SIX
Only in Zeitz did I come to realize that even captivity has its mundane round; indeed, true captivity is actually nothing but a gray mundane round. It was as if I had been in a roughly comparable situation already, that time in the train on the way to Auschwitz; there too everything had hinged on time, and then on each person’s individual capabilities. Except in Zeitz, to stay with my simile, the feeling I had was that the train had come to a standstill. From another angle, though — and this is also true — it rushed along at such speed that I was unable to keep up with all the changes in front of and around me, or even within myself. One thing I can say at least: for my own part, I traveled the entire route, scrupulously exploring every chance that might present itself on the way.
At all events, in any place, even a concentration camp, one gets stuck into a new thing with good intentions, at least that was my experience; for the time being, it was sufficient to become a good prisoner, the rest was in the hands of the future — that, by and large, was how I grasped it, what I based my conduct on, and incidentally was pretty much the same as I saw others were doing in general. I soon noticed, it goes without saying, that those favorable opinions I had heard when still at Auschwitz about the institution of the Arbeitslager must certainly have been founded on somewhat exaggerated reports. As to the entire extent of that exaggeration, and above all the inferences that stemmed from it, however, I did not — nor, in the end, could I — immediately take fully accurate account of this myself, and that was again pretty much what I perceived to be the case with others, indeed I dare say with everyone else, all of the approximately two thousand other prisoners in our camp — the suicides excepted, naturally. But then those cases were uncommon, in no way the rule nor in any way exemplary, everyone recognized. I too got wind of the occasional occurrence of that kind, hearing people arguing and exchanging views about it, some with undisguised disapproval, others more sympathetically, acquaintances with sorrow, but on the whole always in the way of someone striving to form a judgment of a deed that was exceedingly rare, remote to our experience, in some ways hard to explain, maybe slightly frivolous, maybe even slightly honorable, but in any case premature.
The main thing was not to neglect oneself; somehow there would always be a way, for it had never yet happened that there wasn’t a way somehow, as Bandi Citrom instilled in me, and he in turn had been instructed in this wisdom by the labor camp. The first and most important thing under all circumstances was to wash oneself (before the parallel rows of troughs with the perforated iron piping, in the open air, on the side of the camp over toward the highway). Equally essential was a frugal apportioning of the rations, whether or not there were any. Whatever rigor this disciplining might cost you, a portion of the bread ration had to be left for the next morning’s coffee, some of it indeed — by maintaining an undeflectable guard against the inclination of your every thought, and above all your itching fingers, to stray toward your pocket — for the lunch break: that way, and only that way, could you avoid, for instance, the tormenting thought that you had nothing to eat. That the item in your wardrobe I had hitherto regarded as a handkerchief was a foot cloth; that the only secure place to be at roll call and in a marching column was always the middle of a row; that even when soup was being dished out one would do better to aim, not for the front, but for the back of the queue, where you could predict they would be serving from the bottom of the vat, and therefore from the thicker sediment; that one side of the handle of your spoon could be hammered out into a tool that might also serve as a knife — all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate.
I would never have believed it, yet it is a positive fact that nowhere is a certain discipline, a certain exemplariness, I might even say virtue, in one’s conduct of life as obviously important as it is in captivity. It suffices merely to take a little look around the area of Block 1, where the camp’s native inmates live. The yellow triangles on their chests tell you all you really need to know, while the letter “L” in them discloses the incidental circumstance that they have come from distant Latvia, more specifically from the city of Riga, I was informed. Among them one can see those peculiar beings who at first were a little disconcerting. Viewed from a certain distance, they are senilely doddering old codgers, and with their heads retracted into their necks, their noses sticking out from their faces, the filthy prison duds that they wear hanging loosely from their shoulders, even on the hottest summer’s day they put one in mind of winter crows with a perpetual chill. As if with each and every single stiff, halting step they take one were to ask: is such an effort really worth the trouble? These mobile question marks, for I could characterize not only their outward appearance but perhaps even almost their very exiguousness in no other way, are known in the concentration camps as “Musulmänner ” or “Muslims,” I was told. Bandi Citrom promptly warned me away from them: “You lose any will to live just looking at them,” he reckoned, and there was some truth in that, though as time passed I also came to realize it takes much more than just that.