uncorrupted.
As we passed for the second time, Brachowiak said, “Otsche smiled at me just now.”
“Hang on to yourself,” I warned him. “The young lout is only after your tobacco—by the way, can you give me a bit of tobacco for a cigarette?”
“I haven’t got any tobacco down here,” said Brachowiak quickly. “No, he’s not going to get a bit of it. He only wants to clean me out again.”
But at the third time round, Schmeidler said quite amiably to us: “Shall we have a game of cards?”
And he took out of his pocket a filthy pack on which one could hardly distinguish the pips. Brachowiak was willing enough, so I did not say no either, but I nudged him and he nodded reassuringly, as if his mind was firmly made up. So we played our game of cards, Schmeidler with extraordinary luck, Brachowiak with equally remarkable ill-fortune. Schmeidler was the winner, I came second.
The youngster cried: “That’ll cost you a bit of tobacco, Emil,” and laughed at him, and Brachowiak took out his tobacco (which he hadn’t got with him!) and generously filled the youngster’s tin, while I, when I held my hand out, got barely enough for a cigarette. Then the two went round the yard, arm in arm, pressing closely together. I was forgotten. That evening, Emil Brachowiak was in tears again: Schmeidler had cleaned him right out and would have nothing more to do with him. And next day, Brachowiak really split on them, not to the medical officer, but to the head-nurse. But nothing happened, nothing at all. Why not, I do not know. The authorities had everything in their power, they could have punished the offenders, they could have separated them, they could have put the youngsters, that constant source of trouble, into other institutions. They did nothing, just as they did nothing about our hunger. I suppose it was immaterial to them how we lived and in what filth we rotted away. Of fifty-six, there were not six who would ever see freedom again. All, or nearly all, were sentenced to live in this place for ever. It was quite unimportant how they did so, that didn’t matter. They had to work as long as a bit of productivity could be squeezed out of their emaciated bodies. Let them put up with it or perish, life was outside, and this was the house of the dead!
46
I return now to my own experiences. It is still the day of my arrival, the leisure-hour is just over, I have formed my first impressions and made my first acquaintances, and now I stand in the long dim corridor that remains gloomy even on the brightest day. Hour after hour I wander to and fro, idle, tormented and yet dulled. I am glad when the head-nurse or a warder comes by with a patient taking washing to the store or carrying a pile of old documents. At least something is happening! What is happening does not concern me, and really nothing is happening at all, but I am diverted from myself and my uncertain fate; I may not, I cannot bear myself any longer.
Sometimes I stand by the one window that is accessible to me—the other is obstructed by the glass box— and stare out over the barb-wired walls, into freedom, which lies glittering in the sun “outside”. They must be limes; they shade a highway along which cars are speeding by, I see girls in bright dresses riding on their bicycles —but I turn my head away and walk on in the gloomy corridor. Life outside tortures me, it does not belong to me any more, I am severed from it, I want to know no more about it. Drive on, all of you. May the trees wither, the sand blow over meadows and fields, there should be desert about such a death-house as this, dry dead desert.
Sometimes I go into one of the two day-rooms, either the big one or the small one, and sit there for five or ten minutes with my fellow-sufferers. Fellow-sufferers? They cannot suffer as I do, their fate has been decided already, it is the uncertainty that torments me so much.
Some sleep with their head on the table (for it is forbidden to sleep in bed), others stare dully ahead, a small youngish man, completely crooked, with a squint in both eyes (but each in a different way), and a pear-shaped head, has an incredibly dirty pack of cards in front of him, and very slowly he lays one card on the other and grins stupidly at it. One has a newspaper in front of him, but he is staring over the top of it, and one has even taken his trousers off and with a face distorted by pain he examines the suppurating and bleeding furuncles on his leg—at our meal-table!
I retire in disgust and stand in the corridor again. I read the name-plates on the cells; I read: Gothar, Gramatzki, Deutschmann, Brandt, Westfal, Burmester, Rohrig, Klinger. And as I go on I repeat them to myself, repeat them like the vocabularies I used to learn as a child: Gothar, Gramatzki, Deutschmann, Brandt … I go on repeating the list, till it sticks. Then I pass on to the next name-plate … So I learn, I pass the time, this endless time, two and a half endless hours! What are two and a half hours outside? And what are they here? Then at last the inside working parties march back to their cells, the mat-weavers and brush-makers; doors are slammed, shouts are heard, water runs in the wash-room, pipes are lit. Life, thank God, a bit of life!
And already the cry is heard: “Here comes the factory party!” And immediately after, another cry: “Food servers fall in!”
A little later we are sitting in the day-room which is now fully occupied; those who have been in the factory are asked for news, and they tell how this time they had to carry boxes weighing a hundredweight and a half, whereas yesterday the boxes only weighed one hundredweight twenty pounds. At once a furious quarrel breaks out, concerning how this difference in weight is to be explained. We do not need to worry about our food, it just eats itself, it is water with a few morsels of kohlrabi. I am still so finicky that I put these morsels, which are completely woody, beside my bowl. A great toil-worn hand reaches across the table, takes hold of the morsels and stuffs them into a wide-open mouth. Immediately a furious voice calls to me from the other side of the table.
“Why the hell do you give Jahnke your kohlrabi? The bastard stuffs everything into him that he sets eyes on!”
And Jahnke roars back furiously: “What’s it to do with you what I eat, snotnose? If the new fellow gives me his kohlrabi, that’s his business. Are you his keeper? Every young snotnose round here wants to act the keeper… !”
Fortunately, in this new quarrel in which of course others immediately join (“Shut that row, God damn you! Can’t you keep quiet!”—“What’s up with you?”—“He’s right! We want some peace!”—“I’ll shout as much as I want to!”), fortunately, in all the uproar which now arises, I am completely forgotten. But the keeper in the glass box, which has a window on to our day room, does not even lift his head at the din, he goes on calmly reading his newspaper.
The meal is over, I have managed what yesterday I had thought impossible; I have ladled into myself a whole quart of warm water. At the moment I feel satisfied. But in the night the rumbling of my stomach will teach me that I am utterly and absolutely unsatisfied. From now on, I too am to be among those who constantly visit the bucket. The head-nurse collects together all the men who are supposed to or want to see the doctor, the latter only if he approves of their intentions. From our section alone, about twenty men fall in, I am not among them.
Outside the bars which separate one corridor from the staircase, other sick men from the two buildings opposite have gathered. I count over thirty. And now “the women” march in, mostly girls, led by their wardress. They are put quite close to the wall, and the wardress keeps a sharp look-out so that none of us can exchange a word with them. But that is over seventy patients—and already it is past seven in the evening! Is the doctor going to hold his consultations till well past midnight? The outlook for me is bad. “Are there always so many?” I ask another patient.
“So many?” he answers indignantly. “It’s only a few today. In this cursed place every single one is ill. But I don’t report sick any more, there’s no point in it.”
The doctor came while I was at the other end of the corridor. I did not notice him. But that does not matter, I am not seeing him today, in any case. It is better that way, with more than seventy patients he would not have proper time for me. It is better for me to wait till some other day when things are quieter. I have to tell him my story in full detail.
The head-nurse calls: “Foot-patients first, shoes off!”
And now it starts, at a breath-taking speed. Six men at a time are ushered into the consulting room, and at the latest after one minute the first man is out, doctored and treated!
The head-nurse calls: “Shirts off, you others! Fall in, one behind the other.”
The girls watch how the men slip out of their shirts. This arouses the anger of the wardress, a robust elderly
