It was time for roll call. Two men helped Willi to his feet and out to formation. They marched beside him in the middle of the company, helping keep him upright. They sang a folk song as they marched.
I love to go a-wandering
Along the mountain track
And as I go, I love to sing
My knapsack on my back
Val-deri, val-dera
Val-deri, val-dera
The two men were also in Willi’s work group of twenty men, so they helped him march to the work site. They were part of a crew building a road between the new barracks. Half the men carried rocks from a nearby pile while the other half used sledgehammers to pound the rocks into gravel.
Despite his beating that morning, Willi was not in the worst condition of the men in his crew. One man could barely lift the sledgehammer overhead. He let it fall on the stone at his feet without having any effect on the stone at all. The kapo in charge came running, spitting and fuming at the man who stopped his efforts and stood at attention. The kapo punched the man in the arms and chest, shouting at him the whole time.
The crew worked nonstop twelve hours a day with a ten-minute break for lunch which consisted of ‘soup’ with a few scraps of potato. In the evening they marched back to the Appelplatz for another roll call, then eventually back to the barracks for supper and sleep.
One evening, Juergen Diehn, the man who been punched for not working hard enough, wouldn’t eat his supper. He lay on his thin mattress with his arms folded across his chest and refused to eat. Juergen had once been a professional soccer player and then a conservative member of the last democratically elected Reichstag. He had been imprisoned in Dachau right after Operation Hummingbird. He had been brimming with health and resolve, expecting to outlast this ridiculous Führer. But more than four years had passed and he had been turned into a tattered and ruined skeleton. His cheeks were caved in, his hair had fallen out, his neck was too thin to hold up his head. You could count his vertebrae and his ribs. His hips stuck out and his knees were swollen knobs.
‘Eat,’ said Dietrich Dominick. He cradled Juergen’s head in the crook of his arm, holding a spoonful of that wretched soup in front of Juergen’s mouth. But Juergen kept his mouth pressed shut. Dietrich had been a Lutheran pastor. He was in Dachau because he had written, signed, and then circulated among his fellow pastors an open letter to the Führer criticizing his racial policies. Like Martin Niemöller, who would eventually land in Dachau himself, Dietrich Dominick had been an anti-Semite and ardent nationalist to begin with, but had, as he said in his letter, renounced nationalism and anti-Semitism as antithetical to his Christian faith. ‘Please eat,’ said Dietrich. ‘For the love of God.’
Juergen just stared past Dietrich and said nothing. What did the love of God mean to him? Juergen was taken to the infirmary the next day and was never seen again.
Everyone in Dachau found himself forced into a sort of existential solitude, and if you allowed yourself to become truly alone, you would go mad or die. Willi had been a solitary person most of his life, but while solitary, he had also always believed that the only way forward for humanity was humanity itself. And so now he struggled not to allow his instinct for solitude to keep him away from his fellow prisoners. For better or worse, they were a community. They shared everything now. He could even sympathize with Neudeck’s rage. In Neudeck’s mind, Willi had sent him to hell.
In addition to the physical work each man was forced to do, which seemed beyond endurance, there was also the mental and emotional work. In Dachau you were quickly reduced to your essence. You consisted entirely of what your body and mind could do, and were held fast by what they could not do. You were alone with your fears, and they were abundant. You were alone in your own particular anguish, which was profound. And you were alone with your hope. ‘The miserable,’ Shakespeare reminded him, ‘have no other medicine, but only hope.’
All of the prisoners hoped to survive somehow, to come out of this on the other side, whether in this life or another. But each man’s hope had its own shape and dimensions which were molded and formed by his life experience, by the choices he had made, by his beliefs, dreams, and aspirations, by the happiness and unhappiness he had known, by what he saw as possible. Some had grandiose hopes. Some just wanted to be returned to their families. Some found hope in the idea of freedom, in just the thought of not being locked up. Neudeck was like that. He dreamed of being on the street again, up to no good, finding a woman.
For Willi, hope was not about anything he wanted. Hope was just something he had. Hope was like fuel. It was propulsive, it was in his muscles and bones and not in his mind. He was not conscious of hope. He did not hope to see Lola again: he expected to see Lola again.
Hope entered his body with every breath and never left. He did not know where it came from; he might not even have known it was there. Once when he was asked if he was ever hopeful, he answered, ‘What do you mean?’ When he was carrying rocks, or breaking rocks, or even suffering torture, even there, his hope was just something that was present, like his heartbeat, a small kernel, a flame that would not be extinguished. When he finally realized that about himself, he was amazed.
The First Interrogation
After two weeks of breaking rocks, Willi’s crew was harnessed to heavy rollers which they pulled non-stop back and forth over the crushed rock to create the
