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

to those deemed social misfits (work shy, mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts, and prostitutes). Finally, the star of David given to the Jews. Homosexuals wear the pink triangle and always separated from the other prisoners. The idea was that homosexuality could be cured like a sexually transmitted disease. This is how we were looked upon during that period of history…as dirty and diseased. Extermination of gay men was not in the official agenda of the Nazi regime. I believe this is because there were so many closeted homosexuals within the Nazi party. It is rumored that top Nazi leaders enjoyed a life of secretive same sex relationships. But this is the face of lunacy. A continuous contradiction until the truth is too buried deep to ever see the light of day. In either case, we enjoyed our separation. Love continues even in the face of horror. In fact, it is horror that can act as a motivator for love. Personally, my betrayal of Roland, the death of Albereich, and two years of near starvation prevented me from sexual arousal, let alone love. I kept to myself listening to the groans of love making and starvation, and meditated deeply on survival, because survive I was determined to do.

 

Survival is an understatement in the concentration camp, especially Mauthausen. The first six months consisted of not more than hard twelve-hour days building barracks, and oddly at the time, converting an old railroad car into a sealed room. However, by 1939, the camp began to fill to the brim. Sardining prisoners into wooden rectangular barracks have a limit. Prisoners in the main camp began to die of typhus and starvation. Each day on our way to the stone quarry, I would pass dozens of frozen emaciated bodies. The ghastly figures looked like human skeletons with a thin layer of rice paper covering disintegrated muscle. Our bodies began eating themselves as our rations dwindled to a bowl of rotten potatoes and weevil infested bread. My first time I saw a bug crawling through the pours of my bread I must admit, I gaged and vomited. This was a mistake I never allowed to happen again. That precious vomit spilled onto the dirt was a days’ worth of energy wasted. I learned to form an understanding between me and the weevil. I would let him eat as much of the bread as he could, enjoying the contentment of a fat satisfied gut, then I would quickly end his life and feast on his protein rich body. Not a bad trade off I must say. I heard rumors of several barracks throwing out the dead with bite marks taken out of the fleshier parts of the body, but I shudder to think of the act. Our barracks was isolated from the others and for this I was grateful.

 

The stone quarry, in which most of us labored was a true test of survival, at least at first glance. The truth is that the stairs of death was a gamble…a roll of the dice. Most died within six weeks of working in the granite quarry. At the bottom of the stairs, prisoners labored with pick axe and shovel breaking large blocks of stone. Waiting nearby were the unlucky ones. This prisoner carried one hundred-pound blocks of granite on their back up one hundred and eighty-six uneven stairs carved into the face of the mountain. Twelve hours of walking up and down the stairs with only bug infested bread and rotten potatoes to see him through. As I said, most collapsed within a few weeks, but always another newly arrived prisoner to take his place. Many from my barracks died on the stairs. I worked the bottom of the pit for most of the four years I lived at the camp. Oh, yes, I survived four years, but I do not know how. My body appeared no stronger than another. Malnourishment, occasional beatings, and exposure to disease, cold, and back breaking labor broke my body but not my spirit. My indifference carried over from the Berlin prison to the camp. Many of these men were torn from society and brought directly to the camp. I attribute my two years of incarceration as mental preparation for the harsh realities of the Nazi camp system.

 

But I watched others not so fortunate to escape the attention of the sadistic guards.

 

“Hey Heinrich, lets play a little bit of push or die.”

 

“Sounds wonderful, we need to start making room for more prisoners.”

 

“Many of these are too sickly to work usefully much longer. I say one hundred need to die today.”

 

“Many of our resident fairies do not seem to be reformed.”

 

“Then we will have to include them in our game.”

 

And so, the game continued throughout that day, which included dozens of men from the pink triangle barracks. All received horrible treatment, but there seemed to be an especial loathing for the gay men of the camp, not only from guards, but from other prisoners. As if our lives were of less value than others. But the game continued, and it went something like this.

 

A prisoner would carry his one-hundred-pound load to the top of the stairs. Exhausted and ready to collapse he would be forced to the edge of the cliff looking down on the busy prisoners below breaking rock. Another prisoner would be given the choice to either push the man off the ledge to his death or be shot. This was a macabre experiment in human nature. Kill or be killed. Most chose to kill.

 

Another past time was less dramatic and certainly of absolute no philosophical value. An exhausted prisoner would kindly be given the offer to sit down and rest at the top of the stairs. If he did, he was shot in the back of the head. I would often look to the top of the stairs and watch as a fine red mist of blood dissipated into the breeze immediately after the pop of the guard’s pistol. And on and on, prisoners would die only for a new one to take his place. By nineteen forty-two, a more efficient means of killing was born.

 

XV My End

 

In the Spring of 1942, several inmates from my barracks were informed that our work in the quarry was suspended for a few weeks. This pleasant surprise did not meet with any protest from tired minds. Normally, red flags would spring up in a person’s mind if told that a few weeks of rest was ordered by sadists bent on killing people through hard labor, but not in this situation. The only words I heard were “a few weeks of rest.” This did not make the four of us particularly popular among the other inmates. It would be noble of me to describe feelings of guilt tearing at my soul, but I cannot feel an emotion that has long since ceased to have any effect. Rest in the camp meant life, or at least a chance to live another day. Still, somewhere lurking just beneath the surface was a spark of curiosity. A curiosity that would flash across the mind and die like a shooting star, each time my head touched the lice infested straw that made up my bedding. But within one week that curiosity was satisfied with a horrifying reality.

 

“Prisoner 125769 have a seat,” stated Franz Ziereis, the camp commandant. He was not a very imposing man, with dark hair, dark eyes, and an average round face. It was his uniform of the SS that always intimidated the inmate. A black uniform, silver polished buttons, and the skull and crossbones insignia of the deaths head unit. These were the men who ran the daily operations of the camp. Bureaucrats as sadistic and dangerous as the worst criminal housed within the camp. It was his direction that accounted for the daily murders committed by equally brutal guards. I can almost forgive the guards. Most were peasant farmers from the surrounding area, out of work, no education, and happy to do anything for money to survive. The SS so called elite are another story. These men have degrees, and in some cases, doctorate degrees. They understand the subtleties of soft-spoken rhetoric, and the powerful motivation of such speech. Words kill just as frequently as bullets or, in this case, poison gas.

 

“Karl is your name I believe, but that doesn’t matter. I am giving you the opportunity to live out your sentence. You, and the other three were handpicked because of your toughness. Not an easy feat to survive my camp for four years.”

 

I dared not reply. This was an opportunity that would not slip by. I have been reduced to the survive at all cost mentality of the uneducated guards.

 

“You will report to SS Sergeant, Gunther Fry tomorrow, and every morning for the next five days. The camp at Dachau is overflowing with the old, the sick, and woman and children. We are to take some of the pressure off that camp. You will be working at the rail car just a few miles West of the camp entrance, Dismissed!”

 

That night I could not sleep. The other three men did not seem to suspect what duties lie ahead. I wondered if they believed in a reduced sentence in return for the up and coming work. Did they not know that by 1942, homosexuals were no longer targeted for rehabilitation through work? Rumors abounded of mass arrests of not only Jews and political opponents, but also of homosexuals, and concentration camps were not places designed to release people back into society. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union just a year prior, opened the floodgates of true Nazi intentions. Mass shootings, hangings, and gassings of Jews, Gypsies, and those considered anti-social are not easily covered up, not even by the thorough Nazi propaganda machine of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. I was afraid that my days were numbered. Although sad to see your own death like looking into the seer’s crystal ball, some events completely break a person and kill their will to survive long before facing the firing squad.

 

XV Dirty Work

 

That day in March, was crisp despite the unusual brightness of the morning rising sun. I stood outside the back end of the rail car with my fellow prisoners and watched in silence as the sunlight caused the drops of dew to sparkle, like tiny shards of diamonds. My mind was blank because I did not want to look at the people being herded off a rail car that pulled up slowly next to the sealed chamber. You see, I was part of the construction crew that built this sealed compartment. The wooden car was first meticulously measured at twenty feet in length and seven feet in width. We laid bricks from floor to ceiling, and then the outer walls were cemented two inches thick. My concern was that the wooden floor of the car would not withstand the weight. After bringing these concerns to the Nazi SS engineer of the project, support beams were installed under the wooden floor to support the weight. I later received my reward for such marvelous insight…a brutal beating. A six-inch steel door was attached to both front and back of the car, and a peephole installed on the front one only. I remember thinking, “why a peephole, how odd.”

 

As the new arrivals were pushed into the car, I heard the SS guard count one hundred and twenty. I dared not look at the faces. One hundred and twenty people in such a small space. I pictured a large tin sardine can being slowly peeled back to reveal the contents. One hundred and twenty naked people stacked on top of the other soaking in their own excrement, urine, and blood, eyes bulging and looking straight at me…” why were part of this Karl. Why?” I felt my stomach cramp as I shacked my head to dispel this terrifying image. Just as I did so, a large army truck