Just Kiss Me One Last Time, Brian Hesse [top 10 non fiction books of all time txt] 📗

pulled up to the right side of the car. A young SS man ran from the passenger side and connect a hose that ran from the exhaust to a pipe. That was all, except for fifteen minutes of screaming, clawing, and crying to God for mercy.

 

Our job was simple. We opened the back door pulled the feces stained corpses from the car and loaded them on to an open truck. From there I did not know where the bodies had gone. My other job was to disinfect the car with bleach and water. I would scrub as fast as I could the blood and urine from the concrete walls. This continued for five days. I counted at least three thousand dead during that time. I would learn later that at least ten thousand were gassed at the camp before its liberation in May 1945.

 

XVI Indifference

 

On the fifth day the routine changed. After heaving the dead bodies on to the truck, I would go with the grim-faced driver to the newly built crematorium. We drove in silence to the red brick building billowing smoke day and night and dropping human ash into sections of the camp. It was unavoidable once the killings began to eat human ash or have your clothes layered with the dirty grey powder. The Nazi regime was built on death and allowed to exist, first by a desperate German populace, and then by impotent leaders of the world. Hitler could occupy the Rhine, Annex Austria, take Czechoslovakia. This is the price we pay for supporting madness. We eat and wear the ash of our dead.

 

That day, as I pulled the bodies from the truck to place on the steel rollers of the conveyer. I saw my neighbor, Mr. Vogel. I had a flashback to that Autumn day in 1914, watching the soldiers marching off to the first world war. I remembered looking across the street and seeing Mr. Vogel wave happily at the green troops away from home for the first time. He looked so happy then. Here he is now, a pink triangle prisoner, stuffed into a sardine can, and now to be turned to ash. I thought of Roland, and for the first time in years, wanted to cry. But there was no time for crying. My time was at an end. Just one more load of prisoners and then it will be our turn. I tried to make the others see the logic of our execution the previous night.

 

“You know men, we are not going to have our sentences reduced. They are going to kill us,” I stated as we lay on our bunks.

 

Most remained silent except for Abraham. I only know him as Abraham. A Jewish name but apparently not a Jew, otherwise he would not be in our barracks. Worse than being a homosexual was being a Jew.

 

Abraham protested, “what do you know. How can you be so certain?”

 

“You know how I came to be here. I knew about a police inspector who frequented the El Dorado club. For that reason, I never was released from custody.”

 

“You’re here because you are like us. Gay, happy, and beautiful.”

 

This received a good laugh from the other crew. I must admit I laughed too.

 

“Don’t you see. They cannot leave witnesses. Do you think the world knows about the camps and the mass murder? We are witnesses, and we are going to be silenced. Regardless, we would have been killed anyway. Gay men are no longer considered an inconvenient truth. Gay men are targeted for extermination.”

 

The rest of the night was quiet, I felt remorse for expressing my logical conclusion. Maybe it is better not to know until the very moment you receive a bullet to the head.

 

XVII A Last Kiss

 

It is funny how perception of time is not absolute. My time as a boy in Frankfurt, playing silly games with the boys, watching a world prepare for a bloody war in the trenches, falling in love, and coming of age was one of rapid travel without a thought of the past or present, only possibilities of the future. My time of that first kiss with Roland was one of slow time. The world of my peripheral vision moved at its normal pace but bringing myself to Roland’s lips was the blissful slow motion of anticipation. An entire lifetime of living in his strong soft embrace flashed before my eyes as we closed a mere six-inch distance between us. Life in the camp fluctuated between both extremes of rapidity and sluggishness, with days that dragged on forever and nights of exhaustion that seemed to move at the blink of an eye. The morning of our final shipment of sick prisoners ready to march sheepishly to their death was one of obliteration of time. Past, present, and future ceased to exist as if erased by some inexplicable cosmic hand. I found this feeling of absence to be a merciful gift, filling my mind with a type of spirituality I never felt before. The inevitability of one’s death has this effect on an individual. In the end we are nothing but recyclable material. We become food for the worms, or ash in the sky, and all we have done really means nothing. Walking for the last time to the rail car of death, all these thoughts passed through my mind. I began to feel a strange type of power cover me. I felt as a child playing in the cold January air with the anticipation of returning home by sunset to slowly sink into a prepared warm bath. I did not know where home was, but I was content with going.

 

  If this was going to be my last day on earth, I was determined to look at the faces of the final transport of the fifty-two inmates marked for death. I asked Abraham if we could switch jobs for the day. He was reluctant because his job was much easier than the rest. He merely greeted the prisoners and made sure that they undressed before entering the gas chamber. He was instructed to inform the new arrivals that they had nothing to fear. His speech went something like this, “welcome to Mauthausen camp. A hot meal, clean clothes, and a work assignment awaits you inside the camp. Today you will be disinfected for lice. We pride ourselves on living in the cleanest camp in the Reich.”

    That was his speech, and he had to say this with a straight face with each batch. I was glad not to have been assigned this ghastly duty. But my guilt was not entirely absolved. By pulling out the bodies and disinfecting the room of all evidence of mass murder, I felt a part of the process, and for just one last time, I wanted to see the faces of our victims.

 

    I finally persuaded him to change places for the day. I had to suppress a laugh as I promised to give him my daily ration of food for the next two days. I was not concerned about the consequences of such an arrangement, I was certain we would not see the next morning.

 

    I scanned the faces of the prisoners standing in line. All had the indifferent expression of animals in a slaughterhouse once acceptance of the situation set in. So, I walked slowly up the line giving the prepared speech, when…

 

    “Roland. Roland, it’s you!”

 

   I did not know what else to say. There was no time. I ran to him and wrapped my arms around his body. I felt nothing bone as I gently pressed his body next to mine. I looked at his face, no longer the beautiful Greek stature chiseled of the man I once knew. His face was sunken, and his eyes protruded from their sockets. He stared at me as if seeing a hallucination brought about by the typhus that was swarming through his body. But his lips gave the recognition I so craved. He softly said, “Karl my love.” I kissed him deeper than I could ever kiss another man. “I’m sorry Roland. I betrayed you. I love you so much.”

 

   I only remember one last thing he said to me before the SS guard on duty forced us apart with a blow to the back of my head. He said, “Just kiss me one last time.”

 

XVIII A Life Well Spent

 

   I have very left to say. We weren’t killed that day, but at least I was spared from removing Roland’s body from the rail car. As I laid on the ground, with consciousness fading, I watched Roland walk into the chamber, occasionally looking back with an expression of emotion very rare to see in this life. The expression of true love.

 

   My only explanation for my survival is that killing the brother of a war hero was much more dishonorable than killing millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. I care nothing about the reasons for my survival. I came to America, and Pennsylvania, with thousands of other Germans fleeing the tattered post war European world. The camps were either destroyed by retreating Nazis or liberated by Russian and American troops. It would take years for the world to acknowledge the extent of the Nazi holocaust against the Jews. It may take the decades more for the world to acknowledge the Nazi holocaust against homosexuals, but let this lesson be learned well…when people turn away from the systematic murder of an individual group’s freedom today, their own freedom will face extermination tomorrow.

 

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Text: Brian Hesse
Publication Date: 12-23-2018

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