lightbulb. I fall back asleep and eat kohlrabi soup and bread, hasenpfeffer and bread, strawberry ice cream in a silver bowl. Then hazelnut noodles and fancy kipfel pastries. And then sauerkraut stew and bread, rum cake. Then boiled pig’s head with horseradish and bread. And just when I’m about to start in on a haunch of venison with bread and apricot compote, the loudspeaker begins to blare away, and it’s already morning. I eat and eat, but my sleep stays thin, and my hunger shows no sign of tiring.
When the first three of us died of hunger, I knew exactly who they were and the order of their deaths. I thought about each of them for several long days. But three never stays three. One number leads to another. And the higher the number gets, the more hardened it becomes. When you’re nothing but skin and bones and in bad shape yourself, you do what you can to keep the dead at a distance. The mathematical traces show that by March of the fourth year 330 people had died. With numbers like that you can no longer afford separate feelings. We thought of the dead only briefly.
Before it even had a chance to settle, we cast off the dreary mood, chased away the weary sadness. Death always looms large and longs for all. You can’t give him any of your time. He has to be driven away like a bothersome dog.
Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.
The first three deaths in the camp were:
Deaf Mitzi crushed by two coal cars.
Kati Meyer buried alive in the cement tower.
Irma Pfeifer drowned in the mortar.
And in my barrack, the first to die was the machinist Peter Schiel, from coal alcohol poisoning.
In every case the cause of death was different, but hunger was always part of it.
In pursuit of the mathematical traces, I once looked at Oswald Enyeter, the barber, in the mirror and said: Everything simple is pure result, and every one of us has a mouth with a roof. The hunger angel places everyone on his scales, and when someone lets go, he jumps off the heart-shovel. Those are his two laws: causality and the lever principle.
Of course you can’t ignore them, the barber said, but you can’t eat them either. That’s also a law.
I looked in the mirror and said nothing.
Your scalp is covered with little flowers, the barber said. We’ll have to use the clippers, that’s the only thing that can help.
What kind of flowers, I asked.
Little pus flowers, he said.
It was a blessing when he started to clip my hair close to the scalp.
One thing is certain, I thought: the hunger angel knows who his accomplices are. He pampers them and then drops them. Then they shatter. And he with them. He’s made of the same flesh that he’s deceiving. This is consistent with his lever principle.
And what am I to say to that now. Everything that happens is always simple. And there’s a principle to how things proceed, assuming that they last. And if things last for five years you can no longer discern or even notice any principle. And it seems to me that if someone is inclined to talk about it later, there’s nothing that can’t be included: the hunger angel thinks straight, he’s never absent, he doesn’t go away but comes back, he knows his direction and he knows my boundaries, he knows where I come from and what he does to me, he walks to one side with open eyes, he never denies his own existence, he’s disgustingly personal, his sleep is transparent, he’s an expert in orach, sugar, and salt, lice and homesickness, he has water in his belly and in his legs.
All you can do is list.
If you don’t let go, things will be only half as bad, you think. To this day, the hunger angel speaks out of your mouth. But no matter what he says, this remains utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Except you’re not allowed to talk about hunger when you’re hungry. Hunger is not a bunk or a bed frame, otherwise it could be measured. Hunger is not an object.
Coal alcohol
During a ransacked night, when there was no thought of sleep, no merciful outlet for our hunger, because the lice would not stop their torture, during such a night Peter Schiel