Free Holocaust by Gerald Green Page B

away. And when I played soccer I played to
win
. And if the other fellow played dirty, I could trip and shove, and if need be, throw a punch.
    “What will you do?” Anna asked, still weeping.
    “I’ll fight.”
    We watched my father climb aboard the train and wave to us a last time. My mother put her arms around us. Inga stood just behind us, shaking her head in sorrow. I could see there was shame in her face—shame for her own people.
    “Let us go home, children,” Mama said. Her voice was calm again.
    All prisoners in Buchenwald had to work. Karl was an artist, so it was assumed he was accomplished with his fingers. He was assigned—through Weinberg’s influence—to the tailoring shop.
    Weinberg explained to him how much better off he was working inside. At least it was reasonably warm, and the work was not exhausting. Outside, prisoners died daily in the quarries, the road-building teams, the so-called “garden” detail, which consisted of ditch-digging.
    The older man—he’d been a tailor by trade—explained that deaths by beating and torture for any infraction were the order of the day. Late for roll call, answering back, talking out of turn—all these resulted in severe beatings. And anything considered more grave—an attack on a guard, theft—meant a quick death, usually in a special room where the prisoner was made to stand in a corner. Through a hole behind his head, an unseen executioner killed him with a single shot.
    “Does anyone ever get out?” Karl asked.
    “Heard stories of some rich guys buying their way out.
Goyim
mostly. Maybe even a few Jews. The SS runs this like a racket. They keep the valuables, the gold, divide it up. So it might even be the bastards take a bribe from some rich Jew and let him go.”
    The kapo—the prisoner-guard or trusty—came by and warned Weinberg to shut up. Weinberg made some excuse—he was just explaining the ropes to Karl. (This kapo’s name was Melnik, a big fellow, a pickpocket on the outside. The Nazis often took common criminals—Jew and Gentile—and put them in positions of authority. It helped terrify the other prisoners.)
    When Melnik was out of hearing, Weinberg took a box of cloth patches and started to explain them to Karl.
    “So you’ll know your fellow inmates,” he said. He began to hold up triangles of varying colors. “Red means a political prisoner. Anything from a Trotskyite to a monarchist. Green, a common criminal. Purple, Jehovah’s Witness. Black, what they call shiftless elements—beggars, tramps, so on. Pink is for homosexuals. Brown is for gypsies.”
    “Gypsies?”
    “Buchenwald’s full of them. They give the guards fits because they won’t work. The SS ordered two ofthem buried alive yesterday. When they dug them out their tongues were sticking out like salamis.”
    Weinberg then showed Karl the six-pointed yellow star.
    “I know what that is,” my brother said. “But what’s this?” He picked up a cloth patch with the four letters BLOD on it.
    “Idiots, morons, feeble-minded,” Weinberg explained.
    “But … what crime can they have committed?”
    “Considered useless by the state. You should see the way the guards have a field day with them—teasing, dressing them up. Some of the guards take the feebleminded women and do things …”
    “I can’t believe this.”
    “Can’t you? Listen. I’ve heard stories. There’s a house not far from here where they take the crazies. Halfwits, cretins, cripples. They gas them to death.”
    “Gas?”
    “Some guy on a truck detail swears it’s true.”
    The kapo came by and shut them up again, threatening Karl with his truncheon. The kapos wore dark caps and dark jackets, in contrast to the striped suits of the prisoners. Everyone hated them.
    Suddenly music was piped over the loudspeaker. Not recorded music, but real music, from the Buchenwald orchestra.
    Weinberg winked at Karl. “Half the Berlin Philharmonic is in here. The guards like good music. Germany