She helped him into his boots. He went down as soon as he was in uniform and she followed a few minutes later. He watched as he drank another beer. She went about the room laughing loudly, running her hand across the men's shoulders, joking. Two guards, brutal Ukrainians who patrolled the KZ proper, took her upstairs. He pictured her briefly on her knees, taking one from behind, the other in her mouth.
Peter left before they finished. The wind whipped the acrid smoke and it burned his eyes. She had given no sign of recognition.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Survival.
It was clear that survival was the game for the longtime prisoners. The war was almost finished. Those alive when the Russians reached them in a week or less would live and witness Germany's defeat. It was a bitter pill for the guards.
Many of the guards were growing restless. When the officers were not around the conversation turned to the inevitability of their capture. The days for fantasy were passed. No longer did anyone speak of Hitler's miracle weapons as described in Volkische Beobachter that would turn the tide of the war. Since the German defeat at the second Battle of the Ardennes even the most ardent Nazi was silent.
Still the guards who spoke of defeat were cautious, for not everyone faced reality. There were those looking for scapegoats. Defeatists could be shot, or gassed, or hung. Nazism was to many a religion calling for an act of faith. Reality meant nothing to believers. Faith was crumbling now but there were still true believers among them, men who clung to their beliefs as devoutly as any martyr about to die for his cause. A handful spoke of a separate peace with the Allies, who would then join them to make war on the communists and their atheist Mongolian hordes. Perhaps they talked about it to reassure themselves or to cling to anything that kept them from facing utter defeat. They knew what they had done to the defeated. Could Germany expect any better?
Peter had no illusions. Germany had failed. His father had often told him how Germany had been strangled by the blockade and two-front war in the Great War. When Hitler attacked Russia before the defeat of England his father had become deeply depressed. He was a pacifist, but he loved Germany.
This was, his father confided, the ultimate folly and arrogance. The two-front war had drained Germany before, it would be their undoing again. So, despite Goebbels’s twisted hopes and fervent promises, Peter had never believed they would win. He accepted now that their defeat was only days away.
He wondered what the officers discussed when they met at the Kommandant’s residence? He supposed the Party line was zealously spouted, but he could see the waxen faces of the officers and the haunted, desperate cast to their eyes. In recent weeks Peter had observed more than one conspiratorial huddle of officers. Of the officers only Wolff held to his self-assured fanaticism. Whether it was from devotion to the cause or love for his work, Peter could not tell.
But desertion was not easy even for the elite -- or perhaps especially for the elite. They had sworn an oath “unto death” and taken Hitler's brand on their arms. They were expected to continue killing in the name of National Socialism until they were killed.
To keep them at their posts in the event their devotion to duty faltered, the SS had turned the police state into a warden system. Every soldier with his unit, every guard at his post, was held there by an elaborate, unfaltering system as surely as walls, dogs and electric fences held their prisoners.
There was nowhere to desert. SS units roamed the countryside. Anyone whose duties did not permit him to leave his post was hanged. Anyone with orders more than seventy-two hours old was hanged. Anyone in civilian clothes without proper, and to them unattainable, papers was hanged. As the front lines retreated from the East the measures had of necessity grown more severe. Otherwise, as had happened to the Russians in the Great War, whole armies would lay down their arms and walk home.
###
Impossible as it was, however, there were those who seriously contemplated desertion. All of them knew they would be shot by their captors. Their butchery was beyond justification to the enemy.
The guards were divided into three groups. Those who looked for a chance to desert, those who remained for duty's sake “unto death” and last, those like Peter, who held no illusions and waited patiently to die.
In the meantime hate made it possible for him to forget the inevitable. He had felt a certain misguided pity towards the prisoners previously. He had even risked death for the whore Eva. For many reasons now Peter saw how fallacious that decision had been. Had Eva an ounce of shame she would never have been the proficient whore he knew her to be. She would have died rather than submit to this degradation.
Instead she thrived on it. She had the movements and manners down to perfection. Had there been anything decent in her she could never have behaved like this. If there was anything worthwhile in her she could not have serviced him as she did the others, and if there had in truth been anything between them she could not have done so without recognition and some kind of explanation.
There was nothing now Peter would not and did not do, without hesitation, without anguish. He spent most of each day supervising the bodies. They and the lazy SonderKommando who dragged them from the chamber were easy enough to hate.
But portions of his day were spent in the KZ proper or at the Judenrampe, beating the material into submission. He took no pleasure in torture or sadism. The two Ukrainians Eva had taken care of delighted in pitching infants to the dogs or tossing them in the air and spearing them on their bayonets. When time permitted and no officers were about, others stripped the young girls and raped them ruthlessly in front of everyone. Almost daily Wolff took an infant to the trenches and cast it screaming into the pit of boiling human tallow.
Peter did none of this nor did he enjoy watching others. He killed when the circumstances called for it. As long as the bodies moved along he was content.
But he suspected he had become an animal nevertheless. He laughed at the prisoners. He obeyed any order. He killed ruthlessly. He experienced no remorse. How else could he describe what he had turned into?
That night after being with Eva, Steiner approached Peter as he emerged from the barracks shower. Steiner took him to a quiet corner and spoke in a nervous whisper, his breath heavy from the chronic use of flavored Schnapps.
“You’re a good lad and can be trusted. You aren't planning to stay on are you?”
Peter nodded.
“That’s suicide. We’ve all done our bit. You’ve been the best of us even with that business last month. There’s no point in dying. Some of us are making a break for it. Tonight. We're going into the woods and will make our way to Germany while there is still time. It’s not far. We’ll avoid the patrols and the Russians until the surrender. Come along with us.”
“No. I’m staying.”
“Think it’s too risky? Don't be a fool. It's all over here. You can see that. If you can't, look at the swine. They can tell. The Russians will be here inside a week.”
“No.”
Steiner looked guiltily around the barracks. “You won't tell anyone will you?”
Peter shook his head.
“You're a good man.'' He paused. “We're all good men. We did our duty. We deserve better than this.”
Max looked Peter up a few moments later. “You told him no, didn't you?”
“Yes.”
“Smart boy. They don’t have a prayer. It is too soon. I'll tell you when. Stick with me.”
Steiner and two others deserted that night. Max told Peter as he reported for duty that they had been captured only a few kilometers away and hung beside the road. That was the price paid by all traitors to the Reich.
For the next few nights Peter returned to the brothel. Each night he expected Eva would be gone but she was always there. Each time he went up the stairs with her it was as the first time. She bore his attention with the practiced patience of the whore she was. Whenever she joined him at a table it was for whore's talk, no different than the others. Ther
e was never a sign of recognition and he never caused a stir in her dead-fish eyes.
Peter did not mention their past. Her persistent manner enraged him and by the fourth night he took her to her crib, struck her repeatedly and raped her. Afterwards she told him he could not fall asleep and asked if he wanted her to wash him before he went downstairs.
Inexplicably, no trains arrived the following day and all the previous arrivals were dead and burning. Herr Kommandant Hoffmann gave orders for them to kill the prisoners of three of the Blocks. These prisoners knew what they were up to and did not cooperate. Peter used his Schmisser machine pistol, emptying several clips to get any cooperation at all. They dragged and beat those they did not kill outright into the shower.
One of them was the Reichdeutscher Lageraltester. Since before Peter arrived he had ruled the inmate population, second in power only to the Kommandant. A psychopathic homosexual sadist, Max once told Peter, he had been in prisons or KZs since 1934. Each day, including the day he was gassed, he drowned his victim, “You must die so I can live.” He entered the shower both enraged and terrified. His death as much as any other served notice on the inmate population that things had changed. The old rules no longer applied.
It was slow, brutal work gassing the KZ prisoners. There was constant danger of panic spreading throughout the KZ. Peter did not believe the Jews would riot but it was a possibility. There had been stories about other KZs.
Towards late afternoon as the last prisoners of the three Blocks were being gassed Peter heard rumbling in the distance like thunder. Russian guns. A quiet spread over the KZ. Many of the guards stood silently looking about apprehensively. For once the officers gave no orders to keep them busy. He supposed they had run out of orders.
Peter drank heavily at the brothel and towards dusk took Eva to her room. She undressed mechanically and like a record recited her lines to him. He sat fully clothed in the room's only chair and watched her. The pleasure she had given did not begin to match the pain.
“How do you want it?” she asked. Her lip was split from where he had struck her the previous night. Once when he had been on top of her and she had feigned passion to encourage him he had looked into her face. She had been staring off to the side with her fish eyes fixed on the wall, lifeless and removed even as she ground her hips and moaned her phony passion.
“Don’t you have anything to say, Eva?”
She was naked by now. There were a number of bruises from his beating. She lay back on the bed, pulled her knees up and spread her legs. “Come,” she whispered huskily, “show me what you have.”
“Do you like it so much then? Is that all you want from me?” The whore!
After a few moments she rolled onto her stomach and crouched on her knees with her ass pointed towards him. “Is this how you want it?” she asked.
“Shut up! Have you no shame!”
She lay on her side, her breasts pressed together. As she fingered herself she pouted her lips then licked them with a wet flash of tongue. “Then we'll do it French. I’m the best. Even the officers thought so.”
“Shut up! Can't you hear me? I've had enough of your whore's ways!” Peter went to the bed and slapped her. He pushed her down and slapped her again, and again. All the time she looked at him with her flat eyes, revealing no expression at all.
This enraged him further and he beat her again, striking over and over until as suddenly as it had appeared his anger passed. He sat on the bed sucking air. Eva wiped her face with her bare hand. After a time he whispered: “I thought you were dead. When I saw you here I could not believe it at first.” She did not say anything as she pulled clothing over her. “You should not be doing this.”
He heard nothing for long moments. “Do you think I have a choice?” she said finally in a small voice.
At last. Eva was back.
“I was in the queue again. One of the officers pulled me out and sent me to their brothel. How many do you know who were twice pulled from the line?”
“Do you think that makes this all right?”
“I do what I must, like all the rest.”
“I almost died for you! Do you have any idea of the risk I took for you? What they have done to me since?”
“You! You!! Look at me!” she screamed sitting up. “Look what you Nazis have made of me! Look at my wrist, look at your number there! Like an animal! Do you have any idea what most of you want of me? All you do is beat me and use me. Others hurt me because they like it. I do what I must!”
“Why? What is the point? Whores last only a few weeks, a month or two at the most. It always ends the same.”
“What do you want of me? I have survived each day as it comes ever since I was brought here. This is no different. I do what I must, as I always have since you people put me here. Look at me! Look what you have done!”
“I meant something to you!”
“You! You are in the SS! You murder children. You push old men into your gas chamber! You make whores out of girls like me. And you want something more? You can’t have it! You can kill me but you can't have any part of me that matters!”
“I thought...”
“You ‘thought!’ You thought what you wanted! Sol had watched for months for someone like you. You remember Johann? If the guard Sol selected had been homosexual he would have been the bait. But he picked you and I was. They needed someone to save us. Whenever you touched me I shuddered.”
“You are a Jew. You lied.”
“Yes, even that, especially that, was a lie. We’re all liars. Isn't that what you Nazis say?”
“I'm not a Nazi.”
“What are you if not a Nazi? Look at yourself. The perfect Aryan. I have heard a hundred lectures on it. You kill like a Nazi. How can you claim you are not one?”
“You said I was different.”
“Look at me! My God, you beat me yesterday and just now! You bayonet babies! You push innocent women and children into your gas chamber! You spend every day killing and slaughtering. At night you do to us whatever you want. When we get your diseases you kill us. Don't you understand yet? You are one of them! You have always been one of them! Now it is over for all of you. I can hear the guns the same as you. They will be here any day and then they will do to you what you have done to us!”
Hate was powerful. The SS was built on it, the KZ was a monument to its effectiveness. It was hate that drove him. When Peter was exhausted beyond description, when he could scarcely rise from bed, when the bodies stubbornly blocked the doorway and impeded their work, when he gave an impossible order then stood by to see it obeyed, it was hate that drove him, hate that made it possible and sustained him.
And it was hate that made this inhumanity bearable, hate that gnawed at his essence, slowly destroying whatever he had been, leaving this shell in its place.
But in this world he had clung to his belief in Eva, or perhaps more candidly, to his illusion of her. She had been the one hope in his black existence. That, he realized, was why he had found her survival so difficult to accept. When he had believed her dead, even though she had betrayed him, he still had his dream. When he discovered her as a whore the dream had died and nothing remained in its place.
Peter had hoped that alone with him she would break down and confess her shame. Then he would have known it was an act with the others. He would have forgiven her and alone with him she would be herself and he would comfort her.
When that had not happened he had turned on her, he had used then beaten her. All to get a response. Something.
But this was not the one he had sought. Perhaps, from his reaction, it was the one he had feared. “So it was all a lie,” he said quietly.
Eva taunted him with her look. She was wild-eyed. “I am a Jew, what else could it be? Do you think for a moment I could have wanted you? Whenever we touched I thought of the babies you murdered! When I told you how special you were I heard the shrieks and howls from the shower. And when you took me in this room I loathed you and al
l Germans for the swine you are! You, all of you, will pay for what you have done here! God will not allow this to pass without vengeance! You, your Fuhrer, all of you are scum, not fit to be called human!”
Peter struck her, then beat her senseless. He kicked her repeatedly as he had so many in the KZ, in the Himmel Weg or at the Judenrampe. He went downstairs and told Zelda Eva had insulted the Fuhrer. He drank Schnapps as the guards dragged her away.
CHAPTER NINE
In Peter’s nightmares that night the sun rose but it was a black orb that hung in a flat, ebony sky. The KZ was shrouded in shadows, the buildings dark shapes he could scarcely perceive. They went about their duties in hulking greatcoats, their faces shrunken beneath in their helmets like skulls. The prisoners shuffled in the blackness and the acrid, sweet smoke from the burning corpses filled his nostrils. He was emptied inside, hollow and devoid of all emotion.
When he awoke shortly before dawn the KZ was frighteningly like his nightmare and he had trouble differentiating between this reality and the valley of his nightmares. The sun rose reassuringly but did not pierce the gathered mist and smoke until midmorning. The familiar rumble of the Russian guns was steady and ominously close.
Sending Eva to the shower had lanced Peter of any emotion and strangely quelled his fear. As fiercely as his hate had burned, just as completely was it gone. There was no longer any hope, but he did not despair at that. He thought perhaps this was what it was like to fear an incurable disease then to learn, at last, it was true.
Before lunch Wolff ordered him to report to Administration. SS-Haupsturmfuhrer Heidel, looking wasted and haggard, informed him he had a visitor. It was Uncle Hans. Peter smiled for the first time in months as he saluted him.
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