*
Tension hums in the officers’ faces, inexorably turning over to violence in a place that breeds it like pestilence. One young gaunt gypsy boy is beaten and drowned in a filthy 6 centimeter latrine hole for being too slow to rise, even though his feet were a welter of ulcers. Another shaved and spiritless woman gang-raped by a contingent of SS guards. A staffer locks himself in his office, fiddling idly with the front of his trousers as he regards the skeleton mounted to the back wall beside the bookshelf. Crooked Charlie had been a Polish prisoner until his death several months back. Now he stares back hollowly from the holes of his skull, his spine a sinuous S against the wall. He had died from a combination of typhus and malnutrition a few months before and in death the Jew had achieved a notoriety he’d never possessed in life due to two circumstances he could have neither seen nor prevented. One, having contracted spinal meningitis in his youth, and two, having been unfortunate enough to be plucked from his garden near Warsaw two summers before. Reduced now to another hideous emblem of his tormentor’s sadism.
*
Back outside, underneath the soul-white arc lights, we bear the brunt of the January wickedness and the SS commandant’s harangue. Most of us have not eaten a substantial meal for over a year, some two. We drink fetid water, eat thin, meatless gruel sometimes spiked with piss, and just outside the main gates, across a neat gravel lot, we can just see, through the fence, the headquarters, a small drab appointment sitting amid the ruin of death.