The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  In the train, coming from Lodz, she had been afraid. They had been packed tightly together in the darkness of the cattle car, and she had huddled in her mother’s arms and wept for fear. And when the doors had sprung open, and she had seen the Germans with their machine guns lined up outside, she had been afraid.

  “Don’t worry,” her mother had said. “No one will hurt us.” And her father had stroked her hair. After that day, she had never seen him again.

  It was a Saturday. The woman in front of her in line turned around and smiled and whispered. “I hope they take us today. It will be a blessing to die on the Sabbath.” The woman looked in her sixties but probably wasn’t more than thirty-five. The dirt was etched deep into the lines of her face and her teeth were discolored and broken. She looked half mad.

  She’s going mad, Esther thought to herself. She’s crazed with the fear of death. She put her hand on the woman’s arm and murmured, “It’s all right—they won’t hurt us.”

  And then the line had shuddered to a stop. That meant that the pens were full and they would have to wait in the freezing, ankle-deep mud. Here and there one could hear sobbing, quiet and furtive, as if even grief here had to be shabby.

  And while the women waited to die, a cluster of German officers had walked around the corner of the building. She heard their conversation—loud, confident voices such as no one used at Chelmno. They seemed different creatures, really like a separate race. Not human because not suffering.

  Their uniforms stood out in the drab, colorless landscape. They were real and everything else—this camp, this gray mud, these doomed women—were hardly as substantial as smoke. For a moment they stopped. Someone was speaking. Here and there a few of them lit cigarettes. That moment seemed to last forever.

  One of them was looking at her. He was short and fat, and the face above his stiff military collar was a mass of creased flesh, pink as the sun. His eyes were lost in the shadow of his cap bill.

  Smile at him, she told herself. What have you got to lose? Grasp any chance that offers itself. To live is a moral duty. Smile.

  Finally he raised his arm and pointed to her. His lips moved. He turned away and walked on.

  I will die, it seems, she thought. Why should I have thought it could be otherwise? What could anyone want of me now?

  The next thing she knew, two soldiers in light green uniforms had taken her by the arms and were dragging her out of the line.

  “She stinks.” one of them said.

  “They all stink,” the other one answered.

  And for the first time, really, Esther was seized with the terrible dread of death.

  . . . . .

  Today was her sentencing day. She lay in her bed on the lowest tier of the bunk, listening to the boards over her head creaking as the woman above moved in her sleep, wondering what would happen. Vienna was all around them—sometimes, in the exercise yard, she could hear the noise from the traffic outside—but she was quite sure she would never return to Vienna. This prison was like a separate world. There was a stone wall all the way around the building, she had seen it for the first and last time the day she had been brought here. The Russians had erected another inside it, perhaps twenty feet higher, so that even from the windows on the third floor, perhaps even from the roof, it was impossible to see outside to the street. They meant one to forget there was anywhere else.

  She was not guilty of a political crime—except to the degree that these people regarded all crime as political. She would be tried for smuggling. They had stopped her at the checkpoint in the British Zone, had confiscated her papers—in any case, those were forged—and had had her strip-searched by a matron. She had been betrayed, of course. They had found four hundred pounds worth of Russian rubles sewn into the clothes around her waist. The trafficking in currency was a profitable business, but dangerous. She was only a courier, of course. She would have taken a small commission.

  The Russians were strict about their money. They might decide to make an example of her. They might give her five years.

  She would die if she had to stay in this place for five years.

  No, she would not die. One does not die after having learned that there were no limits to what one was prepared to do to stay alive.

  . . . . .

  The Germans had hoisted her up into the back of a half-empty truck, and she had curled up there under a pile of empty sacking and listened as the truck lurched forward and started bouncing along the dirt road that led out through the camp gates and into the trees. She could see the trees through a narrow rent in the canvas flap that closed off the back of the truck, but she made no effort to discover where they were taking her. How would she have known, anyway? One direction was the same as another, so long as it was away from Chelmno.

  And before long she was too blinded by her own tears to see at all. Relief and shame and a sickening fear of death hardly left room in her chest for a breath of air. Already, while she lay there, swaying back and forth as the truck stammered along, the gas chambers were probably filling with carbon monoxide. They had a big diesel engine that pumped the gas into four chambers at a time, and sometimes it would start right away and sometimes not. People could wait there, huddled together so tightly they couldn’t even fall down, sometimes for an hour or two, waiting to die.

  But she wasn’t going to die. Not today, not yet.

  They drove on for two days, stopping to pull off to the side of the road a few times every day to eat and rest. They never drove at night—perhaps they were afraid to use their headlights, afraid of becoming a target for the Allied bombers. Perhaps they had some other reason. When they stopped, someone would come, pick up the flap covering the back of the truck, and give her something to eat. She was not allowed to come down from the truck except to relieve herself, and then always under the eyes of a guard, but what did she care? She wasn’t modest—one lost one’s sense of shame very quickly at Chelmno—and the truck was world enough for her. She would sit there, dangling her legs over the edge of the bed, feeling the bright winter sun on her face, listening to the scrape of the spoon against the tin dish as she ate.

  She ate and ate during those two days; her stomach was too shrunken to hold very much and a few times she became sick. It didn’t matter. It was wonderful to have more to eat than she could hold. What did she care how sick she made herself?

  Finally, they arrived at Waldenburg.

  For the first several hours, the Germans seemed to have forgotten her existence. She sat on the back of the truck, watching them unload and wondering what was to become of her. The problems of this world had narrowed themselves down to just one: will I live today, or will they finally decide to kill me? She looked around her, sick with dread.

  Because Waldenburg was another camp—she had seen the barbed wire fences and the watchtowers as they drove up, and although there didn’t seem to be any prisoners about, the barracks and work sheds were clustered together on the other side of a muddy ribbon of roadway.

  The camp was divided, like Chelmno. On one side of the road there was grass and neat gravel walkways and painted buildings, and on the other only mud and horror waiting to be. Over there, even the wood of the barracks walls had that gray, lifeless look, and there was a halo of darkness around everything. The road was the dividing line between the human and the non-human, between the masters of the earth and their slaves.

  What am I doing on this side? she kept asking herself. What do they want with me? She had just turned fifteen that year, and her mother had been a woman of strict principles, so certain possible answers did not occur to her.

  A little after noon a soldier brought her a tin plate of stew. There were chunks of meat in it and it was so hot that at first she could barely eat any; she couldn’t remember when anything had ever tasted so delicious. The soldier was young, hardly older than herself, and skinny enough that his uniform was noticeably too large for him. The hair on the sides of his head was cut so short that one could see the scalp
through it. At first he stood with his back to her and wouldn’t answer any of her questions, but after a bit he forgot himself enough to be human.

  “It’s to be a labor camp,” he said, pointing to the bare wooden buildings across the road. “The main body of prisoners hasn’t arrived yet, only the construction gangs. They will be assembling bomb fuses.”

  “And the SS has assigned a general to run this place?” she asked, a little startled at her own temerity—it wasn’t safe to question such things. “Even the commandant at Chelmno was only a colonel.”

  “I can t talk about that.” The soldier shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other and then turned his back again for a moment and then stared hard at Esther’s nearly empty plate. “You’ve eaten enough, I think.”

  So there was some secret about their presence here. It had struck her from the beginning—these were combat troops. They didn’t behave like camp guards, even their uniforms were different.

  The young soldier took her by the arm and led her to a small outbuilding that might have been a garage. He unlocked the double doors and thrust her inside. There were no windows and no light, so she had only an instant in which to look around her. There was nothing to see; even the cement floor had been swept clean.

  “You’ll stay here until you hear different,” he said, and padlocked the doors shut behind him.

  She stayed in there for a week. After the first night they brought her a blanket, and once a doctor visited her. Twice a day someone came to bring her food and a large canteen of water, but they never spoke.

  It wasn’t so bad. Every time the doors opened and the sunlight streamed in on her, her heart began beating wildly and she wondered if they were coming to take her away to be executed, but otherwise she was almost happy. Death was always near, but she had learned at Chelmno that it was foolish to think more than a few hours ahead. For the rest, she could sleep as much as she wanted, and in spite of her confinement, she wasn’t bored. The absence of hunger and physical suffering was too much of a novelty for her to be bored. At Chelmno she had felt weak and slightly sick to her stomach, all the time. Her legs had always felt heavy and strengthless, so that walking more than a few yards had been like balancing on a wire. But that was gone now. She felt as if she would be willing to stay just like this, curled up on an army blanket, thinking about fresh bread and the taste of cooked carrots, for the rest of her life.

  But finally they did come for her.

  There were two of them. In the blinding light of mid afternoon, she recognized the general who had pointed her out at Chelmno. He was standing with his tunic unbuttoned, the white undershirt showing beneath it, and his cap was held in his right hand. The man beside him had a corporal’s stripes on his arm; there was a rifle slung from his shoulder.

  “I think we have fattened her up enough.” the general said, gesturing at her with his cap. “Take her with you, but see that they don’t do any real damage.”

  He laughed, as if he had made a little joke, but the other man stared at her with cold, hostile eyes. And then the general walked away.

  Finally, when they were alone together, the corporal looked around, shaking his head in disgust. He wouldn’t come in but stood outside in the sunshine.

  “You have made your mess in here, eh, Jewess?” he said. It wasn’t really a question.

  Esther kept her eyes on the ground. There was nothing to be gained from answering back, except a beating. She would say nothing—she would not even weep. These people allowed one nothing, not even the luxury of a little shame.

  She would be silent. . .

  “Come along, then.”

  . . . . .

  The distant sound of boot heels told her that she had about ten seconds before the Russian guards would bang open the dormitory door to proclaim the beginning of her one hundred and eleventh day of imprisonment. She let her feet slide over the edge of the bunk bed and began feeling for her clogs—otherwise there would be no time to put them on, not unless one was willing to risk punishment for tardiness at morning inspection, and today of all days Esther wished not to incur any official displeasure,

  “STAHYAT SMEERNO!”

  Awake or asleep, it made no difference. Women threw themselves out of their bunks, dropping down to attention so that they seemed to have gone rigid at the precise instant of impact with the cement floor. Half of them, as they stood there with their arms pressed against their sides, hadn’t even opened their eyes yet.

  The guards walked along the rows checking not so much that everyone was there—why should anyone not be there? where would they have gone?—but simply as an exercise of authority. A woman discovered without her shoulders properly squared or who looked as if she might have just stopped whispering, or simply someone of whom, for some mysterious reason of their own, they had decided to make on example, would find herself on report and sentenced to spend the rest of the month in the laundry room, where the temperature never dropped below sixty degrees and the air was filled with unbreathable, rye-saturated steam.

  There were always three of them. They would fan out through the dormitory and then collect together again at the door, where they would shout out the orders of the day—in Russian first, and then with a German translation. They seemed to think they were making some enormous concession to admit that such a language as German even existed.

  Esther didn’t look at them as they made their way down the aisles of bunk beds; she kept her eyes focused on nothing, staring straight ahead without, apparently, seeing anything. It had been the rule at Chelmno that a prisoner could be beaten simply for looking at one of the SS guards, and something of the same attitude applied here too. Attention was attention. You weren’t even supposed to be alive, merely erect.

  Filatov stopped directly in front of her. He smiled, and she knew what to expect. It was his day to frighten little girls.

  “You have business with the tribunal this morning, eh?” he murmured, in his hideous, undulating, Russianized German. His face was no more than a few inches from her own, and she could smell his breath, like stale cooking grease. He was short, with wide, doughy features and heavy ears, and every word he spoke somehow seemed to convey a shrouded menace. “I wonder what you will get. How would you like to stay here with us until you are an old lady, eh?”

  Esther never moved. She never glanced at him. He wasn’t there, and she was made of cold, white marble.

  After a while he tired of the game, straightened up and drew a long strip of paper from the inside of his overcoat.

  “You will report to the guardroom at once after showering.” he barked. It was as if he were addressing the entire room. “You will hear the sentence of the court at nine.”

  It seemed to give him enormous satisfaction.

  . . . . .

  “Come along, then,” the corporal had said. “It’s time to clean you up. If you want to make an impression here you’ll have to be presentable. We soldiers of the Waffen-SS are a very fastidious lot.”

  It was a joke. He threw back his head and laughed. At intervals, as he marched her along, he would laugh to himself, enjoying his witticism all over again.

  Her first bath at Waldenburg came out of a garden hose. The corporal held it for her. and she scrubbed herself off with clumps of withered grass because, of course, there was no soap.

  During the time she was the General’s pet she had a steel tub and lavender-scented crystals that foamed in the hot water. The general had a sensitive nose and even gave her a bottle of cologne. She had three changes of underwear and a pair of patent-leather shoes.

  The General sometimes said that he had never been cut out to be a soldier, that actually he disliked the company of men, which was the one absolute condition of the military life. That would be on rare evenings when the General felt disposed to give himself a little treat and they would spend the whole night together and he would drink wine and play the violin. He liked to be told that he played well—it was a vanity of his that he coul
d have been a great virtuoso, or perhaps, even better, a conductor, even another Furtwängler. “I gave up all thought of leading orchestras to lead my division,” he would say, smiling sadly. “And now, as you see, I don’t even have most of my division.” So he would play Bach and Paganini on his fiddle and get quietly drunk. He was not a very active lover; he preferred to lie quietly and have everything done for him. And then he would sleep, never stirring until nearly noon.

  And in the stillness of night Esther would listen to the faint sound of his breathing and wonder how she could stand to live.

  “The General likes his women well broken in,” the corporal had told her as he led her away. She was still shivering from the cold water, but he had given her a soldier’s tunic to wrap around her. “You’ll spend a little time with the men first, and then you’ll get the idea.”

  He opened the door to one of the barracks and dragged her inside by the arm, shouting, “Here she is, lads! Remember we want her back in good repair.” And then he laughed, and shut the door behind him.

  She would always remember the way their faces had looked in those first few seconds. There were seven men in the barracks that particular afternoon, and they stared at her, grinning hungrily. They were like animals; she thought at first they might tear her to pieces with their teeth.

  There were four barracks. For the next three weeks she was passed from one to the next. She was the evening entertainment. She learned everything there was to know about men.

  No, perhaps the Russians weren’t as bad as that.

  . . . . .

  Filatov took her to the doorway of the hearing room and waited with her outside in the corridor—personally, so that they were alone together. He seemed to think he was conferring some great distinction on her