before the van stopped, and I was ordered far less politely to step into the coldness of some kind of courtyard. An old castle, perhaps? Something they had turned into a prison? The walls and cobbles were in bad repair. The place seemed to have been abandoned for some years. There was new barbed wire running along the top and a couple of roughly roofed machine-gun posts. Though my legs would hardly hold me at first, I was shoved through an archway and a series of dirty tunnels to emerge into a large compound full of the kind of temporary huts built for refugees during the War. I realized I had been brought to a fair-sized concentration camp, perhaps the nearest to Bek, but I had no idea of its name until I was bundled through another door, back into the main building and made to stand before some kind of reception officer, who seemed uncomfortable with the situation. I was, after all, in my army uniform, wearing my honors and not evidently a political agitator or foreign spy. I had been determined that they should be confronted by this evidence since, to me at least, it advertised the absurdity of their regime.
I was charged, it seemed, with political activities threatening the property and security of the State and was held under 'protective custody.' I had not been accused of a crime or allowed to defend myself. But there would have been no point.
Everyone engaged in this filthy charade knew that this was merely a piece of playacting, that the Nazis ruled above a law which they had openly despised, just as they despised the principles of the Christian religion and all its admonishments.
I was allowed to keep my uniform but had to give up my leather accoutrements. Then I was led deeper into the building to a small room, like a monk's cell. Here I was told I would stay until my turn came for interrogation.
I had a fair idea that the interrogation would be a little less subtle than that I'd enjoyed from Prince Gaynor or the Gestapo.
Chapter Four
Camp Life
Better writers than I have experienced worse terrors and anguish than I knew in those camps and my case was, if anything, privileged compared to poor Mr. Feldmann with whom I shared a cell during a 'squeeze' when the Gestapo and their SA bullyboys were busier than usual.
Of course, I lost my uniform the first day. Ordered to shower and then finding nothing to wear but black and white striped prison clothes, far too small for me, with a red 'political' star sewn on them, I was given no choice. While I dressed, bellowing SA mocked me and made lewd comments reminding me of their leader Robin's infamous proclivities. I had never anticipated this degree of fear and wretchedness, yet I never once regretted my decision. Their crudeness somehow sustained me. The worse I was treated, the more I was singled out for hardship, the more I came to understand how important my family heirlooms were to the Nazis. That such power should still seek more power revealed how fundamentally insecure these people were. Their creed had been the rationalizations of the displaced, the cowardly, the unvictorious. It was not a creed suited for command. Thus their brutality increased almost daily as their leader and his creatures came to fear even the most minor resistance to their will. And this meant, too, that they were ultimately vulnerable. Their children knew their vulnerability.
My initial interrogation had been harsh, threatening, but I had not suffered much physical violence so far. I think they were giving me a 'taste' of camp life in order to soften me up. In other words, I still might find an open gate out of this hell if I learned my lesson. I was, indeed, learning lessons.
The Nazis were destroying the infrastructure of democracy and institutionalized law which they had exploited in order to gain their power. But without that infrastructure, their power could only be sustained by increased violence. Such violence, as we always see, ultimately destroys itself. Paradox is sometimes the most reassuring quality the multiverse possesses. It's a happy thought, for one of my background and experience, to know that God is indeed a paradox.
As a relatively honored prisoner of the Sachsenburg camp, I was given a shared cell in the castle itself, which had been used as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Great War and was run on pretty much the same lines. We 'inside' prisoners were given better treatment, slightly better food and some letter-writing privileges, while the 'outside' prisoners, in the huts, were regimented in the most barbaric ways and killed almost casually for any violation of the many rules. For 'insiders,' there was always the threat of going 'outside' if you failed to behave yourself.
Give a German of my kind daily terror and every misery, give him the threat of death and the sight of decent human beings murdered and tortured before his helpless eyes, and he will escape, if he can escape at all, into philosophy. There is a level of experience at which your emotions and mind, your soul perhaps, fail to function. They fail to absorb, if you like, the horror around them. You become a kind of zombie.
Yet even zombies have their levels of feeling and understanding, dim echoes of their original personalities-a whisper of generosity, a passing moment of sympathy. But anger, which must sustain you at these times, is the hardest to hold on to. Some zombies are able to give every appearance of still being human. They talk. They reminisce. They philosophize. They show no anger or despair. They are perfect prisoners.
I suppose I was lucky to share a cell first with a journalist whose work I had read in the Berlin papers, Hans Hellander, and then, by some bureaucratic accident when the 'in' cells were filling too fast for the 'out,' Erich Feldmann, who had written as 'Henry Grimm' and had also been classified as a political, rather than with the yellow star of the Jew. Three philosophizing zombies. With two bunks between us, sharing as best we could and sustaining ourselves on swill and the occasional parcel from the foreign volunteers still allowed to work in Germany, we relived the comradeship we had all known in the trenches. Beyond the castle walls, in the 'out' huts of the compounds, we frequently heard the most bloodcurdling shrieks, the crack of shots, and other even more disturbing sounds, less readily identified.
Sleep brought me no benefit, no escape. The most peaceful dream I had was of a white hare running through snow, leaving a trail of blood. And still I dreamed of dragons and swords and mighty armies. Any Freudian would have found me a classic case. Perhaps I was, but to me those things were real-more vivid than life.
I thought that I began to see myself in these dreams. A figure almost always in shadow, with its face shaded, that regarded me from hard, steady eyes the color and depth of rubies. Bleak eyes which held more knowledge than I would care for. Did I look at my future self?
Somehow I saw this doppelganger as an ally, yet at the same time I was thoroughly afraid of him.
When it was my turn for a bunk, I slept well. Even on the floor of the prison, I usually achieved some kind of rest. The guards were a mixture of SA and members of the prison service, who did their best to follow old regulations and see that we were properly treated. This was impossible, by the old standards, but it still meant we occasionally saw a doctor and very rarely one of us was released back to his family.
We already knew we were privileged. That we were in one of the most comfortable camps in the country. Although still only hinting at the death factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Dachau and some of the other places were becoming recognized as mur-der camps and this, of course, long before the Nazis had ever considered making the Final Solution a reality.
I was not to know my own 'lesson' was only just beginning. After about two months of this, I was summoned from my cell one day by SA Hauptsturmfuhrer Hahn whom we'd come to fear, especially when he was accompanied, as now, by two uniformed thugs we knew as Fritzi and Franzi, since one was tall and thin while the other was short and fat. They reminded us of the famous cartoon characters. Hahn looked like most other SA officers, with a puffy face, a toothbrush mustache, a plug of a nose and two or three tiny receding chins. All he lacked to make him identical to his leader Rohm were the hideous scarred face and the rapacious proclivities which would make men hide their sons when he and his gang came to town.
I was marched between Fritzi and Franzi up and down stairs, through tunnels and corridors until I was brought at last to the commandant's office where Major Hausleiter, a corrupt old drunk who would have been drummed out of any decent army, awaited me. Since my reception, when he had seemed embarrassed, I had only seen him at a distance. Now he seemed nervous. Something was in the air and I had a feeling that Hausleiter would be the last to know what was really going on. He told me that I was being paroled on 'humanitarian leave' under the charge of my cousin, now Major von Minct, for a 'trial period.' He advised me to keep my nose clean and
