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CHAPTER IV

THE DAY OF REST

SUNDAY was of all days the most dismal. The work squads, which during the week labored outside the camp, were kept inside where there was no room for them. The officers drove off in their newly acquired motor cars. Some of the guards were on leave till early Monday morning. Sunday belonged to Schinderknecht.

He began the day at five-thirty in the morning with the command, "Morning prayers!" The morning prayers consisted of making the beds. Schinderknecht did not acknowledge the existence of such a thing as merely "making" a bed in our camp. Elsewhere beds might be "made;" in our camp they had to be "constructed" in such a way that blanket, straw pallet, and bed were one monolithic unit. We had to fold the blankets so that the sixteen gray stripes lay on top; but the main thing was how they lay. The blanket had to be perfectly level, one smooth plane from head to foot. This was a painfully laborious task, especially since the bunks were narrow and the pallets unevenly worn out through months of use. The beds formed one solid oblong across the room with only planks dividing bunk from bunk, one plank being the border between two bunks. It was impossible to "construct" your bed from the side without crawling over your neighbor's. We therefore had to crawl up on our hands and knees and start the "construction" from the head, working down inch by inch toward the foot with infinite care and patience until, in the passage, we were able to put the finishing touches to the whole thing.

Schinderknecht marched through our quarters, looking sharply about him with a trained eye, and examined test cases. Armed with a yardstick from the tailoring shop, he measured doubtful cases. Wherever a gray stripe failed to show in its proper place, wherever the surface of the blanket was not perfectly smooth, he lifted his heavy boot and kicked apart the painstaking toil of an hour. It was only after he had finished his inspection of our sleeping quarters that we got our usual morning brew called "coffee" and the chunk of bread. But we were rarely allowed to breakfast in peace. His military whistle shrilled its summons.

"Boot inspection!"

Polish was never issued to us. We could scrub our boots with paper; we could wash them with water; for all Schinderknecht cared we could lick them-all he was interested in was that we should appear with clean boots. We had to line up in the courtyard with boots in hand while Schinderknecht passed us in review. It was not enough for the boots to be clean; they had to be presented for inspection in strict accordance with Prussian military regulations, one in each hand, the sole up, and turned in a perfect semicircle the moment Schinderknecht looked at them. "Ever been in the army?" he would growl if a prisoner deviated from the prescribed ritual. "No? That's what I thought. Well, never mind. I'll teach you yet. We've got plenty of time for that."

After boot inspection he hustled us back to the dining room. No matter where you were you were not allowed to walk when Schinderknecht was on duty. You had to trot.

The dining room was far too small to hold all of us. There were seats for two hundred. The rest--five hundred and more--stood leaning against the walls and tables, some of them trying to patch up the rags they wore, others sunk in brooding silence.

In fifteen minutes or so the second command would ring out.

"Spoon inspection!"

Once more we lined up in the courtyard, tin spoons in our hands; once more Schinderknecht marched past us showing us how a German soldier is supposed to clean and present his spoon. This would be followed by bowl inspection. After bowl inspection we had to clean the sleeping quarters of the SS guard, the guard house, the courtyard, and the street in front of camp; we had to peel potatoes and empty the latrines. In this way our Sunday mornings were whiled away. Schinderknecht's experience as a jailer had taught him that nothing is so beneficial for the correction of delinquents as uninterrupted activity. His favorite proverb was: "Idleness is the mother of all vice." And if he was in a good mood he would add, "Up with the cock, boys, long live the Fatherland! "

After lunch he took a nap. It was the only peaceful hour of the day. We crowded as near as possible to that side of the yard which was close to the wooden fence. Through some of its cracks and holes we could look out on the street and watch the passers-by.

Despite the fact that for months visitors and letters were strictly forbidden, the prisoners' wives knew what went on in the camp. Often, when we were marching through the streets from our day's work back to the camp, a whisper ran through our ranks: "The Priegnitz girls are here."

With expressionless faces, pushing their bicycles before them, the workingwomen of the Priegnitz region would move toward our squad with their eyes glued to the faces of their husbands and fathers. A few steps and our squad was past them. For these brief glances they had traveled for hours in the bitter cold.

From several near-by dwellings it was possible to look into the camp yard. An elderly couple of Social-Democrats which lived in one of these was not afraid to let unknown women into their home and give them field glasses with which they could scan the courtyard for their relatives.

But the best sources of information were the SS guards when they got drunk in the saloons of Hubertshof and boasted of how they were "coordinating" Jews and Marxists in the camp. The next day these stories passed from mouth to mouth in the town.

The prisoners' wives and daughters knew about the usual course of our Sundays; they knew the regular hour when Schinderknecht took his afternoon nap. It was for this hour that they waited in the vicinity of the camp. From one o'clock on a procession of women passed by the wooden fence--not too close, so as not to be driven away by the guards; and not too fast, in order not to miss that moment for which they had come from their towns, villages, and farms. They could not halt for a minute. "Keep moving, keep moving," the guards ordered without interruption. The women obeyed; but at the street corner they turned around and came back, slowly, as slowly as possible; perhaps they would be lucky enough this time to catch a glimpse of the beloved face behind the barbed wire. They were not afraid of the power-drunk boys with the cocked machine rifles. They did not wear swastikas to put the guards in a friendly mood; they addressed no word to them; they honored them with no request.

In one place the prisoners had pushed aside a loose board in the fence. Every one of us would have liked to station himself near the opening, but we were hundreds. the only thing we could do was to walk round and round the yard so that each of us passed the opening at least once. Slowly the two lines moved on both sides of the fence. Face after face appeared for a moment and disappeared again behind the wooden fence.

At two o'clock Schinderknecht showed up again, dissatisfied with himself and the world. He reproached himself for the un-Prussian weakness of sleeping in bright midday. He appeased his conscience only by four hours of military drill. At six o'clock in the evening, when at his command seven hundred men, like puppets on a string, threw themselves face down in the mud, a warm note crept into his voice again.

"That's better. Once more. Up! Down! Up! Down!"

As we stood out in the cold one Sunday morning, waiting for Schinderknecht to finish insppecting seven hundred pairs of boots, one of the gate sentries appeared with a black-clad gentleman who wished to speak to the officer on duty. Schinderknecht accompanied him to the Administration Building. On his return he questioned us as to our church affiliations. A considerable number of the prisoners were Protestants, a smaller percentage Catholics and Jews; the majority were freethinkers, subscribing to no creed, m en who had withdrawn from the church.

Schinderknecht informed us that hereafter the Catholic priest would deliver and address, to be followed by a brief service, every Sunday morning.

"Who wants to attend?"

There was no response.

Schinderknecht repeated the question. Still no one stepped out. This seemed to dispose of the problem of saving the soul of Hubertshof once and for all. The Catholic shepherd waited in vain the following Sunday for his sheep. He refused to be discouraged, however, and obtained permission from the administration to address the Catholics. He took as his text: "I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repententh, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." He spoke effectively. The prisoners interpreted his choice of text as a thrust at the German Christians, ¹ which delighted them. When the priest promised to take care of their families, thirteen men declared themselves ready to attend the Sunday services regularly.

The Black Shirts were none too pleased with this victory of the Catholic Church. They sent for Kohler, a young evangelical pastor of Hubertshof and a member of the Nazi party, who tried his lick the following Sunday. He delivered a spirited sermon on the retyrn of the German people to the truth faith under their leader, Adolf Hitler. We prisoners, too, he said, were fellow countrymen, led astray by Jewish and Marxian agitators. Now that the whole world was uniting once more against the peace-loving German fold, no one had the right to continue to stand aloof.

Despite the all-powerful brown uniform of God's representative on earth, not one prisoner stirred when Kohler called upon those who wished to seek refuge in the church to step forward. Even when he repeated his invitation in the form of a thinly veiled threat the prisoners remained motionless. The uniformed parson took his departure, leaving it to Schinderknecht to urge upon us the new-German forms of Christian love.

The Nazi minister's fiasco was the talk of the camp. The Black Shirts found it impossible to swallow the insult. As the week wore on, spies began circulating the report that tobacco would be distributed at the conclusion of the evangelical service the following Sunday. A few of the curious who decided to put in an appearance did indeed return with little paper bags of coarse tobacco. This brought results. Two hundred believers--Protestants, Catholics and freethinkers, all anxious to hear the word of God--attended the next Sunday's service. Unequal to this sudden wave of religious fervor, the German Christ was forced to substitute apples and nuts-hastily sent for from home-for tobacco, one nut or half an apple per prisoner. Hoots and jeers met the returning "churchgoers" and for a week thereafter they were made the butts of all sorts of practical jokes. The following Sunday saw a small group of twenty standing outside the First Aid Station-which for some reason the Nazis considered a fit spot for religious instruction.

There followed a stubborn battle between the Catholic and the Protestant pastors for the souls of the prisoners. As an individual the Reverend Herr Zimmerman was as far superior to Brown Shirt Kohler as Bruening to Roehm. But Kohler was in a position to compensate for his lack of intelligence by the authority of the camp administration, of the Black Shirts, and of Reichsbischof Muller. It did not take the Catholic Church long, however, to realize how conducive tobacco was to the growth of religious sentiment, and the holy mother succeeded in overcoming her political handicap by distributing a superior mixture, from which cigarettes could be rolled.

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