thought about and cared about how soon it would be until he ate dinner. Later that night, after having witnessed his first hanging, as he lay awake in the dark of the barracks, Wayne questioned what was happening to him.
“Have I become so cold and unfeeling that the sight of an innocent man being strung up in front of me annoys me because of the fact that it delays my dinner?” he asked himself. Wayne came to the conclusion that if he had not become emotionally detached from such occurrences in camp, he would surely lose his mind.
Wayne, upon hearing his number called out, swallowed hard. As he nervously walked to the head of the roll call area, he felt the gaze of all of the other inmates on him. His turn to feel the whip had finally come.
“Number 31740,” Roll call officer Stepp announced, “you are hereby charged with gambling in camp. The punishment for a first gambling offense is twenty-five lashes.”
Two SS guards secured Wayne to the whipping rack, pulling the leather straps that held his body in place as tight as they could. Wayne could do nothing but endure the punishment that would soon be inflicted up on him.
Stepp signaled the always-present camp band to start playing their well-rehearsed upbeat marching tunes as SS Captain Himmelmann looked on. Block leader Kammler, possessing a whip in his hand and a gleam in his eye, commenced the lashing.
The whip striking against his naked back hurt as much as the first time he had been whipped, back at Gestapo headquarters. Each new snap of the whip hurt ten times more than the prior lash. Men like Kammler were experts in brutality. They were men no longer capable of human stirrings but rather fanatics blindly marching behind their Fuhrer’s flag while all around them their victims fell by the tens of thousands. Wayne, strangely, no longer feared death. He almost welcomed it. He thought, as he was being lashed in front of the whole camp, why not sleep the eternal, peaceful sleep instead of dealing with the misery that his life had become? Deep down in his psyche, however, Wayne was conscious of the reasons why he had to continue living. As the whip made contact with his body on the eighteenth lash of his punishment, the world appeared to start spinning as Wayne’s eyesight blurred. He soon passed out.
Roll call officer Stepp, who was one of the few SS men who would crack a rare genuine smile at least once a week, picked up a handy bucket of cold water and poured its contents on the passed out prisoner. Wayne remained unconscious. Stepp removed a wad of smelling salt from his pouch and waved it underneath Wayne’s nostrils. That was sufficient enough to revive him.
Kammler put his face up to Wayne’s face and, breathing heavily, demanded to know, “Who were you gambling with?” He received no response. Kammler slapped Wayne strong across the left cheek, leaving his large hand imprint behind. “ANSWER ME.”
Wayne got out a meek, “Nobody.” The last thing Wayne wanted to be known as was a camp rat. He knew that the punishment that was being administered to him would end shortly, or so he had hoped, but he also knew that if he had squealed on his bunkmates, they could and probably would make his life a living hell for him.
“You lying son-of-a-bitch,” Kammler angrily said and, breathing heavier than before, almost, Wayne observed, like an asthmatic, continued whipping Wayne with an unbridled passion.
It was a moonless, pitch-black night as Wayne laid awake on his bunk in agony. He had gotten into the habit of clutching his thin pillow against his torso and pretending that it was Lauren’s warm arm with her soft body next to his as he struggled to fall asleep each night. It served as a wholly inadequate substitute, but it did help him drift off. On numerous occasions, as he had awoken, in a temporary daze, to the blare of the reveille horns at the crack of dawn, Wayne would open his eyelids, and, for a split second, forgetting where he had been residing at, would expect to see Lauren asleep in his arms. On that dark night, though, Wayne was hurting too much to grasp his small pillow. Wayne heard somebody slither up to his bunk. He had a good feeling of who it would be.
“You all right, Wayne?” Samuel whispered.
Wayne was in no mood to talk to anyone, least of all one of the men whom had left him holding the bag during the card game. He answered Samuel anyway, hoping to quickly get rid of him. “I’ll let you know when my head stops throbbing and the pain goes away,” Wayne said in a soft tone.
“I felt the same way after my first lashing,” Samuel said. “And my second. And my third, come to think of it. And my fourth, and—”
“I get the idea.”
“Hey, me and the boys really appreciate you not telling on us to Kammler. You’re an okay guy.”
“Gee, thanks,” Wayne said sarcastically.
Samuel continued in a whisper, “My brother Ari is the prisoner detail leader for the new armament plant. How’d you like to leave the quarry pit for a cushy job sitting down turning screws on an assembly line or some shit like that?”
Wayne replied without hesitation, “Anything would be an improvement.”
“Consider yourself in. Tomorrow’s gonna be your last day in that fuckin’ quarry pit,” Samuel proudly informed his hurting friend. He tapped Wayne on the knee and crawled away.
Wayne knew from what he had observed since he had been at Hollenburg that Samuel was a man of his word. When Samuel said he was going to do something, he had always seemed to follow through. Wayne, who loathed the daily routine of working in the quarry, considered it a fair trade — twenty-five lashes of punishment in exchange to not have to break his back in the quarry anymore. No more frostbite. No more pains shooting through his bad back. No more blistery lips from the cold wind blowing. Wayne anticipated the start of his new job. He found himself full of hope again that his luck was changing for the better, but that faded fast as the reality set in that all that had really happened was that he had gotten an opportunity to leave the quarry. Wayne moans turned into snores.
During his final day in the quarry, an incident occurred which only fanned the flames of abomination that Wayne had been feeling towards those who were in charge of running the camp.
Two days prior, a fresh shipment of prisoners from the ghetto had been thrown into the already overcrowded camp. To Wayne, the new prisoners were indistinguishable from the ones that he had arrived with almost two months earlier. He noticed how the new inmates wore the same sad, defeated empty expressions on their faces as the people he had been on the train with had. Some of the new arrivals had been assigned to barracks 19. Since there were more men assigned to the barracks than there were bunks, most of the new slave laborers ended up sleeping on the cold wooden floor.
Most of the new arrivals had been assigned to the quarry, as had been customary. It was the worst place in camp to work, and new inmates had no connections or voice in anything that might have affected their lives in camp.
At some point during mid-morning, a boy, who Wayne figured could not have been more than fourteen years of age, innocently asked one of the SS guards, as he wiped his sweaty brow, “Sir, may I please sit down for a little bit. I do not feel well.” It had been the boy’s first day of labor and he obviously did not know any better.
“Go ahead,” the SS pig told the boy and pointed to a spot roughly thirty meters from the edge of the pit.
The boy, who reminded Wayne of himself, walked to the appointed spot. Before he could sit down, a bullet penetrated his heart. Death came instantly. The SS guard who had given the boy permission to sit down arrogantly reloaded another round into his shiny rifle.
Wayne, having witnessed the incident from his vantage location, knew that the youngster had been deliberately instructed to cross the guard line. In doing so, the guard could explain the boy’s death as the result of stopping a prisoner “attempting to escape”. Wayne had seen other prisoners coerced into crossing the guard line on different pretexts only to be shot down, but never a boy. In his 1995, that boy would have been entering high school with his whole life ahead of him. The sickest thing about what had happened, Wayne found out that night through the grapevine back at the barracks, was that the SS pig that he would “stop an escape attempt” that day. That boy’s life had been worth nothing more than two beers to an SS man. Wayne, in the quarry on that day, wanted to shed a tear for the boy, but nothing came out. All of the death he had seen and all of the tears he had shed for the victims, and all of the evenings he had cried himself to sleep, and all of the tears he had shed for the baby who had been suffocated by her mother in the prisoner holding area, and all of the tears of helplessness had finally caused Wayne’s tear ducts to dry up and cease function. If he cried again, he might willfully cross the guard line himself. Wayne could not cry anymore.
CHAPTER SIX
