One morning Hans was called in to see the Blockältester: “Van Dam, you have to go to quarantine.”

He was shocked and thought he was being kicked out of the Krankenbau again, but Zielina, who was also present, laughed and reassured him: “They’ve got scarlet fever in quarantine and they need a doctor. For the time being, patients aren’t allowed to be admitted from there to the Krankenbau. They’re not allowed to go to the main outpatients to get their wounds dressed in the evenings either. That’s why we have to send a doctor there to do the work on the spot.”

An hour later Hans arrived in quarantine. He was taken to the Blockältester, who met him with an ironic smile: “So, this is the doctor, is it? That means you’re the boss here now. Well, it will all be fine then.”

He led Hans to one of the rooms. In the corner a small cubicle was curtained off with blankets; behind them was an ordinary triple bunk. The Stubenältester slept on the ground floor with the clerk above him. The top bunk was for Hans.

The Stubenältester gave him a few tips on how to behave here in the quarantine block. Whatever else, he had to take it easy and not get wound up about anything.

If he had heeded that advice, everything would have been all right. But right from the start, he began making conscientious and precise requests for all of the measures he deemed necessary. A dish containing disinfectant solution for people to wash their hands was needed at the door of every room. Everyone had to be subjected to a medical inspection every morning to identify new cases of scarlet fever as quickly as possible. There had to be an outpatients’ clinic every evening. A small room needed to be cleared for the patients who, according to instructions, were not allowed to go to the Krankenbau, and for possible cases of scarlet fever. A few quarantined French doctors could help him. When Hans presented his list, the Blockältester answered with that same ironic smile: “It will all be taken care of, Doctor.”

Hans was busy all day with these measures, none of which were carried out. There were no dishes for disinfectants. The Krankenbau chemist refused to supply medicine for non-hospital blocks. The Blockältester didn’t have a spare room to set up a ward for the sick. After all, there were 1,200 people in his block. They were already sleeping three to a bunk.

But Hans felt that, more than just the impossibility of enacting his measures, it was deliberate obstruction. Heinrich, the Stubenältester whose cubicle Hans was sharing, even said as much. He wore a purple triangle next to the number on his breast, the symbol for Bible Students. Every evening there was a small meeting when all of the Bible Students would gather with Heinrich. There weren’t many: five or six in all of Auschwitz. That hadn’t always been the case, Heinrich told me.

Everyone in Germany who used the Bible to demonstrate the evil of the Nazi system and predict its downfall—the “Jehovah’s Witnesses”—had been systematically picked up. The same had happened to those who believed in other prophecies, such as the divine message of the Great Pyramid or the prophecies of Nostradamus.

At one stage there were eight hundred of them together in Dachau.⁷ The Lagerführer had them all line up on Roll Call Square. “Who still believes in the truth of Biblical predictions?” All hands were raised. The Sturmmänner picked out ten men, who were shot on the spot. Then again: “Who still believes…” Again all hands were raised, again ten victims fell.

It went on like that, but with every round of that dance of death, more people were struck by doubt and fewer hands were raised, until finally only the “converted” were left—though only after a hundred of the best had fallen.

They were sometimes wearying, the Bible Students, because no matter what you said, no matter what happened, they were always ready with a Bible quote, regardless of how irrelevant it was. But they were honest, they had your best wishes at heart, and they knew what was what in the camp.

“Be careful, son,” Heinrich warned Hans. “Don’t make things too difficult for them with all your precautions. Before you know it you’ll be in deep trouble.”

A few days later the SS doctor came. He kicked up an enormous fuss and gave Hans a dressing-down because all kinds of measures to prevent an epidemic hadn’t been taken. Stupidly, Hans was too sporting to answer that he had ordered the measures but hadn’t received any cooperation from the Blockältester. Now the Blockältester was thwarting him even more, because he thought Hans’s silence had been motivated by fear.

The only one to help Hans at all was a young Czech colleague. He had been put in the camp as a homosexual, but because he wasn’t Jewish and, as a Czech, could speak Polish with the Blockältester, he was sometimes able to get things done. Ivar became a good friend. He told Hans how he had got his pink triangle.

“A party member in Prague had an old debt to me. When I insisted on payment, he set the Gestapo on me with a statement about how he had supposedly caught me performing homosexual acts. Anyway, Hans, you know how German justice works. I never admitted anything and nothing was ever proven. But a single Nazi witness counts more than the best alibi. I could have proven I wasn’t in Prague at all on the day of the ‘crime,’ but they don’t give you a chance.”

The next day Hans experienced German justice firsthand. He was at work upstairs in a corner of the attic—where ten unfortunate patients were bedded down on a thin, filthy layer of straw—when the gong for the roll call sounded. As it took at least half an hour from the gong until the arrival of the SS man, the Stubenältester hurried down to Hans’s room to let them know to take him into account. But when Hans went downstairs a little later, the count had still been wrong. The Blockältester had been called in and the moment Hans entered the room he started to abuse him, shouting “Cholera…” and a hundred other Polish swear words.

Hans tried to clarify the situation and apologize, but the Blockältester grew more and more agitated and then, without warning, punched him several times hard in the face. Blood gushed from Hans’s nose and his glasses lay shattered on the floor.

But worse than the smashed glasses and his crooked nose—broken by the first blow—he was now a lost cause in quarantine. All of the Stubenälteste and their assistants, the clerks and orderlies, were laughing at him. Nobody listened to him anymore.

That evening Hans discussed it with Krutkov, one of the few Russians who spoke a little German. He had been the head of a kolkhoz, a collective farm with some 2,500 workers. When the Germans arrived, they had all refused to continue working. A lot of them were shot dead on the spot. He was here in the camp with a couple hundred of his people.

They all had black triangles: antisocial, work-shy. Imagine, people who had worked like horses, who had turned their village with its hovels and muddy fields into a fabulous vast farm, who knew better than anyone in the whole world the meaning of community, a community of workers and peasants, and working for that community, labeled here as antisocial.

What did it matter what kind of triangle you wore here, how you were appreciated here?

“Look around at all the people imprisoned here,” the Russian continued. “Most of them are Polish, with those red triangles with a P on them—political prisoners—but I guarantee you that 90 percent are black marketeers, or that their political activities were at most stupid statements they made when drunk. The Germans with a red triangle are more likely to be real political prisoners. Some of them have been imprisoned for ten years, but there aren’t many here. Most of them are already dead anyway. Then you’ve got the Russians, who, as I said, mostly have black triangles. In reality they’re actual political prisoners, because their refusal to work was a political act. The worst scum are often the greens. If the triangle is pointing up, they’re Berufsverbrecher, professional criminals. Pointing down means an occasional criminal. In the camps they get to lord it over the others. As Lagerälteste, some of them have the deaths of hundreds of fellow prisoners on their consciences. But that, too, is all so random. I knew a German from Cologne who scattered political pamphlets from a plane in 1936—anti-Nazi of course. He was caught and they proved that he had accepted money from an illegal organization to pay for the printing costs. They gave him a green triangle—as a criminal. If he’d printed them at his own expense, it would have been a red triangle.”

Evening had fallen in the meantime and Hans needed to check upstairs for a moment. It was a large attic, sleeping three hundred, almost all of whom were lying directly on the cement floor. They were all Jews. A few days earlier a Jew had been caught urinating in a food bowl. Sometimes they weren’t allowed outside for half a day and this fellow had a bladder complaint and couldn’t hold it in that long. That was why a friend from a work block had brought a separate bowl for him, but those excuses weren’t accepted. They beat him black and blue and, as always, if one Jew had done something wrong, all of the Jews were swine. The Blockältester had seized the opportunity to move them all up to the attic, simultaneously making room on the lower floors for the Poles, who no longer had to sleep more than two a bunk.

The attic was a ghastly shambles: an unpolished cement floor, a leaky roof, and two small windows to provide fresh air to three hundred people. The men had to lie on the floor in their linen uniforms with one blanket for two men. In the daytime they jostled for a seat on a couple of rafters or had to stand because there were neither chairs nor tables. They had been living like this for five weeks now, as none of them were allowed to leave the block because of the scarlet fever.

All the sick prisoners from the entire block were crammed into a corner that was partitioned off with walls made of board. The filth was appalling. Still, there was an advantage to this, as they weren’t being trampled by the hundreds of others shuffling back and forth across the attic. But if a Pole or a Russian fell ill, all kinds of difficulties arose. Of course the patient would rather stay in bed downstairs than move up to the filthy sick corner, but sick prisoners weren’t allowed to stay in the rooms because of the risk of contagion. After all, you could never say in advance that a particular case of angina with a 104-degree fever was definitely scarlet fever. The patient would scheme a little with the Stubenältester, who in turn spoke to the Blockältester, and then, regardless of what Hans had ordered, the sick prisoner stayed just where he was. It was clear that he didn’t belong there from a hygiene point of view, but from the sick man’s perspective it was very understandable. In the attic he wouldn’t get any rest or fresh air, and would receive no more treatment than downstairs.

There were almost no bandages and even less medicine. For two days Hans was given thirty aspirins for 1,200 people. And with all these prisoners jammed in together, many of them fell ill. It had taken quite a lot of effort for him to get those thirty tablets. He’d had to go to Dering, the head of the Krankenbau.

The patients were lying in their corner. Several of them had a high fever and hadn’t been able to eat for days because their throats were so sore. There was a special kitchen for restricted diets attached to the Krankenbau, but to use it you needed a note from the Blockältester, who didn’t have time for things like that. Still, it was very stupid of Hans to complain to Dering the following day about the conditions and about the Blockältester hitting him.

At first Dering kicked up an enormous fuss, saying that a Blockältester hitting a doctor was a disgrace and an insult to the whole Krankenbau, but then the Blockältester himself joined them. They talked a little in Polish and Dering calmed down. He would investigate the matter further.

An hour later he sent for Hans again. “I see that you don’t have enough tact for this situation. You’re going back to the block where you first worked.”