AAAIIIEEE!!!
Jeffrey Thomas
All Rights Reserved.
Rat King
I appreciate the drink, my friend, but please don’t take pity on me; those boys meant me no real harm. My face frightens them and bullying me gives them control over their fears. It is easier to be cruel to the maimed, the weak, the cowed. We don’t respect these things, they fill us with disgust…because we don’t want to become them.
And please, don’t feel sorry for me on account of my disfigurement. After all, I did this to myself. Literally, of course. But also, I earned this face. My face changed to match what I had become. It was a miracle that I could fire a bullet from a .455 through the roof of my mouth and live. It is nothing but that; a true miracle. God did not want me dead, my friend. Death would be too quick and merciful. God spared my life through divine intervention so that I could grow old as I have…and suffer the contempt of boys. And suffer my memories of that pit…
When I was a boy myself I once went out on the broken ice of a pond to save a friend’s dog from the water. I might have died, rescuing that animal. How, then, did I become the man I was in 1945? What changes in my heart, in my soul, shaped me…led me…fated me to become an SS guard at the camp of Bergen-Belsen?
Thinking of that dog reminds me of an experience my cousin had while he himself was an Oberschaarfuhrer at Auschwitz. His name would be unknown today, but you Americans glorify some mass murderer who has killed only five, maybe a dozen people. My cousin personally gassed many
He had a wolfhound, a great beautiful animal he told me, and one day the dog had run into a fence while playfully bounding about. The fence carried 6,000 volts and the dog was instantly electrocuted. This dog died just outside one of the crematoriums, where my cousin’s victims were incinerated. While he told me this story his eyes grew moist, I noticed. He blamed himself for the fate of his beloved pet, as he had been throwing a stick for it to fetch. He felt guilty for the animal’s death…outside that crematorium.
But let me tell you about myself, as I started to. Myself, and Belsen…
I understand that after a time the prisoners would no longer smell the stink of death and excrement that reached for miles, reached into the peaceful and lovely town of Belsen like a great tentacled monster which was invisible because the people of the town chose not to see it. We became accustomed to the stench also, though not fully immune, as we did not dwell in those horrid shacks. It was useful that we could still smell the stench. It filled us with repulsion for our charges, and repulsion made it easier to abuse them. It was useful that, starved and sick as they were, the prisoners came to look unearthly; animate skeletons barely sheathed in skin, no longer truly male or female…not so much less than human as other than human. Hideous, ghastly. Their ugliness made it easier for us to treat them as
We manufactured these things at our factory death camps. We were manufacturing obliteration. We unmade people. We meant to unmake cultures, races. It was an ambitious project, one might say.
This was hell as Dante saw it. The prisoners were the damned. And that made me one of the demons. I know that now…
The British came on April 15, 1945, and captured Belsen before we could even hope to do away with all the human evidence. The British saw no grand vision at work here. They were appalled. Great pits were dug. Then, we ourselves were forced to bury the dead. We SS were now the wretched enslaved.
The British could not expect us to bury the dead with dignity; they had to be buried as quickly as possible, there were so many of them, all decaying, and all having lost their individuality in any case. They were all one same tortured soul, in effect, and they all went into one great grave in a jumble, in heaps, in mountains, until at last that vast grave was full of thousands and covered and we went on to the next.
For days we slung the pathetic figures into these pits. Their numbers seemed never to exhaust themselves; our labors, Dante-like, would seem to be eternal. You read of the numbers killed and find it hard to conceive of those numbers as lives. I carried these bodies, I
On the first day of this forced labor I had stumbled back from the lip of the first pit, my uniform soiled with sweat and befouled with human waste and smeared with decay. My shoulders ached, since I had slung bodies over them at times because it was faster than dragging. I mopped my face with a handkerchief, and saw that a British officer was moving toward me. I was weary but a defensive fury was rising in me. He was going to order me back to work and I was going to tell him to go to hell, even if he whipped me with his pistol for it.
But instead of drawing his revolver, the officer produced a tin of cigarettes and extended it to me. I nodded with a grunt meant to sound polite, and accepted one, which he also lit for me. Then the man dropped his gaze into the pit as he inhaled on his own cigarette. His eyes were squinted in revulsion, as if they half wanted to close and shut the scene out.
He said to me in English, “How could you people do this?”
“We didn’t murder these people,” I told him.
He looked to me suddenly; at first I thought he was surprised that I spoke English, but then I realized he was shocked at the words I had spoken.
“What do you mean, you didn’t kill them?”
“They starved. And most of them were very sick. This camp was intended originally to house privileged Jews with Allied nationality. American, British nationality.” I nodded at him. “Conditions here were very good. But this winter they began transporting great numbers of prisoners here from…elsewhere…” Elsewhere meant the camps of Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Mittelbau and others. Like Auschwitz. “We became hopelessly over-crowded. Conditions necessarily worsened. And they made us a center to receive sick prisoners, mostly. So it was these conditions that killed the people you see. We did not exterminate them.”
“How can you look me in the face and say that, man? If…if you were to abandon a newborn infant in the forest, you’d be murdering it through neglect. Murder is murder. You’re only insulting my intelligence and your own.”
I shrugged, drew on my cigarette. The taste of smoke helped mask the stench of death that had even coated the inside of my mouth. “You will be murdering us by exposing us like this so closely to these rotting diseased bodies.”
“A fate well deserved, my friend, I’m sure. And some of you we will murder quite consciously, I assure you. On the gallows.”
“Yes, of course you will. So don’t look down on me, ‘my friend’. You murder for your purposes, we murder for ours; as you say, murder is murder.”
Again my words made the British officer gape at me. “Ten thousand unburied dead, we estimate here. Three hundred dropping dead every day, I’m told. No, SS man, don’t think to compare your motivations to ours.”
“You have your notions of justice, and we have ours. It’s what makes the world so colorful.” And I grinned broadly.
“Colorful. Yes. Blood red.”
I had expected the man to strike me, then, but he was still too much a gentleman, too British. He simply strode away. And I turned back to my labors.
I was going to flick the end of my cigarette into the pit but my eyes locked with the foggy yet weirdly direct
