He had been on holiday in Rome during the blood purge. Much to his surprise he had returned to find himself under arrest. He remained in a state of shocked dismay, yet more than fortunate to be alive. If he had been at the Hotel Deesen, Bad Godesberg, on the night Röhm and his colleagues were there, he would certainly have died. He understood I would not betray him if he was careful not to accuse me of being Jewish. To Seryozha’s good fortune, he had been designated a political, with a red triangle, and not a homosexual with a pink.
Sergei Andreyovitch Tsipliakov had been running to fat the last I had seen him. After so many months, first as a prisoner in Stadelheim, and later in another section of Dachau, he had lost weight but was still bulky and unhealthy when he arrived at our hut. Hoch, our hut commander, had rather let us down. He had abused his privileges. During an attempt to escape, he had been shot. His replacement was Seryozha, already popular with the Dachau authorities as a good, strict leader.
Seryozha’s old, confiding manner had disappeared. To the other inmates he presented only a scowling swagger. Gone were his exaggerated, effeminate mannerisms. In the whole of the camp, only I ever knew he had been a ballet dancer. If he thought I was Jewish, he kept the idea to himself. Indeed, he confirmed to the others that I was of Spanish extraction. He understood I had some relationship with Schnauben and could always betray him. He was wary of my violet armband. Needless to say I cultivated him as a friend, though it was not always within my power or inclination, especially when he went on one of his rampages or ‘pogromettes’, as he described them with a new tone of camp whimsicality.
That so many of these inmates had brought their suffering on themselves hardly excused Seryozha’s brutality towards them. He had to demonstrate his skills to our masters. I suppose I sympathised, but some of his actions sickened me.
Even in Stadelheim during my first incarceration, I had witnessed some moving scenes. Certain Jews had been picked on by SA. I had heard them weeping and begging not to be beaten as they were dragged out of their cells. Even the most anti-Jewish inmates among us had been shocked by what was done to them. Some guards and trustees were positively sadistic. A good few of the arrested Jews, who had committed no crime, had died as a result of their privations. In Dachau, however, things were a little different.
To show his zealotry and his keenness, and in the hope of early release, Seryozha made it his daily habit to pick on Jews. For the entertainment of our masters he would force them out of their hut, where they lived in worse conditions than we did, and assemble them there or in the Appellplatz. These were usually the Jews who were schanung, or off work for some reason. Though I had known him for many years, I would never have guessed this side to his character. He clearly derived real pleasure from hurting the Strajkompanie.
On the parade ground Seryozha would sometimes be allowed to use the Pfahl, a pole on which a man with his hands tied behind his back could be suspended and sometimes whipped. But usually he made them stand before him in the wide Lagerstrasse. There he would kick and beat any ‘son of Shem’ who so much as raised his eyes to him. He would attack them with his whip or anything else he had to hand. He would revile them, torment them, make them beg for mercy even as he opened his flies and pissed on them. He was a great source of entertainment to the SS guards, who cheered him on. They were almost in awe of him in the early days, before such brutality became the norm. Scarcely anyone there was as vicious as Seryozha when he chose to take against a Jew. Within the first two weeks of our being reunited he had beaten half a dozen ‘Jerusalem colonels’ so badly that they died of their injuries. He killed two by splitting their heads open with the heavy stick he sometimes used. The Jews knew him well, and their fear of him could often be comical. Those who lived would do anything he told them. He was the one who, for the entertainment of the SS men at Easter, re-enacted the Crucifixion, using a young Christian priest as Jesus and a crowd of Jews as his tormentors. Nailed rather haphazardly to his cross, the man died of strangulation before his three days were up.
Yet to me Seryozha remained the same rather sentimental friend of former days, sharing a nostalgia for our mutual past. Perhaps even Satan himself needs a confidant. He liked to discuss St Petersburg before the Revolution. He blamed the Jewish Reds for destroying his career. Even though he confided in me, he never mentioned what that career had been. In some ways he knew he had turned into a monster and could be remorseful. ‘As bad as any Cossack.’ His melancholy made him cruel. No doubt he lived in terror of replacing his red triangle with a pink one. I had no choice but to express sympathy, and he was grateful for that, though he never touched me sexually. I was grateful in turn.
‘It’s the sneg I miss most, Dimka dear. I miss it so badly, you know. The way another man might miss a woman. Sometimes I feel so ashamed of myself when I’ve hurt some of these people. I am not proud of myself. I do filthy things. Yet I understand how God has chosen me to be their nemesis. If it were not me, it would be someone worse. Jews refused God’s revelation. Perhaps I can help bring the survivors to Him. I am His instrument. I know it sometimes upsets you, and I am deeply sorry.’
Not for a moment did he allow himself his former lacrymosity, though he could show a certain kindness. ‘I’d never do anything to you, my best and oldest friend. You have always been a good Christian. But unredeemed Jews attack the very substance of our civilisation. By rejecting Christ, they themselves are effectively Christ’s murderers, every one of them. Their writings sent hundreds of honest Germans to destruction. They squeak for mercy now, but they did not demand mercy for all those Russians and Poles they killed. You know as well as I do that their Red co-religionists have been responsible for the deaths of millions of our countrymen. And who benefited?’
I could only agree. Moreover, if I challenged his ideas, I might turn him against me. He needed me to support his arguments. I had learned the virtues of silence with both my captors and my comrades. The Jews feared him as much as he feared the pink triangle. He displayed his brute manliness at every opportunity. In the way he strutted and swung his whip, he was determined to present the most aggressive masculinity possible. His friendship was of considerable advantage to me, since we now shared a home in which he was the undisputed master.
Seryozha was especially cruel to Jewish artists. After he had been in our hut for a month or so, he proposed he prepare an entertainment for the camp. With our Lagerälteste’s permission, who in turn received it from his Untersturmführer, Seryozha formed a number of the Jewish prisoners into a ballet troupe to put on a burlesque of Swan Lake, in which Jewish elders were supposed to represent swans, with goose feathers stuck up their backsides. He, of course, did not take part. He was Diaghilev, these days, never Nijinsky.
The burlesque was a massive success, popular with everyone, inmates included. Seryozha became a camp favourite for a while. His ‘performing Jews’ were even part of a general SS entertainment that Christmas. Seryozha was promised his freedom. Then suddenly, supposedly at the suggestion of Commandant Eicke and to my own personal relief, Seryozha and his performing Jews were taken away in a ‘trainload’, apparently ‘on tour’, and I never saw any of them again. Years later I heard a rumour that he had been promoted to the SS and helped set up one of the Polish camps. He had always believed his skills to be underappreciated. Possibly he even left the SS and at last fulfilled his ambition to command a ballet company entertaining the troops at the front.