Free Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque Page A

saved. So they talked about him as about a stone. The years in the camp had taught them to think realistically.
    509 crouched in the shadow of the latrine. It was a good place; here no one paid any attention to him. For all the barracks together the Small camp had only one large communal latrine which was built on the boundary between the two camps and to which an endless procession of skeletons, continuously moaning, shuffled to and from the barracks. Practically everyone had diarrhea or worse and many lay around in a state of collapse, waiting until they had once more gathered sufficient strength to stumble on. From both sides of the latrine ran the barbed-wire fence separating the Small camp from the labor camp.
    509 crouched in such a way that he could watch the gate which had been cut into the barbed wire. It was there for the SS block leaders, the block seniors, the corpse carriers and the hearses.Berger was the only one in Barrack 22 allowed to use it when he went to the crematorium. To all others it was strictly forbidden. The Pole, Silber, had called it the croak-gate because the prisoners committed to the Small camp returned through it only as corpses. Any guard was allowed to fire at a skeleton trying to get into the labor camp. Almost no one tried it. Nor from the labor camp did anyone cross over except those on duty. The Small camp was not only under a moderate quarantine; it was also generally considered hopeless by the other prisoners and regarded merely as a kind of cemetery in which for a short while the dead still staggered about.
    Through the barbed wire 509 could see a part of the labor camp’s roads. They teemed with prisoners making the most of what was left of their free time. He watched them talking to one another, standing together in groups and wandering along the roads—and although it was just another section of the concentration camp, it seemed to him as though he were separated from them by an unbridgeable gulf and as though over there were something like a lost home in which life and comradeship still existed. Behind him he heard the soft shuffling of the prisoners staggering to the latrine and he didn’t need to glance around to see their dead eyes. They hardly spoke any more; at most they moaned or squabbled in weary voices; they didn’t think any longer; camp humor dubbed them Mussulmen because they were utterly resigned to their fate. They moved like automatons and no longer had any will of their own; save for a few physical functions everything in them was extinct. They were living corpses and died like flies in frost. The Small camp was full of them. They were broken and lost and nothing could save them—not even freedom.
    509 felt the coolness of the night deep in his bones. The murmuring and moaning behind him was like a gray flood in which one could drown. It was the temptation to surrender the self—the temptation against which the Veterans desperately fought. 509moved his shoulders involuntarily and turned his head so as to feel he was still alive and had a will of his own. Then he heard the final whistle in the labor camp. The barracks there had their own latrines and were locked up at night. The groups on the roads broke up. The men disappeared. In less than a minute everything over there was empty, and only the cheerless procession of the shadows in the Small camp remained—forgotten by the comrades on the other side of the barbed wire; written off, isolated—a remnant of lost trembling life in the territory of certain death.
    Lebenthal did not come through the gate. 509 saw him suddenly walk diagonally in front of him across the ground. He must have entered from somewhere behind the latrine. No one knew how he smuggled himself through; it wouldn’t have surprised 509 if he had used a foreman’s armband or even that of a kapo for the purpose.
    “Leo!”
    Lebenthal stood still. “What’s happening? Look out! The SS are still over there. Come away from here.”
    They went