go? What would they do? Escape to starve? To be shot? Not everyone is the Count of Monte Cristo, Ernst. Some men know they belong in prison. Some men know they do not like work. Career criminals. Why escape one prison for another? Why buy your own bed and food when we can buy it for them.’ He put his arm across me to point to an outcrop of rocks not far from the barbed fence. ‘They even have a zoo. Bears, monkeys, birds of prey. You could take kids here. Although the zoo is for the guards of course. The prisoners have a cinema and theatre. A brothel for the non-Jews.’
He closed the car down the gears as we approached the gated walls. All the roads leading off the main marked by decorative wooden signs, this one, the road to the main gate designated ‘Caracho Road’ – Caracho Spanish for ‘double-time’ – decorated with four swarthy-looking men hunched and hurrying close together in prison clothes. Some of the prisoners here would have been from the Spanish war. The building like a factory except for barbed wire instead of walls. A red-timbered building like a Swiss chalet sat atop the entrance, a balcony all around, a clock above, a flagpole rising out of it. The flag just a red swathe. Beaten by the rain. Taller than this I could see the square tower of the crematoria, to the right of the gate, almost opposite the odd zoo. Not far from the main building. Good. We would not have to go deep into the camp.
Klein reached to the back seat, passed me his briefcase as we waited for the guards to come.
‘You take the notes. I will measure and photograph. I have my own Leica. Better than Sander’s Zeiss he would have you use. One hundred it cost me.’
The latticed door in the gate opened. Words were written in the iron tops but I could not make them out. They were reversed. To be read from the other side only. A black-painted slogan on the stucco wall above the gate read to those who approached:
‘RIGHT OR WRONG THIS IS MY COUNTRY.’
A grey uniform and box-cap stepped through, his jacket instantly dappled with the rain.
Klein stubbed out his cigarette.
‘You have your identification, Ernst?’ His window opened. I passed the card and Klein gave the guard his grin with our papers.
‘Good to see you again, Simon. Pity about the rain, eh?’
Simon smiled back but became stern when he looked at our cards. This was his purpose. His moment. It would be his hand that waved the gate open.
‘We are here to meet the Senior-Colonel,’ Klein said without being asked. ‘About new ovens. Another breakdown, eh?’
‘All the time.’ Simon handed back our cards. ‘Build a better one for us.’
‘Pay us more money, eh?’ Klein winked.
A circus going on around me. A joviality incongruous to what was about to happen. I was outside a prison. About to go within. I had never handed a soldier my identification before. I could only see his holster from my view in the car, another guard watching from the gate with a rifle slung. To see them so close. The shape of a gun hidden by leather a few feet from my eyes. I was in a dream. Klein knew an SS soldier’s name and had asked him for more money. An anxious dream. A little nausea, from this scene or the chicory coffee of my breakfast. Not even an oat biscuit in the house to settle my stomach.
Klein’s window closed and the gates opened. The Opel into gear. As usual he noticed or sensed everything.
‘Don’t worry, Ernst. It is quite natural to be nervous around soldiers. And prisons. You will get used to it.’ He leaned over, grinned. ‘As long as you are not forced to get used to it, eh?’
We parked on the left. There were trucks beyond the gate, waiting for their work detail and then another strange sight to add to my dream.
There was a full band in the courtyard, an orchestra almost, dressed in red trousers and green vests. Tubas and horns, even a man with a great drum on his chest like a circus parade. We got out and Klein grinned at me over the roof of the car.
‘Ah. We are in time for the band. This is good, Ernst. Every morning and evening they sing the camp song.’
I could not stop myself blinking, waking from my dream.
‘Camp song?’
‘Of course. Pride in their camp. Good for morale.’
The rain gone fully now and the brass of the band glistened from it, some of the band conscientious enough to wipe their instruments with their sleeves, proud of them, did not wipe their own faces. Their box-caps flat on their heads where they had stood in the downpour.
I flinched to the sound of loudspeakers along the fence crackling into life, the distinct sound of needle scratching record.
Trumpets and oboes blared, a fast drum beat. I would almost call it a ‘swing’ tune as the crash of cymbals came in and Zarah Leander’s voice came tinnily out.
‘To Me You’re Beautiful’ the song. I did not know if the colonel in the red-framed building knew it but this had originally been a music-hall Yiddish song. No. Maybe he did know.
The jolly song used instead of a klaxon. Hundreds of men were coming from huts like bees from a hive. The mass of them terrifying and I stepped back to the security of the steel car and Klein laughed at my reaction.
‘This is just the main camp-men. The work details. With the sub-camps there are almost sixty thousand here. Filthy. Diseased. Typhus. Do not worry, it is clean here. This is the good side.’
I could only stare. The only word for it. Stared. For such a sight. There was something familiar in it. Something I could not place. In the bones of us perhaps. Such sights.
The song came to its end, the men accustomed to timing themselves to assemble in the square before the finish, packed in the square, not an inch between them, and then a prisoner stepped from the band, came to the front. The conductor.
I was watching a conductor at eight in the morning in a prison. A captive audience of hundreds, a choir of hundreds. I began to smile myself, with Klein, to smile as at elephants or bears performing for handfuls of nuts. In absurdity. To not think how the elephants or bears are trained. It was if this were for us, for Klein and myself. But no. This happened every day. Twice a day. Their roll call. They did not even know we were here.
The band began. A martial tune, not like the record, a rousing powerful song, the type used as food for starving soldiers to forget their holed boots and damp socks. But the voices were not rousing, they were dulled and low like a warped record winding down, exactly as Zarah Leander’s wasn’t. The counter of her voice.
‘Here,’ Klein said. ‘They like this bit. Watch them stand straighter.’
It was the chorus. One line in it that came stronger than a mumble. Something on once being free from prison walls.
‘They wrote the song themselves,’ Klein tapped the roof of his car. ‘Ten marks to the composer. A competition. That is quite impressive, no? Every camp has a song. And they beat those who do not sing well enough – which is bad, but it is their song. They should sing it proud. They voted for it. Come.’
We walked away from the car and I remembered to look at the gate with the backwards writing, for those facing it on the inside.
‘TO EACH HIS OWN’.
Klein watched me read it. Saw everything. Always.
‘It means, “You get what you deserve.” And don’t we all, Ernst? At the end. And at the beginning, if you are lucky enough. And work well.’ He waved me to the stairs, to the wooden building above the gatehouse. Guards and their machine-guns walking around the balcony.
‘This is the main guard tower. We passed the commandant’s quarters along the road but Pister likes to breakfast with his men. Likes to hear the song. Walk smarter, Ernst. You are to meet a colonel!’
The marching tune ended. The roll call begun. Zarah Leander again, quieter this time for the guards to hear the names.
This