Olen Steinhauer - The confession

The train was already sitting on the tracks. I was led to its rear, to a cattle car that held three young men-no older than seventeen-with bruised faces. Dirty straw covered the floor, and when the door was pulled shut the darkness and smell of decay covered us. One voice said something about concentration camps. Another told him to shut up.

The train whistled and started to move.

They introduced themselves, and in passing lights through the high barred windows I could connect names with faces. Gyula, his ear crusted with dried blood, was the one who was afraid of concentration camps. Florian, with a purple, swollen right eye that remained shut, had no patience for such talk. He asked what I’d done to end up here. When I told them it was connected to a case, and that I was a militiaman, they fell silent again. But I enjoyed the sound of their voices. “What did they get you on?”

“Nothing!” said Johann, the third, who blushed beneath his bruises. “They didn’t tell us anything. They took us from our homes, beat us, and brought us here. It’s unbelievable!”

They were students who had helped draw up a little manifesto during the height of the Sixth of November fervor, then quietly returned to their studies. But their names had appeared alongside their classmates’, and these signatures became part of the long lists of the condemned.

When the sun rose, we could see through the high windows that we had reached the countryside. Then we stopped at a station that Gyula believed was Ricse. When we arrived at Dombrand, stopping just before the station, I was sure of our destination. Soldiers opened the doors and walked us to another train. Some travelers with luggage watched from the platform, hands shielding their eyes. They put us on another cattle car that was connected to a regional train with passenger cars up front. There were other prisoners there, young and old men, some with no marks on them at all. One held on to his blood saturated pant leg. I moved to a corner and watched them talk among themselves. Then the train pulled up to the station and, pulling myself up to the window, I could just make out the very clean travelers climbing into their cars.

From there we stopped often, letting travelers on and off, and when we reached Vatrina, which must have been the end of the line, the final regular passengers disembarked. The soldiers waited until the platform was empty before opening the cattle cars. There were about sixty of us in all, from three cars. An officer approached, a tall man with buzzed hair who held a black truncheon, and he told us to assemble on the edge of a field that bordered the station. Once we were collected, the officer motioned to the soldiers, who began to herd us across the field and away from town.

I knew this route. We were heading east, and to our right was the road I had driven to the camp. Six, seven miles. A cold wind came over the field, arching the grass and slowing us down. My dirty shirt stuck to me. In a wheatfield just in sight of the five towers of the camp, the prisoner with the bloody pants stumbled and dropped into the grass. A guard wandered over and shouted at him, but we could not see his reaction through the grass. Twice he kicked the prisoner, looking down and shouting, then he took a pistol out of his belt holster and shot him.

Gyula kept looking back over his shoulder. I thought that he was trying to catch my eye. But he was looking farther back, to where the dead man lay.

We reached the barbed wire and waited while the guards conferred by the front gate with Gogu. He looked healthier now that he was in business again. They handed him a file full of papers, and he spoke to his men, his flushed bald head bobbing as he joked. Then the guards ran about, shouting, rounding us up into lines like soldiers on display. Gogu put his hands behind his back and waited until we were ready.

“Welcome,” he shouted, his dirty voice on the edge of breaking, “to Work Camp Number Four-Eighty! I am Captain Gregor Kaganovich and you are my pets! I reward and I punish-I am your last recourse before your god!” He raised his thumb. “Only one rule here-this is simple, now- work! If you want to eat, you work! If you want to sleep, you work! If you ever want to leave here alive, what must you do?”

A couple prisoners in the front answered him, and two guards came over and slapped their faces.

“Work,” said Gogu. “Not talk.”

The blows began. Each guard had a truncheon that he used with fervor, beating us in the general direction of the gate. I caught sight of Filip, the excess skin collecting on the back of his neck, his scarred face twisted into screams as he swung. They beat us into five groups in front of the five buildings. My back and arms stung, and my ear was bleeding. The guard who struck me on the ear shouted, “It’s the big ones that go first, bastard! It’s the big ones we liquidate!”

He was the one who ordered us to strip completely, except for our shoes, and throw our clothes into a pile. We were marched around the side of the buildings, where four guards stood with razors to shave our heads. We froze in that line, waiting for the guards to dump water on our heads and then chip at our scalps. The barber took my hand. “What are these?” He tugged a ring-Hans Lieblich-off my left pinkie. “Hey, Filip!”

Filip came over and called me a bourgeois pansy, then the two of them worked each ring off. Not once did Filip recognize me, and I never saw my German soldiers, nor my wedding band, again.

We waited, arms around ourselves, shivering. Beside the barbed wire were two full burlap sacks. The guard shouted for our attention and walked over to one. He opened it so we could clearly see the dead man inside, his battered face lumpy and purple.

“This!” the guard shouted. “This is the only way out of here!”

Under a rain of more truncheon blows we ran inside the barracks. On the rotting hay was a pile of soiled, striped prison clothes. The guard screamed at us to dress.

It’s hard to say what I was feeling at that point. A certain terror, yes, but a part of me was sure I would make it out alive. The extremity of my surroundings was almost too deadly to comprehend, so I held on to the only thing I could understand: Gogu’s one rule: work. I was still a strong man, and could at least keep up with that. And this was my mistake: I still thought that rules had a power of their own. I thought that camp rules would ensure a path of safety.

That night the weary veterans, who had been out at Work Site Number Two all day, returned to the barracks. Some became angry when they found their bunks occupied by newcomers, while others, too weary to shout, simply dropped into a free shelf. Some questions were answered. We would know when to do what by a bugle call. When to wake, eat, and work. The work at Site Two-the new project Gogu had mentioned a long time ago-was digging: They were building a canal to the Tisa, about five and a half miles away.

The bugle sounded early, and I woke to the cold and a sweet, sickening smell. As I climbed down from the bunk, I asked a veteran who slept below me. He was an old man with a permanent look of worry on his face. “The pus,” he said. “You’ll smell like that once you’ve been hit enough. You’ll get worms, too, but don’t worry, they’ll clean those out in the infirmary.”

There were more truncheon blows when we gathered for the morning roll call behind the barracks. The sun had not yet risen, and in the darkness a guard with a wavering, young voice called the names and we each yelled “Here here! ” as loudly as we could. Gogu looked on from the door of his office. Halfway through the names a heavy, bearded guard reached forward and pulled one of the new prisoners-a student-out of our ranks and dragged him to an electrical pole. As the names continued, he shouted at the student to hold on to the pole, and as he did so, began beating the student’s back. Whenever the student screamed, he delivered a blow to his head. This went on until the student passed out. Roll call was over.