Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(155)

"Auschwitz?"

"No, no."

The iron lettering on the gate read"Arbeit Macht Frei."

"What do you think that means?" asked a man from behind them in line.

"Abandon hope all ye who enter here," replied Alexander.

"No," said Misnoy. "It means, `Work will set you free.'"

"Like I was saying."

Misnoy laughed. "This must be a Class One camp. For political prisoners. Probably Sachsenhausen. In B?chenwald, the engraving didn't say that. It was for more serious, more permanent offenders."

"Like you?"

"Like me." He smiled pleasantly. "B?chenwald read, `Jedem das Seine. To Each His Own.'"

"The Germans are so f*cking inspiring," said Alexander.

It was Sachsenhausen, they were told by the new camp commandant, a repulsive fat man by the name of Brestov, who could not speak without spitting. Sachsenhausen was built at the same time as B?chenwald, and was a full-time forced labor camp and a part-time extermination camp, mainly for the homosexuals who worked at the brick factory just outside the gates, for the few Jews who had found their way here, and certainly for the Soviets--nearly all the Soviet officers who entered the gates were buried within them. It was now called Special Camp Number 7 by the Soviets, implying of course that there were at least six more just like it.

As they were led through the camp, Alexander noticed that most of the prisoners walking from barracks to canteen or laundry, or working in the industry yard, did not have the hangdog Russian look. They had the tall, unbent Aryan look.

He turned out to be right. The majority in the camp were Germans. The Soviets were taken to a special place, slightly beyond the main camp walls. Sachsenhausen was built in the shape of an isosceles triangle, but the Nazis had discovered during the war that there was no room to house the Allied POWs in the forty barracks within camp walls. So twenty additional brick barracks were built, jutting out on the right side of the camp at the farthest corner from the gatehouse. The Nazis called it Class II and that's where the Allies were kept.

Now, Special Camp Number 7 was split into two zones--Zone I in the main camp as "preventive detention" for the German civilians and soldiers picked up during the Soviet advance on Germany, and Zone II, in the additional housing, for the German officers released by Western Allies but recaptured and Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

tried by Soviet military tribunals for crimes against the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also kept in Zone II.

Though in the same general area as the German officers, the Soviets had six or seven barracks all to themselves, they ate at separate times and had separate roll call, but Alexander wondered how long it would be before the camp, stretched to its limits, would start intermingling its prisoners, treating them all as enemies of the Soviet Union.

The first thing Alexander and his group of men were ordered to do when they got to the camp was build a perimeter fence around a square area just to the side of their barracks. This was to be a cemetery for those who died in Special Camp Number 7. Alexander thought it was quite prescient of the NKGB to be so forward-thinking as to be building a cemetery before there were any casualties. He wondered where the Germans had buried prisoners who had died--Stalin's son, for one.

On a walk through the camp, Alexander's group was shown a small enclave built out from the main wall into the industry yard. The enclave contained a concrete execution pit and next to it a crematorium. The Soviet guard told them that that was where the German pigs disposed of the Soviet prisoners of war, shooting them in the neck through a hole in the wall as they stood near a wooden yardstick that measured their height. "No Allied soldier has seen this pit, I can assure you," the guard told them.

Alexander, shaking his bewildered, scornful head, said, "And why do you thinkthat was?"

For that he received a knock with the rifle and a day in the camp jail.

Alexander started out working in the industry yard, a large fenced-in area where the Soviets took their exercise and chopped wood that was brought in from the forests around Oranienburg. Soon he volunteered to go and log himself. Every morning he was taken out with a convoy at seven fifteen, just after roll call, and did not return until five forty-five. He never stopped working, but for that he was fed a bit better, and he was out in the open air, left with his own thoughts. He liked it until it started getting cold at the end of September. By October he was hating it. He wished half-heartedly he were in one of the warm rooms soldering or hammering, making cups or locks. He didn't really want to be stuck inside a factory-floor room, but he wouldn't have minded being warm. He was outside, his boots were falling apart and leaking, held together with jute, and the gloves they had given him had holes in the fingers--an unfortunate flaw for gloves. But at least he was moving his body, metabolizing warmth. The ten men guarding the twenty prisoners were certainly dressed for the weather, but they stood for the entire ten hours, moving from foot to frozen foot. A small satisfaction, Alexander thought.

As it got colder, the cemetery started filling up. Alexander was made to dig graves. The Germans were doing poorly in Soviet-run camps. They had lived through six years of vicious war, but stuck in Special Camp Number 7, they withered and died. More and more were brought in. Clearly there was not enough room. The barracks started getting more and more crowded. The bunkbeds made in the industry yards were placed closer and closer together.