The short medical examination by the doctor consisted of him looking down Wayne’s throat with a flashlight and asking Wayne general questions about his health.
“Do you have any current ailments that would cause you to not be able to perform your work?” the ancient doctor asked.
“No,” Wayne said.
“Have you had surgery or medical problems in the past?”
Wayne had a bad back, the result of doing too many dead lifts in the gym his senior year in high school. A disc had herniated and caused Wayne to be inactive and in pain for months. He remembered, though, what the prisoner orderly said to him. Wayne had no reason to trust that stranger, but something in the man’s eyes told Wayne that he knew that he should.
Wayne heeded the orderly’s advice and answered the doctor’s question, “No.”
The last stop in the whole sickening procedure of the prisoner orientation was the orderly room. The same questions that were originally asked of Wayne when he first entered Hollenburg were again asked of him, only that second time by prisoner orderlies instead of SS men. Wayne’s answers to the questions asked of him were recorded on an official camp file index card. Wayne had a hunch that the other prisoners and himself being subjected to a second round of questioning was a way of the SS checking out their honesty by seeing if there were any discrepancies between the two different sets of answers given by each individual prisoner.
Wayne was handed a ration of cigarettes (10) and a ration of bread (6 slices). He was then assigned to his barracks.
The barracks each had two wings. A wing contained a day room and sleeping quarters for 200 prisoners. A communal washroom, with six pit toilets and four sinks, separated the two wings of the barracks. No barracks had showers. They were located in the bathhouse.
Barracks 19 was Wayne’s new home. On the inside it was a gloomy place. The wooden floor was cold and full of splinters. There were no windows, just small ventilation portholes. Old rusted, metal bunk beds were tightly packed in together. Matted straw was what passed for the bed mattresses. An awful stench, which smelled like a combination of rotted wood and urine, permeated the air. Wayne was assigned the top part of a bunk by the Barracks orderly.
A prisoner approached Wayne. “You got an extra smoke?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Wayne said and handed him a cigarette.
The prisoner placed the cigarette in his mouth, lit it up, and took a deep drag. He asked, “Could I bum another one off you?”
“Here, I don’t smoke anyway,” Wayne said and gave him another cigarette.
The prisoner, without thanking Wayne, walked away.
Samuel, a prisoner of about the same age as Wayne, who had been a resident of Barracks 19 since he was a teenager, strutted over to Wayne from where he had been standing. “Why the hell did you do that?” he asked with agitation.
“Do what?” Wayne questioned.
“Give away your cigarettes!”
“I don’t need them. I don’t smoke.”
“You greens never stop amazing me,” Samuel said. “Where are your possessions? Let me see them.”
“What possessions?”
“Exactly. You ain’t got nothing now. Nothing worth shit. Except later today or one day next week or sometime next year, if you live that long, you’re going to want an extra ration of bread or a pair of socks that ain’t full of holes or some other item in limited supply and you’ll be asked what you got in return for that item and, mister nonsmoker, if you wise up, you might just have something worthwhile to somebody else.” Samuel pointed to the remaining cigarettes in Wayne’s shirt pocket. “Got it?”
Wayne realized that what Samuel had said made sense. “Got it.”
“Good,” Samuel said. “Now, give me a cigarette.”
“Is this some kind of test?” Wayne wanted to know.
“This ain’t no test. I gave you advice that’s worth something and I want a smoke.”
Wayne handed a cigarette to Samuel, who promptly struck a match and lit it up.
“Samuel,” he said and put his hand out.
Wayne shook Samuel’s hand and introduced himself, “Wayne.”
Samuel inhaled on his smoke and said, “We have a saying around here, Wayne. The first fifteen years are the hardest, then a man gets used to it.” Without another word, he walked off.
Wayne spent the rest of that day sitting on his bunk. Many of the prisoners, having come from the same ghetto, knew each other. A few of the new prisoners introduced themselves to Wayne. Some of the prisoners amused themselves by playing cards or shooting dice. The “old timers”, men like Samuel who had been prisoners for years, had been able to finagle such small amusements, like playing cards and dice, into the barracks. Wayne got the impression that most of the new arrivals did not seem fazed by their new surroundings. They appeared to have calmly accepted being interned.
Wayne overheard one new prisoner, “At least I won’t starve here”. Wayne could only imagine the conditions of the places from where these men had come.
A senior block inmate was assigned one per barracks and was responsible for the men living in his barracks. Each senior block inmate was chosen by the prisoner block leader, the man, who himself a prisoner, responsible for all of the barracks and the men who resided in them as a whole.
The senior block inmate of Barracks 19, a man simply called Shorty, informed the new arrivals at ten o’clock that it was time for lights out. A full day of work was ahead.
The main compound of Hollenburg became quiet and still under the darkness of evening, except for the occasional rustle of an SS guard patrolling the grounds. Wayne lay uncomfortably on his straw mattress and could not sleep at all that first night in the camp. He cried and felt homesick. In his mind, all he could think about was getting out of that place and getting a hold of those Gadolinium Crystals. He knew it would be suicide to try and escape, though he was tempted to take the chance. From that day on, the only thing Wayne had in his life worth living for was hope. Hope that he would get out of there somehow and be able to do what he would have to in order to right the wrongs of his actions. Hope that he would return the world back to normal. Hope that he would see his parents again. Hope that he would see his love, Lauren, again. Wayne ate a slice of his stale bread ration, and was finally able to dose off into a light sleep for an hour before the earsplitting sounds of the reveille sirens rang out form the camp loudspeakers.
CHAPTER FIVE
The prisoners, immediately upon waking, had to assemble in the roll call area. Thousands of men dressed in zebra-striped outfits lined up in columns, arranged according by barrack number. The men were required to remove their caps from their heads and stand totally still during roll call, which lasted a minimum of an hour every morning, regardless of how bad weather conditions were. SS men kept a watch on the prisoners during roll call, always searching for the slightest excuse to dish out one of their various forms of punishment to a prisoner. A prisoner might be accused of moving during roll call, which was hard not to do, or not keeping his eyes looking straight ahead at the gallows.
Roll call officer Stepp, an SS man, yelled out the prisoner’s identification numbers. As each prisoner answered, their number was marked off on the roll call sheet that Stepp had with him. “31740,” Stepp yelled out.
“Present,” Wayne sharply replied.
Wayne, like most of the newcomers, was appointed to the toughest, least desirable job at Hollenburg — the quarry. Wayne was assigned by the SS Labor Service Officer to work excavating and pounding away at the rocky ground with primitive tools under the watchful eyes of SS guards. The work was back-breaking and Wayne didn’t understand the point of his job. The prisoners new to the quarry quickly became sweated and exhausted, but they were aware that they had better work as diligently as possible. If a prisoner was caught not working up to what the SS guards thought was full potential, the penalties were severe.