stations — they’re bugged.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Wayne said and started to ingest his inadequate amount of rations called a meal. “Where are you interred?”
Linda answered, “Ravensbruck, a women’s camp not far from here. I asked some of the men here if they knew you, but they didn’t. I was curious as to what happened to you.”
“I have been holed up at the lovely resort town known as Hollenburg,” Wayne said in a sarcastic tone. “No heat, no phones, no cable television, hell, no television at all. But, there’s no extra charge for the torture handed out and the supreme privilege to bust your butt slaving in a quarry from dawn to dusk every damn day. But, then again, what should I be moping about? I mean,” he chuckled, “after all, I did need to take off a couple of pounds.”
“I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Linda said.
“Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me from losing my mind.” Wayne swallowed his lukewarm soup in one big gulp. “How’s life in the women’s camp? Is it any more civilized than Hollenburg?” he asked.
“From what I hear, the same shit goes on in the camps, no matter if it’s a men’s camp or a women’s camp. How’d you end up here?”
“It’s a long story,” Wayne replied.
An identical loud whistle signaled the end of lunchtime for the prisoners. Wayne looked at the loudspeaker fastened high up on the side of the dreary brick building and thought about what a satisfying feeling it would be if he could snip the wire that attached it to the rest of the public address system at the plant. If he could snip the wires to the loudspeakers in Hollenburg too. The snakelike black wires that brought sound to the speakers that woke him so early from his much needed sleep each morning with the sun rising over the horizon. The same lurking wires that sometimes woke him and the other prisoners in camp in the middle of the night for senseless fatigue drills, which included carrying heavy sacks of sand, stone, manure, or soil around camp, doing endless pushups, and scrubbing down the outsides of the barracks in the bitter cold of a winter night.
The workers marched single file, under the always-watchful eyes of the guards, back into the tremendous munitions factory. “By the way, do you know what those things are that I’ve been putting together all morning?” Wayne asked Linda, curious to know exactly what it was that he had been assembling.
“Detonators for explosives,” Linda responded.
“Great,” Wayne sighed to himself.
Wayne continued his monotonous job throughout the afternoon hours. At six o’clock, the sky cloaked in darkness, the loud whistle blew again. Linda waved a goodbye to Wayne. With no unauthorized chatting of any kind allowed between the prisoners while in the plant, even saying a “goodbye” could bring about a disciplinary action on the offender.
Ari signed the prisoners out for the day. They were then handcuffed and loaded onto busses to be shipped back to their respective holding areas from which they had been shipped in earlier that morning.
As he sat on his uncomfortable vinyl seat, Wayne’s mood swung from joyful to downcast. He was happy that he didn’t have to work in the quarry, but he was still no closer to achieving his goal of getting a hold of the gadolinium crystals that he so desperately needed. Plus, he still had no idea as to how he was going to go about it. Wayne attempted to fight his feelings of depression as the bus pulled through the big iron gates of Hollenburg, but it was all too overwhelming.
Rain and hail poured down relentlessly. To the men in Barracks 19, as they readied themselves for bed, it sounded like a barrage of marbles were landing on the roof. Hailstones, some the size of golf balls, frequently made contact with the antiquated wooden structure. Leaks from the shabby ceiling dripped down throughout the barracks.
George Van Leuven, at the age of sixty-two, was one of the oldest men interned in the camp. He had been a slave laborer for the Reich since he was a young man of twenty-eight. Once living the life of a model German citizen with a promising career as a secondary school teacher, he was shattered when, late one warm summer night, the Gestapo arrived at his apartment to arrest him. While his father met the Reich Office of Citizenship criterion for being considered one of a pure German bloodline, it had been discovered that his maternal grandmother had been a Negro. Hence, his family tree, bloodline, and genes were officially, by Reich standards, “tainted with non-Aryan traits” and “an inferiority to the ideal make-up of a true German”.
George lay on his bunk, sick and trembling with a fever. He thought that maybe he had come down with a cold, as had often happened to him before, only to have it go away after a brief spell. But in the last twelve hours, whatever he had that was causing him to feel ill had taken a major turn for the worse.
Samuel sat at George’s side and placed a cold washcloth on his sweaty forehead. “C’mon George,” he said, “you’re gonna be fine. All you got is a little sickness. You gotta lower your temperature and then you’ll be just fine. Be feeling like new again.”
Wayne approached quietly, “Hey, Sammy, I really have to thank you. You weren’t kidding. What I’m doing now is a piece of cake.,” he paused. “Is everything all right there, George?”
Samuel answered, “Old George isn’t doing so well.” Dabbed a cold washcloth over the sick man’s sweaty forehead.
“What do you think it is?” Wayne asked.
“I’m not sure. Could be typhus.”
“How come he hasn’t gone to the hospital?”
Samuel looked up at Wayne. “Do you know what happens when a prisoner reaches an advanced age and goes to the hospital sick?”
“No, What?”
“Kunz, the chief medical officer, declares the guy obsolete and he gets a nice injection of 10cc of carbolic acid directly into the heart.”
“Carbolic acid?” Wayne was not familiar with it.
“Carbolic acid,” Samuel said solemnly, “as in the shit that will stop your heart from beating.”
George started to shake violently. “Is that you, daddy?” he asked deliriously.
Samuel took the elder’s hand in his own hand. “Yes George, it’s me — your father,” he said in a comforting manner. “Get your ass better so we can go out fishing again together. Like we used to.”
George muttered, “We ain’t never been fishing before.”
“Well, then we’ll start to,” Samuel countered. “Now get yourself some sleep, George. It’ll help break your fever.” Samuel let go of his hand and stood up. “George has been like a father to me,” he told Wayne. “When I first got here, he showed me the ropes. Made my life a lot easier those first few years. I owe him a lot. I hope he pulls through.”
“Me too,” Wayne said.
That night, Wayne realized what a big blunder he had made on his first day in camp. The middle-aged long time prisoner he had been assigned to share his bunk bed with, a man by the name of Mitch, asked Wayne, the new prisoner, to switch sleeping places with him on their bunk bed. Wayne was originally assigned the bottom bunk. Mitch claimed that he would only be able to sleep well and not toss and turn all night by occupying the lower bunk. Something to do with his childhood, he said. Wayne did not see that it made any difference and gave it no thought when he agreed to switch places with Mitch and take the upper bunk himself. With a steady trickle of rain falling on his blanket from above, Wayne cursed himself for getting duped so easily.
The freezing rain and hail metamorphosed into a moderate snowfall as the night faded into dawn. A fresh coat of two inches of pure white snow blanketed Hollenburg Concentration Camp by the time horn blew.
As the prisoners moved out to morning roll call, Samuel, standing beside George’s bunk, called to Wayne, “Wayne, come here.”
Wayne joined Samuel beside George’s bunk and asked, “How’s George doing?”
“George didn’t make it,” Samuel said rather nonchalantly. “Help me grab his body.”
“I’m really sorry,” Wayne said and reached to pat his friend on the back. Samuel backed out of his reach.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, now grab the body.”
The prisoners formed fresh tracks in the snow as they marched to the roll call area. Wayne and Samuel moved forward with the procession, each helping to move George along with them by having the limp cadaver propped up between their bodies and pushing it onward.
Wayne had no idea of what they were doing. Finally, he felt compelled to ask, “Uh, Sam, buddy, I have a
