For Wayne, the day meant the endless work of the quarry. As he pounded away at the rock, he thought about what had been said to him about working with his eyes more than his hands. He realized what that older prisoner had implied. There were too many workers in the quarry for the guards to keep an eye on all of the time. Wayne noticed that only when one of the SS slave drivers or detail leaders put in an appearance, did most prisoners start hauling ass in their work. Otherwise, they pretended to work while keeping a look out of the corner of their eyes. Wayne began the practice of doing that and greatly reduced his workload, and his exhaustion, during the day.
Since the prisoners weren’t fed breakfast, by the time lunch came, most of the men were feeling the pangs of hunger. Wayne, who had always been in the habit of eating a large breakfast, was especially hungry by mid-morning.
The prisoners received their fifteen-minute lunch break each day. Lunch was always the standard “meal” of bread and thin tasteless soup of one type or another. To Wayne, the soup sometimes tasted like chicken soup, sometimes like potato soup, often like a vegetable soup, and once in a while like fish chowder, but it was impossible to tell exactly just what was in it. Wayne was not sure he wanted to know, either.
There never was enough lunch to go around for everybody. The SS made sure of that. It was one example of the little sadistic practices implemented in the camp on a daily basis. Instead of complaining or fighting with one another about who would eat lunch on that day, or who more deserved to eat, the prisoners whom received their meal allowances would share what scanty amount of food they had with the men who had received nothing. Every prisoner, at one time, would be shorted a meal ration. Some of the prisoners, the handful who had refused to share their meal rations at all with those men who had received nothing on a given day, were treated in the same manner by the other prisoners when they became the ones without lunch rations. Wayne was thrown a few bite size pieces of bread by some of the other men on a day when the lunch rations ran out before he was lucky enough to get one.
After lunch, it was back to work for the prisoners until six o’clock. The prisoners would then march back in organized columns for evening roll call to the roll call area, where, as the men arrived, the camp band would again play merry tunes.
Roll call officer Stepp would proceed to call off the prisoner’s numbers. Wayne and the other inmates would have to often stand for hours on end, regardless of rain or ice cold weather, until it could be established that no one had escaped during the day.
After roll call, it was almost always punishment time for some unlucky inmate who had an SS detail leader or an SS sergeant determine that the inmate did not give his full effort in his day’s duties, or for an inmate who was noticed by an SS sergeant not following a proper procedure. The unfortunate man would be secured to a whipping rack and then be given the standard twenty lashes to his back. All of the prisoners would be forced to watch and listen to the loud crack of the leather whip as it snapped against their fellow prisoner’s back. Captain Himmelmann was always present for those lashings and would sometimes take great pleasure in dealing them out himself. The only time Wayne ever saw the camp commandant with a smirk on his ordinarily stolid face was when he was cracking the whip at an inmate. Wayne knew the pain of receiving such a lashing and felt pity every time that he witnessed another man being treated with so much brutality. With the lashings occurring at the end of almost every evening roll call, Wayne figured that sooner or later his turn would come up.
The prisoners would then file into the mess hall and line up to have dinner dished out to them by the prisoners whom worked in the kitchen. Kitchen detail was a much sought after job, since it was known among the inmates that the men whom toiled in the mess hall operation ate better than the men working on other non-food related details. The night meal commonly consisted of a piece of white bread, a dab of margarine, a bit of sausage, a cup of soup (the same kind that had been served as lunch that day) and a spoonful of cottage cheese. Once in a while, Viking salad of ground fish bones and potatoes would be served. Wayne never ate enough to satisfy his hunger.
At night, the prisoners would have a small amount of free time before the lights went out at ten. Many of the men would talk amongst themselves, play cards, take a short stroll in front of the barracks, or simply enjoy a smoke. Some of the men, fatigued, would immediately fall asleep upon returning to the barracks. The camp band, made up entirely of prisoners, could often be heard throughout the camp blowing out their upbeat tunes on their brass instruments as they rehearsed. The band sometimes played at official SS functions and was always being ordered to learn new tunes. Reading material, such as the German daily newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, would be available to the inmates, though it often ended up being used as toilet paper.
At Hollenburg, incredibly enough, there was a brothel. The SS wanted to discourage any homosexual activity from taking place in camp and decided that the satisfaction of the sexual libido was a basic need for men, even slave laborers. The ladies whom worked in the brothel were inmates from Hollenburg’s female prison camp population. Wayne never did find out how one gained admission to the brothel, but he did know that there was a waiting list and that the SS men were frequent visitors.
At ten o’clock, it was lights out for the prisoners. With the new morning, there would come another backbreaking day of labor for the men.
For seven weeks, Wayne and lived the daily schedule as a concentration camp slave laborer. With each passing day, he felt less and less that he would ever get an opportunity to leave the hell that his life had become and felt more and more depressed about his situation. He kept to himself, making little more than small talk with the other incarcerated men. Wayne would trade his cigarette rations with other men in his barracks for food, making out with a small amount of additional bread.
Wayne had not spoken to Samuel since the day he had arrived at Hollenburg. Samuel appeared to Wayne to be the authority on every facet of life in camp. It seemed that whenever a prisoner had a question relating to some aspect of camp life that nobody else could reply to, they would ask Samuel and he would have the answer. Due to the length of time he had been at Hollenburg and the fact that he was an outgoing guy, Samuel knew all of the prisoners by first name and he took pride in that. One evening, shortly after the inmates had arrived back at the barracks at the end of a long day of work, Wayne bumped into Samuel.
Samuel said, “Don’t tell me. You were…”
“Wayne.”
“I said don’t tell me. I would have gotten it,” Samuel said disappointed that Wayne did not give him a chance to show that he indeed remembered Wayne’s name. “That’s right, Wayne, the nonsmoker.”
“And you’re Samuel.”
“Samuel to some,” he said and then pointed to his marked forearm, “One eight seven two four to others.” He asked, “Where you from, Wayne?”
“New York.”
“Shhh. Don’t let the SS hear you call it that. Is the ghetto back there as bad as they say it is?”
“Which ghetto is that?” Wayne said, not knowing what Samuel was talking about.