Monday, Feb. 12, 1940

Winter fits the camp like death. The wood details trudge out and back; the snow commandos do their frozen dances. The cold makes the eyes water and then freeze as the tear leaves the socket. The uniforms grow stiff on prisoners who have never stopped moving and sweating. For all the dogs about, their turds never remain longer than it takes the nearest prisoner to clean them up, sometimes with their bare hands. The dogs sit on their haunches and seem to be smiling; the guards laugh. The entire camp seems to have one single, all-consuming drive—to stay warm.

Werner intrudes, enters my tiny office in the canteen with the vague apologetic motion of a debtor; there is something urgent in his manner.

“Your friend,” Werner says without further ritual.

I think for a moment.

“The boy, Braun,” he says. Werner is impatient. I wait. “He just barely made roll call this morning. We had to prop him up. I don’t think he’s going to make it tonight.”

I have not had the chance to see Pierre in over two weeks. He was weak then, and the prisoners who work with him in the greenhouse were doing his share of the work. We didn’t talk much. Talk seemed to tire him, so we didn’t even do a line or two of “Suppose.” I had nothing to give him.

“Of course,” Werner says with a shrug, “there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s plain the boy’s dying. Perhaps it might have been best to let him go to Hartheim with the others.”

“Ah,” I say. “I wondered how it was he didn’t.”

Werner shrugs. “We got Hohenberg’s people to mark him DIKAL—not to be shipped to another camp.”

“For me?” I ask. Werner turns aside. I examine what is not quite my surprise. One is always discovering something new in camp.

“For you both,” he says. More briskly, he says, “You want to see him? Better do it now.” He speaks like a man paying off a debt.

It takes me a few seconds, but I say, finally, “I can’t,” and Werner leaves. Then I start crying, but I tell myself that it’s more for me than Pierre; he can’t get into that place I’ve closed off. No one can, anymore. “Suppose” was for him, but it allowed me to think of possibilities, gave me my anchor back, and, after all, death in this place is catching.

The day passes slowly. I will linger in camp until evening roll call. Uhlmer, Lappus, and Huebner move about preoccupied by the rumored shifting of prisoners from Dachau and the Selektion. Jews will go to Poland as usual; Witnesses to who knows where. Huebner is still not saying what he will do when the Bibelforschers roll call—more consistently rumored now—will be made. It’s been a long time since the last one. I still think he will refuse the offer of the state. He has been like a real Christian who, lost, stops in a jook joint to ask for directions. If they empty some of the blocks, it can only be to refill them. Who’s next?

In winter the daylight speeds by, on its way to a longer night. The details march in singing to the music of the band, to Rosamunde, the air above them filled with vapor from their breath that trails out behind them. Some moan with the soreness of their throats and they try to muffle the slick slide of mucous that chokes them and produces the wracking coughs. They begin filling the ’Platz, as orderly as soldiers. I watch from the window as the roll-call officer speeds his people through the frozen ranks. I cannot see the place where Block 24 gathers. The prisoners stand like dirty blue-striped icicles. The roll-call clerks, SS, and block leaders, check off the numbers. The floodlights become brighter in the galloping darkness. The band falls silent. The prisoner clerks on the roll-call detail move from squad to squad where numbers are checked. With the sun gone, the wind hurtles through the Dancing Ground and the prayer of every man is almost written in fire in the blackness above them: Let everyone be present and accounted for.

The counters are back to the SS Stadie. Now I see why he looked so familiar; he is Karlsohn, and he is dressed for combat. He struts over to the roll-call officer, salutes, presents the papers the prisoner clerks have given him. The officer, too, is in war dress, as is a squad of soldiers. This, of course, is just in case they have to pursue a prisoner. A small truck, its exhaust uncurling white ribbons, idles nearby. Every roll call, everything is prepared for the Hasenjaged, the SS chase for escaped prisoners, the rabbit hunt. The officer barks at Karlsohn, and Karlsohn returns the salute, whirls away shouting at his squad. They leap into the truck and it shoots off into the ’Strasse. Twenty thousand men remain motionless under the lights. Their prayers haven’t been answered. Someone is missing.

We wait for the shots, but none come. I can see the men in the rear ranks closest to my window. They are shivering. The light from the moon, which is rising fast, glistens on the snot running from their noses. The evening meal will be late. I return to my office and unpack a box of canned snails and a box of Mahorca tobacco and some Yugoslavian cigarettes, Dravas. I arrange the little packets of salt and pepper Anna has put up for sale. The camp food has no seasoning and the salt and pepper are luxuries the men buy, or trade their socks for, or bread, or whatever else of value they have. The floodlights are still on, the prisoners still in ranks, I see, when I peek out the window again. The sirens haven’t gone off, which means the prisoner is presumed to be inside the camp. I can feel the hate in those still, frozen forms. Whoever is missing, though recovered tonight, might be found dead in his block in the morning, hanging from a beam in the shower. What melody can one find in such a sight? Which chords to use? The silence is frozen in place out there, and two hours have passed. Dieter Lange will be sending out for me soon; he doesn’t know I stayed. But now is not the time to close up and cross the ’Platz to the house.

There comes then, sharply through the frigid night, like a single trembling note, the sound of the truck. It skids off the ’Strasse and onto the ’Platz, stops before the roll-call officer. Karlsohn jumps out, salutes. The squad lifts a long bundle, a rope trailing after, out of the truck and dumps it before the officer. It is a body. The rope seems to be trailing from its neck. I hear my heart beating in my ears; it is so strong and steady that I think it must last forever. Same steady beat, like a drummer who knows the number’s going to be very long, with extra choruses. I know, though I cannot clearly see from my vantage point, that the body is Pierre’s.

“Achtung!” The roll-call officer roars angrily into the PA system. Men already at attention try to move their frozen bodies to a higher level of attention. “Caps off!” Twenty thousand men snatch at their heads, remove the battered striped berets. “Caps on!” Another storm of motion and the caps are on again. “Absperren!” The floodlights wink off. I hear the prisoners’ footsteps pressing haphazardly over the creaking snow. In the moon-lightened darkness the men mill about to see who was brought in. They surround the body. There is sudden movement. Can they be kicking him? Him, who made them stand two hours in freezing cold, perhaps miss their evening meal, and go hungry to their blocks?

I turn out the canteen lights and slip on my jacket, and as I go carefully down the iced steps, Werner comes slowly toward me. “It’s the boy,” he says. “He hanged himself in the back of the greenhouse.” Werner walks with me to the body. In the light falling across the front of the Dancing Ground from the Wirtschaftsgebaude, and in the moonlight, I see Pierre’s face is frozen in a massive, final, twisted tic. The rope has disappeared halfway into the flesh of his neck. Spit and gobs of snot reflect bits of moonlight. I wipe it off with my sleeve. The prisoners would have spit on Jesus. And so would I.

“Well …” Werner says.

I say nothing. What’s there to say?

“They’ll be coming to take him to the morgue.” He sighs, turns, and walks toward his block. I kneel beside Pierre to finish wiping him off. Suddenly there is someone beside me. I look up. It isn’t Werner. It’s Willy Bader. He unties the rope, straightens Pierre’s arms along his sides. I hear the creak and roll of the wagon and the stomp-warming feet of the men assigned to pull it. Bader waves them away when they are upon us. We move to the head. “I go with you,” is all he says. The Koppeln huddle together. “Where do you go?” they ask.

Bader glances at me and I tell him, “Baracke X. What’s the point of the morgue?” Bader tells them what I’ve said. They tell Bader to bring the wagon back to the morgue, the Totenkammer. We lift Pierre and place him carefully into the wagon, then slip ourselves into the harnesses. We pull through the protesting snow. The wagon, the Moor-Express, is ten times heavier than Pierre. We struggle down the ’Strasse, then turn and go past the disinfection hut, the rabbit hutches, the gardens, the greenhouse, and through the gate to the crematorium. We are sweating when we arrive. Bader speaks in a low voice to the commandos, who look at me and nod. After, Bader guides me out, back to the wagon, and we pull it to the morgue. “Good night,” he says. I shake his hand.

Mon., April 15, 1940

The kids move unsteadily about the house, Lily’s and Ursula’s. But the war’s really all people care about now that the army has taken Denmark and part of Norway. Already we’re getting cases of sardines and Danish cookies; already Anna’s got maps of Copenhagen to study. Goebbels is on the radio all the time now.

I am here in my clean uniform, serving coffee and cake, but I seem to be watching them from that secret place that’s just mine, like a place at the bar between sets the bartender shoos people away from. “That’s Cliff’s spot, man.” I mean, I see them and they see me, but I am really far away, in my own spot, seeing them through mirrors. I can’t say what I see, but it is something so bad it makes me sweat and think of the evil Loas: Agarou Tonnerre, Babako, Bakula-Baka, Ogoun Badagris, and Baron Samedi, who is the Loa all Loas do business with at the end. They will claim all these women and all their children forever and ever.

And I hear in these women’s voices, behind their cooings and cluckings, the pretentious tones of plantation wives or jailers’ wives. Miss Ursula, Miss Anna (“Gott! Gott! Mein Gott!”), I’ve heard your wet sounds, your cocaine sighs, your schnapps-sick moans. Is an asylum any different? Here you are in your pretty print dresses, in your pretty pink-and-white houses, but your husbands wear black (death) uniforms and brown (shit) shirts.

This morning, as we waited for the garbage truck to come down the street, I saw Gitzig. He waved and came over. Up and down, calfactors were taking out the garbage or ladders to begin the spring cleaning—windows, porches, outside walls. Some were tending the flower beds to ready them for blooming. The air was warm and soft for April, and the sky was blue.

“You don’t look so good,” Gitzig said.

I shrugged. What was there to say?

“This spring, it will go,” he said.

“The war? I thought it was going already.”

“Not the way it’s going to go,” Gitzig said.

Of course, he wanted me to ask what was really going on, so he could tell me how much he knew and how he was involved in it. Instead I said, “That kid is starting to look more and more like you, Gitzig, lover man, Gitzig.”

He turned and looked up and down the street. “Do you really think so, Pepperidge?”

“So,” I said. “Blackjack. It is yours.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m with Bernhardt, I turn and catch him studying me. And I think, He knows. Lily wouldn’t tell. He just knows.”

“Shit,” I said, “if he wants her to tell, he can make her. You know that. But the little fucker looks just like you.”

“It really shows through, Pepperidge?”

“To me, yes. From the first time I saw the kid. But I got different eyes than white people, you know.” I wanted to put him at his ease, but he was already nervous. He wasn’t talking about no love now. “What’re you doing these days, Gitzig? You haven’t asked me to take anything to Werner lately.”

“That’s because I heard you and Werner don’t talk too much now. What happened? You want to tell me?”

Tell him Werner packed my coal in exchange for a favor for Pierre? Why? How could that help me? Maybe Werner’s nature turned on him. Maybe that pussy at the Puff was just too worn out for him. Who knew, shit, who cared anymore? Yet I felt that since I knew Gitzig’s secret, he wanted one of mine in return. In jail everything was up for Valuta, trade-price, exchange, barter. Valuta was also insurance: If you tell on me, I’ll tell on you. That way, no Verzinken, no betrayal.

“Never mind, Pepperidge. I can guess. The Reds are just like everyone else.” Gitzig patted my shoulder. “It’s okay. What am I doing? It’s like being back in Leipzig, back in the business again. I’ve been working on ration books and foreign money—counterfeit—because Bernhardt has to get his. So all this is for Denmark and Norway, and already being put to good use there, you know. Soon, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France.” Gitzig offered me a Players. “I do good stuff, Pepperidge. Looks and feels like real. The Swiss eat it up. I can make Bernhardt rich, so what if his wife has my baby? He doesn’t love her. He loves money. All these cock-suckers are like that. It’s the money. So, more countries, ration books, and money; bet your bottom pfennig on that. I think I’ll be around for a while. In the outside world, Bernhardt would be nothing next to me. All he is now, like the rest of his pig SS-SD-Gestapo, is a goddamn crook in a uniform.”

Gitzig was shuffling around like a boxer in his corner. A taste of the good life had changed him, put some fight in him and took out the rat. The good life and love. I didn’t imagine that Gitzig had spent any time lately with Lily if Bernhardt suspected anything. Maybe that’s what got him steaming. I hoped he wouldn’t get reckless.

The garbage truck was not far away now, and Gitzig went back to the front of the Bernhardt house. The street was jumping and voices called out. Shit. It was spring and it was getting warmer, and you didn’t have to split wood or bring in coal or coke and take out the ashes anymore, and the German army was crushing everything in front of it.

Sun., June 23, 1940

“Es blitz!”

“Blitz Schnell!”

“Blitzkrieg!”

It was on the radio two hours ago. The French have signed an armistice with Germany. The “Blitz” did it. Zing, whing, bam, boom, and it was the English into the sea, the Belgians, Dutch, and Luxembourgers on their knees in the middle of bomb-blasted cities, then “Blitzkrieg!!” around the Maginot Line and voila! France fell over as though it was a cow hit on the head with a sledgehammer.

Could all the food have gone to the army? There seems to be a shortage in camp. Which is good for Dieter Lange’s new brand, Krieger. He had the labels printed in Munich. Not like these regular store labels that look so cheap. We pasted his labels on the outside of mayonnaise jars and put the stuff inside—cabbage soup, beet soup, turnip soup. The new label with the big blond warrior-Viking assures the prisoners that the stuff is okay, 100 percent Aryan. Have to be careful with the Krieger brand, though. It’s not approved by the camp director’s office, and it’s not too tasty. But they move when there’s a shortage of food, and as Dieter Lange says, our prices are right. Next, we’re going to try chicken soup, but that’s going to cost. Dieter Lange has to hire some women out on his father-in-law’s farm to kill, clean, and cook the chickens. Women who can be trusted. Or who’re just plain dumb. There’s already the payoff to various guards in charge of the prisoners who move the stuff.

The details that march out to the civilian plants, though, eat okay. Can’t have those prisoners falling out on the job in front of civilians while they’re making guns and plane, truck, and tank parts.

Dieter Lange and Anna have been arguing all weekend. He has to go to Paris. He wants to see how many goods he can reroute from Les Halles to his canteens in the Bavarian camps. She wants to go with him. I can’t imagine Anna walking along the Champs-Elysées. Anna Lange? All that money must be burning a hole in her pockets. Dieter Lange’s, too. Of course, Anna won. She will go with him.

The Dancing Ground was filled with prisoners taking the sun earlier today, taking the sun and exchanging news about the war. Will England be next? How long will that take? Between a couple of the blocks a small group of prisoners listened to a flute player. The man was doing Bach, what else, and he made me think of Ernst. I watched the man lipping and breathing into that battered, tarnished instrument with such love I could have cried. Some of the prisoners did. Once I looked up and in one place the sky seemed bluer than anywhere else, like there was a hole in it. I watched the hole in the sky and listened to Bach. And for just one minute, things weren’t so bad.

Huebner was not in the canteen today.

Thursday, July 11, 1940

They think I don’t know. They talk in low voices around the table when I’m not in the kitchen, and when I’m there, they hardly talk at all. I could put the pieces together for them, but they still wouldn’t know what’s really going on, because they aren’t supposed to. No one is.

Last Saturday, after two days in the Punishment Company, Gitzig was taken to the rifle range and shot dead—after they had made Hackfleisch out of him. On the range they tied him to a post and began shooting from his feet up.

Just before dawn Sunday morning, Lily Bernhardt, carrying her baby, was led to a cottage beyond the rail sheds and was strangled from a rafter. It was hot in the shed. They just tied a rope around her neck while she cried, drew it tight, and pulled it over a cross beam. In the blocks they did that very slowly. The prisoner sweated and the SS called the strangling a “sauna.” They placed the baby in Lily’s arms and put a rope around its neck, too. Gitzig was buried, Lily and the baby cremated. Different places, different times, of course. That bothered me like a sticky piece of lint on a dark suit, because, maybe, Lily and Gitzig and their baby might have been the most natural, the most—somehow, in some way—honest accident to happen here. Lily, fragile, birdlike, and unloved, pushed out of the nest Bernhardt was crowding with his women (of which, besides Anna, there were many, as befitted his station), kept bumping into Gitzig and must have seen something no one else ever saw in him, and then things happened. How? When? Did Gitzig ever confess to adding ingredients to the iced tea and the tapioca? Later, how did she tell him the baby was his? But she must have told him. And then he told me. The fool was happy! What did she tell Bernhardt when he asked about that baby? What was his response? How patient a man he must have been. Having horns grown on his head by the ugliest prisoner Dachau must ever have seen only made him more reserved. It was money he was after, I guess, not prestige. Revenge must have been an orderly thing, scheduled in due time, when Gitzig had finished his cataloging, his engraving, had in fact finished his life, which he was realistic enough to have guessed, no doubt.

Ah, but there was the question of Lily’s revenge. How many people stand up to an SS colonel with the kind of story she had to tell? Not to tell it was never her plan, I bet. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with poor Gitzig.

Colonel Fritz Bernhardt transferred to Lyon. All that the Langes know is that Bernhardt is there and Lily, the baby, and Gitzig the calfactor are gone. They do not have my grapevine. But they can guess. Dieter Lange hopes he is now safe from those nasty whims of Bernhardt’s; Anna breathes a bit easier, too, even if she’s still got the itch for him. Women seem to go for dangerous men like him.

My news came from the Reds with their contacts inside the Punishment Company, the rifle range commando detail, the crematorium commando, and so on. I’d bet bottom dollar that Bernhardt knew all along about his wife and Gitzig, but he needed Gitzig then. Poor Lily. I suppose there was no place for her to run to. I’m just happy Bernhardt is a jazz music freak. And that he liked Anna well enough to leave us all alone—her, Dieter Lange, and me. Well. The Langes can guess, or just make it their business not to know. Ain’t none of my business anyway.

So when Dieter Lange finally gets me alone and says, “Bernhardt’s transferred to France. His wife is gone and his servant’s gone and his house is closed up. What do you think of that?”

I say, “Is that so? He’s in France? Everybody wants to go to France these days. And Gitzig, where could he be, what could he be up to? Surely, something with Bernhardt, wouldn’t you say?” But I can’t fool Dieter Lange; he knows I know something, but he doesn’t know how to make me tell it.

“They say he’s divorced his wife,” he says, “and had his man sent to Buchenwald. Might talk too much here, you know.” Dieter Lange sighs. “Anyway, we won’t have to walk on eggshells around here now. A transfer may be a good thing for Bernhardt’s career.” Yeah, I’m thinking, and for yours, too. Not good having too many crooks working out the same kitchen, especially if one is cooking your wife all the time, and you know it but don’t want to do anything about it.

Anna is more direct when she gets me by myself. “He could be a mean man, Fritz Bernhardt. He could hurt you. Well, you know. Look what happened to those people who tried to get you away.” Anna rolls her eyes. “True, he may be in France, but I believe that’s only to get ready to do in England what he did in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, but worse! And if anything’s happened to Lily, I don’t want to know about it.” She looks at me hopefully, as though I might say something. But that’s not going to happen. Not in this life. “Do you believe he divorced her?” I shrug. “Was there anything going on between Lily and that Gitshit? C’mon. You talked with him. He was your friend. He nursed you when you were sick that time, remember?” I shrug again. “Just as well Bernhardt’s gone,” she says. “He wasn’t coming around too much. Busy, he said. And things, well, they changed.”

Tuesday, Nov. 12, 1940

Listen to Goebbels and the Germans are kicking England’s ass; listen to the BBC and the English are kicking Germany’s ass. One thing for sure, though: English cities are catching hell, so everyone believes Goebbels. They think maybe the invasion of England is on the way, or better, that England will quit like France. The Germans would like the war to be over. They don’t understand why the English won’t quit.

Not quite two weeks ago the English bombed Berlin for the first time. At night. You would have thought a colored man walked into a meeting of Kluxers and punched one in the jaw the way the Germans carried on. What did they expect? Then, two nights after that, the English came again.

This past Sunday Hitler spoke on the radio. He swore to destroy English cities, burn them to the ground. Huebner is now in Mauthausen, working in the quarry with other Witness details. Each such commando lasts about four months. Then the SS marches them right off the top of the quarry. Splat. Splat, splat. Huebner was a good man, but good don’t count for shit in these camps. Anyway, you were okay by me, Huebner.

Yesterday after the noon meal, a bunch of Poles were lined up on the Dancing Ground. Lappus said they were officials. They looked scared. I’m sure they would have traded the “P”S on their uniforms for anything else just then. They formed up after a roll call and marched north on the ’Strasse. To the northeast of the camp is the swamp, and mostly Jews work that detail. The Poles weren’t going out there to help the Jews. Beyond the swamp is the rifle range, the Schiessplatz, where prisoners are shot. The Poles marched north, and we waited for the sound of gunshots to carry back to us on the wind. We always waited, but because of the distance and the way the range was built—halfway down into the ground, what they called a Kugelfangen, a bullet catcher—we didn’t always hear the gunfire.

While we waited, the first French prisoners climbed down from the freight cars that had been pushed onto the siding near the southeast side of the camp. They straggled to the quarantine hut. If Pierre were alive, he’d give them uniforms that had been deloused and had “F”S sewn on them. (The pieces go out, the pieces come in, and all they amount to are lots of dead men.)

Thursday, April 24, 1941

It started Monday. A big Svina Exkursiona, the prisoners call it, was set for Tuesday and Wednesday. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was to visit.

Visits by the big shots, even SS big shots, are good, because no one gets beaten or killed just before, during, or after them. And the food isn’t bad, either, even though the prisoners don’t get the pigs that are always slaughtered just before the big shots are shown into the prison kitchen. On the other hand, the camp has to be made spotless to give the impression that prisoners always live so neatly and are always so clean.

The rain started Sunday night, and on the way into camp Monday morning I could see mud and puddles, and I knew the canteen and the blocks would be filthy by the end of the day. How were things to get cleaned and stay clean until after Himmler’s visit?

The same as always. More ashes and dirt on the ’Strasse and the ’Platz. Shoes off at the door of the blocks, the canteen, all the buildings. It rained all day Monday, into the night. After dinner, Dieter Lange said I should do things around the house on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Himmler’s pig visit would be over by noon Wednesday. This was just in case one of the officers wanted to show off and be cute with the Schwarze Amerikaner. I have to say that sometimes Dieter Lange does try to keep me out of harm’s way.

Tonight he told me and Anna about the visit and how Loritz and his staff stood out there in the rain in the middle of the ’Platz until Himmler’s car, with the license plate SS 1, drove up. This was after Himmler had inspected the SS guards near their barracks. From time to time I threw a small log into the porcelain stove to knock off the damp chill. Anna began to snore softly. Dieter Lange shrugged and continued with his cognac. Himmler came and Himmler went, the shrug said. Of course, he wasn’t one of the big shots in camp, so he missed a lot of what was going on. As usual.

But he had always understood, and so did I, that the things he did he could only do because no one paid much attention to him as long as he did his job. He helped out the SS kitty and his own pocket, of course. And he was going to Paris to see what else he might do to fatten his wallet.

I hate going downstairs when the weather is damp and cold like this, and Dieter Lange and Anna hate going up to their room, but at least they have each other to stay warm by. Dieter Lange thinks Himmler came to look over the problem with space. Germany invaded Greece and Yugoslavia on the 6th, so here we go with more pieces.

Fri., May 16, 1941

Dieter Lange and Anna are due to return from France tomorrow. They have been gone a week. Somebody put a bug in Dieter Lange’s ear that they should go before the middle of June because he just might be busy soon after. He told me this one day while we were rearranging the attic for more space. (The cellar, which now has a strange smell, could not hold even a straight pin, it’s so full.) He looked worried when he told me. “The pieces,” he muttered. “The more they capture, the more pieces to feed.” He grunted. “And the more money to make. But where can I put it all, where? Where to put it.” Then he said, “Now Laufen, now Tittmonig, the pieces …” He was talking to himself and moving the cans and jars and links of dried meat as though they were checkers or chess pieces.

I know that parts of Dieter Lange sometimes fly away from him like crazy notes break out from keys you never intended to touch. His life is too much for him. He was a small-time hustler, pimp, faggot, but through the SS he’d become much more: the canteen supply officer for at least thirty camps for which, to which, and through which he has to “move the pieces.” He has to keep two sets of books (one for the authorities and one for himself) and watch the prisoners who work for him or have them watch each other. What he needs is a colored jazz musician who owes his life to him in each of the thirty-odd canteens in his charge, not just me in Dachau.

Like everyone else, Dieter Lange now prefers Witnesses. Next to a colored musician, they’re pretty good workers. But they don’t last long. They are among the fastest moving “pieces.”

I’m glad the Langes went to Paris again. I thought it might be good for Dieter Lange. He might run up on a solution for moving and hiding his money, which I bet my last dollar is what’s really worrying him. I don’t want him to get sick or go nuts. If I am going to live, I need his help. No Dieter Lange, no Clifford Pepperidge.

Half of this week I spent in the canteen going over the stock and records. I can always eat the canteen food, the good stuff that Dieter Lange and me keep hidden from Uhlmer and Lappus. The problem was the bathroom. The Reds didn’t want me to use theirs and neither did the Greens, who weren’t far away. Both thought I should pay—with cigarettes or canned food or sweets—just to take a shit or a piss. They didn’t used to mind so much, but now everything is so crowded.

The nights with their floodlights and train-rolling, the banging sounds, the occasional shot off in the distance, the “sporting” on the ’Platz when the guards made some poor prisoners run around and roll on the ground while dogs snapped at them for hours on end, could not bring deep sleep. I never spent a night in the canteen without thinking of the time they brought in Pierre’s body.

The rest of the week I spent at the house, cleaning, gardening—and playing for hours at a time. The piano is way out of tune; sounds spongy and the pedals are too loose. But I played. Not trying to work out anything. Just keeping close.

Something’s going on. It’s like before the invasion of Poland. No trains have come into camp carrying new prisoners; they arrive empty and go out filled with finished factory work, rifles, and parts for all kinds of things I don’t know a damn thing about. Those trains pull out two and three times a day, and the prisoners who work in the factories go around the clock in three shifts. The guards whisper among themselves. Piles and piles of new prisoner uniforms have been uncrated, so we all know the camp will get even more crowded.

Tuesday, June 24, 1941

Oh, shit!

The Reds are in as much of a stew as they can be without drawing too much attention to themselves. Germany invaded Russia on Sunday and, according to the radio announcer, is roaring unmolested through it like some ancient Teutonic giant. For everybody it must be like doing a crazy solo in a great big band with row upon row of brass, reeds, and sidemen doubled up everywhere. When will this solo end? How many more bars to go? What, another chorus? What, another and another and another …? No coda in sight? Another bar of a melody that none of the prisoners wants to dance to anymore (though they must, of course)? When does this blues piece end? ’Cause that’s what it is, a blues to end all blues, your soul getting soggy and coming apart like bread in water. Can’t put no name on these blues. But the people who ain’t prisoners like it, the SS and the civilians in the factories and warehouses between the compound and the camp. Everywhere you can hear German marches and Germans marching—in the camp, outside it, over the radio and the public address systems. Oompah-bah! Oompah-bah! Crash! Cymbs! A roll of snares! Trumpets! Bugles! Trombones! Kettle drums! Bass drums! The Germans in their various uniforms. Even coal miners have them.

Every prisoner who enters the canteen has a story. “Russia falls in three weeks,” says one, a Green.

“Ah, no,” says an old Red, one who will be going East to help finish some new camps in Poland. “That symphony won’t be played again, not this time.”

German Greens and Blacks stand up the most for the German army, which “drove the English into the sea, trampled the Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Poles, and French. Germany will extend from the Seine past the Volga.”

“And you’ll still be a child-molester!”

Rumor and gossip and argument and sometimes fact meet in the canteen like people in a train station, but the weight of fact shadows the movements of the 20,000 slaves and their 500 SS guards: The French did give up and the English took a helluva bath, and the hope that they together—or singly—would kick Hitler’s ass and see us released just “durch den Kamin fliegen gehen,” just went up the chimney like the smoke from another burning cadaver. For whatever the Reds feel or want, how can the Russians, who so quickly sold out almost two years ago, defeat a blitzkrieging army that at this very moment is practically at the main highways to Moscow and Stalingrad and Leningrad? Never mind that the English are still raiding the north with their planes and bombs.

“Stalin bought time!” some of the Reds now argue.

“And divided the East with Germany! Naive! Crooked! And now the devil’s getting his due!”

“Trotskyite!”

At home they shouted at me for breakfast the other morning, like I was some kind of slave. (As much as we’d done together.) Made me mad, but I brought it on myself; they got used to this old coon doing his Sambo show with the cooking and serving, just to keep his ass out of, if not the oven, another camp or even, if you want to put lick-back-to-lick, this camp, on the other side. I spoiled them, and now they need me. Wasn’t that what the old coon wanted? Yeah, man, it was, and I do live, and not badly, either, while a whole lot of other folks have kicked the bucket, gone up the chimney, got shot while escaping, taken the “Fantomas” to Hartheim. So I don’t complain. I just get mad.

For Dieter Lange the war in the East means problems, complications, the movement once again of the Stücken. But he’s at least in a better mood since he and Anna returned from Paris. I imagined them there: Dieter Lange in his SS black or gray, his black boots and all that pigeon shit they wear on the collars, his cap, his figure tall and getting thick, his hair graying, his faded blue eyes trying to appear nonchalant instead of tired, cunning, and trapped, his stride slow and careful, not calling attention to itself; and Anna in a flowered dress, girdled, her face made ruddy with rouge and powder, those carefully watched haunches rolling against the restraints. How wonderful Paris must have seemed. I’m sure the French hated them.

Dieter Lange brought back news: Ruby Mae is supposed to be in Portugal. Willy Lewis got to Switzerland. Freddie Johnson is in a camp here in Germany. Josephine Baker is still in France. Django Rheinhardt is playing constantly. Bricktop’s been gone since a month after Poland. We laughed because we knew that was the second time the Germans had sent her packing. So, I thought as he was giving me the news, he got around. Probably told Anna he had business. I wonder how she spent her time on this visit.

The “hot” stuff back home, Dieter Lange told me, was “Cotton Tail” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” both Ellington pieces, and “Brazil” and “That Old Black Magic.” For a while, while Anna visited Ursula, we put the Eastern Front on the shelf and played the records he’d brought back and drank and talked of Paris and Berlin, which they’d visited on the way back. There are bomb shelters there now.

He ran up to the attic and came back with a sweet-smelling box. “For you,” he said, and opened it. Lingerie, dangerous-looking stuff, too.

“I never wore that,” I said. I fingered it; it was soft and smooth. It almost whispered.

He smiled, closed up the box. It was clear he was going to keep it hidden upstairs. “First time for everything,” he said.

I said, “Yeah, well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

He acted like he hadn’t heard me.

Sunday, Aug. 3, 1941

I hear Hohenberg got caught with a Junge. In one of the storage rooms in the Wirtschaftsgebaude. Everything works until you get caught at it. Hohenberg had a group of Pinks who worked in his office, and everyone knew why, but enough got to be enough; Hohenberg got to have too much power, even for a German inmate. They say Karlsohn caught them. His name ought to be Hurensohn, whore’s son. Caught them like salamanders riding each other in a pond. Well. I never thought much of Hohenberg after he tried to take advantage of Pierre. Even after he arranged for Pierre to work in the greenhouse I didn’t like him, because Werner was the man who really arranged it. So Hohenberg has the usual six o’clock Kalter Arsch appointment tomorrow with the end of a rope. He will march out to the sad playing of the sorry-assed band to become another cold ass. Dead. They might as well order us to stop breathing as to stop fucking each other. They know that. It’s just that this time Hohenberg is that periodic reminder.

If Uhlmer is supposed to be watching me, he doesn’t have the time, any more than I have to watch him. The war in the East means work: more inventories to keep for the camp and for Dieter Lange; more timetables to move goods from his storage in Munich and his father-in-law’s farm; more bribes to pay to guards, drivers, and people I don’t even know about; more Krieger products to slip between the approved stuff. The new prisoners from France, Belgium, and Holland haven’t yet grown used to prison food. What money they have they spend for our soups, the salt and pepper bags, the bootleg cookies and candies. When they run out of the packs of cigarettes, they buy the little bags of mixed tobacco and dried lettuce leaves we also sell. Uhlmer must be doing pretty well; his uniform’s always clean and neat, and he always wears socks. But he could say the same for me or for Lappus, who, though not as well turned out as us, certainly doesn’t dress like the average prisoner. Lappus is still nice to people. Uhlmer has been acting like a capo. He will, like Hohenberg, hang himself, and I will be more than happy to help.

More doctors have been sent here. The prisoners have built a foundation for something huge that was rolled up and set between Blocks 3 and 5, and the doctors are recruiting more prisoners to work in the Reviers. At first there were volunteers. I can’t figure what was offered to make anyone here think that volunteering would be good for them. Nobody ever saw the volunteers again. The SS say they were sent home, just like they (the SS) said they’d be. But now everyone who comes into the canteen believes that as far as the doctors and that thing between the blocks are concerned, the air is getting thick, dangerous, Dicke Luft, especially with the rumors of what’s going on with Jews in the East, where more and more of the older prisoners are being sent to work with engineers. Why are only Jews being sent East? Hi-de-hi. If it’s only Jews, then it’s got to be bad. Every prisoner goes the other way when he sees the clerks and doctors from the Infirmary strolling up and down the ’Strasse or the ’Platz.

“Wer ist an unserem Ungluck schuld?” the Jewish capo shouts. “Who caused all our misery?” The guards watch, smiling, as the Jews march out to work, and later march back. The marching call is always the same. The marching Jews, in step, shout back “Die Juden! Die Juden!” (Left, right, left.) Sometimes I think I can hear a strange echo, when the answer could be “The Negro! The Negro!” Then the Jewish columns run into SS guards, whose day isn’t complete until they shout “Dir gefallt es hier? Was?” The guards ask because the Jews have insisted on living. “Do you like it here?” In other words, “Aren’t you dead yet? Damn you, die!” Then I think of a long broken column of men who are Negroes.

Everyone’s saying the doctors working in that thing are doing experiments. Mostly on Jews, Gypsies, Pinks, and Blacks.

Sat., September 13, 1941

So it’s taken longer than three weeks. It’s not over in the East. So what? There’s not a guard or prisoner who doesn’t believe it soon will be. We saw the first Russian prisoners of war this past Monday. (No one knows why they were brought here, but everyone thinks it’s not good for them that they have been.) They say they were marched all the way from Russia after the first battles. They sure looked like it. They didn’t march, they staggered in, dirty, stinking, hungry, thirsty. The guards were hitting them and shouting, in Russian, “Bistro! Bistro! Bistro!” “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” and the Russian soldiers, an ugly shit-colored mass drifting toward quarantine, were calling out to anyone, “Please give me bread, please give me bread,” saying “bread” in both Russian and German so no one would miss the meaning. “Daj chieba, Brot, daj chieba, Brot.”

The prisoners who were on the Dancing Ground as the Russians passed, and who had with them a crust of bread, a cigarette butt, a half-rotten piece of fruit, passed these along as sneakily as they could. Some of them got caught and were hauled off to stand in chains against the Jourhaus wall until their own punishment could be selected.

I have to be more diligent about gathering writing paper. It seems to be getting scarce. Right now there’s plenty of glazed paper the SS sometimes allows prisoners to have for their windows in the winter. Since it’s just the end of summer, I managed to get a few rolls to store.

Dieter Lange came home late and woke me and Anna up and made us sit with him at the kitchen table. He slid some glasses to us and brought from a shelf a bottle of French cognac.

“Well, now we’re in the shit,” he said.

It was about midnight, and through the window I could see the gray mist slowly rolling down the street, blotting out the streetlights every once in a while.

“What’s the matter?” Anna asked.

Dieter Lange sighed. He had been drinking, a lot, before he came home. “We’ve got an SS Colonel and an SS General Major to deal with now. And it’s best you don’t know who they are. In fact, they warned me not to tell who they are.” He poured drinks for us. “They seem to know everything about us and about the business, your father included.” He sighed again.

“They want to—” Anna began.

“Improve things, Anna. That’s what they say.” He stared at her while she twirled her glass on the enamel tabletop. I drank and pushed my glass over for more. Sounded like the way gangsters back home did business. Just muscled their way on in. And the gangsters in Berlin, back in the days when I wouldn’t have looked twice at Dieter Lange, were just as bad. Maybe even worse.

Dieter Lange poured me half a glass and waited for Anna.

“Well …” she said. “Looks like they want to take over. Just how would it work? They’re not going to turn us in? What do they want? How much? When?”

“Starting now,” he said. “What we have we keep. We put back in that souvenir shit, they get us some cheap beer and alcohol, which they will have cut and mixed, and since Himmler’s about to make whorehouses in the KLs legal, we’ll control the Bordellschein. We just tell them what we need and they’ll see we get it.” Dieter Lange turned partly away from us. “They haven’t decided how much money they want from us. They have to look at the figures first.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “There was nothing I could do. These are Nacht und Nebel people; they can make you disappear in the night and fog. They are also Ploetzenee Prison people, where they’re invited to dinner after watching a few people lose their heads.”

“Let them have it all,” Anna said.

“That’s not the way they want it,” Dieter Lange said.

“They need a front,” I said.

Anna said, “How do they know?”

Dieter Lange shrugged.

Bernhardt, I thought. Part of a big plan to squeeze money out of turnips; maybe like Krupp or Siemens, a great big European company store for all the slaves. I didn’t mention this to Dieter Lange because, at least for the time being, he was, deep down, happy that he didn’t have to move the “pieces” by himself or lay his head on the block. And maybe he was already planning to turn over Anna and her father, if push came to shove.

The radio announced that Kiev had fallen with the capture of two-thirds of a million Russian soldiers. I can’t imagine such numbers. The BBC says only that the Russians have suffered heavy losses.

Did I tell you that they call that thing near Block 5 the Himmelwagen? A Dr. Rascher is doing research for the Luftwaffe on high flying. Pacholegg works for Rascher as a ward clerk. He’s an Austrian Red who was in Poland before coming here. Ghosts dance in his eyes. Pacholegg says the rumors about that thing are true. I know just a little about this Rascher. He lives in the SS compound with his wife, Nina, and their three children, all of whom were “born” when she was in her forties. This I told Pacholegg. It is common knowledge among the SS wives, Anna says, because half of them don’t want or can’t have kids. So they kidnap them or make deals through Lebensborn. A lot of these bitches can’t afford to point the finger at anyone else.

Pacholegg may let the ghosts dance in his eyes only when he talks to me, the way Gitzig used to, spilling out all his secrets. I don’t know why people do this with me. Is it because I’m an American, even if a Negro? Or do they look at me and see a witness? How can they know? Anyway, the Himmelwagen is a decompression chamber. The TPs, as Pacholegg calls them, are strapped into a parachute harness. “They give them a helmet, sometimes, so they feel like a pilot. Then they vacuum the air out of the chamber.” Pacholegg talks in a plain, low voice without emotion, as though from memory. “Then the Test Persons die. Horribly. While we watch and take notes. The TPs beat and tear at themselves, you know, pound on the walls and shout and scream. The pressure on the ear drums must be terrible. And their lungs are ruptured, you know. At 30,000 feet of pressure, they last thirty minutes; it’s clear that for only ten minutes are they functioning anywhere near normal.”

Pacholegg blinks, but the ghosts remain. “Once Rascher did an autopsy on a guy whose heart was still beating. He’d passed out from the pressure. That prick Rascher examined him quick, said he was almost dead, took him down, and cut him open. And watched the heart beat. I looked in there, too. It was like a wiggly little animal without skin.”

Pacholegg shudders. “Well, I’ve had it worse, you know, in the East, with Russian POWs, near Minsk.” He had been arrested in Vienna, then sent East to help build more camps. He says he knows nothing about the rumors of the shooting of thousands of Jews in Treblinka.

I light another cigarette for him, a real one, rich in dark tobacco, a French cigarette. Pacholegg tells how much the Germans hated the Russian soldiers for putting up such a fight, even as they were being defeated, and how the order came down to execute every Russian captured—as quietly as possible.

There was a large stone house in the woods—“a white birch forest,” says Pacholegg. It was an examination-interrogation center, they told the Russians. One by one the soldiers were led into a room—there were four rooms with high ceilings in the house. The soldiers were led forward to booths for questioning by German soldiers who asked the Russians their names, and as the Russians gave them, they were shot through the head by riflemen concealed in the ceiling. Each room was soundproof, so there were four at a time. Name? Bang! And ten minutes to clean up before the next group of four Russians came in for “questioning.”

I ask Pacholegg what he does at the Himmelwagen tests.

“What can I do?” he asks me. “I strap them in. I take notes. I clean up after, me and the other clerks and nurses. The TPs make a mess, you understand. After a while, you don’t mind so much death, you know.”

You wouldn’t think it, so slight a man, so scared-looking and quiet, like something under a rock you’ve just kicked over. He’s one prisoner who doesn’t mind having his hair cut so short all the time, because he’s afraid of lice.

Monday, Dec. 8, 1941

Balamabama! Whoampabam! It sounded like an explosion going off on the steps leading down to my room, or a fight. I couldn’t imagine what was going on. I almost did the number right in my underwear. I jumped up. First thing I thought was they had caught up with Dieter Lange and we were all going to the Bunker and maybe worse. Oh, that noise was flying down the stairs and my door flew open and Dieter Lange pulled my light string before I could. Anna was hunched up right under him. “Cleef! The Japanese bombed the American Navy in Hawaii! Come up and we’ll listen to the radio some more. C’mon.”

Upstairs Anna made some coffee. It was after midnight. Dieter Lange said the first reports had come in hours ago, but nobody believed them. “I thought when they said Tagesbericht! it had something to do with that BBC report of the big Russian counterattack,” he said.

“Do you know exactly where is Pearl Harbor?” Anna asked me, and I said no. I only knew Hawaii was somewhere out beyond California; it’s where the ukulele comes from. I put some wood in the stove. Dieter Lange looked worried one minute and confused the next. I wasn’t sure what I felt. Why would the Japanese attack America?

“So, Dieter,” Anna said. “What does it mean? Is it good or bad? Japan is—”

Dieter Lange interrupted her. “Japan is a German ally. Like Italy.” He shook his head and got up to pace. “No good. The Americans will come in now.” He stopped pacing. “Maybe good. End the war. We all go back to civilian life. Cleef goes home. We are all fine, after a while. So.”

“But there will be much more fighting, Dieter. It won’t be so easy to go back to civilian life.” Anna now seemed puzzled.

“And if the U.S. is in,” I said, “then I’m an enemy alien—”

“Things will be the same as now,” Dieter Lange said quite simply. “Exactly the same. You’ve been here so long under the PC warrant, I’m sure they won’t change your status, so forget that.”

We sat sipping the coffee and listening to the radio. Dieter Lange kept working the knobs, but there was nothing more. I thought of Pierre and smelled the sea and the rusty, stale odor of the wet steel of ocean liners. Inside, I think I smiled; inside, I thought I saw in both their faces, another shade of fear. And I was glad, the way you are when you know something, finally, is settled; the way you know that, when you play one note, another precise note must be played for the first one to make sense.

Wednesday, January 14, 1942

I am back. Hope left me. Just got up and hauled ass. Then the blues came stomping in like Dieter Lange drunk and looking for the booty. I just gave up. Beat. Tired of being a witness, a slave for the Germans; of the Langes, of the years, of the war, the whole fucking, stinking war; of the dying, of holding on to the best of the worst that has been my life. I never had the blues so long and so hard. Something was going on inside. Going on far away, down a long road overhung with big dark trees, something like a little kid you can barely see, he’s so far away. When I was feeling most blue, I could just see this child, and I guess I reached out, grabbed him, and held on until he grew bigger and closer and finally climbed back inside me. Here I am again.

I am always a big hit in the lingerie. For Dieter Lange and then Anna and Ursula. I looked better in it than any of them would have. It felt good, too. Anna and Ursula made up some new games for us.

I have seen a few more colored men in camp. It’s the strangest thing to notice a colored face sticking out among all the white ones. Stuck smack in the middle of all this white craziness. I don’t want to feel sorry for them. Sorry requires energy, giving up a little of yourself, whatever you can spare; maybe that’s what happened to me before; maybe it even makes you weak, I don’t know. But even strong white men are niggers here—until a colored face appears—and then, except for the Jews and Gypsies, no one else is a nigger anymore. Even so, the prisoners play the awful game with each other. Some of the latrine signs read: Nur für Polen; Nur für Französen; Nur für Ukrainishen, and so on. Might just as well be For Whites Only like back home. Anyway, these colored guys don’t look American to me. Something about them, some way they walk and gesture, some way they stare back at me. I feel no pull toward them, as I did with Dr. Nyassa and Pierre, but they weren’t Americans either; they were more than that and maybe, to them, I was, too. Shit. I know the only reason those men are here is because they’re colored. The only reason. Even so, it’s hard to keep up with anyone except the older inmates who haven’t been sent East. I know it’s important to have friends in a place like this, but I’m past that. A friend is just a piece to be moved or destroyed, and one way or another, they take you with them, or bits of you.

Some of the Blacks and Greens have been allowed to volunteer for the Russian front, even while the Russian soldiers keep staggering into camp. The SS used to laugh at prisoners who wanted to volunteer to fight. Things must not be going so good in the East. I heard from Bader that the people in Dachau town have been complaining about the sight of the Russian soldiers straggling through the streets, so trains will now be used to bring them directly into camp. Bader now has Hohenberg’s job and makes up the details that work for the civilian companies in the factories just outside the camp. I’m happy for him because I once heard he was going East. Bader’s a good source for news.

With the furnace going and windows closed in the winter, the smell in the cellar seems to be getting worse. I asked Dieter Lange to look around the storeroom and he said he had; nothing was spoiled. He didn’t know what the smell was. Leave him alone, he said. Mind my own business. So what if I have to sleep down there? That’s the way he went running off at the mouth, but I know what it is now.

While Dieter Lange and Anna were shopping in Munich, I opened the lock and pushed inside his storage space. It seemed to me that even the dried meat that was hanging there smelled awful. I found the place that smelled quite by accident. I’d gone through cartons and boxes and metal containers of crackers and biscuits. One more to check. It didn’t lift easily, and I thought, Uh-huh! I left it in its place and moved stuff from around it. Whew! I was growing afraid to open the tin when I’d cleared the area. I thought there might be a head in it or some other part of a body. I was shaking I was so nervous. When I shook the tin, there was a rattling sound, so then I knew there wasn’t a head. Why did I think that? In this place with these people, why not? Yet I didn’t want to think that Dieter Lange was so much like the rest of them. But what was in the tin that smelled so bad? I pried off the lid and turned away from the stink that shot out. I tipped the tin toward the light and the rattle became like stepping on deep-laid gravel. I held my breath and looked inside, but I couldn’t tell right off what was making the sound. I picked up a wood file and dipped it inside and brought out two or three dull-looking pieces of metal. I took them in my hand and looked at them; one was solid, the others hollow with ragged little wires on them. I rubbed them on my clothes. They got a little brighter, a little more … gold. I dropped them as soon as I realized what they were and what remained in the foot-high tin. Gold teeth! My first impulse was to jump, but something, I don’t know what, made that impossible. I just sat there, petrified. After a while, I picked them up and put them back inside the tin, then, with the file, I reached in and stirred the teeth, the bits of rotten flesh and bone. This was all that was left of 5,000 people? Ten thousand? I got up and went to my room and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke all around. Then I had another one. When I was finished with that one, I got some chlorine powder and poured it in the tin and shook it up and replaced the lid. A colored musician with a mouth full of gold or a diamond stuck in a tooth, like Jelly Roll Morton, wouldn’t have lasted long in this place. I put everything back and locked up the storage space. I could see Dieter Lange (and maybe his new partners) melting down gold teeth and fillings and stashing the brick away until it became safe to take it out. For a second I saw that little boy way down the road, but I made him come back where he belonged.

From now on there will be more free time in camp. Improve morale, get more work out of the slaves. That’s the word. And there is the whorehouse, sanctioned by Himmler himself. That’s to improve morale, too, even if it doesn’t hold down the spread of the clap and syph. This new place is bigger than the old Puff.

Radio London says the Russians claim they have trapped and are killing the soldiers of fourteen German and Rumanian divisions. Goebbels said on the radio, “What does not kill us makes us stronger.”

There is something about news like this that gives me a feeling like warm sun you can’t see because of the fog.

“So, Pacholegg,” I say when I see him and another Infirmary detail in a corner of the canteen where they are smoking and avoiding the other prisoners who come in. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.)

“So?” he says and turns away. I think this is because he doesn’t want the others to hear him talk about the work they are doing in the big black tank over there. Kohler, who has that same look in his eyes that Pacholegg has, looks the other way; Kohler has already told me about the other experiments. The more they are forbidden to talk about these nasty things, it seems, the more eager they are to do so—if they can do it without getting caught, of course. So Kohler doesn’t know that Pacholegg talks and Pacholegg doesn’t know that Kohler talks. And then there’s Neff.

I shrug and continue marking down the prices of the carvings the prisoners made for Christmas for the SS. If these don’t move within a week, back in storage they go until next Christmas. I pause right there. Who knows? There might not be a next Christmas in Dachau. Then, revenge. That’s why everyone wants names, and that’s why names and deeds are forbidden to be discussed. To hell with that. We all want revenge. It is like strong, hot soup with a tumbler of cognac thrown in.

We know what needs to be known. Rascher and his decompression chamber, Schilling and his malaria research for the Afrika Korps in North Africa—for this the Test Persons get inoculated with a serum, then they are shot to see if their blood has coagulated.

Neff, another Rascher orderly, works with the doctor on a second air force experiment, which makes it look like Hitler still imagines the Third Reich running from the Atlantic to the Urals, and from the Arctic to the equator. (Maps have appeared in camp and are marked, then whisked away again.) Neff’s work is on Arctic weather. Rascher wants to determine how much cold people can stand. “At first we just put people naked out in the cold behind the fence and splash water on them every hour,” Neff says with a shrug. “The test is nothing. Not controlled. We take temperatures at the start and at the end; then, if they’re not dead, we revive the TPs with warm baths.” He pauses. “But now we’ve got a big vat and a bunch of Russian TPs.”

“Why don’t you shut up?” Pacholegg says.

“Why don’t you make me?” Neff answers.

They’re up snarling and straining like dogs. I retreat to my cubbyhole. An old Red pushes between them, pats them on the shoulders, and shoves them off in different directions.

Something’s going around. I hear it whispered: Sonnenaufgang. It’s from the Reds and it means victory is coming over the German army and fascism. Maybe that’s why everybody’s so touchy. Hope. The possibility. A future where there wasn’t anything before. Don’t mess up, but start remembering the names.

Dieter Lange tells me that Goebbels and Baldauf have formed a big swing band, Charlie and His Orchestra, to play over Berlin Radio. For the morale of the military. Freddie Brocksieper plays drums. They play Gershwin, Dorsey, and Miller—and change the titles of the numbers. The Zazou Junge, the kid jitterbugs, are still raising hell in Hamburg, between visits by the British fliers who also like to say hello to Essen, Bremen, and Berlin, of course, as well as a few other places. Me and Dieter Lange listen to Charlie on the radio. Pooo … They’ve written in most of the ad libs. The music’s got as much swing as a wet firecracker. Not nearly as swinging as we were at the Pussy Palace.

Sunday, March 1, 1942

There are men in this place whose faces make you want to run away from them. But you can’t. You’re afraid to ask them what’s wrong. You don’t want to know more than you already do. But you do. You want to know if things are worse than you know they are or maybe a little bit better. You sometimes believe you know everything that’s going on but the camp with its blocks, factories, officers’ compound, SS barracks, and outside work areas are far too large now. Before, you could never know anything for sure; now it’s impossible.

Herbertshausen is now a Schiessplatz, too, but I never heard of it until Werner and Bader took me on a walk around the ’Platz yesterday. I knew there had to be some reason for it, because you don’t walk around the ’Platz in March unless the sun has made a mistake and come out. And for the past few days the sky has been gray, spitting snow and rain sometimes. It’s so gray that you begin to think that God’s doing something up there He doesn’t want you to see, or that maybe Loa Aizan has closed up and gone off on a binge. The only thing above that’s not gray is that curling smudge of black from the crematorium; when the weather’s like this, it flattens out over the camp and the smell drills through everything.

Werner and Bader, who now seem to be on speaking terms, probably because of whatever’s happening in the East, have heard that Laufen and Tittmoning have been designated ILAGs, internment lagers, or camps for enemy and neutral civilians. They told me they think I will be transferred to one of them. My heart jumped! But … wouldn’t Dieter Lange know how things work better than they do? Maybe, they said, but in case things did change, they wanted me to know that the SS is systematically killing the Russian prisoners. Well, everyone knows that. The Russians are mostly assigned to the quarry so they can die one way or the other. But they are so tough, many of them have made little hearts out of quarry stone, and they wear these around their necks to show the SS their hearts are just as hard. The prisoners call these guys Steinerne Herzen. The Germans know. Last fall, the SS lined up 6,000 at Herbertshausen and killed them all. The Reds in the Herbertshausen Sonderkommando who were allowed to live after the burials reported the shootings. Werner and Bader said they had no documents for this, but the graves could easily be found. Why do they tell me this? So that, if I did get transferred, I could pass along the word somehow. Would I do it? I said yes and hurried back to the canteen where it was at least warmer than outside.

Wednesday, March 25, 1942

Two weeks ago, there was the sound of trucks grinding through the streets of the compound. It had just turned dark and it was close to dinner time. I had left the camp early to work at home, and I was ready to serve dinner when the trucks came. There was a pounding on the door and someone calling for Dieter Lange. Up and down the street there was shouting. Dieter Lange does not like to be disturbed at dinner, but he jumped up and ran to the door. “What? What’s going on?” Whispering. “Oh! Oh!” Dieter Lange said out loud, which made Anna run to the door, too. More whispering.

I waited in the kitchen. I could see the headlights of the trucks, which were lining up one behind the other in the street, their engines running, the steam from their exhausts floating up the sky.

“Get dressed warm, Cleef,” Dieter Lange said when they came back. Anna was right up under him. “They need you people out here to help with the evening meal in camp.”

I asked what was the matter. He and Anna exchanged a look and he shrugged and said a lot of people were sick.

“From what?” I asked.

“They don’t know, but they don’t think it’s serious,” Dieter Lange said. He was now at the closet pulling out gloves and a thick scarf. Anna was chewing on her bottom lip. I knew it had to be something bad over in camp, like another epidemic. I never once thought they were going to take all the servants out and shoot us. The officers and their wives had gotten too used to us for that.

Anna jumped to the bread box and began slicing bread and hurriedly placed some bologna in between. “Boots,” she said to Dieter Lange, “he will need boots. And an old sweater, Dieter. It is very cold and still much snow.”

I went downstairs to dress, putting on two pairs of underwear, socks, and a lumber jacket I wore when I worked outside. I put my prison jacket over it. Beneath my cap I put on a hood I’d made from Anna’s old stockings. Then I returned upstairs and put on the boots. I shoved the sandwiches in my pockets and pulled on the gloves. “Try not to go near the prisoners in the blocks,” Anna said. Dieter Lange said nothing. But I knew if there was an epidemic over there, he would quickly find a trip again to take him away from here. I looked out the front-room window and saw the calfactors standing like statues in the road in front of the houses where they worked.

“Go. They’ll pick you up,” Dieter Lange said. Anna pulled her sweater tight around her and it seemed just then she was getting heavier.

I went out. There were lights on in all the houses along the street. Guards were shouting, the engines rattling and humming. “Get in the trucks. All prisoners, get in the trucks. Hurry, hurry!” The voice came over a loudspeaker. The guards, their long coats bouncing around their legs, pushed the servants into the first trucks and sent them off, and the next group and the next, until I was pushed in myself, out of the wind, which was steady and sharp, and bit through everything. “Hurry, hurry! You miserable, soft-life shitters, hurry up!” The trucks vibrated, creaked, and rumbled through the snow and ridges of ice. I noticed Captain Winkelmann standing at the front of the line of trucks. He seemed to be in charge of this business.

Guards at the back blew on their hands and lit cigarettes. “What’s going on?” someone whispered. “Typhoid,” someone else whispered. “Not again,” another said. “Yes,” still another said. “I work for one of the camp doctors. It’s typhoid all right.” So the talk went as the truck crunched over piles of frozen slush, skidded this way and that, and got up enough speed to rush through the Jourhaus gate, where the guards waved us across the roll-call yard, made bright as day by the floodlights. There the trucks slid to a stop, and we were bullied out of them and into formation. Men not dressed as warmly as I was began to shiver and softly stamp their feet. The guards shouted for silence and, with their leashed dogs bounding and snarling, herded us into two groups. I was resenting all the shouting, pushing, and cursing, the goddamn dogs, but I knew it was a luxury to get mad; the general population went through this several times a day. Who were we to get uppity when we all knew that a prisoner who let anger show got the crap beat out of him—and that was the mildest punishment!

Then we were trotting in formation up the steps into the kitchen in the Wirtschaftsgebaude. It was deliciously warm inside and smelled of food. We looked at each other and smiled. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. The prisoners who were wearing Holtzpantinen, wooden shoes, slipped, regained their feet, balanced themselves carefully, and continued to skate along the tile floors that were fast becoming wet and dangerous. Soon we were lined up before the long row of sparkling stainless-steel food containers hooked above ovens. Each container had a number, and they were huge! I wondered how many men it took to carry one. My group was broken down into three smaller ones, and mine was sent to stand before the container marked “29.” Twenty-nine! That was way at the end of the camp, the last block on the east side, if this was for Block 29! There were twelve of us, and I could now see that we would use long wooden handles to carry the container. These were six inches square and rounded at the places where they had to be held. Our eyes flashed and flickered from one face to the next. Six of us on each side, but could we lift, let alone carry, that huge, hot kettle of food?

“Bereit … heben …! Heben!!” Down along the ovens men were grabbing hold, fear and panic already plain on their faces. We, too, grabbed the handles at the command to lift, and tried to force the container up and away. It didn’t move. In shock, we glanced at each other once again. I was sweating from fear and too many clothes. Up the line, out of the corners of our eyes, we saw the SS start down, beating, punching, kicking, and suddenly men who only a moment before couldn’t lift their containers freed them from their places above the ovens, and began staggering toward the doors. As the guards approached, we got our vat off its hooks and began sliding, skating, stumbling toward the doors being held open by the guards. They popped us with their clubs as team after team scampered out and steam leaped from the containers into the night sky. There were only two steps to climb down, but they might have been twenty feet apart as we maneuvered down, wheezing, whining, and panting. Behind us, as we gained the ground, we heard a cry, more cries, of anger, despair, and fear, then shouts followed by the bang of metal on the concrete steps, and soup came washing down under our feet, but we hadn’t stopped. The dropped container banged once or twice more and then its sound was lost among the curses and screams of men, and the barking of dogs.

Before us we saw, and behind us we heard, these curious beasts shuffling and clomping and moaning, all the legs and the bright metal containers reflecting the lights of the ’Platz where we were slide-skating toward the ’Strasse, a guard at each end of the pole. We struggled to hold the container high enough to keep it from bouncing on the ice and snow. It seemed to take an hour to cross the roll-call square. My legs trembled. Someone behind me was crying (I was the second man on the left pole) and someone else kept saying, with each step or slide, “Oh, oh, oh.” The men at the front and rear positions were easy targets for the guards. It helped not to look up, to just somehow in the dark feel the steps of the man in front of you and match your own to his, to find your own music to struggle to. So unless we caught one of the blows, we only heard them land, followed by the muffled reactions of the prisoners. “Ow!” “Oh!”

There seemed to be three teams in front of us, judging from the SS shouts and curses and the reactions to them, but most of the teams were behind us. Our efforts, the dying heat from the containers, and our fear brought the sweat to our bodies like sheets of warm water. Our clothes would freeze on us. I called my legs back from going off on a solo. We couldn’t stop to wipe away the sweat. I tried not to feel or think. I felt the weight biting down in the side of my neck, then my shoulder. I felt we’d gone another hour, but when I glanced up, I saw we were just passing the canteen! The first building after the square! My heart flew away and my stomach fell to my knees. I’d never make it. By the time we got between Blocks 1 and 2 I’d be dead.

“Stop!” one of the guards in front called. “Set it down. Change sides! Hurry! Hurry! Useless pieces of shit. You! Move, nigger!” In a frenzy we scuttled around, lifted the container and struggled off again. I felt a little better. We were gaining on the team carrying the container for Block 30, one section of which had become another Revier. I looked around and saw that the “30” team was letting their container slide along on the snow, and as much as the guards were beating them, they still couldn’t get it up. We shuffled and skated past them.

Behind us, panting and groaning and singing, we heard a group of Jews. I wondered how many men were on their poles. Surely they had come from their block, 15, because if they didn’t get their own food, no one else would get it for them. The guards wouldn’t let that happen.

There is no mistaking the sound of a club against a human skull, and the “30” team in back of us was getting more than its share of clubbings. Fear and pain, fear of pain, will make a man do almost anything. It wasn’t long before we heard the “30” team right behind us, and the “15” team not far behind them. We switched again between Blocks 3 and 4, and in the dim lights of the block entrances, I saw tears, sweat, and snot on the faces of the men in my team. My heart was pounding in my ears; it felt like it would tear loose. We lurched forward again and somehow we seemed to have found each other’s rhythm; I could feel the coming together, like a bunch of musicians. The crunch and wheezing of the teams behind us seemed to be falling away. Then we were changing at the Punishment Company block, 7, and starting up again. On the next change, between 11 and 12, I looked behind. Some teams had reached their blocks; others continued down the middle of the ’Strasse.

The crematorium smell shifted to our direction, and that may have goaded us on, for the next time the guards said to change, we just kept going, fueled by the momentum of our pace and by the fact that we were midway to 29. I wondered about the men who did this twice a day. Now there were breathless whispers among the team. “C’mon, pick it up. Faster. Aren’t you as tough as the guys who live here? What are you, Kaminfutter, chimney fodder? Show a little courage. Don’t be a Señorita. C’mon, put your back into it, we’re more than halfway there.” We were sounding like horses that had been at the plough too long. We encouraged, coughed, panted, prayed, talked to ourselves. But our container was now bumping and scraping the ground, and each time it did, in fright, we forced it back up and struggled on. We strained to see the block numbers. We switched between Blocks 23 and 24 in the section called Moscow and Warsaw.

The north watchtower loomed tall and white before us. Was the guard pretending, fixing us in his sights, pulling the trigger? There was then the point at which we knew we were going to make it, being so close to the tower. I could feel a surge of power along the pole as we leaned toward 29, moving to our right. Block 25 crept backward, then 27, and we were at 29, where the block leaders were waiting and the prisoners who were able, weakly waved their enamel bowls and beat them with spoons. We struggled up the steps, through the doors and into the building, which stank of shit and vomit. We set down the container and fell to the floor beside it.

We had done it!

About 400 of us hauled food for three days and then, because the SS feared we might contaminate the families we worked for, we were carefully examined and sent home. Gangs of new prisoners from other camps and Russia replaced us.

Saturday, April 18, 1942

New and bigger signs have gone up in the latrines:

Nacht dem Abort, von dem essen

Hande waschen, nicht vergessen.

After the latrine, before eating,

Wash your hands, do not forget.

The prisoners hardly have time to do anything—wash, shit, or eat. Work, yes; everything else is Schnell! Avanti! Rasch! Ein biss rascher als sonst! Wenga! Wenga! Hurry, hurry, faster, a little bit faster.… So shit gets in the water and everyone gets sick.

The Langes were glad when I was finished carrying food. I noticed they didn’t get too close to me for a while, which was fine with me. The canteen stayed closed, so I did things around the house.

The fertilizer truck has just left a small pile of gray ash for mixing in the soil. The past couple years I haven’t been so squeamish about shoveling it. Now I just whisper to it, “Who were you?” Or “Who were you guys?”

I’ve begun the spring cleaning, taking time out to lay in my bed and look at old magazines when the Langes aren’t around. Anna’s down in the dumps. I talk to her in English, but she’s not interested anymore. So I say, “Inefay ithway emay. Uckfay ooyay. Itchbay.” She doesn’t know if she should smile or get mad; I smile so she should know what I said was harmless. She’s got something on her mind besides the war, the big-shot partners, and all the scheming and hustling.

Dieter Lange was right, of course; I will not be moving my rusty-dusty from Dachau to any other camp. He visited Laufen and Tittmoning. Says they are filled with people who are naturalized citizens of the U.S., Canada, England, and South American countries. He found an American Negro in Tittmoning, a painter. There are a few colored men there. Dieter Lange pulled out a piece of paper and read, “Josef Nassy. From New York. He had been living in Brussels when the war caught up with him. The commandant over there likes him. Helps him get his painting stuff.”

“Oh?” I said.

“No, no,” Dieter Lange said. “He’s married to a Belgian woman.”

“You’re married, too.”

“Shut up, Cleef. Don’t be smart with me.”

I shut up and wondered what kind of life this Nassy was having. Dieter Lange explained that the men in those camps had problems with their passports or were resident aliens when the Germans took over. “But their status is being honored,” Dieter Lange said. “There are even Jews there who aren’t headed for—you know—the East.”

There was something like a little hole in our talk then. I knew there was stuff he’d heard about what was happening in the East, besides the war, and he knew there were things I’d heard. The prisoners weren’t the only “pieces.” The SS guards, too, were moved from camp to camp as the need arose, or as some, especially the officers, felt their careers could be improved in another camp. Rumor said the new camps in the East offered the fastest chance for promotion, and jokers like Eichmann, Loritz, Remmele, Zill, Hoess, Koegel, and others had gone far up the ranks when they went to them. Maybe Dieter Lange was like me in this case. I’d heard a lot of stories about what the Germans did and were doing, but the stories coming in on the grapevines through prisoners being transferred from camp to camp were the kind that, if you believed, you also had to know the train had gone off the track carrying you with it.

Dieter Lange shook his head. I wasn’t going to say anything unless he did. Something like this was so dark and bloody that whatever words you used to describe it were just the introduction to a composition that could never be finished. Dieter Lange shook his head again. He said he didn’t understand why Winkelmann wanted to go East. But Winkelmann was old for a captain. In the East he might get ahead fast, if nothing happened to him first.

Sunday, May 17, 1942

The Winkelmanns have left. Dieter Lange said he told Winkelmann not to let himself get caught by the Russians because they were doing to the Germans what the Germans were doing to them. Winkelmann said don’t worry; he wasn’t going to the front, but to a camp in Poland called Auschwitz, a big place with many smaller camps attached to it. There were important things going on there that should warrant quick promotion, Winkelmann said. Dieter Lange said he just grunted when Winkelmann told him that. When Dieter Lange, Winkelmann, and some others went into Munich for a farewell party, Anna, Ursula, and me had one of our own. Now I think I will miss Ursula. With her around I learned things I never knew, couldn’t even imagine.

Fri. July 17, 1942

Goebbels had said that he was going to get even with the British for bombing Germany by punishing the Jews. There can’t be a person in Germany who doesn’t know what’s already being done. Radio London said Americans bombed German bases in Holland on the Fourth of July. To which Dieter Lange said, “Hmmm, hmmm.” It’s more dangerous than ever to listen to London, but naturally, Radio Berlin is saying only good things or that things are not as bad as we may hear. You have to listen to the outside to know what’s really going on.

Haven’t seen any of the colored prisoners in a while. Dead or transferred?

New camp rule: Only German prisoners can beat other German prisoners. Well. All the camp police are German. The block leaders, seniors, secretaries, capos, and so on are mostly all German, too. Like Uhlmer in the canteen. He’s handling all the whorehouse passes for Dieter Lange—but I still handle the money at the end of the day. Next in line come the Austrians, then the Poles, who could make good Germans (Eindeutschungfähig). Same old shit. Everybody sticks together except colored people, and they don’t because everybody else makes sure, one way or the other, that they can’t.

Anna started moping around after Ursula and her husband left. Feeling sorry for herself, I guess. Also, she’s back exploring the joys of the wine closet, and I don’t mean just the wine.

Sunday, August 23, 1942

It was very pleasant today. Everyone strolling around the camp, spazierganger. Here and there church services, the Catholics, the Protestants. Why not? There are 2,000 priests in this place. How many ministers I don’t know. The priests and ministers both are called by the SS Kuttenscheisser—robed shitheads. (Prisoners with dysentery are called shitters—Scheisser.)

On days like this the Russians walk around and whisper about Der Rasche Gang des Onkel Josef, while they hunt down and exchange Kippen, cigarette butts. That means Stalin’s Red Army is beating the shit out of the Germans.

There are a couple of places in camp called Interessengebiet, where the prisoners go to barter. Cigarettes and tobacco are the main forms of exchange. I don’t know who decides the rate of exchange or how or why. It does no good to argue that last week the rate was lower. When the food hits rock bottom—like now—with turnip and beet tops and dandelion greens and one piece of bread served day after day after day, the canteen does good business—if the inmates have money, of course. Then there’re the bartering places for those who don’t. Today the Valuta is:

1 loaf of bread = 30–50 cigarettes

1 dead cat (Katze) = 20 cigarettes

1 small dog (Hund) = 30 cigarettes

portion of soup = 5–6 cigarettes

suspenders = 3 cigarettes

1 slice of a sausage = 1–2 cigarettes

Blocks 15 and 17 are being cleaned out again, which only means that Jews are going East to make room for more Jews coming from the West—France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.

Thursday, Nov. 26, 1942, Thanksgiving Day back home

Oh-oh! Oh, boy!

I just got my paper out of Dieter Lange’s storage because he’s going to clean out everything that’s not in cans or jars. Just in time, too. He’s now moved all the boxes and canned goods out to Anna’s father’s farm. I think they plan to bury stuff, including the gold teeth.

He’s keeping the dried meat because there are food shortages in camp, and this time they’re bad. They seem to be bad everywhere. A train transport from Danzig rolled into camp with 600 prisoners, Poles and Russians. There had been 900 when it started out. A ten-day trip. No food. Six corpses chewed down to the bone. Bad? It’s worse than that. And Dieter Lange has heard that scrip will replace money in the camp. That word came from his big shots, he said. “Who the hell can use paper play money?” he said.

There are other things going on. In July the Americans had bombed Holland. Eighteen days ago they landed in North Africa! And the Russians have surrounded the German army at Stalingrad and are killing the soldiers and starting an attack of their own! Hitler said on the radio: “We knew the fate that awaits us if we lost, and for this reason we have not the remotest idea of a compromise. We have always had the Jews as internal enemies and now we have them as external ones.” Got news for that joker. It ain’t only Jews lookin’ for his ass; it’s the whole damned world. So what does the great leader do in return? Why, he takes over the rest of France.

And Anna drinks.

And Dieter Lange drinks. They drink and talk, him and Anna, about the idea they had while in Paris.

“We would go to France and from there to Portugal. Spain was out. Franco might have sent us back, but Portugal is neutral. Now France is out. We would have had Anna’s father send us whatever he could make on the sale of things, you know.…”

“No,” I say. “I don’t know. What was supposed to happen to me?”

I drink, too, and get so mad my blood bubbles like spit on a hot stove.

“That’s why we didn’t do it,” Anna says, the lying bitch.

“Yes,” Dieter Lange says. “That’s why.”

Lies, all lies. I have the feeling that they want to climb on my good side and stay there. I think about the time off they gave me after hauling food during the last typhoid epidemic, the good word they put in for me with Dieter Lange’s new partners. There is something more than sex now and music (which I’m not playing too much of) and watching Uhlmer and Lappus; it’s my being American, colored but American, and maybe, if push comes to shove, I could put in a good word for them. Yeah, I would. In a pig’s ass.

So I take myself another drink and hold up the glass in a toast to them for their kind thoughts and say, “Shit. I don’t believe you. Shit.”

Sunday, Dec. 13, 1942

The Langes were quiet and hung over when I left them this morning to go to the canteen. The guards at the Jourhaus were kind of evil, but the camp hummed with the talk of the raid last night. Everybody wanted to know if anyone else knew more than they did. Prisoners who’d come from the French coast or Holland or Belgium or camps in the north were familiar with the sound and rejoiced in what it meant.

A siren had sounded. It was the first time a siren like that had ever gone off in the compound or the camp. I crept to the window above the coal bin and peered out. Pitch black. No streetlights. Nothing.

I had been lying in the dark, my mind just one big hole, not able to sleep, wrapped in the darkness that opened dark doors that led softly, quietly, to deeper darknesses, considering for the first time, really, Freitod, suicide, and also thinking from some other, strange, removed distance, how silly that was, to have such a thought, when it was looking like Hitler had got both his balls in a nutcracker. But you wanted the Russians to hurry, the English, the Americans; you wanted the Germans to fold and step up and take their punishment. The sirens kept howling, echoing in the darkness. Then they fell silent.

I heard a long, low rumble, like Loa Aizan or maybe God snoring, but there wasn’t a space in the sound; it just kept getting fatter and fatter, louder and louder, closer and closer, mightier and mightier, and then I could hear little spaces in it the way you can in vibrations. I felt the earth and house shiver, heard the glass in the windows whine. Air raid! I thought. Air raid! They are coming! Where, where? Munich, yes, Munich. Blow the motherfucker to bits. Make dog meat of the people. Leave a hole a hundred miles deep where the city used to be.

Light began to slip into my darkness. The sound of the planes grew shorter and thinner, then thinner still, and weaker, and the night began to breathe again. The sirens didn’t come back on for two hours.

So everyone wanted to talk about the raid.

“They’re coming,” everyone seemed to say. “The Kuhtreiber Luftwaffe.” The American cowboy army air force. It was coming. For a moment nobody seemed to mind that all they were eating right then was carrot greens in warm salted water and sawdust bread.

Monday, Dec. 28, 1942

Dieter Lange said it himself: “The way things are going, the next Christmas we celebrate a little bit the American way for real, eh?” It was Christmas Eve. We had decorated the tree, eaten, opened presents, and were drinking and playing records.

“Why do you talk like that?” Anna asked. “You know what they could do to you if they heard.”

“You never minded before,” he said. “A fact is a fact unless it’s too close to home, is that it?”

“So,” she said. “What do you and your Colonel and General Major plan to do about the situation? And does whatever you do include me?”

I was drinking pretty good myself, and I said to Dieter Lange, “She knows too much for it not to.”

“Who asked you, big mouth? You forget yourself.”

“So do you, you faggot,” I said. The Christmas tree smelled pretty and I felt reckless as I threw myself into the middle of this drunken, nasty storm. Once it was just me and Dieter Lange who were so dangerously tied together, then Bernhardt, who had the upper hand, and Anna who also had a hand up, then Ursula. Now it was just the three of us and those two ghosts of Dieter Lange’s; but they did not create the presence, the unending threat, that Bernhardt had. I smirked at him.

“You nigger queen,” Dieter Lange said. He was growing red in the face. “Bitch.”

Anna laughed. “Sometimes.”

“You shut up, too.” He filled his glass again and drank half of the cognac it contained. Between him and Anna, it was going fast. “You know I could have you both killed like that!” He snapped his fingers.

Anna laughed again.

Dieter Lange slapped her.

The Americans are coming, I thought, and went over and knocked him on his ass.

Anna laughed once more. “Meine Held,” she said. “My hero. Be careful of the tree.”

Dieter Lange got to his feet and rushed me. I pushed him away. He looked puzzled. “Go to bed,” I said. “Don’t beat up your wife at Christmastime.”

“Or any other time,” she said. “Let’s put him to bed and we can stay and talk.”

“I don’t want to talk,” I said. We started up the stairs with Dieter Lange.

“Du Dreckneger,” Dieter Lange mumbled, “hau ab.”

“You shit Nazi,” I said, “You fuck off.”

I pushed him onto his bed, then went to the attic. When I came back down, Anna saw what I was holding and she began to giggle. Dieter Lange saw, too, when we rushed into the bedroom, and he shouted, “No!” But when we jumped on him and began to pull off his clothes and put on the lingerie, he didn’t struggle so hard, it seemed to me.

I pulled off my clothes and Anna pulled off hers. Dieter Lange said no again, but I don’t think he meant it.

Thursday, January 7, 1943

He came in roaring and stomping like a tank, throwing his cap, coat, gloves, and scarf on the floor, ripping his arctics off and hurling them against the wall of the foyer. He grabbed off the wall the picture of Hitler everyone has in his house and threw that on the floor, breaking the glass. Himmler’s picture was next. Dieter Lange stomped on it until the shattered glass sounded like grains of sand beneath his feet. He kicked the remains of both pictures from the doorway through the living room. He pounced on the piano and beat it with both fists. He kicked chairs and sent them bouncing. He picked up the poker and wound up to throw it through the window, but Anna jumped on his back and, as he was shrugging her off, he seemed to get hold of himself. I stayed in the kitchen where I was waiting to serve dinner. Right then my name was Wes, and not in that mess, whatever it was.

“Cognac, Cleef!”

I grabbed the bottle I’d uncorked for dinner, filled a glass, and gave it to Anna to give to him, the way you’d give the lion tamer a hunk of meat instead of giving it to the lion itself. Dieter Lange groaned and his eyes watered with anger.

Krieger brand goods are no more, not here. There are food shortages all over Germany, not just in the camps. The Colonel and the General Major, Dieter Lange said, grinding his teeth, had directed that all KL canteen goods be diverted to the civilian population. Therefore, commandeered were all the services, supplies, and equipment of all camp canteen provisioning units. Supplies provided by canteen officers as individual vendors would now be compensated at the rate of 50 percent per item. The present rate of production, however, was expected to continue. Supplies ready for distribution would be gathered at a new central warehouse in Munich. Because it was necessary to maintain high public morale, this would not be disclosed for the present, as in the directive concerning the use of human hair in mattresses.

Dieter Lange was imitating his General Major, I took it to be, reciting all this like a prissy Prussian.

“It’s the scrip,” he said. “And the black market. They can check you too good with scrip. The black market, it’s still real money—and good rates. They know what they’re doing. It’s people like me who’re getting fucked and there’s not a thing I can do.”

“Pass it on,” I said.

He was blubbering and snatching at his food like it was raw meat and he was a Doberman. Anna sat straight up and watched him carefully. I kept the table between me and him. “Just cut what you pay those women to cook and clean and pack those jars, and what you pay the guards. Tell them the same thing your partners told you. What can they do, what can they say?”

He rolled his eyes at me. I used to know about this kind of shit. A joker hires you for a date at one price. When you’re finished, there’s all this who-struck-john about the size of the house, or the house this or that, so it turns out that the money isn’t anywhere near what you were told in the first place. What do you do? Don’t take it, or take it and remember? You know the band leader got his before dividing the rest. So, yeah, pass it on. I’ve seen some bad fights over short money and two or three musical careers cut short, too. “They didn’t tell you not to pass it on, did they?”

“I was going to do just that,” Dieter Lange said. He smiled for the first time since coming home.

“Then why were you so mad, Dieter?” Anna asked.

I turned to the sink so she wouldn’t look at me.

“I didn’t think they’d cheat me so soon and so much, but however you figure it, that’s what they’re doing. They took over the operation all right. After you’ve done everything and delivered the goods right into their hands.”

“War is hell,” I murmured.

“What?”

“I said that’s right. They can go to hell.”

Dieter Lange passed the bottle around. “Listen. Everybody’s getting ready.” He held up his hand and rubbed his thumb across the fingers. “Everybody.”

“Yes, and we’ve got ours, too, haven’t we, Dieter?”

She was making sure, but he was slow to answer. “Yes, yes.” Anna smiled like someone with a pat hand you’re not supposed to know about. Most of the stuff they had was somewhere on her father’s farm—or better be.

“So,” she said, “let this go.”

But I said, “Everybody’s getting ready for what?”

They both looked at me. I just wanted them to say it, that things weren’t going so hot: that business with Hess almost two years ago, the air raids coming deeper and deeper into Germany, the Cologne raid by a thousand planes last May, the slaughter at Stalingrad, the landings in North Africa by the Americans. Hell, we all listened to the radio in the dark, spinning dials, picking up London. Anna never saw the congestion in camp, which now held five times as many prisoners as it was designed for; she didn’t see the bodies piled up beside the morgue or in ditches near the train sidings or thrown against the four sides of the crematorium. She didn’t know that a prisoner found with a single louse on him went to his death like the signs said: Ein Laus Dein Tod! Typhus was typhoid’s shadow. She closed her ears and mind to the sounds of the trains clanking in, mostly at night, with more “pieces,” or clanking out for destinations in the East, the most recent being a load of Gypsies. Someone told me the guitar player Danko was among them. They let him keep his git so he could play for the rest of them on the trip. No one ever talks much about what they’re doing to the Gypsies. I’d thought poor Danko was long dead. The place is as big as a city, and inmates hear last month’s news only today.

“They allowed me to keep the name Krieger,” Dieter Lange finally said. “Who knows, maybe after, when all’s calm again, I can really go into business with it.”

Yes, I thought, drinking along with them, so they can stick you with the rap when Gotterdammerung comes. No, they don’t have to tell me why they think everyone’s getting ready. I know. No Franz and Heller comedy here.

On average, we finish two bottles of cognac or something else just as strong every night when Dieter Lange is home.

Sunday, Jan. 31, 1943

Werner, who now seems less whipped, and Bader, Pacholegg, and Neff from the Revier, and some others, gathered in a corner of Block 1, where the Family is located. The Reds still want me to know things in case I get a break and get out. They never listen. That’s not going to happen. Dieter Lange said so, and in this case I believe him. Still, they say, it’s possible.

Pacholegg spoke first. The Schiller malaria experiments have been canceled, and anyway, it looks like the English and Americans are running the Afrika Korps out of Africa. The TPs who’ve not recovered well from the injections have vanished, and the others have returned to their blocks. The rule is that if the TPs survive the experiments in good shape, they’re allowed to live; if not …

Neff says Rascher is in the final stages of the Arctic experiments. One Russian survived, but Himmler ordered him killed anyway. “We had a Jew, a Gypsy, and the Russian, who I don’t think was Jewish. The usual stuff. The life jackets held them up. The water was 29° centigrade. We had gauges on their heads, stomachs, and in their assholes. People die quick when the head’s chilled, the medulla and cerebellum. We always find up to a pint of blood in the cranium during the autopsy, or Rascher does.”

Neff’s voice was soft and slow. His glance kept falling on me.

“These were turning blue quick. They held hands. Rascher said to make them stop, but their grips were too tight, like they were already frozen together. The Russian kept hollering, ‘Today us, tomorrow, you.’ Rascher paid no attention. He expects such statements when people are dying. I had the feeling that holding hands made them last longer. And so did Rascher, but the Jew and the Gypsy went almost together. The Russian—all their names are locked in Rascher’s files, as usual—after two and a half hours responded fully, but you know, there was damage inside. We begged Rascher to give him a shot. The Russian laughed. At three hours and fifteen minutes we pulled him out, covered him, and he came back all the way. What to do with him? Did the survivor rule apply to Russians? Rascher contacted Himmler’s office directly. Himmler said the rule did not apply to Poles, Russians, or Jews. A Kommando from Herbertshausen told me they marched him out, all alone, and shot him, but not before he said again, ‘Today me, tomorrow, you.’”

I said, “I heard from another assistant there were women.”

Neff nodded. “They were used to keep the men warm. From Ravensbrueck. Rascher even had two men and two women fucking at zero degrees. Right after, their temperatures rose right back to normal.”

Bader said, “So every pilot who gets shot down in the North Sea is going to have a Nutte along to revive him?” He snorted.

“You watched?” Werner asked.

“Of course. We all did. We had to monitor the gauges. Listen, that’s not as bad as decompression. Four hundred Arctic tests, maybe ninety died. The rest, mainly Russians and Jews, on Himmler’s orders, were killed.”

Sometimes you can see men trying to remember. Those people of the Family who were there, got up and walked one by one to the window, lit cigarettes, if they had them, or mooched them from someone else—not without grumbling from the donor—and asked Neff and Pacholegg questions:

“Exactly how many Russians in the experiments?”

Neff and Pacholegg looked at each other.

Pacholegg said, “We work different shifts for different doctors. It’s hard to say.”

Werner said, “Hundreds, surely. Thousands?”

Neff said, “Maybe two thousand, but that would include talk of the work of other doctors.”

“Which ones?” Bader asked.

“Well, in addition to Rascher, Schiller, and Deuschl—you know Rascher also developed the cyanide pill. For suicide or execution,” Neff said.

“Grawitz,” Pacholegg said. “He does stuff on infections.”

“Fahrenkamp. He works with Rascher,” Neff said. “And Dr. Blaha, he’s a Czech, also does some things with Rascher. What, I don’t know. But if you have a tattoo that’s not a number and fall into his hands, it’s too bad.”

“Finke and Holzloehner—”

“Siegfried Ruff,” Neff said, interrupting.

“How can all this be going on right under our noses?” Werner said.

“If we knew, what could we do about it?” one of the Family asked. “Nothing.”

I looked outside the window. The ’Platz was empty. Shit, it was cold out there. In winter, free time was time to sleep, on the floor, sitting in a corner, anywhere but the bunk, unless you had doctor’s orders. The men walked around beating the rhythm of the doctors’ names into their memories. They would have to remember a long time; how long, no one knew. I had only to remember until I could get here, now, with pencil and paper.

Neff and Pacholegg sat there after the Family had broken up. They smoked the cigarettes they’d been given with a leisurely sadness, pausing to look at them as though they might speak. I said, “You remember stuff like that, what you told us?”

Pacholegg shrugged. “I can’t forget it.”

There was a space between us and the others, the space you feel between yourself and someone with a disease you could catch. These two, and others who worked with them, knew too much. They knew they were going to die, be bundled off to the Bunker or trucked out into the gray mist of a new day to Herbertshausen; no six-in-the-evening public hanging for them. They’d not been caught committing a crime like stealing food or trying to escape or fucking another inmate or getting fucked by one; but like so many of the Sonderkommando details, Neff, Pacholegg, and the other assistants were branded. Maybe that’s what their cigarettes told them when they looked at them.

I said, “Like me. I think I can’t forget things, either.”

“No,” Neff said. “You’re a musician. You remember things. There’s a difference. And that’s why you’re here. That’s why we say things to you. You’re an American.”

It is such a wonder to me, this “American” thing, the faith these jokers seem to have in them, the Americans, the respect, the hope that it will be the Americans, finally, who rescue them. (They would take the Russians, too, but only if they had to.) In the abstract, the American army cowboys, the Statue of Liberty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms they talked about on the radio, have worked on the prisoners like a slow electric current through the forbidden foreign broadcasts, shocking them with possibilities. And to many of them, even those who once laughed at me, I am the symbol of all these things. Most of them don’t know what America is really like, and probably wouldn’t care as long as the truth didn’t disturb the dream.

You learn something every day. The Prisoner Company was always for the toughest guys. Now the PC holds some of the Blacks who used to belong to the Zazou jitterbugs and to the Edelweiss Pirates; the Pirates ran away from conscription—but got caught. And also there are what are called the Meuten, anti-Nazi gangs touched with a little Red.

How did I learn this? From the canteen I watched a Postenkette, a ring of guards, empty Block 7 and march the prisoners to the siding where a boxcar waited, empty.

“Russian front,” said a young runner for the SS who’d just got some cigarettes. Then he told me who those kids were.

All the Prisoner Company inmates wear the Himmlerstrasse haircut—bald except for a strip of hair running from front to back—and have the targets painted on the backs of their jackets. “Kanone Futter,” the runner said, jerking his thumb toward the boxcar into which the kids were climbing, the targets on their backs rippling as they moved. “Wurst Fleisch. They’ll have the Russians in front of them and the SS behind them.”

Monday, March 29, 1943

For two weeks they came, day and night, the RAF and the Americans. I didn’t know there were that many airplanes in the world. Down they came from the northwest, shaking loose clouds in the daytime and stars at night. It was like someone drawing a bow across a tremendous bass fiddle. The target was Munich, of course. We didn’t need Radio Berlin to tell us that. I wondered if Schwabing was still there, the university where the students—or some of them—had called for a revolt against the Nazis and were executed for it, the Englischer Garten, the Marienplatz. I just wondered. Didn’t matter a piece of shit to me whether they were or not. As for the students, it took them a long, long time to get brave, but maybe they belonged to another generation. Maybe.

From here and Mauthausen, even until now, details were gathered and put on trains, buses, and trucks. Sometimes they marched along Dachauerstrasse all the way into Munich to dig out unexploded bombs and bodies everyone knew were under the bricks and stone because they smelled. Or hauled away the shattered buildings. Or repaired the water and gas lines, the electric wires. Or made it possible for Siemens and BMW to continue making stuff for the war. Or laid new track for the trains. Could they say no, these men who were half-starved, who fought off typhus and typhoid, brutality, injustice, bigotry, prejudice? Those who came back said some of the people spat on them, while others offered them crusts of bread or half cups of ersatz coffee.

Many didn’t come back; the Himmelfahrtskommandos, the bomb disposal details, they went to heaven. In bits and pieces and a loud noise they didn’t even hear. And the ones the walls fell on. And the ones who just died in Munich instead of Dachau because that was where their hearts quit. And the ones who walked away, their filthy Drillich, striped uniforms, easy targets for the aging SA overseers and SS, who made believe they were Russians.

Friday, May 14, 1943

The camp is quivering. Everyone wants to talk about the war, the victory, the Sonnenaufgang, and Zukunft, the time after the liberation. But the guards are touchy and evil. The prisoners who are able, talk of these things in whispers, move away from approaching guards like small, quick waves of water.

As the winter at Stalingrad when the Russians turned back the Germans had been the most fierce in half a century, so this spring has been the coldest in memory. The Himbeerpfluckerkommandos haven’t been sent out to pick raspberries. These are the sick and weak. Way out among the raspberry bushes, when a decent spring comes, and the earth has been enriched by who knows what, the SS orders the shooting of the prisoners and reports they tried to escape. That’s the Kommandoaufgel. The capos just march out the details to an isolated place, usually north of camp, kill everyone with a shovel, a club, an axe—whatever’s handy—and return the report to the SS detail officer, “Command dissolved.”

We haven’t had anything on our shelves for two weeks. Uhlmer and Lappus have been detailed to rifle the Red Cross packages and whatever else gets into camp. Potato soup and sawdust bread make up dinner. Sawdust bread and hot water passing for coffee are for breakfast.

Wednesday, September 29, 1943

Goddamn, oh, goddamn!

In mid-June the Allies—I think that means mostly Americans—landed in Sicily! And Italy surrendered three weeks ago! Each bit of news like that was like a loaf of fresh, real bread. Speaking of which, Dieter Lange and Anna have been slipping tins of stuff back from her father’s farm. And fresh meat.

Oh! I felt like playing the piano and singing, making a joyful noise, but I’d have to fight the Langes. They’re drunk most of the time now when he’s around. And they spend a lot of time on the farm. Probably getting some hideaway ready. Ha, ha, ha!! Forgive me. It’s just too exciting to write sometimes and besides, Dieter Lange and Anna snoop around a lot now. I have a large cracker tin that I store you in, wrapped in a raincoat. There’s a corner space in the cellar ceiling where you just fit. Now I have all the pages together. Pardon the crayon.

Back in May there was news of a big fight with the Jews in Warsaw. The grapevine now carries word of riots at a couple of camps in the East where Jews are being killed. They say there are whole towns in Eastern Europe where there are no more Jews; they’ve all been killed, and they are doomed in Dachau, just like the Gypsies. That’s what they say.

The grapevine. Prisoners come here from about thirty-five camps, Dieter Lange says, when he’s raving about moving the “pieces,” and inmates are transferred from here—those that live—to about thirty-five other camps. Sometimes they’re sent back to the camps they came from. Really moving the pieces.

Sunday, October 17, 1943

“I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you; I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you …”

The tune just climbed into my head a few days ago as I was walking home from camp, just climbed up there, pushed a few things around, and made itself comfortable. It comes in different rhythms: the Dead March, slow and heavy; or the bounce and tinkle of a ragtime piece; or the up and down of a Pine Top Smith boogie-woogie; or some old stiff Paul Whiteman ballroom number where the rhythm is like somebody scared walking on cracking ice; or some banjo or guitar-driven, foot-stomping Dixieland beat.

I see Loa Aizan blinking in time to whatever rhythm “Rascal” plays in. Sometimes I think I hear God humming it to Hitler, then Dieter Lange or Anna will say, “What’s that tune you’re humming?” And I say, “What tune?” When I catch them looking at each other a certain way, I know I’ve been humming it and get hold of myself. But it always comes back.

We’re down to Greek and Yugoslav cigarettes. Forget the salt and pepper packs. Food is so scarce there’s no need for them. One of the priests sells lengths of rope to be used as belts. Does good. Another guy sells little squares of paper to roll straw, potato skins, grass, or anything that will smoke like a cigarette. Dieter Lange and Anna don’t care anymore about making cigarettes to sell out of whatever is handy. “Scrip is shit,” Dieter Lange says. “Stop that goddamn humming, Cleef. You’re driving me crazy!”

What’s doing good is the whorehouse. It’s in the storeroom where prisoners’ clothes are kept in the Wirtschaftsgebaude. There are mountains of shoes there, and pants and jackets and things, and even though they’ve been disinfected, the place smells like bodies rotting in the shade. Lappus and Uhlmer at first liked taking care of the passes and handling the scrip because they thought they could get a little pussy once in a while, and maybe they did. Now, they don’t seem to like it as much. (Not the pussy, the job.)

A good-looking pros is a rare thing. Maybe it’s because good-looking women can always find someone to look after them. The times I’ve been over during the hours of business, it was hard to tell if the women had ever been good-looking. The good lookers are usually snapped up by the SS. The so-so by the block seniors, boss capos, straw capos, and on down the line until what we get are what you wouldn’t look at twice on your drunkest night, no matter how much you wanted to “jelly-jelly.” Women who were selling before they came to Dachau (and maybe that’s why they’re here) I guess make up about half those working. The rest just want to stay alive, especially if they are Jews or Russians or Poles or Gypsies.

Women prisoners live outside the wall in a couple of blocks, in another enclosure. Most work for the SS officers in their homes, watching kids, cleaning, cooking, and shit like that. Most of the women capos and SS guards are dykes, big as men, bass at you in a minute, mustaches creeping on their upper lips. Some of the women inmates brought little kids with them and others have had babies in the camp. Gitzig is the only man I knew in this place who was happy to claim he was a father. I don’t think I hum “Rascal” when I see this. And I don’t know what happens to those babies and kids. It’s only the fucking that people care about, men and women. You would think that would be the last thing the prisoners think of. But it’s the first, right up there next to food. I am thinking about every woman I ever heard of who fucked for a drink or a good time or to feed her kids or to keep a job or just to be with a guy.

Sunday, Dec. 19, 1943

Christmas next Saturday. Bitter cold. No wood for the stoves. Now is the time of Nix Travacho, Nix Camela. (That’s a mix of German and Spanish.) No work, no food. Food? A pig wouldn’t touch the shit coming out of the kitchen these days. So the weak get weaker. Now they have wagons to carry the food vats down the ’Strasse. Most prisoners aren’t strong enough to carry them anymore. The strongest men are the ones in charge of things. They aren’t thin. They look almost as healthy as the guards. Cocksuckers. You notice them right away.

In the canteen, where we burn old cardboard cartons when we have them, you hear again the stories from the blocks of the Leichenzuchter, the corpse growers, inmates who don’t tell when another prisoner has died so the dead guy’s food rations can be used. In winter it takes longer for the dead guys to stink, so you naturally hear more of these stories in cold weather than you ever do in summer.

Good men who are strong don’t last here. I mean jokers who are strong in the usual ways, good fighters, or they have powerful faith, guys you can trust, like that. Once in a while you hear a story of a man who turned on the guards or just plain said no to something that would hurt other prisoners. Of course, the man is killed. The guards wonder how such a person could behave that way, because these camp guards recognize strengths through training and instinct, and maybe they are even jealous or afraid of them. The KLs are designed to break strong men like Werner and Bader; they are either broken or bent (in ways that are not obvious), made into capos or block leaders or runners; and they serve the SS as sort of “decent” men other prisoners work well for. They are watched very closely.

Then there are the quiet, shuffling, watchful men who never look you in the eye, maybe because they fear what they might see or what might be seen in their eyes, who whine and snivel, steal, grow corpses, do almost anything for food—food—who know when to work hard and when not to. They move through their days like they are walking through a bayou filled with cottonmouths; they survive the way moles survive, or rats, or anything else that lives in dark, underground holes. These inmates are inconspicuous, which is, for survival, the best way to be here. They grow a toughness I can’t describe; it’s slow, smooth, and colorless—or colorful if need be, like some lizards. You can’t really call them hustlers or operators since you know they want only to live. Their hustle—yes, their lives—depends on not being noticed, on not being seen in uniforms that are too clean or shoes that are too good, on appearing to have become exactly what the Germans (it’s easy to forget, and shameful too, that there are many German prisoners here as well) wanted—the hidden, quiet parts of some awful machine. But I’d sure hate to see a world filled with such people when the war is over. People forget pain, laugh at it when it stops hurting. I want them to remember.

There are only a few names for the strong—stark, “Kong,” chlopak—but a whole bunch for the weak, names that’ve come since Dr. Nyassa flew to the wire: Zaramustafa is what they call Muslims from Yugoslavia, and Muselmann is for prisoners so weak that they look like they’re praying all the time. Then there is the Schwimmer, whose arms float around to help him keep balance as he tries to walk, and Schmuckstuck, “a jewel of a guy,” which means he’s a goner, he’s so weak. There are dozens of names. Everybody jumps on the weak until, finally, the SS makes Selektion—on the detail, in the blocks, at random—and the shuffling marches begin to the rifle ranges or to the wagons lined up for transport to Hartheim Castle. (I am well-known to the guards; they see my face from a distance, so they know I “belong” to sort of a big shot. This continues to be a good thing, a very good thing, otherwise I would have been fertilizing flowers by now.)

And practically everybody who isn’t with those poor bastards feels they deserve to die because they let themselves become weak. What bullshit. And what a bad time to go. The Russians are almost in Poland. The Americans are in Italy. Every night and day when the weather is good, a German city is bombed to hell. So I wonder why aren’t these prisoners rising up, like those Jews in Warsaw or some of the other camps we’ve heard about? I know: Fuck the Jews. They had no choice, like the Gypsies. If the machine does nothing else, it will make Jews and Gypsies disappear as though they never existed in the first place. We will wait, though, even if they kill us one by one and empty the whole goddamn place. But each prisoner believes, with all his heart, that he will not be on Selektion, that he will get by, and that by next Christmas he will be free. Merry Christmas, diary.

Tuesday, January 11, 1944

Yesterday Dieter Lange took me up to the attic and pointed to one corner the farthest away from the stairs. “Tear up the floorboards from there when we need it,” he said.

I know they have been trading tinned goods and preserves for small bags of soft coal and bottles of coal oil for the stove they now have in their room. I have no heat in mine. The whole house smells of kerosene.

There is no more coal to sift for in the ashes from the furnace, and the ice on the windows is so thick you can’t see outside. It takes a whole day to thaw out the food we have in the window box.

The piano keys play thick and sad, like they are pounding in deep snow.

The war, especially in the East, is sucking the life out of Germany with each blast of freezing wind rushing from the Alps.

The best-dressed, best-fed prisoners are those who work in the munitions factories adjacent to the camp. For the war effort. And these are the “Pearheads,” the Birnkopfer, the guys with the training to work the machines over there with the civilians.

Nothing has changed except there are more prisoners. From 180 men to a block there are now over a thousand—three, four, and sometimes six to a bunk, with three rows of bunks. There are 2,000 men in Block 30 alone.

In the canteen they talk of the bastards with dysentery who can’t get to the bathrooms because they aren’t working or because of curfew. They climb out the windows to shit on the rooftops. Neff has told me that some men are so weak that, to avoid punishment for messing themselves, they crap in their food bowls and then try to clean them out so they can eat from them. That’s another cause of typhoid. And all the signs about louses don’t help; that’s why the typhus.

I used to think of the canteen as being like a barber shop back home, where jokers gathered to gossip, get news of people they knew, make a quick trade, or play the numbers. No numbers here, though, just “pieces,” and they have driven Dieter Lange crazy. He goes through the motions. The canteen is bleak, gray, and cold. Anything we get on the shelves lasts only a few minutes, if it can be eaten, but usually we’re out of stock.

One day some inmates were gathered around the stove, in which there was no heat whatsoever. It just made them feel there was heat because what they surrounded was the stove. One of them had an old magazine. They were playing “Eat.” He opened the pages slowly, and when there was a picture of a steaming plate of food, beautiful cake, or something else to eat, the first one to jam his face into the page got to “eat” it. The pages became wet with spit. Uhlmer could not watch; Lappus was amused. Like me, they weren’t starving, were merely a little bit hungry most of the time. And cold.

The Russians reached Poland almost two weeks ago. Oh! That sounds so good! I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you.

Bader says that sonofabitch Karlsohn and other SS guards his age have been sent to the Eastern front. (Please, you Russians, don’t miss!) They’ve been replaced by wounded or sick soldiers from there, and even some civilians from the town.

Waiting. We’re all waiting, like for some lover to come, only he hasn’t said exactly what time or what day; but you know he’s coming because he’s sent you little notes from North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and almost every day from Russia. Imagine—I’m forty-four and still looking for the best loving ever! Freedom! Freiheit! Befreiung! Liberation!

And across the ’Strasse the doctors still work, stacking the dead like logs, and we stare at them. They have nothing to do with us. They are just “pieces” lost in the shuffle.

Saturday, March 25, 1944

The SS replacement soldiers from the Eastern front have sometimes talked of troop trains being put on sidings so trainloads of Jews can be hurried to the camps there. When they’re asked why, the soldiers, almost every time, say nothing and draw a finger across their throats.

There are some things I don’t understand about this war, like how come the Germans are invading Hungary now. I thought they were aces, Germany and Hungary.

The Langes are having some terrible arguments. Anna wants to go live on the farm and Dieter Lange doesn’t want her to leave him. Then he should come with her, she says, but she knows he can’t. All that talk about afterward, when Germany won, he was going off on his own to do this, and she was going off alone to do that. Now they’re afraid one will get to whatever they have stashed away before the other one can. The General Major and the Colonel aren’t letting us get anything for the canteen, and Dieter Lange knows they’ve conned him good and he can’t do one damn thing, though he tells me he’s been trying to pry goods loose from the ILAGs like Laufen and Tittmoning. Wonder how those colored guys are doing there. I wonder if there are any more here. When there are, the other prisoners call them Zulukaffer. Since there are always new prisoners who don’t know me, I am a Zulukaffer, too—but I am Dieter Lange’s Zulukaffer.

I’ve been with Anna. She likes to dress up, put on lipstick and perfume now, and we dance to records. Acts like she’s Brunhild. Cries in bed. Tries to get lost doing it, it seems to me. She’s getting strange. She’ll start a conversation and then break off to stare at something like it will remind her of what she wanted to say. I wait and wait until finally I have to say, “What?” or, “What were you going to say?” That makes her furious. I try to get her to speak English, but that’s a waste of time.

And I’ve been with Dieter Lange. With both it’s like maybe that time will be the last time. But Dieter Lange gets so drunk he’s useless. He’s so busy, busy, busy, brushing off this or that, complaining that things haven’t been cleaned or the figures I give him don’t look right or Anna doesn’t put enough starch in his shirts. He’s like a damned fussy old woman one minute and a drunken pig the next. They drive me crazy, the both of them.

They say Dr. Grawitz is doing new experiments with Gypsies. Pacholegg and Neff say that’s true.

Nobody wants to ask what. Nobody wants to ask why, with all the talk of the Allies landing in France soon.

“Causing new kinds of infections, then trying to cure them,” Pacholegg says.

It’s very muddy outside and the men are strapped to the rollers, crushing gravel into the mud. It is something to do.

“Seeing if people die drinking too much sea water,” Neff says.

Still nobody asks why.

Friday, April 14, 1944

The flower beds are being turned, the earth raked. Suppose the blooms turn out to be little bodies of prisoners, just swaying in the breeze.

During the winter we all noticed that the smoke from the crematorium never stopped coming out. It was like a factory, running all day and all night long. That many people dead, many more gone, yes, Another Man Done Gone, without so much as a good-bye or a prayer.

Anna has noticed that the wives with children seem to be vanishing, leaving. “Running like momma and baby rats together,” she says. If she had kids now, she could use them as a passport out of Dachau to the Black Forest. Or her father’s farm.

Some of the women out here, and there must certainly be some, would have fallen out if they’d known about those eighty Jewish kids who came in last week from France. I heard it from Werner, who now seems to have found the old purpose to his life. The oldest kid, he said, was fifteen, the youngest eight, and they knew they were going to die because their parents had been killed in Buchenwald. They put the kids in Block 7, and a few days later they were transported to Hartheim, and probably were damned glad to go after spending time with some of those hard cases. Eighty kids, eighty small “pieces” Dieter Lange wouldn’t have to worry about. Younger than Pierre.

You would think if a killer was told, “Stop killing, the cops are coming,” the killer would stop. But no. I think this place, Germany, is like a sanctified church, where the spirit takes hold of one person, then two, three, or four catch it, then the whole church, and nothing stops the dancing, singing, and crying until somebody falls out and cracks his head or everyone’s just too exhausted to move any more. Sometimes, even the people who’ve fallen out still quiver and shake on the floor. Never liked sanctified churches. Always scared me.

Friday, May 26, 1944

They’re coming, but it’s taking forever. The days seem like weeks, the weeks like years. We’ve even gotten used to the bombers going and coming. They seem to have little to do with us except for the companies of Himmelfahrtskommandos that march to the trucks to dig bombs out of Munich’s belly (while singing “Lili Marlene,” which they hope will get them some bread with marmalade, maybe a cup of tea or coffee from a civilian). We want the planes to come, not by the thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands—but every time they come, a mess of prisoners goes into Munich to die. Why the hell can’t they bomb this place, bomb all the camps, destroy the factories and rails everywhere, since the prisoners are dying anyway?

My mind seems to be on the Zukunft. This year, God, this year. Loa Aizan, please, now. I’m forty-four, but I feel like ninety-four. Will I still be able to play? I know the music’s changed. I can guess what the colored musicians are doing with the music from what I hear the German bands play on the radio. But how are they doing it? What keys are they playing in, what chord changes are they making, what times are they playing in? Colored folks fuck with white folks’ music, turn it inside out like you do a worn-out collar. But will I be able to do that? Fingers gone all dumb, the piano my enemy, just sitting there all out of tune, daring me to take some licks at it. Mr. Wooding, wonder how he’s doing, if he’s got hold to what’s going on. Instead of whining and carrying on when I was in touch with Willy Lewis, I should’ve been talking about music. I listen to “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “Dear Mom,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “When the Lights Go on Again,” stuff like that and it all sounds soft and tender. Young and sweet. Slow-drag stupid. Stick your head out the door for a minute and smell those human steaks cooking and you know ain’t nobody singing the right songs. Not for this shit.

Thinking like that brought me back to the piano and to some of the things I was doing before I had the band at Lebensborn, when I thought I heard all kinds of things where I hadn’t heard them at all before. I didn’t even ask if I could play. The Langes are always drunk anyway. They just sit there fussing, him saying she took too much of the hooch, or her saying he’s drinking too fast. Just waiting for the news, just waiting to pick up Radio London or Armed Forces Radio on the shortwave. Dieter Lange got him a new set so he could catch it all, including a station called the Voice of America. Said, “Everybody out here has got one or if they haven’t, they know where they can listen to one.” So they can know which way to jump, I think.

The first time in a while back on the box, when I wasn’t feeling so sure of myself, I slid into “Yellow Dog Blues.” Playing was like sticking my fingers in Karo syrup, but the more I played, the more the piano loosened up, the more it became less spongy, kinda friendly, like it knew what I wanted to do. I tried on “Muskrat Ramble” and “Tiger Rag.” “I Ain’t Got Nobody” seemed a natural since I knew that piece backward, forward, and sideways, and then some. I think Dieter Lange and Anna calmed down a little, because I didn’t hear them fussing. I felt old-fashioned, but I just punched the keys and kicked the pedal into “I Surrender Dear,” and then feeling like to hell with it, jumped into “One O’Clock Jump” and “Moon Glow,” but damn, even I didn’t know if it was going to land on its feet. It did. “Body and Soul,” and my skin grew a few goose pimples. That’s a dark number with a lot of addresses on it. Then I did some of the things that came over Armed Forces Radio—“Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You,” done by a pianist I never heard of, Nat Cole, and Ellington’s band (new one, I think), ripping with “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Then a really swinging band doing “Apple Honey.” Woody Herman, I think. Big, big band, lots of brass. They don’t play too many colored bands, and the singers are white, too, folks named Crosby, Sinatra, Haymes, Como, Eberle, women like Jo Stafford, Helen Ward, and Helen Forrest. Not too many vocalists like Jimmy Rushing, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, or Herb Jeffries. It’s a special day when they play those singers.

I tried another number I’d heard, “This Time the Dream’s on Me,” and just to give Anna and Dieter Lange a little something, I threw “Blue Skies” at them. It didn’t take. Besides, it’s not much anyway. Some of these white-boy tunes you just can’t do anything with but let them die, because they aren’t songs, just tunes. Russian white boys are different. On Sundays sometime you hear them singing in Blocks 6, 20, and 22, where most of them are segregated. (It’s funny using that word with white people, Absondern, Rassentrennung.) If you could sing blues in Russian, those jokers got it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like Russia when the band went there with Mr. Wooding—what those people suffered was too close for comfort. In the canteen the Russians are the only ones look like they don’t want to kick my ass at first sight. But then, I got my stare when some of these jokers been pissed on all their lives walk in and right away pull that European-type cracker shit on me. Number one, they haven’t ever had no colored man look at them like that in their life, and number two, they look at number 3003 on my jacket and figure I know something about staying alive, and I see them thinking, If he can do it, so can I. But they don’t know the arrangement for that number. Well, sometimes I wonder about it myself. Anyway, the more I played, the better I felt and the better the piano sounded. To hell with anything else but that.

It’s yesterday I really want to write about.

Dieter Lange has been away checking the camps at Augsburg, Kaufering, and Allach, so I’ve spent the time in the canteen. Anything not to be stuck a long time alone with Anna, not that Dieter Lange gives a damn anymore. In fact, it seems to get him hot if he thinks I’ve been with her.

So I’m at the canteen window when the morning roll call begins, before six, the sun not quite up. I never risk sleeping when roll call starts; never can tell when some guard might take a notion to see what I was up to. I always get up and watch the prisoners march down the ’Strasse with breakfast, see them like chickens without heads, dressing, making their beds, washing, eating, all in half an hour, and then rushing into formation on the Dancing Ground, just row upon row upon row of stiff, striped men in that flat, gray light that everyone hopes to see again tomorrow. The slow-rising sun throws thin shadows from the poplar trees that square the camp. Once they were just sprigs stuck between an occasional white birch tree; now they stand like spears with their handles jabbed into the ground. The count comes in, block after block. Then the details are ordered to march out. The capos wait for their men.

No one moves.

I don’t understand what’s going on. For a minute, I think maybe I hadn’t heard the command. I stare past the backs of thousands of men to see the expression on the face of the SS officer in charge. But I can’t see it from here because now they have to use all the ’Platz, which covers a large area. So I imagine his face, imagine him looking at the loudspeaker like maybe there was something wrong with it.

“Alles heraus; im Gleichritt … Marsch!” he calls again. “All out; in step … March!

There is no motion. Every man I can see on the ’Platz this morning looks like something strange growing out of the earth. It is so quiet.

The roll-call officer backs away from the loudspeaker and his assistants huddle around him. The guards on the ’Platz hike their rifles to the ready. The prisoners aren’t going to work! The roll-call officer and his men are looking at a group of Russian officers from Block 6; I can barely see them from the right corner of my window. Two or three roll-call clerks scurry back and forth between the Russians, whose spokesman seems to be a ramrod-stiff oldish guy, and a couple of block leaders.

Willy Bader is escorted to the roll-call officer, who is looking mad now, scowling at the Russians. He goes nose to nose with Bader, maybe asking him what the hell is going on. Bader gestures and shrugs and points to the prisoners, then to the Russians. The Russian officer marches out, turns around to face the prisoners, and leans toward the loudspeaker. “Go to work,” he shouts in bad German. His voice carries tough. “Do not sacrifice yourselves for us.”

Later I find out the Family and the International Committee had told the inmates not to fall out for their work details in protest over the rumored plan to shoot ninety-two Russian officers. Thirty thousand for ninety-two.

But still the prisoners don’t move. I wonder if they would have done this a year ago. Certainly not two years ago.

The roll-call officer marches off to the Wirtschaftsgebaude. He returns within minutes as trucks filled with SS from the barracks roar through the guardhouse gate and park with the back ends of the trucks facing the prisoners. There are machine guns in them with men already crouched to fire.

The sun behind the gray lends a kind of silver shimmer to the scene. Is it really happening? Still nobody moves. The SS reinforcements, hundreds of them, spread out, ready. The roll-call officer again gives the command to fall out and march away, and as before, there is no movement.

The Russian officer wants to speak to Bader; the roll-call officer agrees. The Russian is insisting, Bader is arguing, but the Russian finally wins. He shouts to the prisoners, “Comrades, march off! Good-bye!” The Russian’s name, I find out later, was Lieutenant Colonel Tarassow.

Bader speaks to the roll-call officer’s assistants. One of them speaks to the officer, and he gives the order to march out again. This time the striped forest moves, and even as the details march off, singing loud as usual, the SS begins to herd the Russian officers into small groups and leads them away. By now the sun is way up. It seems the prisoners have left something behind that took years to grow.

That was yesterday and the rumor was true. The SS shot them all.

Wed., May 31, 1944

Dr. Rascher is in the Bunker. His wife’s been sent to Ravensbrueck. Because of the experiments? Ah, no. Because they lied about “their” kids. Pacholegg thinks also that with the Russians moving fast out of the East, and the Allies moving up Italy, and with the talk, talk, talk of invasion across the English Channel, maybe somebody wants to close Rascher’s mouth. What about the other jokers? Pacholegg provides an answer to why the experiments continue. If the results look good, he says, maybe the American, British, and French pharmaceutical companies will lease the patents. It’s all about money, like with the sulfa drugs.

Tuesday, June 6, 1944

The news we’ve waited so long for … the invasion! It started last night when the Americans landed in France. Rome fell about the same time. Dieter Lange has not left the radio in almost a week.

Sunday, June 11, 1944

Yesterday the bombers hit Munich again. From Italian bases this time. Dieter Lange says he heard on the radio that there were 750 bombers. “That fat-ass, Goering, doesn’t fight, doesn’t send his men to fight. It’s the anti-aircraft guns he wants to use instead. Why does he save the planes?” he whines.

Turns out there was a Wuwa, a secret weapon, after all. It’s a Vergeltungswaffen, a get-even bomb. And they started dropping it on the English last month. Goebbels tells us this, and so does Radio London and Armed Forces Radio. The British call them buzz bombs. Dieter Lange is angry because Germany waited so long to use them.

Thursday, July 20, 1944

We got the news in the darkness in which we sat listening to the radio. This news came from Radio Berlin: Somebody tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. The report said he was alive. Dieter Lange took his mouth off a whiskey glass long enough to say, “You can’t trust them. Maybe he’s dead, and if he’s dead—maybe it’s over. But some of the generals don’t want it to be. Sometimes I think the goddamn generals are worse than Hitler.” The announcer gave a bunch of names of generals with Hitler who were wounded. Nobody got killed? We’ll see. (I’ll be glad if you’re dead you rascal, you.)

Anna said, “Damn it, they missed!”

The Russians are 100 miles from Warsaw. Prisoners again pull out the maps. “The Russians are here.” Pointing. “The Allies will come this way in France.” More pointing. Every prisoner is a general and a prophet. The war will be over in three months, five months, two months, ten months; Germany will quit day after tomorrow, next week, the first of the month—but not before they kill everybody. Some of Werner’s people went missing, and while trying to find out where they might be, he ran into this: When the trains come in to the sidings now, the SS asks all those who are university graduates or who speak a few languages, to step out. They will act as interpreters. This is an important task, say the SS. And of course, always willing to be special, not one of your ordinary people, they rush forward gladly. Then they are marched out to the rifle range (instead of a special campus barracks) and are shot dead. Werner’s people saw this, so they, too, were killed.

Bader told me that in addition to “regular” inmates, there are now almost 8,000 women here, nearly half of them Jewish, plus 300 German civilian workers who have been charged with some crime, and 4,000 more from assorted countries. “And,” he said, “You’re not the only American anymore. There are nine more down in Block 24. They’re American pilots. Shot down. They’re to be moved to an officer’s POW camp. There are 685 other prisoners of war also waiting for transfer, to a Stalag. There are only 262 Gypsies left …”

His voice drifted off. It was warm, a nice day with dust floating lightly in the air, kicked up by the marching details, the camp work. Not too much wind, and it was blowing from the east, so the smell from the crematorium wasn’t bad. Details were hauling away the bodies outside the Reviers and those beside the railroad tracks. You look at the corpses and think of the Americans, British, and Russians coming day by day a step closer, and you wonder if they will arrive soon, or if the Germans with their Selektions, which seem to be more frequently random, will succeed in making more prisoners vanish up the chimney, or through the doors of Hartheim Castle in Linz, or out on the rifle ranges. There isn’t a prisoner who doesn’t wonder about this.

These are the only realities: securing food enough to stay alive, having energy enough to avoid Selektion, and doing both successfully enough to enjoy liberation. There persists the fear that for revenge, the SS will kill us. They must kill us. They exist to kill us. Though there are many thousands more of us to kill, this seems not to be of great concern to them. The machine pistol and the machine gun and the areas in which we are confined make it as easy as shooting a bunch of small animals trapped in a barrel.

But now you see, even in the eyes of the Muselmänner, a distant, sharp little light that wasn’t there before. The most irreligious pray to somebody, to something. Heilbare, “recoverable,” is the way every prisoner wants to appear at Selektion or Taufe time. “Weg von heir!” is the word at the approach of a guard, a capo, or someone you don’t know and who might be an informer, a Zinker. “Get away from here, out of the way of trouble!” “Not now! Don’t fuck up now!”

You can almost hear some giant unseen clock ticking to every train that rolls in, to every puff of thick black smoke the wind snatches from the chimney, to every number called at the morning and evening roll call. I keep wondering what the world will be like when this is all over, when the inmates of this great insane asylum get free of their keepers. And what about the rescuers who’ve waded in blood to save us? The world will be, I think, a very crazy place.

The half-planted and half-tended flower beds have bloomed with their multitude of flowers; how silly they look now.

Sunday, August 6, 1944

Who can believe the stories from the East? We know they want to kill us, but out there the stories describe a symphony of killing—with rhythms and numbers and with the finest industrial instruments—in the killing camps, the Vernichtungslager: Treblinka, Belsec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidanek, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen. Oh, there are hundreds; I can’t recall all the names people mention. How are they killed, the Gypsies, the Jews, the Russians, Poles, French, Dutch, Italians, Austrians, and so on? Bullets, car gas, and the kind of gas, in more powerful doses, that Pierre used to disinfect clothes, Xyklon B. Five thousand a day, 10,000, 20,000 … off the train and into hell, to music, naked (something queer with these Germans—killing and nakedness together, sex and killing). In a strange way, you get used to what happens here. I mean, that’s the plan, to get you used to it. But what happens in the slaughterhouses that brings these men here with a look in their eyes like a bullet just missed their heads, is a thing I can’t begin to imagine. Yet they are here, with their stories of digging up bodies to burn or move, or planting seedlings of trees where acres of bodies have been buried. But that means the Germans who did and who do and who order and who allow these things to happen know exactly how murderous they’ve been. If even Dieter Lange starts shaking when he talks about what he’s heard and seen, God help us all. Oh, it’ll be quite a world afterward with all the lynchers. They won’t get caught; they never get all the lynchers, because they don’t want to, because the sheriff protects his deputy, the judge protects the sheriff, and the church-going business people and politicians protect the judge.

How can this meal be served to me? I didn’t ask for it. All I ever wanted was to play my music and be happy with someone I liked who liked me. Now look at this world these white folks have made. Jeeeee-suss.

Wednesday Night, August 16, 1944

Yesterday morning, on the French Riviera, American, British, and French soldiers landed near Nice and Marseilles. (“I’ll Be Seeing You …”)

Saturday, October 21, 1944

Paris was freed in August, and the rest of France is coming loose, too. The Russians are in Prussia. Some of the American cowboys are inside Germany, or what’s left of it. Radio London, Armed Forces Radio, the Voice of America, all say the bombers and fighters never stop flying from England, Italy, and now France. And everyone who has been into Munich says it looks like it’s been hit by ten earthquakes.

Luxembourg is free and the Germans have been pushed into northern Italy. Was it the accumulation of these things that made me dig up the address of Dr. Nyassa’s wife? Did these events force into my hand the name of Mulheim, where Pierre came from and where his mother, bitch that he said she was, may still live?

There must be some connection between the war, the way it is going, and my daydreams of being back with musicians who are exchanging stories about the Club 802, the Clef, the Amsterdam Club in New York; or lying about the Petit Chaut in Constantinople, the Weiburg Bar in Vienna, the Flea Pits, the Paraquet Cabaret, the Casino de Paris, the Tabariss in Holland. They would tell me their stories and I’d tell mine, and we’d laugh and drink and maybe they’d call me Pepper instead of Cliff because I’d lived through this. And we’d talk about the down-deep prejudice of white men everywhere—home, France, Turkey (even if not so white there), Belgium, Italy, Germany (of course!), and how they made Louis work so hard he busted his lip and that changed his sound because he had to play on another part of his lip.…

I daydream and dig up addresses. Dieter Lange sweats fear so you can smell it. Anna is sick and he won’t help her; he wouldn’t mind if she died. The doctor says her symptoms are of typhoid. I nurse her, wash her, clean her, feed her. There’s no one else to do it. I put cold cloths on her head, check her temperature, and listen to her whining and crying and moaning. I check the redness of her spots, give her the sulfa pills and clear soup (like the prisoners get, but hers is made from something besides water and salt and turnip tops). Dieter Lange doesn’t come near her. If it were safe to go check some other camp he’d have been long gone, but there’s no point. The house smells of shit. Opening windows doesn’t help.

What else doesn’t help is Hitler. He offered peace, but Roosevelt, Churchill, and that bad-assed Joe Stalin already done said “Unconditional surrender.” I guess that means give it all up. What it also means is Germany has lost but just won’t quit. How many times did I see bad jokers start fights in clubs, clearing out the tables, spilling drinks, making women scream and men holler, only to see Mr. Bad get his ass kicked, if not his face slashed? Nothing feels better than to see a bully get his. Must be human nature, to see Mr. Bad get his ass kicked good. Now it’s Germany’s turn. Now.

But I attend this frau, this farm girl, whose only discoveries in the world have been money and fucking. That’s all. If she got religion, it was for one lousy stinking second. She lays there, the autumn air blowing with a slight chill through the windows I’ve opened; lays there watching me do things for her, her eyes filled with thanks, her fat little hands lingering on my arms and wrists. Anna has no friends. Ursula is gone and Lily Bernhardt, who kept her distance anyway, is dead. The sewing circle that made swastika flags broke up a long time ago. If there are still Kaffeeklatsches, she hasn’t been invited to one in over a year, and she hasn’t held any probably because no one would come. Anna Lange is a prisoner, too.

She tells me of her life before Dieter Lange, when she lived on her father’s farm south of Esterhofen, not far from Dachau. An only child, like me. Her parents hated her because she was a girl, not a boy, and her mother couldn’t have any more children. A boy would have been of more help. She took care of their small herd of cows, milked them, brought them in and out. She hitched the horses to the plow and drove them and walked in cowshit up to her knees. She helped care for the crops, planting, weeding, harvesting. When the harvest was in, read the magazines from Munich and Berlin and went to the movies.

Then came these SA and SS officers from Munich looking for a place to build a camp. Good Nazis. Dieter Lange kept coming back. Anna’s father had voted for Hitler. He liked what the Nazis said they would do for Germany. Hindenburg had his turn and failed. Things would go better with Hitler in office. So how could he refuse Dieter Lange’s request to marry her? And she, anyhow, was dying to get away; even the town of Dachau was bigger than Esterhofen, and Dachau was just a ways from the big city, Munich. Queer? She didn’t know what queer was. She had no friends even then to talk to about such things. Not even in school, which none of the kids liked. She watched the animals until her folks chased her away (just like I thought). She got hot watching them and knew something should have been happening to her, too. So, then, Dieter Lange.

He wasn’t very good-looking, but neither was she. He’d come from Berlin, though, and talked about the bright lights and the clubs and the entertainers, and he flattered her mother and father and made them feel that they had a son after all, one who was an officer, too. She knew they couldn’t understand why he wanted her, but what could they say? What could they do? And since the camp would be for criminals, he would see that they got the help they needed to run the farm and make it prosperous. That he promised. And he kept his word.

He liked to fuck, Dieter Lange did, in the behind, which at first she thought was all right, though it didn’t do much for her. She questioned him. He said that was the way all the Catholics did it to please the Pope and to not have children. In those days, who could afford to have kids, and she didn’t want them anyway. There was too much life to be lived. Sometimes she got him to do it the other way, but not nearly enough, which was why, of course, she got involved with Bernhardt, who could do it half the night without coming up for air. And he had that reputation; he would fuck anything moving, the more unusual the better. He showed her lots of things. He teased her about how much she wanted to do it and wondered why Dieter Lange wasn’t doing his work at home. Then she began to wonder. So that day she came home and I was fighting with Dieter Lange over the records I broke and that slap I gave him, she knew what was up. Finally. She was glad that she had helped to make me, as she’d told Dieter Lange, not all queer.

I told her, as she lay there (this was a couple of weeks ago, but she’s still down—the typhoid takes nearly a month to break), that I never liked doing it with women. I didn’t know why. I just didn’t. Always? she wanted to know. Not always, I said. You know, when you get to that age. Why, that’s what I meant, she said. Then she said, Oh, dear.

She then wanted to know how we had met, me and Dieter Lange, and I told her about Berlin back in the old days and how he was a small-time pimp and confidence man—and queer—who used to go to the clubs for one thing or another, and how he’d always send me drinks and try to talk to me. Berlin, I told her, was full of queers then, but they began to melt into the woodwork when the Nazis came in, even though so many Nazis were themselves freaks. I put it to her that she was queer and she smiled. You mean Ursula, she said, and I said Yes, Ursula. No, she said. She just liked doing something different. But you liked her, Anna said. You liked doing it to her. I know. I could tell. She had a nice behind, I said. Not like mine, which is a little bit too much, eh? she said.

“Get some sleep,” I say. “I have to go to the canteen.”

“Why doesn’t Dieter come and help look after me?” she asks.

“He gets the medicine,” I say.

She cries herself to sleep.

Friday, Nov. 24, 1944

Back in the spring there was what I called a roundup. It was like a Selektion, only the SS were forming labor battalions to go work on the Western Front. Whatever they did wasn’t enough, wasn’t shit, because the Allies came anyway. Now they’re forming another labor battalion. Somebody said they’re doing this in all the camps. Nobody wants to go now. In the spring it was different. But now the whole American, British, Canadian, and French armies are fighting in Germany. Any Haftling who looks halfway healthy is going West, and those Zinkers and rats and hustlers and SS runners and everyone else who has managed to eat regularly and can carry a shovel—Uhlmer from the canteen included (Dieter Lange told me to choose between him and Lappus)—will get a taste of war. And that may be their last taste of anything, because the Germans will throw even their own kids, yes, little boys, into the fight to save the Reich. The prisoners ain’t gonna be nothin’ but sitting ducks.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. We listened to all the Thanksgiving stuff on the radio. There was even an American football game broadcast from Italy.

Anna is able to get up for a little while at a time. If she were in the camp, she’d probably be dead by now.

Tuesday, December 26, 1944

A late Christmas present. Big bomber raid about a week ago. Bader says Elser (Eller?) was killed in the raid, but I don’t see how, because they say he was in camp, not Munich. Maybe they just decided it was time to kill him. Elser was the guy who tried to kill Hitler two months after the war began.

The Germans got back into Belgium and, according to Radio Berlin, kicked the shit out of the Americans. That was another Blitzkrieg. Through the mountains. More German bullshit! It’s got to be.

I write in my room. It is bitterly cold. There’s only the little kerosene stove going up in their bedroom. Now Radio Berlin is saying “counterattack, successful counterattack.” The Allies are saying “heavy fighting, heavy fighting.” This would have been the Christmas every prisoner wanted, with liberation around the corner. Not now. Everyone’s afraid the Germans have pulled another rabbit out of the hat, like the buzz bombs, that maybe they’ll take back everything they’ve lost since June. Now we know where all those labor battalions went. Maybe Uhlmer will never come back, so it’ll be just me and Lappus in the canteen, where what we have to sell isn’t worth buying, not even with scrip.

The gas chamber that was being added to the crematorium is finished. Me and Bader slipped around the stacks of bodies with the help of one of the Sonderkommandos to see it. He was grumbling, because now there’d be more work to do and maybe not so many men to do it. The smell was a little bit more powerful than the stink of the dead lying all around; that wouldn’t last. On the door, lettering read:

Zu:

Gaszeit:

Auf:

In:

Gas time:

Out:

Then a skull and crossbones and an arrow pointing to a handle. Under these was:

Versicht! Gas!

Lebensgefahr!

Nicht Offnen!

Danger! Gas!

Dangerous to life!

Don’t open!

The place looked like a shower, with tiled floors and walls. Bader whispered, “So now a little bit fewer transports to Hartheim, eh?”

Tuesday, January 2, 1945

A few nights ago I heard a noise on the steps leading to my room. I knew it was Dieter Lange and I sat up to curse him out. He came through the door with a crash, carrying with him the rancid odors of sour sweat, bad breath, and liquor. He felt for me. I started to shout, and then there was a second of pain and nothing else. As soon as I woke I felt the pain in my face and I knew it was swollen. My pants had been torn off. My insides hurt so much I couldn’t take a deep breath. The cocksucker had raped me.

I called him those things right to his face, yes, I did: you dirty, stinking, low-life sonofabitch, sneaky, no ’count German white trash, shiftless, chickenshit Kraut, pickle-sucking Nazi dummy, two-bit shitbag, motherfucking slimy …

Anna tried to shush me, but I told her to shut up.

You nasty, funky, trifling, shithead queer, dried-up old fruit, freak, sissy, you worn leather asshole …

I took his neck in my hands. Anna pulled at me and I shoved her away over the linoleum floor that was cracking with the cold. Dieter Lange was still drunk, his eyes half-closed. Slobber dribbled out of his mouth. He looked like he wanted me to kill him. What a start to the new year.

It wasn’t any of my goddamn fault that his General Major and Colonel got caught in the big black market that covered Europe from Poland to France. The Munich paper was open on the kitchen table with their pictures in it. “That’s them! That’s them!” he’d cried when I staggered up the steps meaning to kill him, whatever else happened, just kill him deader than dead. And as he ran from room to room, me chasing him and trapping him in the kitchen, he said, “They’re coming next for me!”

“You gonna be one dead Nazi when they find your ass!” I was throwing chairs and shoving the table, and I picked up the stove poker and swung at him with all my might. He jumped back out of the way and I hit a rack full of glasses that exploded into fragments. Anna screamed. “The Gestapo can have your stinking ass when I’m through with it, you pork-pushing, shit-packing punk!” He fell into a chair, and that’s when I wrapped my hands around his neck. “Fuck me like I was some kind of pig …” I said, thinking how good it felt, having his neck in my hands, and in their embrace he tilted his head backward, as though to make more room for me to squeeze, but I hadn’t started to do that yet.

Anna threw her arms around my waist and pulled, her feet making screeing and cracking noises on the broken glass. “But it’s almost over, Cleef. Please, don’t.”

That was true. The Americans had pushed the Germans back and were advancing, ready to cross the Rhine. I didn’t stop because Anna asked me to; I stopped because she reminded me of what I already knew and because, if the Gestapo didn’t come for Dieter Lange, if they stopped with the big shots—and everyone likes to hate big shots—then Dieter Lange would remain my ticket to survival. Not so if they got him—or I killed him. If he lived, I remained Dieter Lange’s nigger; if not, I was a dead nigger. And with the Germans in retreat again—what the Poles called Zirkus Plechovi, the metal circus—the guards were scared, ready to kill, especially an American who didn’t have a gun, like me, for example.

I stood a moment looking down at him, catching my breath. With a whimper, Anna tugged once more, as though she’d read my thoughts. I knew just then that whatever happened outside the house, no matter how Dieter Lange behaved toward me out there, or even Anna the rare times she went out, I, The Cliff, was the strongest person in that house. I drew back and slapped Dieter Lange out of his chair. “Bull rape me, will you? Because you’re scared, you do that to me? Because your buddies got caught and you lose some money you knock me out and joog me like I was a corpse or something? What is wrong with you fucking people? Just how crazy are you, to make everybody in the world hate you? Come near me again …”

I told Anna to make me some coffee. She started, then paused over Dieter Lange. “Fuck him, bitch. Coffee!”

Sunday, January 28, 1945

I stared at Dieter Lange and Anna Lange last night when the BBC announced that the Russians had liberated Auschwitz and found—shit, what can I say? We’d heard the rumors for a long time and now knew them to be true. The Germans behaved as though they didn’t have one single thing to do with Auschwitz, or even Dachau. I said, “Just wait till they find all the other camps.” Then they looked at me like they were seeing me for only the first or second time. Slowly, fear climbed up in their eyes. I watched it, thought of the way death, the cruelest kinds of death, and sex, the more unusual the better, seemed always to go together with people like the ones I was staring at. It was a luxury brought only by the prospect of Germany being ground under, thinking like that. I had lived in the middle of it for almost a dozen years, heard about the edges of it every day, and yet only news that this place was done for allowed me to think of how big and how evil it all was, the kind of evil they couldn’t begin to imagine when preachers talked about it in church.

Friday, February 16, 1945

The Allies bombed Dresden; the place is still burning. Thousands died, burned to a crisp. Fried. Baked. Barbequed. Good. Great.

Dear, dear God. Oh, Loa Aizan.

I think I have the syph. These sores on my butt. In my butt. That rotten sonofabitch. At dinner I told them. Dieter Lange said it’s probably nothing. I cussed him out and asked who had he been fooling around with, anyway? He said nobody, but he lies. I can tell he’s lying. Anna said Dieter Lange wasn’t sleeping in her bed anymore. I said it was too late for that. Dieter Lange said he’d have someone come and look at me, and I said who could look at me and not know what had been going on all these years between us? He said the same doctor who’d done the Lebensborn papers for them. Anna wants an examination, too. I think Dieter Lange already had one and is on medication.

“Pears” are rolling now for reasons the guards never thought of two or three years ago. Yesterday the “pear” belonged to a man who got caught stealing a rag from another prisoner to replace his own, which he’d used to wipe his behind. After he used it, he washed it out. After three months it was worn out. He needed another. He stole one and his “pear” rolled. Twenty-five lashes used to be the punishment for petty theft.

Diary, could I become rich selling you piece by piece for toilet paper? Then could I buy some magic cure for this?

Sunday, February 25, 1945

I leave Lappus to run the canteen and I walk around the Dancing Ground and up and down the ’Strasse. It’s cold and windy, but, like everyone else, I keep waiting for that good thing to happen. It’s in the air. A fool couldn’t help seeing it. The Family and the International Committee have gathered and have posted lookouts at the door of Block 1. The Blacks seem to have huddled closer to the SS guards, like the Greens. But the guards are mostly old men now and some are even civilians. It’s plain they’d rather be somewhere else. The Family and the IC are just as concerned with maintaining the routine as the guards. No work today. Everyone is inside, out of the cold, wondering if the rumors of still another typhoid epidemic will turn out to be true. Maybe the rumor was started by one of the groups to keep the guards away from the blocks. Maybe not. Now there is always talk of a rebellion, of guns that are already in the hands of the IC or the Family, of knives and clubs, of battle positions.

The big problem is food, getting enough of it and sharing it to try to keep people alive until liberation. If I brought food in, it wouldn’t last but a second. There are just too many starving jokers stumbling around here. In the old days when I brought food and things in for Werner or for Pierre or to trade, it was different—you didn’t have to worry about 30,000 other people trying to snatch it out of your hand. I miss those old days, sometimes, when I felt I was a part of things, the Widerstand, the resistance, hauling around radio parts, passing on information from Gitzig to Werner. Now it’s every man for himself.

I find no one to talk to. Besides, it’s too cold to talk for long outside. I return to the canteen and take one of the sulfa pills Dieter Lange’s doctor gave me. I suppose he gave them to him, too. What a shabby little man. He just pulled me apart and flashed a light up there and tskked. He’s probably seen unimaginable things so often that he’s used to them. He just said, “Yes, that’s what you have, syphilis. Take these four times a day with water.” Then he left. I feel like a leper. I’ve never had a disease before, not even the clap.

When I get home, I take the piano stool and break it apart and make a fire in the stove. I take the plate of boiled potatoes Anna fixed for me and sit beside it. Dieter Lange is bent over the radio. I know Anna doesn’t want me in the kitchen, and him neither. She sits on the other side of the stove, pulling her fingers and mumbling something about going home. My mind is a thing watching me trying to think. I feel so tired, so weak. When I finish writing this, I have to check my hiding place. Dieter Lange’s bin is empty. Just a few sausages hang there with mold growing on them. They smell rotten. But maybe it’s me I smell, or Anna, or Dieter Lange. It’s hard to tell who or what is smelling these days.

Thursday, March 15, 1945

Now I believe what I’ve heard. Werner came into the canteen today with a woman SS guard. Oh, he seemed proud of her and she was giggling and carrying on, and they were touching each other. Well, what can I say? This close to the end and he’s got an SS girlfriend? And he’s been working with the International Committee and the Family? Seems to me he’s got his dick on his mind instead of his thinking cap. But who am I to mark the changes in other people?

Anna tried to leave yesterday, but she was brought back because she fell down in the mud and couldn’t get up. Drunk. Dieter Lange doesn’t know what to do with her. All she needs to do is start screaming about two faggots with syphilis and there’ll be a black “pear” and a blond “pear” rolling at six o’clock that night. Stupid bitch. Who would miss her if she turned up dead?

Sunday, April 1, 1945

Yesterday the sky was blue except for a few big white clouds. A bunch of American planes marked with white stars with red balls inside them and red tails, dove out of the sky with a noise that made the ground shake. They were heading toward Munich along the railroad tracks. They zoomed low and then high, turned sideways, went up, and came back again. They were sparkling silver. Then German planes appeared out of nowhere to chase them.

I was just outside the camp when the racket started, on my way home where I was thinking of burning the top of the piano for heat. All the SS and their runners in the Jourhaus ran out to see. The planes roared and whistled up and down the sky, then flattened out over the camp, making noise like rolling thunder, their guns yammering and pounding, their engines howling, until they flew out of sight over the horizon. Enlisted men, SS officers, wives, calfactors, civilians—we were all watching this business in the sky, the vanishing, the thundering, the climbing up into the clouds and diving down again. The machine guns sounded like drummers practicing on snares at the far end of a great big empty hall. All the sounds flew far away, but left the echo of a promise to return—a whine, a growl, something. And then an American plane came roaring out of the west behind the factories with a German plane right behind it. The German plane didn’t sound like the American plane—more like a long, sharp whistle—and its guns went Poom! Poom! Tatttaaaattttaaaaat! The American swung up in the sky in a big loop and came down right behind the German. The American plane was skidding back and forth like a wounded bird, but man, the American sounded like he was doing the Mammy-Daddy roll on that German’s ass and wasn’t going to quit. Then he tried to pull up, but only skidded off to the north. Now the German was trying to climb up into one of the big clouds, but it seemed like he hit an invisible wall, and then smoke came rushing out of his tail. He started to nose over and then began a run down the sky, leaving smoke like a big pencil streak against the blue. Flames jumped out. I heard people groan. I heard myself shout “Get out!” Then, “Jump!!” At that moment it didn’t matter that he was a German. People were shouting, “Fallschirmspringen! Fallschirmspringen!” Parachute!

Parachute! But the plane seemed to be drawn faster and faster to the ground. It went through a cloud and marked it with a black, whirling streamer. I almost turned away, and maybe what kept me from doing so was a sudden blossoming of white with the sun sparkling off it. The American! His plane had been hit, too, and he’d had to use his parachute. There was a faint explosion to the north, but everyone’s attention was on the German plane whining through the air in a long steep angle that carried it out of sight behind the horizon east of the camp. There was a crumping sound. It shook the earth delicately. I thought, He’s gone. Not up the chimney, but down the stack.

The American was drifting north of the camp, toward the rifle ranges. His plane had gone down, without smoke or fire. Two trucks filled with SS from the Jourhaus drove out of camp through the factory road and turned north. How great it would be to capture an American pilot! they said. Nobody I could notice was going to see about the German. There was nothing new about jokers being burned up around here.

The airplane fight gave us something to talk about at home, a chance to break the nasty stillness that had closed in on us. I could not burn the piano top. Just couldn’t. Not even to spite them, to dare them to say something so I could curse them out. Anyway, the house wasn’t quite so cold now, and really, since the compound guards brought her back that day, Anna hasn’t treated us so much like lepers.

Dieter Lange was grumbling over a big bowl of soup with a little meat but mostly turnips and cabbage made thick with flour, that the Americans had shot down another secret weapon, the Dusenjager, the jet fighter that had crashed. “The buzz bombs only make Hitler feel good,” he said. “And the jet fighters can’t protect us here. You saw. The American shot him right in the ass.”

“Isn’t he talking bold these days?” Anna said.

“Everybody’s talking these days,” he said, “and some are doing more than talking. You’ll see.”

“And what does that mean, Major Lange, what does that mean?”

“It means not everyone is going to sit still and take the blame for things Hitler and Himmler and Goering and Goebbels ordered done. That’s what it means.”

Anna slid a look toward me.

“You better take more time to cure your syphilis instead of trying to think up schemes,” she said to him. “Look where your scheming has got us.”

“Shut up, you tub of lard.”

“Oh, shut up yourself, you queer.”

I said, “Why don’t you both shut up and listen to the radio.”

God. Every night it’s like this. Dieter Lange hasn’t been away on a trip because he’s up to something. I know him. And, besides, now that Anna’s tipped her hand with that running away, he’s not going to let her out of his sight.

The sound of a car stopping quickly in front of the house made Dieter Lange unplug the cord to the shortwave radio, which he kept hidden in a closet. He pulled some clothes over the radio and closed the door and walked to the window. He was scared. And so was I. What was on Anna’s face was not fear, more like she was expecting to have some of her problems solved.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! I said to myself, Oh, shit. Dieter Lange’s face went white. The General Major and the Colonel and now us. Dieter Lange went from the window, whose curtain he hadn’t even had time to push aside to look out, to the door, his face clouding up like he was going to cry. He managed to open the door and an SS sergeant saluted and shouted, “The Jourhaus duty officer, Captain Baugh, wishes the use of your black, Major, at once, please.”

Understanding that he wasn’t to be led away to have his head chopped off, and also that there was a duty officer involved, Dieter Lange demanded to know for what purpose.

“To help, sir, with the American pilot who got shot down this afternoon.”

“Ah hah! You got him then?” Dieter Lange said.

“Yes, we did.”

“An American who doesn’t speak English?”

“Oh, he speaks English. He’s a black man like your black and speaks no German, of course.”

“Oh! Is that so? But you must have someone there who can translate.”

The sergeant came close to Dieter Lange and said, “Captain Haug would like to show how well we treat prisoners, even black ones.”

“And there aren’t any in the camp?”

“Not worth showing, Major.”

“But what do you want my calfactor to do?”

“Just to make the pilot feel comfortable.”

An ugly grin spread over Dieter Lange’s face. “Ah, the captain wants to get points with the cowboys for a little later on, eh?”

The sergeant grinned. “You said that. I didn’t.”

“I’ll join you,” Dieter Lange said.

The sergeant looked uncomfortable. “Captain Baugh said, in case you said that, there are already too many people in the interrogation room, sir.”

“Let him change clothes and take him then.”

I could not imagine it. A Negro riding one of those mighty machines, a Negro who’d shot down a German plane, a secret-weapon plane? Who’d floated through the sky to land safely out in the fields? What would they do to him? These thoughts and others raced around in my head as we sped to the gatehouse in the last light of day.

My third time. There’d been Count Walther von Hausberger, then Ruby Mae Richards, and now the pilot. Up the stairs again (which meant they hadn’t beat him) and into the same room, which was filled with cigarette smoke and SS men.

Even in clean rags I must have looked a sight. He stared at me out of the cozy-looking, wool-lined leather jacket. His gun holster was empty. His wool-trimmed aviator cap sat cockily tilted to one side and a little back on his head. He looked like a boy, only a little older than Pierre but in good health. He was smoking and I think he was a little afraid; the smoking helped him to hide it. There was a little blood on his face and his left cheek was swollen, like he’d bumped it or been hit.

“You work with the translator. Make this man feel comfortable, eh?” Captain Baugh said. I guess it was Captain Baugh. “Who he is, where he’s from. In a friendly fashion. See if he’s hurt and needs a doctor.”

“Hello,” I said in English.

“Hello,” he said, squinting up, trying to figure what was going on.

“Can I please have a cigarette?” I asked the captain in German.

As I was lighting it the pilot asked, “What kind of camp is this? Are you an American? What outfit were you in? What do they want? I’m a prisoner of war, you know, and an officer.”

I said, “I know. Are you all right? Not hurt or anything from the parachute jump?”

“No. I’m okay,” the pilot said.

“They want to know who you are,” I said. Captain Baugh smiled approvingly.

“Captain Homer Harrison, Jr., serial number 628-93-47, Protestant. Blood type, O. That’s it, mister, name, rank, and serial number. That’s more than I’m required to give these cats. Who are you?”

Captain Baugh approached holding out his hand. “Captain Harrison.”

The pilot, suspicious, shook Baugh’s hand briefly, then turned back to me.

“Clifford Pepperidge, from New York,” I said. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a prisoner.”

“What’s that you’re saying?” the captain asked loudly, moving toward us.

“I just told him I wasn’t a soldier.” The translator verified this with a nod.

The young Negro pilot and I stared at each other. He said again, this time to the captain, “What kind of camp is this?”

The translator spoke rapidly to the captain. “Tell him it is a camp for criminals,” the captain said. Everyone stared at the pilot.

“Criminals?” the pilot said, looking at me. I didn’t answer.

Then another officer leaned forward and spoke in German, “Where are you flying from? Since when does the American air force have black pilots?”

The translator spoke.

Harrison shook his head. “I told you,” he said. “Name, rank, and serial number. Blood type and religion were free. That’s it. Nothing more.” To me he said, like they weren’t in the room, “Where are we? How close to or far from Munich?”

“Dachau,” I said.

“How far from Munich?”

“About fifteen miles.”

“What does he say? What did you say, Pepper-ah?” the captain asked before the translator could speak.

“He wanted to know where he was and how far from Munich.” While they were talking, coming up with the next questions, I said to the pilot, “This is a concentration camp.” I saw that meant nothing to him.

“Why are there so many dead people just laying around? I saw them. Are those cemeteries out there where I came down?”

I said, “Yes.”

The translator rolled his eyes.

“What does he say?” Captain Baugh asked.

“Make way,” someone in the rear of the room said, and the bodies moved apart while an SS man leaned forward with a bottle of cognac, a glass, and a sandwich. The pilot looked at me. I looked at the captain, who nodded, and said, “Let him eat and have a drink. The Luftwaffe people will be here to take him to an officer’s prisoner of war camp. I think they’ll want to know just how he shot down one of our best planes. He doesn’t have to be frightened. The war’s almost over. Remind him he was treated well in Dachau and that Captain Hans Baugh was his interrogation officer.” The captain winked at me. “You understand.”

“Can I talk with him, Captain?”

“Why?” Captain Baugh seemed to be tired and resigned. “What about?”

“Because he’s a colored man,” I said, because there really wasn’t another reason.

“I think not. He doesn’t need to know anything more about this place and I think you would tell him, no?”

I didn’t answer. “But can I stay until they come for him?”

“No. He’ll be all right, and even if that was not to be the case, it’d do no good your being here. That’s all.” He told the sergeant who’d brought me to take me back.

The pilot was eating the sandwich and drinking, his eyes jumping from me to the captain. “What’s all this about?” he asked.

“The German air force people are coming to talk to you about shooting down that plane—”

“That ME 262?” His face broke into a great, beautiful smile. “You saw that? Messed up that cat, man. Another jet kill—”

The captain interrupted. “What’s he talking about now?”

There was a look of wonder on the translator’s face as he said, “About the plane he shot down. He shot down one before.”

A growl came from the men in the room.

To Harrison I said, “They won’t let me stay with you till they come, so good luck. Uh—when will it be over?”

He looked sharply at me as though I’d turned suddenly into a spy. He drank and held my eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay. Aybemay ootay, eethray eeksway. Orefay at eethay ostmay. Ancay ooyay akeitmay?”

“Esyay,” I said. I didn’t know I looked that bad, but I nodded and held out my hand. He shook it, then the sergeant took me away.

The Langes were waiting up for me with a piece of sausage and a big glass of schnapps. I told them all about it, answered what questions I could, even the one about when it would be over, and I laughed at them. I felt like Gabriel warming up on his horn. But I wasn’t feeling so good. Had they poisoned me with the schnapps? I drifted downstairs and pulled the blanket over me and curled up. Just tired, I told myself. You hold yourself together for a thousand years with threads and strings of hope, and when somebody who should know tells you it’s going to be all right soon, maybe the strings start breaking, pop, pop, pop.

Thursday, April 19, 1945

Yesterday in broad daylight, they made General Delestraint take off the uniform he insisted on wearing and shot him dead. On the ’Strasse near the Appellplatz. He thought … I don’t know what he thought. But the Family and the International Committee, which have become Resistance Committees, or some jokers who belong to one or the other, or maybe both, say he was told he was going to have a shower and then join the honor prisoners in their Bunker. He must have known that was bullshit, if that’s what they told him.

He was a rigid, proud little man. He once told me in the canteen when he wanted a pack of Bleus (which of course we didn’t have), that the best soldiers he ever commanded were Senegalese during the Great War. (“They had no illusions. They knew they were in France to die for France.”) Thing is, after the SS shot him, they left his body there in the dirt for a couple of hours before they took it away.

I haven’t been in camp since then. It’s getting dangerous, and I still am not well. Neff tells me to get out and stay out because it looks like we’ve got typhus going around again. The SS and their camp police are like kids who must have a last taste of candy, except in this case, it’s not candy, but killing; they can’t seem to stop. “Let the Kuhtreiber come,” they say. “We’ll show them the wild west. Bang! Bang! And we don’t have to worry about Rosenvelt anymore since he died last week.” Roosevelt was a president I never even knew much about.

The prisoners are mainly confined to the blocks. There are too many of them for the SS to guard outside, with the few men they have left. And the SS are afraid of large details because some SS have been murdered. I think of a can of meat left too long in the sun, the way it can swell and then explode.

The airplanes with the red tails—how wonderful yet sad they make me feel, because I don’t know what happened to Captain Harrison—fly over almost every day now. It’s like being greeted by a neighbor from down the street or Loa Aizan looking things over.

Every prisoner with any sense knows, or thinks he knows, that the camps have been liberated in Poland, that Bergen-Belsen is free, and that Buchenwald was liberated ten days ago. The 3,000 prisoners the SS was trying not to be caught with there are all dead on the siding just outside the east wall of this camp, stinking like hell in the fifty boxcars that brought them here, says Bader. Bader’s people do the count. Bader is busy these days, keeping peace and getting some kind of final tally on who is dead and who is alive, block by block. Resistance group people (who announce themselves as such) are coming out of the woodwork now. What or how Werner fits in, I do not know and don’t care too much to know. Prisoners who have lived for months in holes beneath the blocks or in the eaves of the blocks have crept out.

Tuesday, April 24, 1945

Oh, Captain Harrison, your two weeks are up; now we have to work on the next two. Damn!

Nuremberg, Hessenthal, and a dozen camps to the north, including Flossenburg, have been liberated. Next stop, Berlin, where the Russians already are. The news comes in static bursts over the radio. Anna sits blubbering, her legs swollen, her feet puffing out of her shoes. Dieter Lange is in and out. “Yes, it’s typhus,” he announces. “No point running to your father’s farm,” he shouts at Anna. “The Americans will be there in another day or so, if not already.” She cries and holds out her arms to him. He spits.

The compound seems empty. No flower beds turned. Few cars and trucks. Few people out under the gray April sky that often opens and lets loose rain. I think at night the mothers and children go, in trucks if they can, on foot if they can’t, hoping to get into the town and from there as far away from this place as possible.

We don’t sleep, we doze in chairs, coming awake in the night when a truck or car glides down the street with slitted blackout lights. Alarms go on and off, crying down the night like children lost in the darkness. Even in the house, the smell of burning flesh invades through the cracks, and I think of the bodies that have been thrown every whichaway, like store dummies. Nobody cares. Nobody moves them. They are just there, from one end of the camp into the compound.

We have been hearing guns a long way off, soft as though they meant us no harm. Last night they seemed closer, a little louder, a lot meaner. Dieter Lange has been running back and forth to the Jourhaus for orders and news. Like the way he was in the old days, cutting a deal here, a hustle there. Evacuation orders, he says, are coming. The camp will be destroyed.

“What do you mean, ‘destroyed’?” I say. “How can you destroy the camp?”

He does not answer. He tries to look wise, like only he knows the secret.

Anna says it. “You mean kill all the prisoners, leave 30,000 bodies for the Americans to find? Is Commandant Aumeier crazy?”

Dieter Lange shrugs. “I have nothing to do with these things. I run the canteens, and that is all. You know that is all I’ve ever done.”

I laugh and nibble at my boiled potato. The house is silent and cold. No sense listening to the radio. I don’t know about Dieter Lange and Anna, but I can almost see them coming, red tails blazing in the sun, tromping through German farms and along German roads. Out in the street the SS, the old men in and out of uniform, the kids, and the wounded troop by for the changing of the guard, singing the sad “Lili Marlene.” What must the prisoners be thinking to be still singing in the camp?

Saturday, April 28, 1945

It’s hard to find paper. They’re cleaning out everything in the camp, the compound, the factories. Everywhere. And running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Burning records. Every day there are fewer guards; they just seem to vanish. Probably burned their uniforms and slipped away in civilian clothes, which are priceless now. You’d think they were made of gold. They aren’t even trying to feed the prisoners in the camp, Dieter Lange reports. They have to do for themselves for food—buy it, steal it, take it from somebody else. Bodies are stacked up beside the moat, in the ’Platz, in the ’Strasse, along the outside walls of the crematorium, and just inside and outside the electric fence. The SS officers’ wives have all gone, some west to Augsburg to surrender to the Americans, and others south to avoid both the Russians and the Americans.

Americans. Will they be black or white or mixed up? I don’t think mixed. Will white American soldiers look after me the way Negro ones would? And if they don’t, what do I do? Great God Almighty, what if nothing’s changed? C’mon, Cliff, whatever else has changed, you know that ain’t changed. The whole world is looking for Americans to save them, and I don’t know that they will.

I am going south with Anna tomorrow. Dieter Lange has arranged for us to go with a women’s group. We won’t have much food; two boiled potatoes each. Going may be safer than staying around here because there are supposed to be committees in the camp with arms to stop the guards from killing off the prisoners. That will start a war. The SS wants to empty the camp or leave corpses so the Americans can’t know what they really did to us. Dieter Lange thinks the guards are crazy to want to kill more prisoners now, but it doesn’t matter to him, he says. Of course it doesn’t. He’ll be gone. He’s got money, civilian clothes, and papers, and he’s not taking Anna, and certainly not me. Anna’s on her own. She knows and Dieter Lange knows that I’ll leave her as soon as I can. She’s so weak she can hardly walk. We’ll make a good couple for a little while. Me shuffling because of the infection, and her hobbling like some baby elephant. We’ll go with the third group of women prisoners. She should keep her mouth shut and stay with the prisoners, Dieter Lange says, shaking his finger in her face. She’s been crying and pleading with him, saying she can’t walk all the way to Allach. There are no vehicles, Dieter Lange tells her, and besides, Cleef will look after you. Cleef is not my husband, she cries, and he shouts maybe he’s not, but he’s fucked you often enough. I think, why now? Who cares now who she’s fucked or been fucked by? I am mad at Dieter Lange and I wish I was well enough to kill him. Look at him! Thin as a piece of old wire, his face wrinkled and worried and stubbled with a dirty gray beard, his muddy blue eyes sliding back and forth from her to me and to the window …

Yet if not for Dieter Lange, I would be dead, like those other colored men, the Africans from the Cameroons, the Mischlings, like those thousands and thousands of Reds, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, Witnesses, like all those thousands who were in the way. I needed him like God needs the Devil, like Loa Aizan needs Loa Baron Samedi. I would not rather have died. So we used each other, Dieter Lange and me. He liked tight places and a chocolate lollipop and jazz music. I liked living, being alive, and I lived better than the prisoners in the camp and sometimes better than those who worked out here. He could have taken my life as easily as he took me, even if he feared the consequences. If I was made into something less than human, I lived. If he gave me syphilis, I lived. If he enjoyed my humiliation and suffering, I lived. Living is everything. Death is shit. Death is smoke going up the chimney without one single note of sorrow being played or sung to mark your passing. Death in Dachau is rotting in the swamps, flying to the electric fence, bleeding from broken, beaten bones in the Bunker, being mauled by the dogs, shot by the SS, drowned by them, hung by them, beheaded by them, starved by them. And then they pull your gold-filled teeth before they burn you and spread your crushed bones and ashes over the Appellplatz or use them as fertilizer for flowers. In Dachau, death is escape, they always said, and maybe it is. I don’t know. Life will keep me walking until I find the Americans, but I have to rest now. I’m not a youngster anymore, and I don’t know how far we’ll have to walk. I hope it stops raining.

Dear Bounce,

October 18, 1986

It was great talking to you and Justine again! And Liz is in college! Wow! It’s been that long since I saw you? Did you pass along my greetings to my man Tank? I’m sure the teams you’re putting together will do fine. You worry too much. You’re probably secretly glad not having a son who’s an athlete, the way college and pro sports are now. I know I am. But you know more about that than I do.

I’ve now finished reading the diary you sent—some package! I will try my damndest to get it into the right editorial hands, but do understand that we have a severe generic problem in this business. But I won’t quit trying, trust me. I am grateful that you thought to send Clifford’s diary to me. Imagine that old soldier keeping it so long and then giving it to you. During all these years, there must have been many African Americans passing through, not to mention those in the army. He sure has repaid the brothers who didn’t waste him when they could have. He must have seen something in you he had not seen in the others. I can dig that. Strangers trying to pierce the consciences of one another by sight, maybe vibes, in a world stranger than we can begin to imagine.

The diary is a heavy thing, Bounce. Bet you a sideline ticket on the fifty the next Super Bowl that they’ll be celebrating that war from the invasion of Normandy until its end—without looking too hard behind or between the lines. People don’t know, and probably don’t care, about the black people in those camps, not that there’s any honor in having been in one. You wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy. But here it is almost fifty years later and people are just beginning to learn about outfits like the Red Tails, the 2221 Regiment, and dozens of others.

I got real curious and looked up some of the names Clifford mentions. Freddie Johnson did get camped, but he was freed in an exchange in 1944. Willie Lewis got to Switzerland, where he sat out the war. A guy named Arthur Briggs, trumpeter, who Clifford doesn’t mention, played with Johnson and got out of Europe one step ahead of the Germans. He says the International Red Cross may be located in Switzerland, but it was then German from its chitlins out. I heard that Valaida Snow got camped, too. Ruby Mae Richards died in Paris in 1976. Sam Wooding died just last year in New York at ninety. During the Depression, while Clifford was in Dachau, Wooding dropped out of the music scene and went to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1942 and then taught music. One of his students—you guessed it—was Clifford Brown—“Brownie.” Doc Cheatham is still wailing; he was in Wooding’s band, too. His chops gotta be made of titanium. Saw him in New York a few months ago. I think he wears a rug, but there’s nothing phoney about his playing.

I wonder what happened to Clifford. If Cheatham and Wooding lived so long—like so many others who were camped—isn’t it possible that The Cliff could have lived long past his diary? Couldn’t he right now be playing at some tiny little club in one of a dozen European countries? Or could he have gotten back, given up music, and gone into something else? But surely he would have been rediscovered by all those black musicians who’ve been going to and from Europe since the end of the war. And if he came home, I think he loved his music too much to have ever given it up, especially when he could have teamed up with guys like Eubie Blake and Cheatham and become old royalty.

Had to run, but I’m back. This guy Joseph Nassy. I’ve seen some of his paintings in a little synagogue in Philadelphia. He was Jewish, born in Surinam. His father was Dutch. They lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and then Brooklyn, then he moved first to England and after that Belgium, where the war caught up with him. He was a naturalized American and a radio engineer who loved to paint. After the war he managed somehow to gather all the paintings he’d done, so they were available after he died and went on a tour across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. He was in an internment camp, where the Germans tried to live up to international standards.

A friend of mine conducted a search for Ethiopian Jews who were reported to have been in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Some had been taken to Europe for study even before World War I. He checked archives everywhere, including Israel. There he was told by an archivist that the Ethiopians had not become Jews until the 1975 Law of Return, so they wouldn’t have been registered as such in the camps or on the Holocaust lists.

Dr. Nyassa’s buddy, Ernest Just, had a best friend, a German, Dr. Max Hartmann. In 1949, with a couple more good guys, Hartmann compiled a rap sheet on his colleagues who’d worked with the Nazis on all kinds of experiments. What I don’t know is what happened when he turned that list in. (Probably not much.) I’m not sure, but from what I’ve read, it seems that Just was doing work—some of which involved changing the sex of worms, without the DNA charts that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins later came up with. You probably already know that Just’s forebears were German immigrants to the U.S.

I’ve met a lot of guys who were in the army in Germany during the war, and they all say that the Germans they met wanted them to kill and capture Russians, not them. Hey, if I’d been a German then, I’d probably have said the same thing, given what they did to the Russians.

Getting back to Clifford, I can’t imagine, though I’ve tried to, how I could have survived in that place. He was lucky he had his music, his German, and his body. I thought the Germans would have done things to black people that they would not have done to others. Maybe they did and that’s why there’s no record, so far. It is hard not to think of James Howard Jones’s Bad Blood: The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments, while reading sections of the diary. There wasn’t a lot of fuss when that book came out. How different are we, then, from the Germans from whom we got so much? As you know, one of the German defenses at Nuremburg was that a lot of their crazy experiments were conducted here first.

It’s time for me to quit this letter before I really let loose. I’ll be checking in with you regularly. You and Justine have to settle in for the long haul, because you know no one is going to be eager to hear Clifford play these blues.

—Jayson Jones