H. Adler - Panorama

The rats swing truncheons with which they wale away at the naked, and the rats bellow out that this is no sanatorium, threatening to punish anyone who has hidden anything, for everything will be found, and punished, anyone who has hidden something in his mouth or in the folds of his body, it will be punished, all of it a crime, it will be punished, every possession is a crime. Then the naked learn that among the lost there is no such thing as equality, because the collaborators are powerful, the other lost ones powerless, the Conqueror’s conspirators distant and with an exalted air about them, though the lost are made aware of it only from time to time, otherwise the collaborators take care of things for the conspirators, making sure to herd together and control the endless waves of the nameless. The lost are scolded as they are driven into the next room, there they are stripped of their hair by four Greek Jews, themselves also among the lost, crouching on stools and shooting unintelligible words back and forth, the rats saying “ Klepsi ” to them, which means to steal in Greek. The naked must kneel down in front of the Greeks, who scrape off the hair on their heads, the skull naked and bloody, then the naked have to raise the right arm, the left arm, as the Greeks shave the armpits, the naked standing as the Greeks shave the pubic hair and the buttocks. Then the naked are shooed onward, stumbling into the shower room, where they are pressed together in close bunches under the showers, warm water beneficently pouring down upon them, though there is no soap here to wash with, only water, which flows for a while, the naked driven farther on until they arrive at a threshold and they have to wade through the reeking grayish-brown lye, striding past a lost one who holds a sponge in one hand soaked with the same cold solution, running it over the raw privates of each naked one and then over the skull, irritating and burning the skin like liquid fire.

The naked now stand in a cold hall, the bodies still damp from the showers, but there are no towels, the naked having to form rows as, without a care for shape or size, ragged shirts are tossed to them, dirty trousers and jackets often damaged and ripped, trousers and jackets with blue patches and made of gray striped material. In clothes made of the same material, the collaborators run about in “zebra stripes,” though for ages there have been none available to the naked, the Conqueror’s weavers incapable of fulfilling the endless demand, though from the repositories of the death factories the worst rags have been selected from a limitless supply of clothes that once belonged to the hecatombs of nameless murdered people, miserable trash still able to be utilized for the Conqueror’s marvelous deeds and relief work, as now the mottled zebras are fitted out with the plunder of the murdered victims, after which a brush is dipped in rust-red varnish and circles and crosses are smeared on the trousers and jackets. Foot rags cut from soft, warm wool of the prayer shawls of murdered Jews are also thrown to the naked. Then shabby caps made out of zebra cloth are tossed in an arc to the naked. The last element of the wardrobe is the shoes, the soles made of wood, the black uppers of rough material. The naked have to dress quickly as they try to make the stuff fit them, some of it too short and too tight, other parts too big and too long, though that is preferable, while best is to find someone sensible with whom to trade clothes in order to look respectable. The naked barely finish dressing before being driven out of the hall under the threat of blows, as they stand in the dreary October cold of the year 1944, realizing at last that they are lost, though there is no time to reflect on this as they are bellowed at by angry voices that want to bring order to the misshapen heap, though it is not done with screams but rather with clubs and whips. Finally around a hundred of the lost stand in rows of four, then are led away from this cursed place which is called a sauna, the Finnish word for bath.

An armed conspirator and some collaborators proudly decked out in their snazzy garb accompany the lost along the length of a sandy path, on the edge of which stand some withered pines followed by nothing but crunchy gravel, to the left an open field where some building is under way, to the right concrete pillars that loom and are bound together by electrified wire, in between the covered watchtowers lifting up, behind them a camp for the lost, immense and bleak, every now and then an entrance, a wooden hut standing nearby, the word OFFICE legible on it, yellow and black letters on a sign spelling out the odd words SHH — THE ENEMY IS LISTENING! The entrances lead to separate parts of the camp, “F” written above the first entrance, which is called the sick bay, on the next the letter “E,” the Gypsy camp, now only a reminder of the former inmates, who in large part exited the camp through a chimney, as a collaborator explains. Here the surge of lost ones remains standing, a collaborator hurries over to the office window, where he stands stiff as a board, then marches them off through the open gate. They move across a courtyard, then they arrive at some larger huts, then move along a road that runs through about thirty huts painted green, stretching back from the camp road almost to the edge of Section E, the huts standing one next to the other, always one to the left and to the right, and behind them wire stretched from pillar to pillar, each part of the camp remaining separate from the rest. The lost are not led to these huts right off, but instead they must stand in the far field, a gathering place where they wait a long time, though in the camp of the lost there is no time, or nothing but time, since it’s all the same, whatever happens, or time is a tight net thrown over the lost, and each strand of the net cuts into life. There Josef gathers his wits and decides that he must hang on, he can’t let himself wither away, and yet he doesn’t yet know what such a proposition entails, what he even means by it. Suddenly he is driven into a hut along with his fellow marchers, the number 13 labeled on it, first through an entryway, then he sees a small room to the left and right, but immediately he is pressed into a long room that takes up almost the entire hut, someone suggesting that in old Austria, and later in Poland, these were the horse stalls of an army garrison. A waist-high brick wall forms the middle axis of the room, right and left of it there runs a narrow passage in front of triple-decker wooden bunks, upon which a couple of red horse blankets lie, though there are no straw mattresses, paltry light pressing through small, glazed portholes in the roof, such that it is twilight within during the day, perhaps lighter at night when the two lightbulbs are turned on. At the end of the hut there is another entryway with an exit, the floor everywhere consisting of nothing but packed-down earth.

In this hut and for many days to come, existence is reduced to this warehouse for humans. To get away from here, that is Josef’s only wish. Although he has managed to steer his little ship through fateful seas, a feeling still compels him to do everything he can to get away from here, and yet he knows for sure that this place of sickness can only lead to another place of sickness, while in the end Josef is still determined that it shouldn’t happen here in this near-grave which they call quarantine, whose destruction still presses through the chimneys that run day and night, where the flames are not lit to celebrate the sacrificed lives of the murdered but which nonetheless eerily exalt them, despite the will of the murderers, such that Josef senses this destruction much more as an eternal repose that wipes away all urge to fight back, an uneasy prospect of that indolent state in which the thinking being is robbed not of the justification for his existence, but rather of the ability to possess and reflect upon it, even when the inquisitive spirit poses endless questions otherwise unfit for grown-ups, questions of youth, with which one seeks to strip a secret of its secret, because the questioner has no idea that the question itself — though empty of insight — contains the answer, since the deepest questions have no answers other than more questions. This insight is lost upon the inmates of the waiting station, for here there is only a life of relinquishment, where even life itself is relinquished in much the same way that the sum total of all possessions are relinquished, a life of nothing more than inner reserves, in many ways a pure life, though pure rather than virtuous, for it is not a life lived in accordance with human nature, which does not feed on memories alone, but rather one that lives for discoveries that cannot be replaced simply by hopes and dreams.