Wayne, for the first time since he had been at Hollenberg, had been caught doing something that was against camp policy. He thought maybe he would be able to hastily make something up about why he had the cards and a stash of extra bread and cigarette rations on his person, though he knew that the punishment for being caught lying to an SS official could be just as severe as for being caught gambling. Before he was able to speak any words, Kammler silently exited the barracks, taking the cards and the rations that he found on Wayne with him.
Wayne was aware that he had some form of discipline coming his way the next day. He was not sure what the punishment de jour would be. Would he be whipped? Would he be forced to do a hundred knee bends while a guard, with his burly fists, administered kidney blows to him? Would he be locked inside a wooden box, barely large enough for an average-sized man to squeeze into in a squatting position, while nails were driven through it? Or would the punishment be any one of the other many various forms of torture that the SS had up their sleeves? Worst of all, Wayne shook with anticipation, would he be hanged as an example for the other inmates? He cursed the men who had left him alone in the washroom to be caught red-handed. He cursed Dr. Hoffmann and her time machine. He cursed the quarry. Wayne did not sleep a wink that night.
Morning roll call came and went as usual. Wayne spent his day working in the quarry. Nothing was said to him by any of the prisoners or guards about what had happened the previous evening. Wayne was beginning to feel optimistic that he would receive no punishment at all for his gambling offense. Maybe, Wayne had hoped, Kammler got plastered during the night and totally forgot about entering barrack 19 and finding cards and rations on him. The prisoner with the number 31740 inked on his forearm would not be so lucky.
Roll call officer Stepp, immediately upon the completion of the evening’s roll call, said “Prisoner number 31740, step forward.”
During roll call, the whipping rack had been wheeled in to the center of the roll call area by an SS guard, tenderly as if it was a delicate statue or a fine piece of art. To the SS, the whipping rack was considered as indispensable object whereas a prisoner could be replaced with much more ease than building a new instrument of terror.
Once he saw the whipping rack arrive, Wayne’s instinct told him that it was there solely for him. He knew that the SS would not bother to bring in the rack if they planned on instead using the gallows, which eased his fear that he would be hung.
Wayne had witnessed four hangings since he had been at Hollenburg. None of the offenses seemed to him to be anything that should warrant the death penalty. One man had been accused of sabotage when he accidentally broke a drilling machine in the tool plant he had been laboring in for the previous six years. During his second week as a prisoner, Wayne had viewed a hanging. After that, he’d become pretty numb. A man had been murdered right before his eyes. The sight of the hanging, though, did not vex him as much as the fact that he felt insensitive to the crime. As he had watched the bucket get kicked out from underneath the man’s bare, dirty feet, Wayne only thought about and cared about how soon it would be until he ate dinner. Later that night, after having witnessed his first hanging, as he lay awake in the dark of the barracks, Wayne questioned what was happening to him.
“Have I become so cold and unfeeling that the sight of an innocent man being strung up in front of me annoys me because of the fact that it delays my dinner?” he asked himself. Wayne came to the conclusion that if he had not become emotionally detached from such occurrences in camp, he would surely lose his mind.
Wayne, upon hearing his number called out, swallowed hard. As he nervously walked to the head of the roll call area, he felt the gaze of all of the other inmates on him. His turn to feel the whip had finally come.
“Number 31740,” Roll call officer Stepp announced, “you are hereby charged with gambling in camp. The punishment for a first gambling offense is twenty-five lashes.”
Two SS guards secured Wayne to the whipping rack, pulling the leather straps that held his body in place as tight as they could. Wayne could do nothing but endure the punishment that would soon be inflicted up on him.
Stepp signaled the always-present camp band to start playing their well-rehearsed upbeat marching tunes as SS Captain Himmelmann looked on. Block leader Kammler, possessing a whip in his hand and a gleam in his eye, commenced the lashing.
The whip striking against his naked back hurt as much as the first time he had been whipped, back at Gestapo headquarters. Each new snap of the whip hurt ten times more than the prior lash. Men like Kammler were experts in brutality. They were men no longer capable of human stirrings but rather fanatics blindly marching behind their Führer’s flag while all around them their victims fell by the tens of thousands. Wayne, strangely, no longer feared death. He almost welcomed it. He thought, as he was being lashed in front of the whole camp, why not sleep the eternal, peaceful sleep instead of dealing with the misery that his life had become? Deep down in his psyche, however, Wayne was conscious of the reasons why he had to continue living. As the whip made contact with his body on the eighteenth lash of his punishment, the world appeared to start spinning as Wayne’s eyesight blurred. He soon passed out.
Roll call officer Stepp, who was one of the few SS men who would crack a rare genuine smile at least once a week, picked up a handy bucket of cold water and poured its contents on the passed out prisoner. Wayne remained unconscious. Stepp removed a wad of smelling salt from his pouch and waved it underneath Wayne’s nostrils. That was sufficient enough to revive him.
Kammler put his face up to Wayne’s face and, breathing heavily, demanded to know, “Who were you gambling with?” He received no response. Kammler slapped Wayne strong across the left cheek, leaving his large hand imprint behind. “ANSWER ME.”
Wayne got out a meek, “Nobody.” The last thing Wayne wanted to be known as was a camp rat. He knew that the punishment that was being administered to him would end shortly, or so he had hoped, but he also knew that if he had squealed on his bunkmates, they could and probably would make his life a living hell for him.
“You lying son-of-a-bitch,” Kammler angrily said and, breathing heavier than before, almost, Wayne observed, like an asthmatic, continued whipping Wayne with an unbridled passion.
It was a moonless, pitch-black night as Wayne laid awake on his bunk in agony. He had gotten into the habit of clutching his thin pillow against his torso and pretending that it was Lauren’s warm arm with her soft body next to his as he struggled to fall asleep each night. It served as a wholly inadequate substitute, but it did help him drift off. On numerous occasions, as he had awoken, in a temporary daze, to the blare of the reveille horns at the crack of dawn, Wayne would open his eyelids, and, for a split second, forgetting where he had been residing at, would expect to see Lauren asleep in his arms. On that dark night, though, Wayne was hurting too much to grasp his small pillow. Wayne heard somebody slither up to his bunk. He had a good feeling of who it would be.
“You all right, Wayne?” Samuel whispered.
Wayne was in no mood to talk to anyone, least of all one of the men whom had left him holding the bag during the card game. He answered Samuel anyway, hoping to quickly get rid of him. “I’ll let you know when my head stops throbbing and the pain goes away,” Wayne said in a soft tone.
“I felt the same way after my first lashing,” Samuel said. “And my second. And my third, come to think of it. And my fourth, and—”
“I get the idea.”
“Hey, me and the boys really appreciate you not telling on us to Kammler. You’re an okay guy.”