Perfectly Ordinary People(88)

And what had happened to Johann?

Are you sure you want to know this?

From the fact that you’re asking, I’m guessing that I probably don’t . . . But tell me anyway, just for the record.

He was eaten by dogs.

Christ . . .

Yes, he was mauled to death by German guard dogs.

You know, a terrible thing is happening. I’m getting to the point where these horrors don’t even surprise me anymore, and that feels kind of tragic.

It’s called compassion fatigue, dear, and it’s both tragic and entirely normal.

Was Johann trying to escape from the camp or something?

No, they just set the dogs on him for no reason. Jean-Paul said that they’d stripped him naked and tied him to a post before setting the dogs on him. They did it in front of the whole camp, apparently, so Jean-Paul was forced, along with everyone else, to stand and watch. It was fairly common practice, I believe. They liked to do that kind of thing to the homosexuals in the camps. If you were a Nazi it was what passed for fun back then. They used them for target practice, too. They’d strip them naked and release them in the woods and have fun chasing them and shooting them dead. Plus the horrendous so-called experiments. The list is endless, really.

The medical experiments?

Yes, they were horrific. And there was nothing medical about them. They tested mustard gas and nerve gas on inmates and filmed them as they died in agony. They injected dyes into their eyes and did lobotomies and amputations without anaesthetics. They even sewed pairs of children, twins, together to make conjoined twins – what they used to call Siamese twins back then. How utterly obscene is that?

That is utterly, utterly disgusting.

I think it’s what’s so hard to get one’s head around – the unbridled cruelty. I mean, even if they had been real experiments – which they weren’t – and even if it had been justified to experiment on people against their will, or on children – which it totally, absolutely, wasn’t – to choose to do it without anaesthetics on top of all the rest was just . . . evil is the only word I can think of, but it’s really not up to the job. It’s the stuff of horror films, only it wasn’t a horror film, it was real. They starved people and froze them; they removed bones to see if they’d live or die. They smashed people’s limbs with massive mechanical hammers, sterilised women and gave the men electric shocks until it killed them. But for the gay inmates, their speciality was attempting to cure them of their homosexuality. Specifically, there was a Danish doctor called Carl V?rnet who went to Buchenwald camp, where the Nazis gave him free rein. His speciality was injecting hormones into the testicles of gay men or castrating them and inserting hormone implants under their skin. These were all supposedly attempts at finding a way to ‘cure’ them of their ‘unnatural’ desires. And do you know, at the end of the war Denmark helped that bastard escape to South America? In a way, I think people like Matias were the lucky ones. He apparently died in front of a firing squad. What they did to the people in the camps was quite literally hell on Earth. And then at the end of it all they would kill them anyway and perform autopsies. The twins, the gay men, the women, the children . . . there was never any mercy for anyone. They all suffered horrifically and then were killed. It’s beyond imagination.

I’m sorry, but I feel a bit sick.

That’s a good thing. That means you’re a human being.

You know so much about this all. So much detail, I mean.

Well, how could I not? All three of us grasped at the tiniest smidgen of information, our whole lives. We always wanted to try to understand what might have happened to our families, our friends . . . But the more you find out, the worse it is. That kind of information never provides any kind of closure. So in a way, I can see why people don’t want to talk about it. But the problem if you don’t is that people forget, and if people forget then the whole thing can happen again.

So how . . . I mean . . . Someone like this Jean-Paul . . . How did he manage to survive? Do we know?

Yes, we do because he told Christophe. He survived by becoming a dolly-boy.

A dolly-boy?

Yes, he was good-looking and young, and he used it to his advantage to survive.

You mean he serviced the Germans?

Yes. He survived by having sex with one of the SS guys who ran the camp, as far as I can remember. Or it might have been one of the kapos. Either way, he did what was needed to stay alive.

The hypocrisy of that . . . The SS throwing them in camps because they were gay and then simultaneously abusing them sexually . . .

Yes. I know. But that’s how Jean-Paul survived anyway. At least in body.

You mean that he lost his mind?

Lost it might be overstating things, but I know Christophe said that he was an utterly broken man.

How could he be anything but, after that? But we need to take a pause there. My cassette is about to run out.

Good. Because I think that after re-visiting Mulhouse, I could do with a cigarette break.





Ruth. Part Five.

By the time I had read to the end of cassette #3, my eyes were distinctly humid. That Genevieve’s father had died saving them – that he’d died because he’d driven them to safety – was quite simply heartbreaking. And had he known, as Genevieve hinted, that he hadn’t had enough fuel to get home? If so, then what a terrible choice he’d been faced with. And what a terrible sacrifice he had made.