Dear grandkids,
Thomas is deep into his story now. No need for me to interrupt!
The next morning dawned cold and clear. The same gray figures shuffled back on the same road we had been on the night before. We felt as dreary as the drizzle that had penetrated deep into our clothing just a few hours ago.
I was cold and sleepy, but not unhappy. This was the first time I was really on my own, away from the comfortable footing of home, and it felt like an adventure of sorts. I was suddenly considered a man -- old enough to work like one and old enough to suffer like one.
I knew that things could have been much worse. We could have ended up hundreds of miles away, in Russia. Or we could have been deported to Theresienstadt, or even to Dachau -- names people whispered when they were in trusted company. No, this was not that kind of concentration camp. The guards here were dour and unapproachable, but not harsh or cruel. Word was that no one was beaten or mistreated. They were just doing a job. Whatever this camp would turn out to be, it was somewhat reassuring that it wasn’t run by the SS, but rather by Organisation Todt, the building and construction arm of the Nazi machinery, whose reputation wasn’t nearly as sinister.
And, I told myself, it would not last forever -- if one could only survive the crescendo toward the inevitable apocalypse. I knew that I must lay low now and remember the Bible quote Pfarrer Hoffmann had chosen for my confirmation (“If God be for us, who could be against us?”), a defiant and courageous statement about some of the positive forces that were fermenting under the surface in Germany. Like many of his colleagues, Hoffmann used the sanctuary of his pulpit to give voice to what was good, decent, and intelligent. These values had not disappeared, but they had become voiceless.
On the first day at Munzig, we unloaded the prefabricated barracks from railroad cars. The wooden spars and trusses were heavy and were crusted with a thick layer of ice. Never had I done such hard physical labor, so I tired quickly. The other men whispered to me to slow down, to remain hidden and faceless in the crowd and only do the bare minimum. So the next day I exhausted myself less.
(The barracks at Munzig)
It took a week to build the barracks and the outhouse which consisted of a long pit with a ten-foot-long tree laid along its edge. Moving into the new barrack from the drafty barn was an event. No longer were we to sleep on the ground on moist straw; now we’d sleep on straw sacks, perhaps even on bunks. Here we were, making a major stride in the development of civilization!
I picked an upper bunk near the oil drum stove. The air would be bad there, but it would be warm. The man who called himself Wagges ended up on the bunk below, and next to him was Heiner, a frail boy my age.
Although they were all Mischlinge Ersten Grades[1] like me, none of the men seemed to be — or at least professed to be — of Jewish religion. Except for Wagges, who made a fetish of it. He had a particular and coarse hatred for Heiner who never smiled, never spoke voluntarily, and always carried a New Testament with him. Heiner surrounded his bunk with religious pictures, and when everyone around him talked or laughed, he read his Bible and prayed. With glee, Wagges drew obscene pictures over Heiner’s religious ones. One night, when Heiner was in a deep, exhausted sleep, Wagges tied a long string to what he called “that big dunce cap”— the symbol of non-Jewishness, Heiner’s foreskin — so that Wagges could tug on it in the middle of the night.
After the barracks were finished, I rarely saw the place in daylight again. From then on, every day was like the next: before daybreak, we walked an hour to the construction site and worked until noon, when we got our rations of watery soup consisting of cabbage and caraway seeds in water. (We called it “foot rags with flees.”) Then we worked until dusk, walked back to the barracks, and slept like logs.
The evenings were short and were taken up mostly by housekeeping chores. Those of us still lucky enough to own regular socks washed and mended them, while others washed the gray foot rags (square pieces of material consisting of a mixture of recycled textile waste and paper) which had been issued to us. Clothes had to be patched and the barracks had to be swept. Some read, while others wrote letters or smoked cigarettes rolled from peppermint tea, and there were always a few who played cards. But no one stayed up late; sleep was too precious. Besides, once you were asleep you couldn’t feel the constant hunger, nor the cold.
The construction site was a terrible mess. Depending on the weather, the ground was either frozen-hard ice or ankle-deep mud -- sometimes both at once. For the first two weeks, I was assigned the job of laying the rails for the narrow-gauge muck train. It wasn’t exactly like playing model railroad, but it was more varied and less strenuous than the assignment which was to follow -- pushing the loaded cars from the place where the conveyer belt belched rock and soil from the mountain, to a dumping pit.
(Thank you, Google Images. Found with a search for “Organisation Todt” and “rock work.” This is probably much like the work Thomas did.)
I soon proved too weak for that job, which rightfully belonged to a locomotive, and I was relieved when they put me to work where the conveyer belt was being loaded, inside the huge rock that constituted the whole hill. It was here, in the cavernous bowels of the earth, that I first realized what we were working on: these large underground caverns, hewn and blasted from the rock, were to be some kind of war material plant, away from normal air attack targets, hidden in the solid rock under an innocent-looking hill.
This was still very hard labor. Even the instructions on how to use the knee for pushing the shovel into the pile of crushed rock — given by a sensitive and aristocratic-looking gentleman in the group who seemed to know my family — didn’t make it much easier for me. After all, I was only a sixteen-year-old high school kid who knew a lot more about how to fake his Greek vocabulary than about how to get away with the least amount of physical effort in a digging crew. I tried to prove to everybody, most of all to myself, that I was one of the men and could work hard, but many times during the ten-hour days, I had to stop shoveling because my nose would start bleeding uncontrollably.
It may have been no more than a nosebleed which was responsible for one of those bizarre strokes of luck or coincidence — if there is such a thing — that come out of nowhere when everything seems blackest. Perhaps one of the guards was tired of my bleeding nose, or maybe he felt some real compassion for me. Most likely, I was in the way of him making his daily quota of rubble. Whatever prompted him to do it, he picked me as one of twenty people who were needed in Meissen, at the Organisation Todt warehouse, to unload several boxcars of supplies.
It was monotonous work, passing sacks of dried peas and 40-pound boxes of dried barley soup from hand to hand up the stairs for endless hours. Pick a box - swing it up - let it go, pick a box - swing it up - let it go. Strange as it seems, at one point we found ourselves singing. Many years later, when I heard how Negro spirituals developed from the work songs of slaves in the American South, I remembered that day. It was the same repetitive, rhythmical movement that are made easier by singing or humming, even if it has to be marching songs.
After two days, the railroad cars were empty, the warehouse was well-stocked, and the men were sent back to the quarry.
All, that is, but three. Three men were needed to maintain the warehouse and to load and unload future shipments. Herr Uckel, the man who oversaw the operation, did the picking. He was a gentleman in his early sixties who had obviously seen better and more rewarding jobs than running a warehouse.
The first man he picked was the one who would be most helpful to him, Horst Reiszmann, the young carpenter who’d had so much trouble believing he was a descendent of a Jew. Horst was to build the shelving for the warehouse. Herr Uckel’s other two choices were a purely humane deed. His second pick was a short and fragile little man in his early forties with delicate hands and an embarrassed Charlie Chaplin smile, who turned out to be a former violinist with the municipal orchestra of the provincial town of Zwickau. And the third person he picked the rosy-faced high school boy with the dreamy and bewildered eyes: me.
For the three of us, this meant a fantastic measure of freedom.
[1] “Mixed Race, First-Degree” (or “Halbjuden” = “Half Jews”)
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