The prisoners, immediately upon waking, had to assemble in the roll call area. Thousands of men dressed in zebra-striped outfits lined up in columns, arranged according by barrack number. The men were required to remove their caps from their heads and stand totally still during roll call, which lasted a minimum of an hour every morning, regardless of how bad weather conditions were. SS men kept a watch on the prisoners during roll call, always searching for the slightest excuse to dish out one of their various forms of punishment to a prisoner. A prisoner might be accused of moving during roll call, which was hard not to do, or not keeping his eyes looking straight ahead at the gallows.
Roll call officer Stepp, an SS man, yelled out the prisoner’s identification numbers. As each prisoner answered, their number was marked off on the roll call sheet that Stepp had with him. “31740,” Stepp yelled out.
“Present,” Wayne sharply replied.
Wayne, like most of the newcomers, was appointed to the toughest, least desirable job at Hollenburg — the quarry. Wayne was assigned by the SS Labor Service Officer to work excavating and pounding away at the rocky ground with primitive tools under the watchful eyes of SS guards. The work was back-breaking and Wayne didn’t understand the point of his job. The prisoners new to the quarry quickly became sweated and exhausted, but they were aware that they had better work as diligently as possible. If a prisoner was caught not working up to what the SS guards thought was full potential, the penalties were severe.
During Wayne’s first workday in camp, a prisoner was singled out by a guard for slackness in his duties. The prisoner was trussed up on a tree in a special harness that the SS used for such a purpose.
“Why were you pissing off?” the SS guard who had singled the man out asked.
“I was not, sir,” the prisoner nervously said from his hanging position above the guard.
“Then you are calling me a liar,” the SS guard noted.
“No, sir. I would not say such a thing.”
“Either you were pissing off your work or I am a liar,” the SS guard commented.
The prisoner knew that by saying or even suggesting that the guard was a liar would be enough to get him killed. He decided to go the safer route and said meekly, “I was neglecting my work, sir.”
“Pissing off on your work?” the SS guard said loud enough so all of the other men, who continued to concentrate on their jobs at hand, could hear. “Lazy son-of-a-bitch. You are pissing off your work while everybody else out here is busy doing their share for the Reich. You will serve as an example for other vermin that piss off work. Your type will know that being a lazy motherfucker will not be tolerated at Hollenburg.”
The SS guard began to throw heavy rocks at the trussed up prisoner, specifically aiming the stones at the man’s head. Three more SS guards joined in the fun, and after only a few hits, the prisoners head was bleeding form deep cuts.
Wayne kept his eyes focused on his work as he continued pounding away at the cold ground with a pickax. Though it was a cold day, he sweated excessively. Wayne could hear the thumps of the stones hitting the man’s body, which could not have been more than 10 yards away, from where he stood. Wayne knew enough to know that the SS guards were using that unlucky prisoner as a model for him and the other new arrivals. It was yet another scare tactic to keep the prisoners walking on eggshells.
“There will be no pissing off of work at Hollenburg,” one of the SS guards said between throwing rocks at his human target, now bleeding heavily from the head and unconscious. The SS guard who had signaled the man out picked up his gun and put it to the man’s skull.
Wayne heard the pop of a gun being fired. He swallowed hard.
The prisoners received a fifteen-minute lunch break. Lunch was the standard pint of thin soup and a small piece of bread per man, an inadequate meal for a person doing hard labor.
To Wayne, it felt fantastic just to be able to give his aching back and feet a rest. He placed his soup down and rubbed his weary eyes, completely exhausted.
He did not look to be tired as Wayne appeared to be. “Let me give you some advice, son,” the older prisoner whispered to Wayne in a husky voice. “Work with your eyes more than your hands or you won’t last a week here. And you might make the rest of us look bad. Think about it.” Having said that, he walked off.
Wayne, on that day, did not pay much attention to what the man had told him. He was too worn out to concentrate on anything. Wayne went to grab his small bowl of soup, but it had vanished. He had a good idea, though, of who had taken it.
On Wayne’s second night in Hollenburg, the SS held one of their occasional night inspections. Though winter loomed on the horizon and it was already bitter cold, the prisoners were allowed only to wear shirts while sleeping underneath the paper-thin blankets that had been issued to them. Any prisoner caught wearing socks, underwear, or any other article of clothing, could expect to receive severe punishment. Block leader Hans Kammler, the SS corporal in charge of the barracks and with keeping the men in them disciplined and who was also fond of spending most of his evenings acting like the drunken buffoon that he was, always led those impromptu inspections. The new arrivals, including Wayne, had heard from the old timers that Kammler always held a late night inspection within three days of a new batch of prisoners arriving.
At three past midnight during that drizzly night, Kammler and three of his SS coadjutors held one of his surprise inspections of the men in Barracks 19. Block leader Kammler and his men stormed the barracks, which was quiet except for the snoring of a handful of prisoners. Kammler’s men flicked up the switch to the lights, illuminating the sleeping occupants.
They went around banging loudly on the bedposts with their shiny steel clubs and shouting, “Up, vermin!”
The inmates, wearing only their nightshirts, were made to line up beside their bunks as Kammler strutted through both wings of the barracks.
On that particular evening, all of the prisoners were dressed according to regulations. But that was not good enough to satisfy the tipsy Kammler. No, he had to find some reason to dish out pain to at least a few of the subhumans standing half naked before him. For block leader Hans Kammler and his men in reality could not care less whether or not any of the prisoners wore clothing to bed that they were not supposed to. The true purpose of a late night visit to a barracks was to fulfill their barbaric, sadistic urges. So, on the pretext that the prisoners did not get out of their bunks quick enough, the prisoners were forced to get down on the cold, wooden floor and do fifty pushups each, calling out the number of each pushup as they did them. Doing the pushups was a tough enough task for the average person to perform at any hour, but even more so difficult for a person having just awoken out of a deep sleep.
As the prisoners complied with the order to do the pushups, Kammler strolled about, yelling out, “Faster, you swine! All the way down or else you’ll spend thirty days in the hole!”
Wayne had always done pushups regularly as part of his exercise regiment, so the fifty to him was no big deal. Most of the men, though, struggled to get past thirty.
Some of the older and weaker men could not do the pushups fast enough for the block leader, no matter how much he prodded the man along. In those frequent cases, Kammler would have an SS aide issue a swift blow with their club to the unlucky inmate’s back or legs. Kammler personally kicked a large amount of the prisoners in their stomachs with his steel tipped leather boots with as much force as he could.
With the rising sun, Wayne and the other prisoners once again began the daily routine of living as concentration camp inmates. Roll call would always end with the command from Stepp, “Caps off! Caps on!” That was the morning salute for Captain Himmelmann, the camp commandant, who was always present at roll call with, of course, his beloved horse, Snowflake.
Stepp would next issue the command, “Labor details — fall in!”
With that, each prisoner would move out to his assigned work assembly point — the location where all members of a work detail would gather before moving out to their work detail site. As the prisoners dispersed in columns of five abreast out to a long backbreaking day of labor, the camp band played merry tunes as if a celebration or parade was taking place.
At Hollenburg, prisoners were categorized into one of three groups. The first group was the “shiftless elements”. That group included alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, wife beaters, people who showed up late for work one time too many, and other such types of persons that the Reich thought needed some time in a camp for “re-education” until they were ready to return to the racial community of German society as better men. The second group consisted of the political opponents. Those were men who were overheard saying something “anti-Nazi” or “anti-German”, which basically included any kind of criticism at all. One man had been sentenced to two years of hard labor at Hollenburg because, as he traveled on a public bus to work, he complained to a fellow worker, “I think we’re spending too much money and wasting manpower on building the new Reich War Museum.” The Gestapo had picked him up at his work place within three hours of him innocently making the former comment. The third group at Hollenburg was made up of the inferior races, which comprised anyone who was not of German blood who did not fit into the other two categories. Wayne had been interned as a political opponent.
For Wayne, the day meant the endless work of the quarry. As he pounded away at the rock, he thought about what had been said to him about working with his eyes more than his hands. He realized what that older prisoner had implied. There were too many workers in the quarry for the guards to keep an eye on all of the time. Wayne noticed that only when one of the SS slave drivers or detail leaders put in an appearance, did most prisoners start hauling ass in their work. Otherwise, they pretended to work while keeping a look out of the corner of their eyes. Wayne began the practice of doing that and greatly reduced his workload, and his exhaustion, during the day.
Since the prisoners weren’t fed breakfast, by the time lunch came, most of the men were feeling the pangs of hunger. Wayne, who had always been in the habit of eating a large breakfast, was especially hungry by mid-morning.
The prisoners received their fifteen-minute lunch break each day. Lunch was always the standard “meal” of bread and thin tasteless soup of one type or another. To Wayne, the soup sometimes tasted like chicken soup, sometimes like potato soup, often like a vegetable soup, and once in a while like fish chowder, but it was impossible to tell exactly just what was in it. Wayne was not sure he wanted to know, either.
There never was enough lunch to go around for everybody. The SS made sure of that. It was one example of the little sadistic practices implemented in the camp on a daily basis. Instead of complaining or fighting with one another about who would eat lunch on that day, or who more deserved to eat, the prisoners whom received their meal allowances would share what scanty amount of food they had with the men who had received nothing. Every prisoner, at one time, would be shorted a meal ration. Some of the prisoners, the handful who had refused to share their meal rations at all with those men who had received nothing on a given day, were treated in the same manner by the other prisoners when they became the ones without lunch rations. Wayne was thrown a few bite size pieces of bread by some of the other men on a day when the lunch rations ran out before he was lucky enough to get one.
After lunch, it was back to work for the prisoners until six o’clock. The prisoners would then march back in organized columns for evening roll call to the roll call area, where, as the men arrived, the camp band would again play merry tunes.
Roll call officer Stepp would proceed to call off the prisoner’s numbers. Wayne and the other inmates would have to often stand for hours on end, regardless of rain or ice cold weather, until it could be established that no one had escaped during the day.
After roll call, it was almost always punishment time for some unlucky inmate who had an SS detail leader or an SS sergeant determine that the inmate did not give his full effort in his day’s duties, or for an inmate who was noticed by an SS sergeant not following a proper procedure. The unfortunate man would be secured to a whipping rack and then be given the standard twenty lashes to his back. All of the prisoners would be forced to watch and listen to the loud crack of the leather whip as it snapped against their fellow prisoner’s back. Captain Himmelmann was always present for those lashings and would sometimes take great pleasure in dealing them out himself. The only time Wayne ever saw the camp commandant with a smirk on his ordinarily stolid face was when he was cracking the whip at an inmate. Wayne knew the pain of receiving such a lashing and felt pity every time that he witnessed another man being treated with so much brutality. With the lashings occurring at the end of almost every evening roll call, Wayne figured that sooner or later his turn would come up.
The prisoners would then file into the mess hall and line up to have dinner dished out to them by the prisoners whom worked in the kitchen. Kitchen detail was a much sought after job, since it was known among the inmates that the men whom toiled in the mess hall operation ate better than the men working on other non-food related details. The night meal commonly consisted of a piece of white bread, a dab of margarine, a bit of sausage, a cup of soup (the same kind that had been served as lunch that day) and a spoonful of cottage cheese. Once in a while, Viking salad of ground fish bones and potatoes would be served. Wayne never ate enough to satisfy his hunger.
At night, the prisoners would have a small amount of free time before the lights went out at ten. Many of the men would talk amongst themselves, play cards, take a short stroll in front of the barracks, or simply enjoy a smoke. Some of the men, fatigued, would immediately fall asleep upon returning to the barracks. The camp band, made up entirely of prisoners, could often be heard throughout the camp blowing out their upbeat tunes on their brass instruments as they rehearsed. The band sometimes played at official SS functions and was always being ordered to learn new tunes. Reading material, such as the German daily newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, would be available to the inmates, though it often ended up being used as toilet paper.
At Hollenburg, incredibly enough, there was a brothel. The SS wanted to discourage any homosexual activity from taking place in camp and decided that the satisfaction of the sexual libido was a basic need for men, even slave laborers. The ladies whom worked in the brothel were inmates from Hollenburg’s female prison camp population. Wayne never did find out how one gained admission to the brothel, but he did know that there was a waiting list and that the SS men were frequent visitors.
At ten o’clock, it was lights out for the prisoners. With the new morning, there would come another backbreaking day of labor for the men.
For seven weeks, Wayne and lived the daily schedule as a concentration camp slave laborer. With each passing day, he felt less and less that he would ever get an opportunity to leave the hell that his life had become and felt more and more depressed about his situation. He kept to himself, making little more than small talk with the other incarcerated men. Wayne would trade his cigarette rations with other men in his barracks for food, making out with a small amount of additional bread.
Wayne had not spoken to Samuel since the day he had arrived at Hollenburg. Samuel appeared to Wayne to be the authority on every facet of life in camp. It seemed that whenever a prisoner had a question relating to some aspect of camp life that nobody else could reply to, they would ask Samuel and he would have the answer. Due to the length of time he had been at Hollenburg and the fact that he was an outgoing guy, Samuel knew all of the prisoners by first name and he took pride in that. One evening, shortly after the inmates had arrived back at the barracks at the end of a long day of work, Wayne bumped into Samuel.
Samuel said, “Don’t tell me. You were…”
“Wayne.”
“I said don’t tell me. I would have gotten it,” Samuel said disappointed that Wayne did not give him a chance to show that he indeed remembered Wayne’s name. “That’s right, Wayne, the nonsmoker.”
“And you’re Samuel.”
“Samuel to some,” he said and then pointed to his marked forearm, “One eight seven two four to others.” He asked, “Where you from, Wayne?”
“New York.”
“Shhh. Don’t let the SS hear you call it that. Is the ghetto back there as bad as they say it is?”
“Which ghetto is that?” Wayne said, not knowing what Samuel was talking about.
“The one you came from,” Samuel replied. “I assume you came from the ghetto. You speak in that funny way,” he said alluding to Wayne’s thick New York accent, “and you came in on a shipment with ghetto-dwellers.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re right,” Wayne said in agreement. He knew it would be easier to go along with that Samuel thought about where he came from instead of trying to tell him otherwise. “My mind is dazed from working in the quarry so much. You’re right, it’s pretty bad back in the ghetto.”
“Well, it ain’t no garden of roses here either,” Samuel stated.
Wayne had been curious about something since he had first arrived in camp, but was apprehensive about asking any of the other prisoners about it for fear of inviting unwanted attention or suspicion unto himself. Wayne felt semi-comfortable enough around Samuel to inquire of him, “Let me ask you something. Have a lot of people escaped from camp?”
“Only one since I’ve been here.”
“How long ago has that been?”
“I ain’t quite sure,” the long time prisoner said. “I guess it’s been ‘bout twelve years or so.”
“Only one escape in twelve years.” Wayne said with disheartenment. “Don’t prisoners regularly try and leave here?”
“And go where? Ain’t nothing out there but more Nazis. There isn’t a person in here that hasn’t thought of escape at some time or other, myself included. But, believe me, it ain’t worth it. They’d find you.”
“You think so?”
“I know so,” Samuel said confidently. “And you know what’d probably happen to you when they did. Same thing that happened to that last guy that escaped.
“Which was?”
“The SS took it out on the rest of us big time when that asshole left,” Samuel explained with a tinge of anger from the memory of the incident. “Food was kept from us for days, work hours were extended late into the night, and hell, just ‘bout everyone of us got twenty-five lashes. So when the Gestapo caught the escaped guy, which took them ‘bout a week, and he was brought back here to Hollenburg, the SS didn’t do nothing to him but return him to his old barracks.”
Wayne asked, “That’s all they did?”
“That’s all they had to. During the night, a couple of real hungry, real tired prisoners took care of him in their own way.”
“What’d they do to him?” Wayne wanted to know.
“Well,” Samuel hesitated, as if thinking about how to phrase his answer, “let’s just say he hasn’t been heard from since. So, keep them thoughts and ideas of escape out of your head. Don’t even talk ‘bout it. You never know who’s listening. It ain’t worth it. Understand?”
Wayne was dismayed to hear the things Samuel said to him on the subject of escape. He felt more hopeless than ever.
“Yeah, I understand,” he muttered out.
Samuel lit up a cigarette and said, “Listen, me and a couple of the boys are getting a game up. You in?”
“A game of what?” he asked.
“Poker.”
Wayne had often witnessed other men in his barracks playing cards, but it was always card games that never involved any wagers. He knew the SS had a policy that outlawed gambling by inmates. He questioned, “Isn’t gambling forbidden?”
“Yeah, but that ain’t never stopped us. We gotta have some fun. Besides, tonight there’s a big party being held for Himmelmann on account of his birthday. All the SS will be over at his place. We go nothing to worry ‘bout,” Samuel reassured Wayne.
“Okay, count me in.”
SS Captain Himmelmann’s luxuriant house sat atop a hill half a kilometer outside the gates of the camp he oversaw. It was his castle and he was the king overlooking his subjects. The gardens were lavish and were attended to by three full time gardeners. The grounds also included a swimming pool, which was rarely used. The inside of the beautiful residence was decorated with plenty of antiques and relics of Germany’s glorious past. There were lush hand carved furniture from the nineteenth century and exquisite military swords. On the walls, hung large oil paintings, including one of Adolf Hitler.
Commandant Himmelmann, his wife (a pretty woman twenty years his junior), Officer Stepp, Medical Officer Kunz, and many top SS Sergeants, SS Captains, and SS Lieutenant-Generals were present. Caviar and alcohol were abundant, as was intoxicated laughter.
Medical Officer Kunz, the man in charge of the camp infirmary and with the control of disease inside the camp, offered his close friend, the commandant, a toast. He raised his glass of brandy and said, “Happy birthday, Wilhelm. Fifty-two and yet, you do not look a day over forty. What is the secret to your youth?”
Captain Himmelmann threw his arm around his wife’s waist and told the crowd, “This lovely lady keeps me feeling like a youngster. I do not know what I would do without her.”
“What keeps you so physically fit?” an SS Sergeant yelled out.
“I do my regular exercises,” Himmelmann responded. “One must stay in fine shape to be a commandant. One day, I beat prisoners, the next day, I beat more prisoners, the following day, and more prisoners must be disciplined. It is a tough exercise.” Himmelmann performed a mock beating, complete with hits and kicks, on one of the party guests.
The crowd roared with laughter at the comical site of the staged beating.
In the washroom of barrack 19, sitting on the dusty floor, Samuel, Wayne, and Walter, Adam, Richard, and George played poker, using cigarettes, bread rations, and socks as ante.
“Okay, what’ya guys got?” Samuel asked with a grin on his face. “I doubt any of ya could beat what I got.”
“Nothing. I’m out,” Walter said as he put down his cards.
“Pair of nines,” Adam said.
“Two pair,” Richard stated.
George threw down his hand and said, “I’m out too.”
“Ha, ha, ha, I’m lovin’ it,” Samuel twitted the other players. He said to Wayne, “The only thing that’s going to save ya is a four of a kind or a royal flush. What’ya got, Wayne?”
“Royal flush,” Wayne answered and showed the men his hand.
“Shit!” Samuel exclaimed.
Walter, Adam, Richard, and George laughed as Wayne took the winning pot of four cigarettes, two small pieces of bread, and a sock without holes. Samuel, without a word, dealt out another hand.
For the first time since that day when Dr. Hoffmann had innocently asked to see him after school and for the first time since the whole damn ordeal began which led him to where he currently was, Wayne laughed. It felt fantastic to him. He had instantly sensed a relief of tension inside of his stressed body. Wayne had not realized how much a person could miss something until that person did not have it for a while — even a thing as simple as laughter.
Adam, one of the fortunate men who worked in the mess hall, and who also happened to be black, smuggled out some sausage that night and shared it with the rest of the poker players. The cold, soggy meat tasted wonderful.
Wayne thought back to the time when he had dined with Dr. Hoffmann and the Rausching family and how when the main course of smoked eel was passed around he had been disgusted by it. He now thought it ironic that if the same plate of food had been put before his eyes, he would have gobbled it up without hesitation.
Since entering Hollenburg, Wayne had tried to talk to as few people as possible and mind his own business. That night of the card game, though, it was a good feeling to Wayne to finally be able to have conversations, and share a couple of laughs, with the guys.
Wayne had learned that they all had similar tales to tell about how they had ended up as prisoners in a concentration camp. Samuel, Adam, George, Walter, and Richard had all been born and raised in filthy ghettos where the inhabitants were considered inferior by the Nazi government for being of an inferior bloodline to that of the German people. At the average age of thirteen they were picked up by SS Work Labor Units and brought to Hollenburg, one of a network of concentration camps, to work as slave labor, as long as they were fit to. They had been told that they would one day be returned to their ghettos, but none of the men, including Samuel — who had been in Hollenburg the longest amount of time — had ever seen an inmate leave the camp, unless as a corpse.
Richard won a hand and collected his winnings — four small rations of stale bread, which, when put together, would have equaled the size of no more than a slice of bread.
“Don’t bite down too hard on that bread,” George joked. “You might break a tooth.”
“I think I already have,” Richard retorted.
Richard turned to Wayne and asked him, “How’s life in the quarry treating you?”
“Like shit,” Wayne said.
“I’ve done worse,” Richard said. “When I first got here, they had a squad of us busting our asses building these free standing walls, only to have us later tear them down. Pointless shit, man!”
George added, “You think that’s bad? When I was working on transportation detail, a bunch of us would be harnessed, as if we were fucking mules or something, to a heavy wagon piled up with stones. We’d then be forced to pull it while singing at the same time. The guards would laugh and call us their singing horses.”
Wayne said to his new friends, “You guys all seem to work on real smooth, cushy details — mess hall, print shop, carpentry. How’d you guys hook up?”
“Time,” Richard responded. “We’ve all been here a long time. You make connections after a while.”
“C’mon, cut the talk.” Samuel said sharply. “Let’s concentrate on the cards.” He was down on cigarette rations, and, being a heavy smoker, the thought of losing his precious fixes of nicotine was too much for him to handle. The reason Samuel enjoyed playing cards at all was that he was usually good enough to win a few extra cigarette rations.
Wayne did think about telling the men about what he had done to change the course of world history and about how he was responsible, at least indirectly, for them living their lives as slave laborers in Hollenburg. The notion of doing so quickly left his mind. He realized that what he said would have sounded crazy to them. Wayne had heard about how the prisoners whom had cracked under the work strain, or simply from living the strained life of a slave laborer, had “disappeared” never to be seen again. He had a good idea of what had happened to them and he decided against taking any chances on having rumors of nuttiness concerning him spread around camp.
Wayne, holding three aces and two kings, won his fifth hand in a row.
Samuel asked, “Where’d you learn to play cards like that?”
“Atlantic City.”
“Atlantic City?” Samuel thought for a moment and said, “Ain’t never heard of it.”
All of the guests at Captain Himmelmann’s birthday party had brought with them gifts for the guest of honor. These were not average birthday presents, such as a silk tie or a pair of gloves would have been, but more like major offerings. At the Captain’s previous birthday party, an SS-Scharführer (staff sergeant) with the last name of Neumann presented the Commandant with a painting by one of his favorite nineteenth century artists. Two weeks later, Staff Sergeant Neumann was promoted up to that of Sergeant Major Neumann — a significant promotion. Himmelmann had used his numerous connections in Berlin to have the man moved up in rank. With the memory of that incident still fresh in their minds, every party guest wanted to make certain that their particular gift to the Captain would be one that made a deep, lasting impression.
Captain Himmelmann opened his presents with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning. He unwrapped a gift, which turned out to be an expensive bottle of a fine red wine and read the attached card.
“Ah, one of my favorite wines, vintage 1896,” the birthday boy stated, clearly pleased with the gift. “Thank you, Herr Rueger,” he said in gratitude to the SS Lieutenant, also an old friend, who had given him the gift.
Captain Himmelmann grabbed a small wrapped box out of the large pile of presents and tore off the covering. He opened the box up too reveal the shrunken head of a woman, complete with miniature locks of brunette hair covering the tiny skull. The party guests let out an admiring gasp.
“I had that one made especially for you, Herr Commandant,” Medial Officer Kunz proudly said. “It should make a fine addition to your fabulous collection. It is of Bolshevist origin.”
“It’s splendid. Thank you, Herr Kunz,” Captain Himmelmann said and took a swig from his glass of brandy. He snatched another present from the pile of gifts and, with excitement, begun to unwrap it.
Wayne continued with his winning streak at poker, accumulating a stockpile of cigarettes, bread rations, as well as several socks and a shirt, which Samuel had bet and lost. Wayne did not plan on keeping any of his winnings and was going to return them to the other men when they were done playing. He did not want any hard feelings felt towards him by his fellow inmates for taking their few measly belongings. The laughs he had and the diversion from the regular camp routine made the game worthwhile to Wayne.
“Are you sure Jack is keeping an eye out?” Adam asked Samuel.
Samuel replied, “He better be — I gave him a cigarette.”
It was Richard’s turn to deal the cards. As he dealt a hand out, he said, “You guys ever wonder what would happened had Adolf Hitler lived and not died so early on? I mean, would the course of history have been the same? Would we be sitting here right now?”
“Not the what if Hitler lived discussion again. Spare me, Richie,” Samuel said. He viewed his cards and clearly did not like his hand. “Damn it!”
“I think, that had Hitler lived,” stated Walter, who was of a Hungarian bloodline, “and hadn’t kicked the bucket so early on, he would have made war against his neighbors and with America. In Mein Kampf that’s what he said he would do once he had full control of Germany. He wanted to fight so the Germans would have more breathing space.”
“I don’t know about that,” George said. “Who knows if he would really have done what he said he would in his book or instead just gone and lived happily like a fat cat as head of Germany?”
Samuel won his first hand in fifteen minutes. He collected seven cigarettes and pocketed them, making sure he would walk away with at least some smokes for the next day.
“What do you think, Wayne — what would’ve happened if Hitler lived?” Richard asked.
A chill shot through Wayne when he heard the question posed to him. Did anyone suspect the truth about him? How could they possibly? No, the conversation, he decided, was a strange coincidence.
He fumbled for words, not really sure of what to say, though he knew he would have been able to tell them in great detail what he knew would have been, and should have been, the course of human history. “Well, I’ve never given it any thought.”
The loud thump of three knocks against the washroom wall was heard. Samuel, Walter, Adam, Richard, and George instantly threw down their cards and made a big rush to exit the washroom. Wayne was left sitting alone.
“What the hell?” Wayne said and wondered what was going on. He picked up the cards and the rations of bread and cigarettes that had been left behind and stuffed them into his shirt and pants pockets. Wayne stood up and went to exit the room, walking dead smack into SS Block leader Kammler.
Kammler shoved Wayne with so much force that Wayne thought, when his body made contact with the aged wooden wall behind him, that he might have actually gone through it, and fallen into the right wing of the barracks. Kammler frisked Wayne, finding the cards and his winnings.
Wayne, for the first time since he had been at Hollenberg, had been caught doing something that was against camp policy. He thought maybe he would be able to hastily make something up about why he had the cards and a stash of extra bread and cigarette rations on his person, though he knew that the punishment for being caught lying to an SS official could be just as severe as for being caught gambling. Before he was able to speak any words, Kammler silently exited the barracks, taking the cards and the rations that he found on Wayne with him.
Wayne was aware that he had some form of discipline coming his way the next day. He was not sure what the punishment de jour would be. Would he be whipped? Would he be forced to do a hundred knee bends while a guard, with his burly fists, administered kidney blows to him? Would he be locked inside a wooden box, barely large enough for an average-sized man to squeeze into in a squatting position, while nails were driven through it? Or would the punishment be any one of the other many various forms of torture that the SS had up their sleeves? Worst of all, Wayne shook with anticipation, would he be hanged as an example for the other inmates? He cursed the men who had left him alone in the washroom to be caught red-handed. He cursed Dr. Hoffmann and her time machine. He cursed the quarry. Wayne did not sleep a wink that night.
Morning roll call came and went as usual. Wayne spent his day working in the quarry. Nothing was said to him by any of the prisoners or guards about what had happened the previous evening. Wayne was beginning to feel optimistic that he would receive no punishment at all for his gambling offense. Maybe, Wayne had hoped, Kammler got plastered during the night and totally forgot about entering barrack 19 and finding cards and rations on him. The prisoner with the number 31740 inked on his forearm would not be so lucky.
Roll call officer Stepp, immediately upon the completion of the evening’s roll call, said “Prisoner number 31740, step forward.”
During roll call, the whipping rack had been wheeled in to the center of the roll call area by an SS guard, tenderly as if it was a delicate statue or a fine piece of art. To the SS, the whipping rack was considered as indispensable object whereas a prisoner could be replaced with much more ease than building a new instrument of terror.
Once he saw the whipping rack arrive, Wayne’s instinct told him that it was there solely for him. He knew that the SS would not bother to bring in the rack if they planned on instead using the gallows, which eased his fear that he would be hung.
Wayne had witnessed four hangings since he had been at Hollenburg. None of the offenses seemed to him to be anything that should warrant the death penalty. One man had been accused of sabotage when he accidentally broke a drilling machine in the tool plant he had been laboring in for the previous six years. During his second week as a prisoner, Wayne had viewed a hanging. After that, he’d become pretty numb. A man had been murdered right before his eyes. The sight of the hanging, though, did not vex him as much as the fact that he felt insensitive to the crime. As he had watched the bucket get kicked out from underneath the man’s bare, dirty feet, Wayne only thought about and cared about how soon it would be until he ate dinner. Later that night, after having witnessed his first hanging, as he lay awake in the dark of the barracks, Wayne questioned what was happening to him.
“Have I become so cold and unfeeling that the sight of an innocent man being strung up in front of me annoys me because of the fact that it delays my dinner?” he asked himself. Wayne came to the conclusion that if he had not become emotionally detached from such occurrences in camp, he would surely lose his mind.
Wayne, upon hearing his number called out, swallowed hard. As he nervously walked to the head of the roll call area, he felt the gaze of all of the other inmates on him. His turn to feel the whip had finally come.
“Number 31740,” Roll call officer Stepp announced, “you are hereby charged with gambling in camp. The punishment for a first gambling offense is twenty-five lashes.”
Two SS guards secured Wayne to the whipping rack, pulling the leather straps that held his body in place as tight as they could. Wayne could do nothing but endure the punishment that would soon be inflicted up on him.
Stepp signaled the always-present camp band to start playing their well-rehearsed upbeat marching tunes as SS Captain Himmelmann looked on. Block leader Kammler, possessing a whip in his hand and a gleam in his eye, commenced the lashing.
The whip striking against his naked back hurt as much as the first time he had been whipped, back at Gestapo headquarters. Each new snap of the whip hurt ten times more than the prior lash. Men like Kammler were experts in brutality. They were men no longer capable of human stirrings but rather fanatics blindly marching behind their Führer’s flag while all around them their victims fell by the tens of thousands. Wayne, strangely, no longer feared death. He almost welcomed it. He thought, as he was being lashed in front of the whole camp, why not sleep the eternal, peaceful sleep instead of dealing with the misery that his life had become? Deep down in his psyche, however, Wayne was conscious of the reasons why he had to continue living. As the whip made contact with his body on the eighteenth lash of his punishment, the world appeared to start spinning as Wayne’s eyesight blurred. He soon passed out.
Roll call officer Stepp, who was one of the few SS men who would crack a rare genuine smile at least once a week, picked up a handy bucket of cold water and poured its contents on the passed out prisoner. Wayne remained unconscious. Stepp removed a wad of smelling salt from his pouch and waved it underneath Wayne’s nostrils. That was sufficient enough to revive him.
Kammler put his face up to Wayne’s face and, breathing heavily, demanded to know, “Who were you gambling with?” He received no response. Kammler slapped Wayne strong across the left cheek, leaving his large hand imprint behind. “ANSWER ME.”
Wayne got out a meek, “Nobody.” The last thing Wayne wanted to be known as was a camp rat. He knew that the punishment that was being administered to him would end shortly, or so he had hoped, but he also knew that if he had squealed on his bunkmates, they could and probably would make his life a living hell for him.
“You lying son-of-a-bitch,” Kammler angrily said and, breathing heavier than before, almost, Wayne observed, like an asthmatic, continued whipping Wayne with an unbridled passion.
It was a moonless, pitch-black night as Wayne laid awake on his bunk in agony. He had gotten into the habit of clutching his thin pillow against his torso and pretending that it was Lauren’s warm arm with her soft body next to his as he struggled to fall asleep each night. It served as a wholly inadequate substitute, but it did help him drift off. On numerous occasions, as he had awoken, in a temporary daze, to the blare of the reveille horns at the crack of dawn, Wayne would open his eyelids, and, for a split second, forgetting where he had been residing at, would expect to see Lauren asleep in his arms. On that dark night, though, Wayne was hurting too much to grasp his small pillow. Wayne heard somebody slither up to his bunk. He had a good feeling of who it would be.
“You all right, Wayne?” Samuel whispered.
Wayne was in no mood to talk to anyone, least of all one of the men whom had left him holding the bag during the card game. He answered Samuel anyway, hoping to quickly get rid of him. “I’ll let you know when my head stops throbbing and the pain goes away,” Wayne said in a soft tone.
“I felt the same way after my first lashing,” Samuel said. “And my second. And my third, come to think of it. And my fourth, and—”
“I get the idea.”
“Hey, me and the boys really appreciate you not telling on us to Kammler. You’re an okay guy.”
“Gee, thanks,” Wayne said sarcastically.
Samuel continued in a whisper, “My brother Ari is the prisoner detail leader for the new armament plant. How’d you like to leave the quarry pit for a cushy job sitting down turning screws on an assembly line or some shit like that?”
Wayne replied without hesitation, “Anything would be an improvement.”
“Consider yourself in. Tomorrow’s gonna be your last day in that fuckin’ quarry pit,” Samuel proudly informed his hurting friend. He tapped Wayne on the knee and crawled away.
Wayne knew from what he had observed since he had been at Hollenburg that Samuel was a man of his word. When Samuel said he was going to do something, he had always seemed to follow through. Wayne, who loathed the daily routine of working in the quarry, considered it a fair trade — twenty-five lashes of punishment in exchange to not have to break his back in the quarry anymore. No more frostbite. No more pains shooting through his bad back. No more blistery lips from the cold wind blowing. Wayne anticipated the start of his new job. He found himself full of hope again that his luck was changing for the better, but that faded fast as the reality set in that all that had really happened was that he had gotten an opportunity to leave the quarry. Wayne moans turned into snores.
During his final day in the quarry, an incident occurred which only fanned the flames of abomination that Wayne had been feeling towards those who were in charge of running the camp.
Two days prior, a fresh shipment of prisoners from the ghetto had been thrown into the already overcrowded camp. To Wayne, the new prisoners were indistinguishable from the ones that he had arrived with almost two months earlier. He noticed how the new inmates wore the same sad, defeated empty expressions on their faces as the people he had been on the train with had. Some of the new arrivals had been assigned to barracks 19. Since there were more men assigned to the barracks than there were bunks, most of the new slave laborers ended up sleeping on the cold wooden floor.
Most of the new arrivals had been assigned to the quarry, as had been customary. It was the worst place in camp to work, and new inmates had no connections or voice in anything that might have affected their lives in camp.
At some point during mid-morning, a boy, who Wayne figured could not have been more than fourteen years of age, innocently asked one of the SS guards, as he wiped his sweaty brow, “Sir, may I please sit down for a little bit. I do not feel well.” It had been the boy’s first day of labor and he obviously did not know any better.
“Go ahead,” the SS pig told the boy and pointed to a spot roughly thirty meters from the edge of the pit.
The boy, who reminded Wayne of himself, walked to the appointed spot. Before he could sit down, a bullet penetrated his heart. Death came instantly. The SS guard who had given the boy permission to sit down arrogantly reloaded another round into his shiny rifle.
Wayne, having witnessed the incident from his vantage location, knew that the youngster had been deliberately instructed to cross the guard line. In doing so, the guard could explain the boy’s death as the result of stopping a prisoner “attempting to escape”. Wayne had seen other prisoners coerced into crossing the guard line on different pretexts only to be shot down, but never a boy. In his 1995, that boy would have been entering high school with his whole life ahead of him. The sickest thing about what had happened, Wayne found out that night through the grapevine back at the barracks, was that the SS pig that he would “stop an escape attempt” that day. That boy’s life had been worth nothing more than two beers to an SS man. Wayne, in the quarry on that day, wanted to shed a tear for the boy, but nothing came out. All of the death he had seen and all of the tears he had shed for the victims, and all of the evenings he had cried himself to sleep, and all of the tears he had shed for the baby who had been suffocated by her mother in the prisoner holding area, and all of the tears of helplessness had finally caused Wayne’s tear ducts to dry up and cease function. If he cried again, he might willfully cross the guard line himself. Wayne could not cry anymore.