Clifford's Blues (15 page)

Wednesday, March 17, 1937

On the roof of the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
, in big letters, they have posted these words:

THERE IS ONE ROAD TO FREEDOM. ITS MILESTONES ARE: OBEDIENCE, DILIGENCE, HONESTY, ORDER, CLEANLINESS, TEMPERANCE, TRUTH, SACRIFICE, AND LOVE OF ONE'S COUNTRY

Inmates can see the sign from the end of the Lagerstrasse, way down where the gardens and the disinfection hut are. Can't miss it. From the canteen window the words jump out like giants.

I don't like Baum. I don't like him because he is friendly with Karlsohn, who is really the only guard who gives me trouble. Doesn't seem to matter too much to him that Bernhardt is my patron. Even Dieter Lange, still a major, can't have Karlsohn done in. Karlsohn's only a corporal. Only a corporal! But the plainest soldier—hell, a free civilian—has the power of God where we prisoners are concerned.

Dieter Lange is very busy now with planning a canteen for a new camp to open in July. I think he said it's near Weimar and is called Buchenwald. He has also been able to arrange for a regular detail from the camp to be trucked out to his father-in-law's farm to turn the soil and ready it for the spring planting. He's not the only one who makes such arrangements.

Coal has been scarce this winter and we've had to switch to coke. Dieter Lange is in charge of ordering it for the crematorium and he has got himself a good racket with the dealer. I guess the dealer himself is doing pretty well, since he knows the potter who makes the urns for the ashes. They all know each other, like anywhere else.

Monday, May 10, 1937

The Blacks have come in by the hundreds, and Dieter Lange has raised prices on everything—cigarettes, candy, gum, biscuits, canned goods—everything.

“These are the crazy ones, the Blacks,” Werner said, “but some are crazy like foxes. They're all meat for the Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology.”

The Institute deals with people it calls asocials, like the Blacks. “But in the meantime,” Werner said, “they can help finish the camp, drain the swamp, cut stone from the quarry, rebuild the factory buildings, and all that other shit. The Nazis have got a pretty good slave system here. By the time they finish, with the forced labor and the slaves, Germany will be as big as America became with slavery, eh?”

We were looking out the canteen windows watching the trucks unload yet another batch of Blacks. They didn't have their black triangles yet, but we knew what they were. When I told Werner about Bernhardt's list that Gitzig had seen, I knew something was going to happen to the museums. I didn't know, though, that getting news of that list gave Werner time to get word to “his people,” as he called them, to get out of those cities fast. The Reds seem to have a smooth-running organization that reaches outside the camp, even to America, where, I heard, Werner has learned that his wife is very sick. “His people” in New York are looking after her, helping out. I thought that was kind of strange—after not hearing anything from her or even about her for such a long time and now …

I've seen Dr. Nyassa a couple of times lately. I thanked him for his care when I was sick. He has the blues. His wife can't get any answers. They've offered to pay whatever money they have and leave Germany, but they don't have what the Nazis want—15,000 marks for him and 30,000 for her. That's $22,500! She's written to Dr. Just, but he can do no more than write to people he knew in Germany. Now it seems safer for her to leave, and that's why he's so blue. She's off to Paris. Dr. Nyassa said he was doing better, even getting along with that evil-looking
Revier
block leader, because he's been treating his friends with the clap and syph with the sulfa powders, and they're grateful. He knows it cures, but they don't, so he said he goes into a lot of mumbo-jumbo about maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, but it'll be better than running that thing down their dicks, huh? He gave me some medicine, just in case of a slight relapse, and a swallow or two of the old medicinal brandy. This, he said, he has to keep hiding, moving from one place to another so the block leader can't find it and either drink it up or sell it.

Becker? They can't break him, Dr. Nyassa said. So they've eased off a bit, but they'll try something else, he said, watch and see.

Thurs., May 27, 1937

I've noticed that Karlsohn doesn't holler at me anymore in the canteen unless we're alone. Oh, he's got the meanest look, the kind that says, Let me catch you on a dark night in an alleyway and your ass is mine, boy. My Aunt Jordie once told me about this Negro man who hurt colored people. White people didn't pay him much mind as long as he wasn't bothering
them
or
their
favorite colored people. Did just what he wanted to do, cut people with his razor, beat them up, was fresh with women—anybody's woman—and he would walk right into someone's yard and help himself to a chicken or a watermelon or a burlap sack of pecans. Karlsohn treats me like that sometimes. For a prisoner, I've got a little “prominence,” as Dieter Lange calls it. I didn't think there was such a thing in Dachau. Now I know different. That's only because I'm a musician and a freak. I know just being a freak wouldn't be enough to keep Karlsohn and some of the others off me, but being Bernhardt's and Dieter Lange's musician so far has done just that. Thank you, Jesus. I am a
Prominenter
.

Dieter Lange was right about Baum. He clips cigarettes, the expensive foreign ones like Gauloises, Luckies, Camels, Benson & Hedges, Players, and so on. So I said to him yesterday in the canteen when we were alone, “We're lots of cigarettes short, Baum.” He turned twenty different shades of white. He thought I was dumb, couldn't count, couldn't read the invoices; that I could seemed to surprise him. He's a fat little man who jokes all the time. When he farts, he holds one of his legs way up like a dog. He's lucky. Don't know how lucky he is, because a fat man in prison is like a red cloth to a bunch of bulls looking to stick him. I've told him that. Wanted to put that fear in him, because it's there in every man, the idea of going to prison and having your nature bent south. 'Course he went into a lot of labba-labba yabba-yabba. He
knows
if I tell Dieter Lange he'll be sent to the Prisoner Company, where they put targets all over your clothes and work you to the bone. Fat man like Baum probably wouldn't make out his time there. Thing is, I've learned—and maybe it works even outside a concentration camp—that to have something on someone is like having money in the bank. And that's only the beginning; once you have him, yank the hook, again, again, like you got a channel cat on your line. Too bad he's not taller and good-looking.

“An error in the accounts is all,” he said.

Then I said, “But where are the cigarettes? They should be here even if there is an error. But they aren't. I guess I better have the major go over the cigarette invoices. But he'll be mad. That's
our
job, not his. He expects the pieces to match the money, Baum, and they don't. Now what am I supposed to do?”

At that moment I knew he hated me as much as Karlsohn does—but there wasn't anything he could do about it. Nothing. “Well?” I said. Baum had been in the plumbing-supply business, I'd heard—not
plumbing
, but supplying the parts—and had made a little fortune on brass and copper parts. They caught him, so he was here claiming his boss was the one who got rich, not him. That was probably true, but I guessed he was closer to grand than petty theft. The big shots always got away.

“I don't have the money to put back,” he said. He choked on the words. He knew what he faced, and here was this black faggot who was gonna do him in. I asked if he was willing to make a bargain. He said yes. Anything. But he didn't mean that. Anything reasonable.

“Your wife comes once a month?”

He said yes, oh yes.

“She comes next week?”

He said yes again, and I could see he was trying to think what I would ask. I said, “I'll give you a letter. She must smuggle it out. In my letter I'll ask the person to write back at once, addressing the letter to your wife, and that letter she will bring when she comes next month.”

“Well,” he said, “I don't like to get my wife involved, you know.”

I said, “Okay.” I went back to checking the invoices.

“But I'll do it,” Baum said. “This once.”

“No,” I said. “You'll have to do it whenever I say. That depends on the kind of answers I get.”

“To America?”

“Holland. Why?”

“I don't want to make trouble for my wife. I think they check all the mail from America and going to America.”

“You already made it,” I told him. But I didn't tell him how I'd cover up his stealing. I'd simply not say anything until Dieter Lange was up to his neck in work in the room he used as an office, and then I'd tell him some of the guards came in and helped themselves to the cigarettes, which they did often enough anyway, but we were supposed to keep count of what they took. Sometimes we couldn't because there were customers and sometimes we didn't even see them. Things haven't gotten better with four eyes instead of two because there are more people in camp now. I can handle Dieter Lange. Hmmm. Could even suggest to him that he keep an eye open for Karlsohn and the guards on his watch. He could pass it up to Bernhardt that Karlsohn was making trouble for me! Now the
SS
Prisoner Company was a solid dick-licker, Jack, like gods booted out of heaven into pure-dee hell. Heh, heh. Slick score, Cliff.

“You'll take care of it then, Pepperidge?”

“Yes.”

“No money?”

“No money. But Baum, you won't steal anymore, will you?”

“No. I won't. Thank you.”

“Don't thank me yet, because if your wife doesn't bring me a letter next month …”

His face turned a color again, this time somewhere between red and purple. “But—suppose the Hollander does not write back?”

“He will. And move the cigarettes to the back shelf, so Karlsohn and his buddies can't reach over and help themselves. Now.” I think he also hated me because I could talk to him in his language. My German isn't great, but it isn't bad, either. Having to translate English lyrics into German has helped a lot. Knowing someone else's language is something like being a spy. Oh, in a restaurant they'll pat you on the back and say your German or French or Italian or any other language is great, but they don't really want you to understand the bass notes.

A small group of asocials (
ASOS
, we call them) crept into the canteen and looked around in surprise like every new prisoner does, and you could see in their eyes they were thinking, A canteen! Well, not so bad. Like a store on the outside. And they were used to stores.

After my talk with Baum, I slipped in to see Werner. He's now got both sections of his block under his “command.” His block is still made up of
Roter
, the Reds. In his block there is the “Committee,” or
“Familie,”
which tries to look after the guys who don't have their rabbit's foot with them. They gather information from all over—workers in the Medical Office, Political Office, Labor Office, the
SS
homes, the
SS
and
SA
barracks. What they gather, they pass around. They try to get their very sick people off the tough details. They keep a record of who's missing and when he was first missed and which guards were with him, and they try to help the newcomers get used to things like the commands and keeping track of their bowls and spoons. They've even been known to try to talk the guards into going easy on jokers who aren't yet used to the slavery.

Werner told me that there are a few Thaelmann Brigaders in camp now, picked up as soon as they hit their front porches after being sent home from Spain with wounds. The Germans fighting with the Spanish Republicans named themselves after Ernst Thaelmann. He lost in two elections in 1932. Thaelmann's a Red, one of the first the Nazis put into a concentration camp. It was kind of strange, Werner telling me that, because I had a bunch of magazines from Italy and France to give him and they carried stories and pictures about the Spanish war. He thumbed through them looking at the pictures. He doesn't speak French or Italian, but there are a lot of people in his block who do. “Well,” he said. “They sat on their hands when that idiot Mussolini went to Ethiopia, and they're still sitting. But now the Germans and the Italians are in Spain. Why is everyone so goddamn blind?” He was so disgusted he spat on the floor. Then he got up to hide the magazines. In Dachau, everybody hides everything. From the guards and from each other.

Monday, June 7, 1937

The summer uniforms feel good, but tuxedos feel even better, like you're somebody, not a prisoner. The guys in the band have a feel for each other now. Moritz and Fritz and me sometimes play some of their stuff. I struggle on the piano (I'm reading more now because of them) with stuff like Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Violin and Brahms's Violin Concerto, which is mainly for Moritz. If I lose my way they just go on ahead without me, hearing a piano where there should be one until I catch up or plain drop out. Mostly they like the Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. I've heard Moritz many times off in a closet of The Nest playing his favorites, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Vivaldi's Concerto in D Minor, and Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto. And he'll go on as long as he can with violin sections from a lot of Bach.

Sometimes Teodor's in another room running through Haydn, Vivaldi, and Purcell. The first time I heard him he stopped to explain that Bach had a guy named Gottfried Reiche playing trumpet for him, and Handel had Valentine Snow, and Henry Purcell had John Shore. “Now,” he said, “Cliff Pepperidge has his Teodor Loeb—with a French horn.” He waved up his circle of brass and valves and grinned. This guy Haydn also did a lot of things for cello, so many times Fritz sits in with Teodor and then does “Clouds” and “Festivals” from Debussy. They say they're jamming when they play Berlioz's “Roman Carnival,” because it's fast.