry their bodies with.
The last stop for the new prisoners in the bathhouse building was the tattoo room. Each prisoner was marked with an identification number on their right forearm, seven centimeters above the wrist. The blue ink on Wayne’s forearm read: 31740. When Wayne was a child he had wanted to get a tattoo so he could look cool; this wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. He looked at his arm and was repulsed by the notion that he had ever wished for one.
Behind the roll call area and the bathhouse were the mess hall, laundry building, and prisoner hospital. In back of those camp buildings, was the prisoner barracks — a series of one story wooden buildings lined up in neat rows. A network of unpaved dirt roads connected the various buildings throughout the camp.
The SS men deliberately guided the new prisoners, straight from the bathhouse naked and cold, through the long web of camp roads. SS men threw anything they could get their hand on at the wandering men, including stones, sticks, rotten fruits, and small rubber balls, as well as hurling a steady barrage of insults. Wayne was hit by a raw egg smack in his chest. The egg yolk streamed down his body as he and the other prisoners were forced to keep moving. The SS men made it a point to aim their throws at the men’s genitals. This was one more episode designed to eat away at the new arrivals self-esteem and pride.
The new prisoners lined up in front of the clothing room, which was part of the laundry building, to be issued clothes. As each prisoner passed by a window, a set of striped workclothes were flung at him. The bundle included a shirt, trousers, thin coat, socks, cap, and a worn out pair of black shoes. To Wayne the clothes appeared tattered and he questioned himself as to how many other prisoners might have worn the clothes he held in his hands. The only good thing about them was that they smelled freshly laundered. Prisoner orderlies instructed them to get dressed.
They were then led to the camp infirmary for the basic medical examination. As he was about to enter the infirmary, one of the prison orderlies, whispered in his ear, “Do not talk of any medical problems, past or present.”
The short medical examination by the doctor consisted of him looking down Wayne’s throat with a flashlight and asking Wayne general questions about his health.
“Do you have any current ailments that would cause you to not be able to perform your work?” the ancient doctor asked.
“No,” Wayne said.
“Have you had surgery or medical problems in the past?”
Wayne had a bad back, the result of doing too many dead lifts in the gym his senior year in high school. A disc had herniated and caused Wayne to be inactive and in pain for months. He remembered, though, what the prisoner orderly said to him. Wayne had no reason to trust that stranger, but something in the man’s eyes told Wayne that he knew that he should.
Wayne heeded the orderly’s advice and answered the doctor’s question, “No.”
The last stop in the whole sickening procedure of the prisoner orientation was the orderly room. The same questions that were originally asked of Wayne when he first entered Hollenburg were again asked of him, only that second time by prisoner orderlies instead of SS men. Wayne’s answers to the questions asked of him were recorded on an official camp file index card. Wayne had a hunch that the other prisoners and himself being subjected to a second round of questioning was a way of the SS checking out their honesty by seeing if there were any discrepancies between the two different sets of answers given by each individual prisoner.
Wayne was handed a ration of cigarettes (10) and a ration of bread (6 slices). He was then assigned to his barracks.
The barracks each had two wings. A wing contained a day room and sleeping quarters for 200 prisoners. A communal washroom, with six pit toilets and four sinks, separated the two wings of the barracks. No barracks had showers. They were located in the bathhouse.
Barracks 19 was Wayne’s new home. On the inside it was a gloomy place. The wooden floor was cold and full of splinters. There were no windows, just small ventilation portholes. Old rusted, metal bunk beds were tightly packed in together. Matted straw was what passed for the bed mattresses. An awful stench, which smelled like a combination of rotted wood and urine, permeated the air. Wayne was assigned the top part of a bunk by the Barracks orderly.
A prisoner approached Wayne. “You got an extra smoke?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Wayne said and handed him a cigarette.
The prisoner placed the cigarette in his mouth, lit it up, and took a deep drag. He asked, “Could I bum another one off you?”
“Here, I don’t smoke anyway,” Wayne said and gave him another cigarette.
The prisoner, without thanking Wayne, walked away.
Samuel, a prisoner of about the same age as Wayne, who had been a resident of Barracks 19 since he was a teenager, strutted over to Wayne from where he had been standing. “Why the hell did you do that?” he asked with agitation.
“Do what?” Wayne questioned.
“Give away your cigarettes!”
“I don’t need them. I don’t smoke.”
“You greens never stop amazing me,” Samuel said. “Where are your possessions? Let me see them.”
“What possessions?”
“Exactly. You ain’t got nothing now. Nothing worth shit. Except later today or one day next week or sometime next year, if you live that long, you’re going to want an extra ration of bread or a pair of socks that ain’t full of holes or some other item in limited supply and you’ll be asked what you got in return for that item and, mister nonsmoker, if you wise up, you might just have something worthwhile to somebody else.” Samuel pointed to the remaining cigarettes in Wayne’s shirt pocket. “Got it?”
Wayne realized that what Samuel had said made sense. “Got it.”
“Good,” Samuel said. “Now, give me a cigarette.”
“Is this some kind of test?” Wayne wanted to know.
“This ain’t no test. I gave you advice that’s worth something and I want a smoke.”
Wayne handed a cigarette to Samuel, who promptly struck a match and lit it up.
“Samuel,” he said and put his hand out.
Wayne shook Samuel’s hand and introduced himself, “Wayne.”
Samuel inhaled on his smoke and said, “We have a saying around here, Wayne. The first fifteen years are the hardest, then a man gets used to it.” Without another word, he walked off.
Wayne spent the rest of that day sitting on his bunk. Many of the prisoners, having come from the same ghetto, knew each other. A few of the new prisoners introduced themselves to Wayne. Some of the prisoners amused themselves by playing cards or shooting dice. The “old timers”, men like Samuel who had been prisoners for years, had been able to finagle such small amusements, like playing cards and dice, into the barracks. Wayne got the impression that most of the new arrivals did not seem fazed by their new surroundings. They appeared to have calmly accepted being interned.
Wayne overheard one new prisoner, “At least I won’t starve here”. Wayne could only imagine the conditions of the places from where these men had come.
A senior block inmate was assigned one per barracks and was responsible for the men living in his barracks. Each senior block inmate was chosen by the prisoner block leader, the man, who himself a prisoner, responsible for all of the barracks and the men who resided in them as a whole.
The senior block inmate of Barracks 19, a man simply called Shorty, informed the new arrivals at ten o’clock that it was time for lights out. A full day of work was ahead.
The main compound of Hollenburg became quiet and still under the darkness of evening, except for the occasional rustle of an SS guard patrolling the grounds. Wayne lay uncomfortably on his straw mattress and could not sleep at all that first night in the camp. He cried and felt homesick. In his mind, all he could think about was getting out of that place and getting a hold of those Gadolinium Crystals. He knew it would be suicide to try and escape, though he was tempted to take the chance. From that day on, the only thing Wayne had in his life worth living for was hope. Hope that he would get out of there somehow and be able to do what he would have to in order to right the wrongs of his actions. Hope that he would return the world back to normal. Hope that he would see his parents again. Hope that he would see his love, Lauren, again. Wayne ate a slice of his stale bread ration, and was finally able to dose off into a light sleep for an hour before the earsplitting sounds of the reveille sirens rang out form the camp loudspeakers.