Buchenwald lies on the crest of one of the elevations in a region of hills and dales. Its air is clear, the countryside varied, with woods all around and the red-tiled roofs of the village houses in the valleys down below delightful to the eye. The bathhouse is situated off to the left. The prisoners are mostly friendly, though somehow in a different way from in Auschwitz. On arrival, here too one is greeted by bathhouse, barbers, disinfectant, and a change of clothes. The stock of the clothes depot, as far as that goes, is exactly the same as at Auschwitz, though the bathhouse here is warmer, the barbers are more careful in carrying out their work, and the storeman at least tries, if only with a cursory glance, to assess your size. Afterward you find yourself in a corridor, in front of a glazed sliding window, and they ask whether you happen to have any gold teeth. Then a compatriot, a longer-term resident with hair, records your name in a big register and hands you a yellow triangle as well as a broad strip, both of linen. In the middle of the triangle, as a sign that you are, after all, a Hungarian, is a big letter “U,” while on the strip you can read a printed number—64921 in my own case, for example. It would be advisable, I was informed, to learn as soon as possible how this was to be pronounced in German, clearly, intelligibly, and in a distinctly articulated fashion, thus: “Vier-und-sechzig, neun, ein-und-zwanzig,” since from now on that was to be the answer I must always give when anyone asks me to identity myself. Here, though, they do not inscribe that number in your skin, and if you were to have been worried on that score and had inquired about it beforehand, in the bathhouse area, the old prisoner would raise his hands and, rolling his eyes to the ceiling in protest, say: “Aber Mensch, um Gotteswillen, wir sind doch hier nicht in Auschwitz!”[9] Nevertheless both number and triangle must be affixed to the breast of the jacket by this evening, specifically with the assistance of the tailors, the sole possessors of needle and thread; if you should get really bored with queuing until sundown, you will be able to put them more in the mood with a certain fraction of your bread or margarine ration, but even without that they will do it willingly enough as, in the end, they are obliged to, so it is said. The Buchenwald climate is cooler than that at Auschwitz, the color of the days gray, and rain often drizzles down. But at Buchenwald it can happen that they spring on you the surprise of a hot, thickened soup of some sort for breakfast; and furthermore I learned that the bread ration is normally one-third of a loaf, but on some days might even be one-half — not the usual one-quarter and on some days one-fifth as at Auschwitz, while the midday soup may contain solid scraps, and in these may be red shreds or even, if you are lucky, an entire chunk of meat; and it was here that I became acquainted with the notion of the “ Zulage,” an extra that you can requisition — the term used by the army officer, likewise present here and looking mightily pleased with himself on such occasions — in the form of wurst or a spoonful of jam along with the margarine. At Buchenwald we lived in tents, in the “ Zeltlager”—“Tent Camp,” or “Kleinlager ”—“Little Camp”—as it was also called, sleeping on hay strewn on the ground, not separately and somewhat tightly packed maybe, but at least horizontally, while here the barbed-wire fence at the back is not, as yet, electrified, though anyone who might step outside the tent at night would be ripped apart by Alsatian dogs, they warned, and if that warning might perhaps surprise you at first hearing, don’t doubt its seriousness. At the other barbed-wire fence, marking the start of the cobblestoned paths, neat green barracks and single-story, stone-built blocks of the main camp proper, sprawling all around farther up the hill, every evening offers good opportunities for bargains in the shape of spoons, knives, mess tins, and clothing from the local, indigenous prisoners who trade there at that hour; one of them offered me a pullover for the price of altogether half a bread ration, as he demonstrated, signaled, and explained, but in the end I didn’t buy it as I had no need of a pullover in summer, and after all, winter, I supposed, was still a long way off. I also saw then just how many variously colored triangles and different letterings they wore, to the point that I ended up not always being able to figure out where a person’s homeland might actually be. Even here, in my immediate surroundings, I picked out lots of dialect words from the speech of the Hungarians, and indeed more than a few times the strange language that I had first heard on the train at Auschwitz, from the odd-looking prisoners who had greeted us. At Buchenwald there was no Appell for the inmates of the Zeltlager , and the washroom was in the open air, or to be more precise beneath the shade of the trees: essentially much the same structure as the one at Auschwitz, except the trough was of stone and, most of all, water trickled, spurted, or at least oozed all day long through the holes in the pipe, and for the first time since I had entered the brickyard, I experienced the miracle of being able to drink when I was thirsty, or even merely when the fancy took me. At Buchenwald too there is a crematorium, naturally, but merely one, and even that is not the camp’s purpose, its essence, its soul, its sense, I make so bold as to declare, for the only people who are burned up here are those who die in the camp, under the ordinary circumstances of camp life so to say. At Buchenwald — so went the rumor that reached my ears, probably originating from old prisoners — it was most particularly advisable to steer clear of the stone quarry, although, it was added, that was now hardly in operation, unlike in their time, as they put it. The camp, I am instructed, has been functioning for seven years, though there are some here from even older camps, among which I heard the names of a certain “Dachau” as well as “Oranienburg” and “Sachsenhausen,” which is when I understood why at the sight of us there was a touch of indulgence in the smiles on the faces of some of the well-dressed Prominents on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, on whom I spotted numbers in the twenty and ten thousands, indeed four- and even three-digit numbers. Close to our camp, I learned, lies the culturally celebrated city of Weimar, the fame of which I had already learned about back home, naturally: here had lived and worked the man who wrote the poem beginning “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?”[10] that even I know by heart, while somewhere within the area of our camp, so they say, marked with a commemorative plaque and protected from us prisoners by a fence, is a now nobly spreading tree that he planted with his own hand. All things considered, it wasn’t at all difficult to understand those faces at Auschwitz: it is fair to say that I too soon came to like Buchenwald.