Free Pursuit by Robert L. Fish Page A

the camp was a disgrace. For one thing, for a camp dedicated to furnishing labor and not to extermination, the pair of ovens in the crematory behind the high wall in the southeast corner of the prisoners’ area seldom lacked customers—while at the same time half the machines at the Gustloff and German Works were idle for lack of proper personnel. Still, he could hardly be surprised; an organization run by a bureaucracy that would criminally misuse boxcars would certainly not be intelligent enough to properly use labor.
    The camp also lacked order, lacked that discipline the colonel’s engineering soul demanded. Prisoners would rip out electric wires when the night food containers arrived, and in the darkness fight savagely and even kill to get an extra ration of food, while the Kapos and barracks orderlies would mill about helplessly, unable to control their charges. And inmates too weak or too crowded in their tiered bunks to climb down and make their way to the latrines would relieve themselves into their mess gear instead, or climb to the barrack roof, removing planks and tar paper, and then defecate onto the roof itself, or foul the beams and often the prisoners below.
    But it was not the fighting for a scrap of food, or the filth in which the men lived, or the pile of corpses that were deposited daily outside the barracks and had to be removed that bothered the colonel. These were, after all, animals, and nothing more could be expected of them. What bothered von Schraeder was the waste. Even the small amount of food the inmates received, even the small amount of space they occupied, should have been repaid by having some useful labor extracted from them. If Colonel von Schraeder had been running the camp, the prisoners would have been separated into two groups: those able to work and those unable to work. The first group would have been given sufficient rations to sustain them, enough room on the tiers to get proper rest, and they would have the duty to keep the Gustloff and the German Armament Works functioning. If they did not, they would instantly join the second group and go to the gas chambers, which would have been the first thing constructed.
    He would sit in his office in the command barrack with little to do, leaning back and consuming cigarette after cigarette, constantly analyzing his alternate plan, should Valkyrie fail. It was at these moments that the barren camp, its stench and drabness, its filthy prisoners, and its constant outpouring of skeletal bodies for the furnaces would disappear, and in its place would come a vision of his plan. And with it would come a gentle chiding of himself for worrying about the operation of the camp. What importance could one give, at this moment in time, to the armaments Gustloff produced or did not produce, or the food the prisoners ate or killed to eat or did not eat at all, or where they chose to shit or upon whom? All this minutiae were of no concern to him; his concern was the survival of Helmut von Schraeder and nothing else.
    At such moments he was thankful that his mother was dead and there was nobody alive to concern him. The aunt who had raised him in Hamburg after his mother’s death had gone up in the fire storm that swept the city after the Allied bombings; he had been fortunate in never having any woman make a claim on him for anything beyond the moment’s pleasure. As for his father—he had never been sure about his feelings toward his father. As a child he had wept uncontrollably when he learned of his father’s death; the heavy man with the rough tweed clothing who smelled of tobacco and brandy and shaving lotion who would toss him in the air and catch him, and kiss him, nuzzling his thick beard against his face. And when he was older, old enough to understand, and had learned that his father’s death was a suicide, he could not recall his first reaction. He knew he felt it wrong for a general in the Kaiser’s army to