Briar Rose (17 page)

ITS MILESTONES ARE:

OBEDIENCE, INDUSTRY, HONESTY, ORDER, CLEANLINESS, SOBRIETK

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TRUTHFULNESS, SPIRIT OF SACRIFICE AND

LOVE OF FATHERLAND.

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A mocking smile played around Josef's mouth. It was hard not to be obedient and sober when a gun was at your head. It was hard not to be truthful when a boot was on your neck. It was hard not to be sacrificed when the other man was the one in power.

"But I am damned if I am going to love the fatherland doing it."

He must have spoken aloud because too many of the other prisoners looked quickly at him and moved as quickly away. Luckily he spoke in Polish, not German. All he got for speaking aloud was a rifle butt to the stomach. It knocked his breath away; it did not make him A

1 throw up. He hadn't been allowed to eat for days.

Picture if you can (he said) an enormous semicircle, the outsid(

enclosed by an arched stone wall. To one side is a fine barrack: clubhouse and theater and administration building, all for tl stapo and SS Reserve units. Flowers surround the structur pretty formations.

But the center is the roll call area, a place so large fully t thousand men-they have to march into it for roll call three a day whatever their physical condition-are almost lost in j Near the roll call area is an isolated barrack. If God had I it would be outlined in red. The sign over the door reads Patj Not a hospital. No. A place of such ordinary horror that by & Josef arrived at the camp, its name is never mentioned. You notice at once the drainage ditches inside. That is necessary blood flows so freely. And a storeroom for 5,000 corpses. Jo not believe the number when he was told that first night by tl who lay in the hard bunk by his side.

"That cannot be," he said.

"Everything that goes on here cannot be," the man said, li dulled by the dark. "But still it happens."

"Five thousand corpses?" Josef murmured, still not believ the first week's end he could name a good many of them.

The prisoners were housed on the other side of the stor

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far enough so the Gestapo did not have to look on the eighty-six barracks every moment. Here, indeed, was the life of the camp. Each barrack, overfilled already with a hundred people, held three and four hundred, lying head to toe at night like sardines.

And on the far side of the camp were the hothouses full of flowers and vegetables and a hog-breeding farm.

Josef had never paid much attention to flowers before, except for the edelweiss to crown Alan's head, except for roses brought to the theater door. And it seemed odd to him that in this place-where men were routinely castrated, where corpses were dissected and the heads shrunk for experimental purposes, where guards made prisoners roll naked in the snow for hours-that in this place he learned about flowers. Later he could not smell the powerful spice of carna-dons or the sweet scent of lilac without connecting it with the odor of blood.

Josef quickly learned not to let anyone know he was Polish, because the Poles suffered dreadfully in German hands. For months the guards refused to allow air into the Polish barracks, keeping the doors and windows shut whatever the time of year. Many died at night from suffocation.

He learned not to identify with the Jews, because they too suffered horribly in the camp. They received one-half food rations and were routinely denied any kind of medical attention, until they were corpses. Then the doctors in the Pathologie got new heads to shrink.

He learned not to identify with the Gypsies for they were the prime live targets of the Pathologie experiments. Dr. Mrugowsky used them as targets for his aconitine nitrate experiment, shooting projectiles into their thighs to prove that it would invariably bring death within two hours. The guards had betting pools on the exact

time of those deaths. Rom races.

He was identified as a homosexual, a pink triangle. They were treated terribly enough.

If you had asked Josef Potocki to describe himself before he entered Sachenhausen, he would have said: "I am a Pole educated in Cam-bridge, a poet and playwright, a member of the minor aristocracy, a man of literate tastes, master of five languages (Polish, German,

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English, French, and Italian), and a gourmet cook," He woul, have mentioned sexual preferences. That was no one's busir his own. Besides, he was quite aware of family honor wl
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manded an heir, an abstract concept he was prepared to de in the future.

After Sachenhausen he would have said, "I am a fag gay-there was nothing gay about being a homosexual in thz

Nothing sexual either. Like the other men, he lost all de anything but staying alive. The option of

"rehabilitatio:

tricky. If a night in a brothel proved one could not perforrr prostitute, one would be castrated.

Josef preferred to t chances with the beatings and tortures.

Josef was driftwood, really. He floated through life, ma decisions, no plans. He had drifted into his first love affair bridge, drifted to London and Paris, to Berlin. He had not b to make plans to leave Germany, and so he had drifted hands of the Gestapo. In Sachenhausen he drifted into a escape.

It was in November of 1941, the snow crisp and evei ground. Josef was lying in his bunk unable to sleep. Outsi the drunken laughter of the German guards as they , through the prisoners'

barracks. It was clear from their vc they were standing outside the Jewish huts, for they ca

"Pig-Jews, come out. Out. Now. At once." And he coul hear the frantic scrabbling as the Jews in that particular hut into the cold in their thin striped pajamas.

"Take off your clothes, and roll," commanded a voice Josef had shuddered, knowing what that meant. The~

roll in the snow until the SS men themselves were too colc about watching any more. Then the Jews would be allowe(

back into their unheated huts and try to get warm under blankets. Many would be dead in days of pneumonia cou despair.

Though he had heard of this, he had never actually sc something seemed to force him to get up, to walk to the d barracks, to open it a crack.

"Josef!" Someone whispered his name, put a hand on h: is nothing. We can do nothing. Do not make a fuss."

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143

He turned abruptly, started to say something aloud, something about being men, about fighting, about dying with honor, something theatrical. A hand was slapped brutally over his mouth, his arms were pinned behind him.

"Do nothing. When they are gone, we will be gone, too. We will kill you if you ruin our plan."

The words were whispered fiercely in his ear.

He nodded and the hand dropped from his mouth. He whispered back: "Take me." He did not know the plan, He did not know the planners. He did not care. "Take me." They might kill him anyway.

He did not care. He was driftwood, you see.

When the drunken soldiers had had enough of the game-"Jesus, Maria-it is too cold for this. I want some more schnappes," one complained-and the last of the Jews had crawled back inside the hut, someone in the dark tapped Josef on the shoulder.

"Come," a voice muffled by the night told him. "You can be the lookout. Karol is at the last minute too frightened. Better the devil you know. . . "

He went with them, not knowing either the plan or the direction, not knowing that Karol had already informed on them, that Karol was a spy who was neither a fag nor a Pole, but a Czech jailed for profiteering. They slipped out through the trap door in the ceiling, by the chimney, the door that was supposed to be sealed shut. He never found out who had opened it. They clambered down the sides of the building. Josef was told to come last, to watch, to call out any warnings.

The guards were waiting for them, counting them and naming them, just as Karol had listed. But Josef, still on the roof, crouched by the stovepipe chimney as the lookout, was neither expected nor counted. And when the others were marched away to the Pathologie, a welcome addition to Dr. Mrugowsky's dwindling supply of exper-irnental prisoners, Josef shivered in his thin striped pajamas by the chimney and tried to plan his retreat. But the trapdoor was shut again, either frozen by the cold or bolted from inside by the informer Karol. So once more Josef drifted.

Pleased with the night's catch, the guards began to drink riotously in their own warm barracks.

Josef practically strolled up to the fence and, heedless of cuts to his hands and feet, flung himself up and over the wire.

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By morning's light, he was in a forest somewhere-he was: to be sure where-outside of Oranienberg, colder than he ha6

been in the camp, his hands cramped and stiff, his nose rui ceaselessly, a line of diarrhea brought on by fright hardening c inside of his right thigh. But free.

He would have frozen in that filthy condition had not a wo(

ter discovered him just as the sun was rising.

The woodcutter was Henrik R-, also known as The Rz was a partisan.

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Forget every romantic notion you have ever had about the partisans (he said) for they are all incorrect. These were not brave men and women brilliantly plotting moves ajzainst the slug-gish enemy. These

were not the underground chess game masters checkmating the P,eich. These were farmers and woodcutters and escapees. These were students and housewives and professional thieves. These were the flotsam and jetsam of the world, driftwood like Josef, whose victories were sometimes catastrophes, whose defeats were the stuff All of them were liars because the were afraid or because the were brave or because thev could not care or because thev cared too

Once he was no longer starving, no longer freezing, no longer running from the Sachenhausen Gestapo, Josef joined the particular cell that The Rat led. He did not like the woodcutter, who was a rough, unlettered boor. But Henrik made him feel safe, for the firs time in years. He became a partisan because he was grateful and because he was afraid and because like any piece of driftwood, he went where the tide nulled If Henrik had wanted to make love to 1:

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him, he would have assented; if Henrik had beaten him, he w have blessed the striking hand.

At night, deep in the forest, in lean-tos Henrik showed them to build-but without fires to give their positions away-the five and three women of Henrik's group told little stories of the r ance to lend themselves courage.

One, a Jewish university student who had fled to the w under cover of a terrible storm while being transported to Dal reported to them of the diarists in Warsaw, the "Joy of Sabl circle that recorded the news of any who fought back. '

mother," he recalled, "fought like a lioness." He had repeate word several times and the women nodded, echoing him.

"A lioness," they said.

"She refused to turn her baby over to the murderers as asked."

"A lioness," said one woman, herself a mother whose chJ

had all died on a forced march. She called herself Mutter H(

"And what happened?" Josef asked.

The student shook his head. "They grabbed the child froi and hurled it from the window. But. .

." he turned a ravago towards Josef and there was a shining in it, a reflection of borr courage,

"but she did not turn the baby over to them on her own.

Josef did not speak but made a tsach with his tongue agair teeth.

Mutter Holle put her hand on Josef's arm. "You think, then, not matter, that the results were the same. But you are v

Prince." They called him Prince because of his manner and b(

the student had known something of the Potocki family, b Pole himself. "But we are all stronger for such women."

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Josef did not know what to say. He was thinking: a deac is a dead child. There is nothing good that comes of murde baby. But he had seen so much horror in his year at Sachenh he dreamt at night that drains in his body were constantly with blood, though when he had been in the camp he ha(

dreamed of food. He said nothing and the women took agreement.

"Josef understands," Mutter Holle said. "He is a Prince.'

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Only once did Henrik speak to them of the resistance as a movement. "We have not come here to live," he said, pointing to the forest around them. "We have not come here to stay alive. It is our sacred duty to fight when we can and to die if we must, but to avenge what they have done to our Germany." Then having deliv-ered himself of the only beautiful paragraph he was likely ever to utter, Henrik finished in rather more usual fashion, "The shits. We will kill them all."

Josef did not remind him that of the eight of them, only four were actually German-Henrik, Mutter Holle, and the two men, brothers, who had escaped conscription into the army: Fritz and Franz, known as Donner and Blitzen.

Josef lived with the Oranienberg partisans in the forest for the four months of winter: November, December, January, and February.

And in all that time-except for a raid on a grocery in the outskirts of Oranienberg for much-needed supplies, and three late-night forays onto the train tracks to destroy sections of it that were built back again the next day by concentration camp inmates-they did nothing except exchange stories.