Clifford's Blues Read Online Free Page A

Nazis; they cling together. They must have broken some party rule. And there are some army officers, too. In all, there are ten companies of prisoners, each of about 250 men. Number 7 company is the real bad one, for prisoners who need disciplining. These men always look bumped and bruised, with dried blood on their faces. Werner says they are flogged and beaten. Lumped together in 7 are prisoners with all colors of triangles. The members of Number 1 company, the one Werner belongs to, also receive heavy punishment for being Communists, intellectuals, social democrats, teachers, people who made movies, writers, newspaper reporters, and so on. In the whole camp there are fourteen other foreigners besides me. Number 2 company has Jews in it. They are German, just like everyone else here except me and those fourteen other foreigners. Werner says that Hitler has it in for the Jews; that the Nazi party is against Jews and nearly everything and everyone else except “real” Germans and German tradition. Werner whispered to me that the number of prisoners killed in camp is not three or four, but closer to fifty. How can it not get worse? While this place is being enlarged, ten other camps have opened, Werner said: Brandenburg, Papenburg, Konigstein, Lichtenburg, Colditz, Sachsenburg, Moringen, Hohnstein, Reichenbach, and Sonnenburg. Germany has become a dreadful, murderous place, he said, mostly because of the Treaty of Versailles. I don’t know anything about that, but he told me the terms of the German surrender were so harsh that the only reaction to it had to be somewhere, sometime, revenge. That time is fast approaching, especially with someone like Hitler in charge, who cries for living space, says Germany must have it.
    Werner asked me if I was a Tappete . I told him yes because he must have already guessed. He said I was better off than those in the camp, but I already knew that. The thing to do, he said, is to outlast them, no matter how, no matter how long it took, and the prisoners had to work together, did I understand? I said I did, but I didn’t know what I could do. Information, he said, is power. Then he said, if each of the prisoners brought just one handful of dirt and dumped it in the Appellplatz (which everyone calls the Dancing Ground), we would have a small hill. That’s what information was, when it was all brought together and sorted out.
    Thursday, Aug. 24, 1933
    Dieter Lange and his wife, Anna, live in a medium-sized house along one of the main camp roads that leads into Dachau. Between the camp itself and this row of pink and white houses are the buildings where munitions used to be made. Like everything else, these are being renovated and enlarged. Today, I had to spend most of the time helping in the canteen. Then, as usual, I started back to the house, checked in at the guardhouse (Jourhaus) at the gate between the camp and the staff quarters, in full view of a tower where an SS guard mans a machine gun. The guards know me; there’s no problem. I can’t escape with my skin. I know it and they know it. My going and coming disturbs nothing. Yet I always feel like the gun is trained on the middle of my back. I wonder, too, if maybe one day a guard, just for the hell of it, will kill me and say it was an accident.
    I hadn’t seen Dieter Lange all day. Usually, when he’s going on a trip, he tells me. So I wondered where he was.
    I entered the house through the back door and went down to my room in the cellar. Dieter Lange called from upstairs. I hurried up. You do nothing at a normal pace unless you are out of sight of the SS . The stairs opened on a corner of the large room Anna had not yet furnished, though I had to keep the floor spotless. I came through the door and Dieter Lange swept up his arms. He had a great grin on his face. In the opposite corner stood a baby grand piano. It looked new. I’d never seen such a gorgeous instrument. I always played the box