Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

At first I took a hand myself, and the guards found this hugely amusing; and it was not as if the work grew any lighter as a result of my participation. One of them said to me:

‘What, are you a Jew-lover or something? I don’t get it. You don’t have to help them, so why do you bother?’

For a moment I had no answer. Then I said: ‘You don’t get it. That’s why I have to bother.’

He looked rather puzzled, and then frowned. For a moment I thought he was going to take offence, but instead he just laughed and said: ‘Well, it’s your fucking funeral.’

After a while I realized that he was right. The heavy work was killing me, just like it was killing the Jews in my kommando. And so I stopped. Feeling ashamed, I helped a convict who had collapsed, hiding him under a couple of empty handcarts until he had sufficiently recovered to continue working. And I kept on doing it, although I knew I was risking a flogging. There were informers everywhere in Dachau. The other convicts warned me about them, which seemed ironic since I was half way to being one myself.

I wasn’t caught in the act of hiding a Jew who had collapsed, but they started questioning me about it, so I had to assume I’d been fingered, just like I’d been warned. I was sentenced to twenty-five strokes.

I didn’t dread the pain so much as I dreaded being sent to the camp hospital after my punishment. Since the majority of its patients were suffering from dysentery and typhoid, it was a place to avoid at all costs. Even the S S never went there. It would be easy, I thought, to catch something and get sick. Then I might never find Mutschmann.

Parade seldom lasted longer than one hour, but on the morning of my punishment it was more like three.

They strapped me to the whipping frame and pulled down my trousers. I tried to shit myself, but the pain was so bad that I couldn’t concentrate enough to do it. Not only that, but there was nothing to shit. When I’d collected my alms they untied me, and for a moment I stood free of the frame before I fainted.

For a long time I stared at the man’s hand which dangled over the edge of the cot above me. It never moved, not even a twitch of fingers, and I wondered if he were dead. Feeling unaccountably impelled to get up and look at him I raised myself up off my stomach and yelled with pain. My cry summoned a man to the side of my cot.

‘Jesus,’ I gasped, feeling the sweat start out on my forehead. ‘It hurts worse now than it did out there.’

‘That’s the medicine, I’m afraid.’ The man was about forty, rabbit-toothed, and with hair that he’d probably borrowed from an old mattress. He was terribly emaciated, with the kind of body that looked as though it belonged properly in a jar of formaldehyde, and there was a yellow star sewn to his prison jacket.

‘Medicine?’ There was a loud note of incredulity in my voice as I spoke.

‘Yes,’ drawled the Jew. ‘Sodium chloride.’ And then more briskly: ‘Common salt to you, my friend. I’ve covered your stripes with it.’

‘Good God,’ I said. ‘I’m not a fucking omelette.’

‘That may be so,’ he said, ‘but I am a fucking doctor. It stings like a condom full of nettles, I know, but it’s about the only thing I can prescribe that will stop the weals going septic.’ His voice was round and fruity, like a funny actor’s.

‘You’re lucky. You I can fix. I wish I could say the same for the rest of these poor bastards. Unfortunately there’s only so much that one can do with a dispensary that’s been stolen from a cookhouse.’

I looked up at the bunk above me, and the wrist which dangled over the edge. Never had there been an occasion when I had looked upon human deformity with such pleasure. It was a right wrist with a ganglion. The doctor lifted it out of my sight, and stood on my cot to check on its owner. Then he climbed down again, and looked at my bare arse.

‘You’ll do,’ he said.

I jerked my head upwards. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Why, has he been giving you trouble?’

‘No, I just wondered.’

‘Tell me, have you had jaundice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t catch it. Just don’t kiss him or try to fuck him. All the same, I’ll see that he’s moved onto another bunk, in case he pisses on you. Transmission is through excretory products.’

‘Transmission?’ I said. ‘Of what?’

‘Hepatitis. I’ll get them to put you on the top bunk and him on the bottom. You can give him some water if he gets thirsty.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’

The doctor sighed wearily. ‘I really haven’t the faintest idea.’

Later on, when, with a considerable degree of discomfort, I had been moved by the medical orderlies on to the bunk above, and its previous occupant had been moved below, I looked down over the edge of my pallet at the man who represented my only way out of Dachau. It was not an encouraging sight. From my memory of the photograph in Heydrich’s office, it would have been impossible to identify Mutschmann but for the ganglion, so yellow was his pallor and so wasted his body. He lay shivering under his blanket, delirious with fever, occasionally groaning with pain as cramp racked his insides. I watched him for a while and to my relief he recovered consciousness, but only long enough to try, unsuccessfully, to vomit. Then he was away again. It was clear to me that Mutschmann was dying.

Apart from the doctor, whose name was Mendelssohn, and three or four medical orderlies, who were themselves suffering from a variety of ailments, there were about sixty men and women in the camp hospital. As hospitals went it was little more than a charnel-house. I learned that there were only two kinds of patient: the sick, who always died, and the injured, who sometimes also got sick.

That evening, before it grew dark, Mendelssohn came to inspect my stripes.

‘In the morning I’ll wash your back and put some more salt on,’ he said. Then he glanced disinterestedly down below at Mutschmann.

‘What about him?’ I said. It was a stupid question, and only served to arouse the Jew’s curiosity. His eyes narrowed as he looked at me.

‘Since you ask, I’ve told him to keep off alcohol, spicy food and to get plenty of rest,’ he said drily.

‘I think I get the picture.’

‘I’m not a callous man, my friend, but there is nothing I can do to help him. With a high-protein diet, vitamins, glucose and methionine, he might have had a chance.’

‘How long has he got?’

‘He still manages to recover consciousness from time to time?’ I nodded. Mendelssohn sighed. ‘Difficult to say. But once coma has set in, a matter of a day or so. I don’t even have any morphine to give him. In this clinic death is the usual cure that is available to patients.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

‘Don’t get sick, my friend. There’s typhus here. The minute you find yourself developing a fever, take two spoonfuls of your own urine. It does seem to work.’

‘If I can find a clean spoon, I’ll do just that. Thanks for the tip.’

‘Well, here’s another, since you’re in such a good mood. The only reason that the Camp Committee meets here is because they know the guards won’t come unless they absolutely have to. Contrary to outward appearances, the SS are not stupid. Only a madman would stay here for any longer than he has to.

‘As soon as you can get about without too much pain, my advice to you is to get yourself out of here.’

‘What makes you stay? Hippocratic oath?’

Mendelssohn shrugged. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said.

I slept for a while. I had meant to stay awake and watch Mutschmann in case he came round again. I suppose I was hoping for one of those touching little scenes that you see in the movies, when the dying man is moved to unburden his soul to the man crouching over his deathbed.