lawyers, doctors, school teachers, army officers. Republican soldiers from the Spanish Civil War, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, Catholic priests, gypsies, Jews, spiritualists, homosexuals, vagrants, thieves and murderers. With the exception of some Russians, and a few former members of the Austrian cabinet, everyone in Dachau was German. I met a convict who was a Jew. He was also a homosexual. And if that weren't enough, he was also a communist. That made three triangles. His luck hadn't so much run out as jumped on a fucking motorcycle.
Twice a day we had to assemble at the Appellplatz for Parade, and after roll-call came the Hindenburg Alms floggings. They fastened the man or woman to a block and gave you an average of twenty-five on the bare arse. I saw several shit themselves during a beating. The first time I was ashamed for them; but after that someone told me it was the best way you had of spoiling the concentration of the man wielding the whip.
Parade was my best chance for looking at all the other prisoners. I kept a mental log of those men I had eliminated, and within a month I had succeeded in ruling out over 300 men.
I never forget a face. That's one of the things that makes you a good bull, and one of the things that had prompted me to join the force in the first place.
Only this time my life depended on it. But always there were newcomers to upset my methodology. I felt like Hercules trying to clean the shit out of the Aegean stables.
How do you describe the indescribable? How can you talk about something that made you mute with horror? There were many more articulate than me who were simply unable to find the words. It is a silence born of shame, for even the guiltless are guilty. Shorn of all human rights, man reverts back to the animal.
The starving steal from the starving, and personal survival is the only consideration, which overrides, even censors, the experience. Work sufficient to destroy the human spirit was the aim of Dachau, with death the unlooked-for by-product. Survival was through the vicarious suffering of others: you were safe for a while when it was another man who was being beaten or lynched; for a few days you might eat the ration of the man in the next cot after he had expired in his sleep.
To stay alive it is first necessary to die a little.
Soon after my arrival at Dachau I was put in charge of a Jewish work-company building a workshop on the northwestern corner of the compound. This involved filling handcarts with rocks weighing anything up to thirty kilos and pushing them up the hill out of the quarry and to the building site, a distance of several hundred metres. Not all the S S in Dachau were bastards: some of them were comparatively moderate and managed to make money by running small businesses on the side, using the cheap labour and pool of skills that the K Z provided, so it was in their interest not to work the prisoners to death. But the S S supervising the building site were real bastards. Mostly Bavarian peasants, formerly unemployed, theirs was a less refined type of sadism than that which had been practised by their urban counterparts at Columbia. But it was just as effective. Mine was an easy job: as company leader I was not required myself to shift the blocks of stone; but for the Jews working in my kommando it was back-breaking work all the way. The S S were always setting deliberately tight schedules for the completion of a foundation, or a wall, and failure to meet the schedule meant no food or water. Those who collapsed through exhaustion were shot where they fell.
At first I took a hand myself, and the guards found this hugely amusing; and it was not as if the work grew any lighter as a result of my participation. One of them said to me:
'What, are you a Jew-lover or something? I don't get it. You don't have to help them, so why do you bother?'
For a moment I had no answer. Then I said: 'You don't get it. That's why I have to bother.'
He looked rather puzzled, and then frowned. For a moment I thought he was going to take offence, but instead he just laughed and said: 'Well, it's your fucking funeral.'
After a while I realized that he was right. The heavy work was killing me, just like it was killing the Jews in my kommando. And so I stopped. Feeling ashamed, I helped a convict who had collapsed, hiding him under a couple of empty handcarts until he had sufficiently recovered to continue working. And I kept on doing it, although I knew I was risking a flogging. There were informers everywhere in Dachau. The other convicts warned me about them, which seemed ironic since I was half way to being one myself.
I wasn't caught in the act of hiding a Jew who had collapsed, but they started questioning me about it, so I had to assume I'd been fingered, just like I'd been warned. I was sentenced to twenty-five strokes.
I didn't dread the pain so much as I dreaded being sent to the camp hospital after my punishment. Since the majority of its patients were suffering from dysentery and typhoid, it was a place to avoid at all costs. Even the S S never went there. It would be easy, I thought, to catch something and get sick. Then I might never find Mutschmann.
Parade seldom lasted longer than one hour, but on the morning of my punishment it was more like three.
They strapped me to the whipping frame and pulled down my trousers. I tried to shit myself, but the pain was so bad that I couldn't concentrate enough to do it. Not only that, but there was nothing to shit. When I'd collected my alms they untied me, and for a moment I stood free of the frame before I fainted.
For a long time I stared at the man's hand which dangled over the edge of the cot above me. It never moved, not even a twitch of fingers, and I wondered if he were dead. Feeling unaccountably impelled to get up and look at him I raised myself up off my stomach and yelled with pain. My cry summoned a man to the side of my cot.
'Jesus,' I gasped, feeling the sweat start out on my forehead. 'It hurts worse now than it did out there.'
'That's the medicine, I'm afraid.' The man was about forty, rabbit-toothed, and with hair that he'd probably borrowed from an old mattress. He was terribly emaciated, with the kind of body that looked as though it belonged properly in a jar of formaldehyde, and there was a yellow star sewn to his prison jacket.
'Medicine?' There was a loud note of incredulity in my voice as I spoke.
'Yes,' drawled the Jew. 'Sodium chloride.' And then more briskly: 'Common salt to you, my friend. I've covered your stripes with it.'
'Good God,' I said. 'I'm not a fucking omelette.'
'That may be so,' he said, 'but I am a fucking doctor. It stings like a condom full of nettles, I know, but it's about the only thing I can prescribe that will stop the weals going septic.' His voice was round and fruity, like a funny actor's.
'You're lucky. You I can fix. I wish I could say the same for the rest of these poor bastards. Unfortunately there's only so much that one can do with a dispensary that's been stolen from a cookhouse.'
I looked up at the bunk above me, and the wrist which dangled over the edge.
Never had there been an occasion when I had looked upon human deformity with such pleasure. It was a right wrist with a ganglion. The doctor lifted it out of my sight, and stood on my cot to check on its owner. Then he climbed down again, and looked at my bare arse.
'You'll do,' he said.
I jerked my head upwards. 'What's wrong with him?'
'Why, has he been giving you trouble?'
'No, I just wondered.'
'Tell me, have you had jaundice?'
'Yes.'
'Good,' he said. 'Don't worry, you won't catch it. Just don't kiss him or try to fuck him. All the same, I'll see that he's moved onto another bunk, in case he pisses on you. Transmission is through excretory products.'
'Transmission?' I said. 'Of what?'
'Hepatitis. I'll get them to put you on the top bunk and him on the bottom. You can give him some water if he gets thirsty.'
'Sure,' I said. 'What's his name?'
The doctor sighed wearily. 'I really haven't the faintest idea.'
Later on, when, with a considerable degree of discomfort, I had been moved by the medical orderlies on to the bunk above, and its previous occupant had been moved below, I looked down over the edge of my pallet at the man who represented my only way out of Dachau. It was not an encouraging sight. From my memory of the photograph in Heydrich's office, it would have been impossible to identify Mutschmann but for the ganglion, so yellow was his pallor and so wasted his body. He lay shivering under his blanket, delirious with fever, occasionally groaning with pain as cramp racked his insides. I watched him for a while and to my relief he recovered
