Point of No Return

by Gellhorn, Martha;

  “Yeh,” Jacob Levy said. Unaware of having moved, his hand slid down to protect himself. In Italy, that was why the guys were so scared of mines; they were scared they’d catch it there. It had happened to two men he knew and afterwards he only wanted to forget about them; it was the very worst; it was the oldest, deepest fear. But to do it to men on purpose, to have it done to you in an operating room: Christ! shooting was too good for those Nazi doctors. He wished Heinrich wouldn’t stand so close. Heinrich smelled like the people in the hall, though not so strong. He wished they wouldn’t all look at him the way they did. What were they waiting for? He was damned if he was going to show them how sick he felt.

  The doctor watched with that polite smile; his cold eyes watched to see how an outsider would receive news from this world of darkness where they all lived. For years he had watched the Nazi doctors, seeing the operations, the implanting of disease, the experiments. He could do nothing except keep a record for the future, if there was a future. He had accepted the torment and humiliation of his own body, but he feared madness. If he went insane he would be taken away with those who raved and those who stumbled, the ones no longer useful to the Nazis as work animals. And though he did not want to live, he did not want to die as the Nazis made men die. The prisoners, knowing he was like them and their friend, turned to him as the sick had a right to turn to the doctor charged with their healing. And he could not help them. He had come to dread this welcome in the eyes of the prisoners; it reminded him of what he once had been, and the honorable practise of a profession he loved. Finally he had learned to observe everything, dispassionate as the dead. He had not spoken to the American camp commandant about leaving Dachau, or trying to find his family if he still had a family. He had not tried to change anything. He lived because it was a habit. Meanwhile there was some interest in studying these newcomers.

  Heinrich, speaking with a grey unexcited contempt, went on to tell of the experiments which killed hundreds and hundreds of prisoners in vats of freezing water or strangled them in airless boxes, and Jacob Levy listened, unable to make sense of what he was hearing. He looked at the doctor and the two assistants and Heinrich, and they frightened him, they had seen too much, they couldn’t be right in their heads. Then like a repeating victrola record, Heinrich started to explain it all over again. Heinrich checked himself, and his eyes blinked with doubt, as if he too wondered about his sanity. The doctor stood by, smiling.

  “Shall I show you the boxes where the prisoners collapsed their lungs, sir?” Heinrich asked.

  “No!” He had not meant to shout at them. What did Heinrich have to bring him here for? If Heinrich hadn’t grabbed him, he’d have been away long ago.

  “Tell the doctor it was very interesting. I got to be going, I got to get back to my unit.”

  He stood up and shook hands with the three men in white jackets, and Heinrich said, “This way, sir,” and led him into the evil smelling hall where the prisoners still waited on their chairs. They walked back through the prison yard and Jacob Levy watched his feet again, fearing those faces. Then he raised his head, and saw a group of women standing on the steps of a brown weatherbeaten barracks.

  “They had women here?” he said.

  “At the end, they bring some womens from other camps. Auschwitz, Ravensbruck.” They had walked towards the women as they spoke.

  The women looked at Jacob Levy silently and he looked at them. They wore rags of dresses, not prison uniforms, rags of flowered cotton and faded silk and torn woolen suits. Some had kept their hair combed and curled as best they could, clinging still to what they remembered of themselves. They had numbers tattooed on their arms. They seemed younger than the men and he could not understand why several of them were so repulsively bloated. You could not feel them as women. They were different animals from the ones in the prison yard, but not people.

  A woman began to speak, then many spoke. They crowded around him. One of them plucked at him lightly like a beggar asking alms and then many touched him. Jacob Levy was seized with panic; he had to force himself not to raise his arm to push them away from him.

  Heinrich tried to soothe the women. He translated pieces of their talk for Jacob Levy. “Poor womens,” he said, “She says they will not let her die in the gas chamber with her sister, they kick her to let go and they take her sister … she says they broke her arms, yes, see, they are not straight; they did not heal … she says please help them, please help them …”

  “I can’t,” Jacob Levy said. “What can I do?” He pulled money from his pocket and offered it to the women and they stopped talking and stood back from him. “Tell them to buy themselves something.”

  “There is nothing to buy. I do not know what they want. To go home, I think.”

  “Tell them the Army will take them home as soon as they can.”

  The women seemed quieter, hearing this. One of them smiled.

  “Good luck,” Jacob Levy said, and then he thought it sounded not only foolish but mean, as if he didn’t know there wasn’t any luck for them.

  They waved, when he walked away. At a distance, when you could not see their faces and bodies clearly, they made a piece of attractive bright color in that grey place.

  Heinrich had led him to another building; he was helpless in the hands of this insistent little man. He seemed to have no will any more, only a futile desire to escape.

  “Here is the nacht und nebel,” Heinrich said. “This is where the prisoners are put who must die alone. Secretly, so no one knows. I never understand the Nazis. If they want the mens to die why do they not shoot them? They shoot us every day. Shoot, gas, starve, beat; many ways. But here they have a special house for special people and they make them die slowly. I do not understand.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if he had been speaking of a foible of strangers which was not worth discussion.

  The hallway was long and narrow, broken by small thick wooden doors. The building was silent and apparently empty; it smelled clean, but there was still a prison smell about it. Heinrich led the way down the hall; he seemed eager and almost gay. Jacob Levy heard his own feet scraping on the cement floor. At the end of the hall, Heinrich said, “Look at this, sir.”

  Jacob Levy saw a small plain windowless closet. “What about it?”

  “This is the punishment. Eight mens in here; see how little is the room? Eight mens stand up close together, touching each other, in the darkness. Is a little air from the top. Water to drink once a day. Cannot move. The filth, you can think of the filth. Two days, four days. The prisoners become crazy and then they are taken out.”

  Heinrich was smiling a little, nervously or apologetically. The American soldier could not understand what this prison meant; and perhaps he did not even believe what he, Heinrich, was saying; perhaps he thought this closet was stupid and not interesting or Heinrich had made it up. Heinrich had stood in the closet three years ago; he did not remember why or what he was supposed to have done; even now, looking at it, a kind of darkness passed over his mind. But the good young Americans, how would they understand? Heinrich suddenly felt ashamed, because all he had to show, the only world he knew, was this place. He had no other life and no other knowledge; he knew that he could not live anywhere now because in his mind, slyly, there was nothing but horror. He wanted the others to know; the sane, the healthy, the free; he wanted to infect them with his pain, or what had been pain. Now he had no feeling but he wanted them to know. They could never know; no one could know; you had to suffer it to know.

  A woman’s voice, behind them in the hall, rose from a groan into a high single screaming note. The scream stopped; the hall was perfectly silent; then the voice repeated itself, and the unendurable high note rang between the cement walls.

  “Christ!” Jacob Levy said. “What is that? Why doesn’t somebody do something? They’re killing her!” He started to run down the hall.

  Heinrich followed him; he could not run. Jacob Levy was trying to trace this voice. Heinrich went to a d
oor and opened the sentry-slot in it.

  “Here, sir,” he said.

  Jacob Levy saw a woman, thin, of no age, perhaps thirty or twenty or forty, with dark hair fallen across her face and down her shoulders, half kneeling and half lying on a cot in the corner of one of the solitary cells. She was silent now. Then the scream started again in a groan; and slowly she began to beat her head against the wall.

  “Get a doctor! Can’t you see she’s killing herself?”

  “Sir,” Heinrich said, “she is crazy in her head. You see that. She comes with the other womens from their camps and now her brain has gone. It happens always, every day, sometimes many. What shall anyone do? She will die soon; it is the best.”

  Jacob Levy turned on Heinrich; he was alive wasn’t he; he seemed to be doing allright; why couldn’t he hustle around for somebody else; he seemed to take everybody else’s troubles pretty lightly.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked with suspicion.

  “Twelve years.”

  “They had this place going twelve years?”

  “I am one of the earliest,” Heinrich said. “I am a Social Democrat. Here I have book-keeping work, I can sit down, I am lucky. I do not even remember what is Social Democrat politics. The food is so little, you see. The memory goes away from you. I try for two years to remember if my mother is dead; I cannot remember. It is funny.”

  They were all crazy. Now the woman took a rasping breath and began the patient insane scream.

  “Let’s get out of here, for God’s sake!” Heinrich was so slow too, moved slow, talked slow, thought slow. Let everybody hurry; burn the place down would be best; send the people to real hospitals and pour gasoline on the buildings and burn it down now; quick, fast, so nothing would be left.

  But he was lost, in the jumble of brown wooden buildings, and the crowds of grey prisoners. He did not know where the main gate was, and Heinrich said, “Yes sir, I take you out the quick way,” and walked with infuriating slowness along a path, between the barracks.

  “No no sir,” Heinrich said, “you must not go that way, there is the barracks where all have typhus. We must stay here.”

  They now passed a beautifully arranged vegetable garden. Heinrich pointed to it. “Food for the officers. You see, over the trees in the big houses.” Jacob Levy realized these were the backs of the grey, tree-shrouded houses he had seen beyond the outside wall. That was when I figured it looked like a pretty good prison, he thought.

  “Very fine garden,” Heinrich said, “See also the fine glass house for flowers. The Nazis love flowers. We work, they beat us, then they take home the lovely flowers to the lovely wife.” Heinrich’s airy colorless voice seemed never to stop. Jacob Levy had begun to hate him. He was doing this on purpose. They didn’t have to walk all around the camp to reach the gate. Heinrich led him under a grove of pine trees; a big factory chimney rose above the trees.

  “We stop here a little instant on the way for the gate,” Heinrich said innocently.

  Then they were on it, and Jacob Levy could not turn back. He could not, in front of this man who had lived here for twelve years, break and run.

  On the right was the pile of prisoners, naked, putrefying, yellow skeletons. There was just enough flesh to melt and make this smell, in the sun. The pile was as high as a small house. On the left was a mound of S.S. troopers, dressed in their black uniforms, and looking like giants compared to the faggots of the Dachau dead. Alongside the low brick building were two big mastiffs.

  “Their dogs,” Heinrich explained. “They had many. We killed them all.”

  Jacob Levy followed Heinrich in silence. They entered a whitewashed room. Heinrich pointed out a square grille in the wall, a ventilator, you might think, but not exactly. “The gas comes from there,” Heinrich said. Jacob Levy had his handkerchief over his mouth and nose, his eyes were stinging with the smell. He followed again, into the other side of the building. A disorder of bodies spread over the floor. “They had not time to burn these,” Heinrich said, and showed Jacob Levy the great ovens, like old fashioned bakers’ ovens. Jacob Levy could not take the handkerchief from his mouth and he was glad, because that way he did not have to talk. He was trying not to gag on the smell, and he hoped Heinrich would not notice. If he can take it, Jacob Levy thought, I can. But waves of heat flushed over his body and he felt sweat trickling down his cheeks. He couldn’t let Heinrich see, that was all, that was what he had to do; keep going, and not let Heinrich know.

  “It makes many ashes,” Heinrich said, and gestured with his hand. “The ashes fall in the lovely gardens of the lovely wives and make the house dirty.” Then he walked around to the back of the building, and Jacob Levy saw the neatly sorted prisoners’ clothes, trousers in one pile, jackets in another, boots in another. “Can be used again, always,” Heinrich said. “They take out the teeth for the gold fillings before they bring here the bodies, and also at the end cut off the womens’ hair for the mattresses …”

  “Get me out of here, God damn you!” Jacob Levy shouted, and suddenly Heinrich changed, and became a man used to threats, small and wary and quiet, waiting inside an old fear.

  “Yes sir,” he said, and started to move quickly along the path under the trees, past the vegetable garden, towards the prison yard. Jacob Levy caught up with him and saw the white sweating face, and heard the little man sobbing for breath.

  “Heinrich,” he said, “slow down. I’m sorry I said that. Take it easy, Heinrich.”

  “Yes sir,” the little man said, but fear and wariness stayed in his eyes. At the gate he shook hands, keeping his head lowered. There was a clammy sweat on his face and his breath did not come easily; he could not move that fast. Jacob Levy offered him money and Heinrich declined it with thanks; then Jacob Levy pressed a package of cigarettes into his hand, and turned and stepped outside the barbed wire fence before the little man could return the cigarettes too. Jacob Levy forced himself not to run down the prison street to the main gate. As he passed, the sentry called, “How’d you like it, Mac?”

  23

  But Jacob Levy could not speak; he shook his head and walked through the gate, just not running. He forgot he had parked his jeep across the street, and walked fast along the wall, trying to put distance between himself and the sight and smell of that place. The smell went with him, he thought he could taste it. He felt it sticky and oozing and thick, on his hands, his clothes, his hair. He would have been warned of what he was walking into, had he not thought the smell went with him.

  Then he turned a corner and found the street blocked by a long line of freight cars, with a sandy path beside them and feathery, newly green trees shading the path.

  A train was being unloaded. The freight cars looked like any others; most of them were low open coal cars, there were perhaps ten box cars. The civilians, doing the unloading, wore masks over their faces, made of colored bandanas or white handkerchiefs. Also their clothes were unusual for working people; they seemed to have come here dressed for their everyday occupations, as if they’d had no time to change. Jacob Levy stared at a fat bald man wearing gold rimmed glasses, a stiff-collared shirt, black trousers and grey spats. Beyond these civilians, American soldiers, masked and therefore expressionless, policed the job with tommy guns. There were twelve of them, the length of the fifty car train, standing as far back under the trees as they could. No one spoke. The unloading went on in such silence that Jacob Levy could hear the flies buzzing over the train’s cargo.

  Bodies were handed down by a man standing in a freight car to a man standing on the path beside it. Open trucks, parked alongside the train, received these bodies; the trucks were now about three quarters full. There were also men with shovels, for the decomposing bodies nearest the floor could not always be lifted. A middle-aged German in a dark business suit threw a limp stinking bundle to another man, standing below him: the long hair of the woman caught on the buttons of his left sleeve. He cursed and tried to disentangle it. Below him, the other man
said, “Was ist los? Mach’ schnell!” in a voice of simple irritation.

  Jacob Levy turned and started to run back the way he had come. He passed the corner out of sight of the train: the smell of the dead was everywhere. He coughed and stood still and vomited. He steadied himself against the wall and went on vomiting. Then he groped along the wall that hid the fine grey houses. On the other side of the houses were the ovens and the gas chamber. If you didn’t get around to gassing them, you could pack them into freight cars. They would die allright, look at them. Or maybe one man was in a box car so he wouldn’t die of exposure, and he fought his way to a crack where he’d get enough air, and lived because he was young and had once been strong; but then he went crazy afterwards. If the woman screamed enough, she would die; maybe the man in the blanket would start to scream soon. Or he might even get well and then he could sit in the prison yard with the others who had no place to go.

  They were people, Jacob Levy thought, they lived somewhere. They were real people like anybody else. Like Poppa and Momma. He leaned against the wall and rested his head on his folded arms. The ground was moving under his feet; he felt cold. He pressed his forehead hard against his arms.

  I never thought about them except it was pretty tough on them and they should of left Europe long ago. I never knew. They had their lives and their friends the same as me. They went to work and came home like Poppa and there’d be a wife there fussing around the house and trying to make things nice. They weren’t bad; nobody said they did anything wrong. They were born. What gave these krauts a right to say who should be born and who shouldn’t, and who could live and be let alone, and who would get caught and killed? What gave them a right to gang up and murder poor people who lived like everybody else and did no harm and only wanted their kids to have it good and go to college and get a start and have some fun? I never knew; I thought those goddam krauts had to fight like we did and I thought these weasling kraut civilians were sort of stupid and pretty yellow besides. I never thought; I never thought about anything. I went along and tried to keep out of trouble and make the best of it. And all the time this was happening. They were murdering people for nothing. For nothing, for nothing for nothing. For being Jews. Who did they hurt? What did they do to anybody? I didn’t hate the krauts. I didn’t have the sense. I thought they must be pushed into it, like us, by whoever decides those things. And who caught all those poor people and who ran the train and who guarded the prison and who did the beating and the starving and the gassing and the burning in the ovens? That wasn’t any big shots did that dirty work. That was krauts, just everyday krauts like anybody you’d meet on the street. And I hoped I didn’t mush up that bastard’s legs. I hoped he wouldn’t have to go around like the Sarge. You had to kill them or they’d kill you but I didn’t hold anything against them except that. And they knew; they knew about Dachau. They were here. By God, they must of liked it or they’d of stopped it. They must of laughed when they saw all those dumb Jews waiting around to get killed. Heinrich said they took the gold fillings. They wouldn’t even shoot people and make it quick; they fixed it so everyone died slow, the longest hardest way, so you’d know every minute you were dying and every minute would twist in you. They’re worse than murderers; they’re something you couldn’t ever have heard about. They’re the dirtiest lowest things on earth, and they’re getting away with it. The people are dead and the krauts are all over the place, acting friendly and not saying what they’d really done. They wouldn’t say, not them. They’d murder the people and talk nice afterwards. They’d lie and say they didn’t do it. But the people are here, you can smell them till you choke on it. The people didn’t have a chance; there were too many krauts; they got caught slow whenever the krauts felt like it and killed slow. I hope to Christ I mushed his legs. And what did that count? One. When they should all pay for this, all the time they lived. Momma has black hair too, long black hair.