within the camp. However, I was immediately assigned to the worst work detail, the stone quarry. I started making arrangements to be transferred to the laundry or the Gustloff armament works, where one would at least be inside, or to the kitchen, which of course was ideal because of the access to food. And that is where I did end up. Until liberation, in fact. But organizing the proper payments took some time, and meanwhile Koch was still irritated enough with me that I began my incarceration in the quarry. And that was a literal hell.
Q: What did quarry detail consist of ?
A: We worked twelve hours a day, from six in the morning until six at night. We had the poorest rations, and we worked in all weathers, carrying enormous stones about. I never quite saw the point of it, but then I’ve never been one for manual labor. The exposure to the elements and the lack of food started to tear me down fairly quickly.
However, it was the guards who posed the greatest danger. They hated the monotony of overseeing the quarry; they called it Shit Detail—you should forgive the vulgarity. They were very easily bored, as stupid men often are, and often hungover and most often drunk, and they had atrocious ways of combating their ennui. The favorite was to whisk the cap off the head of some unfortunate inmate and throw it across the sentry line. It was punishable by death to be without one’s cap, and it was equally forbidden to cross the boundary. Yet the poor devil singled out would be commanded to retrieve his cap, and the instant he stepped over the line he would be shot. All of the guards found this endlessly entertaining. Gretel and Lard-Ass, as we called them, were two of the most willing participants. And Wasserkopf—water on the brain—a Kapo so nicknamed because of his abnormally large head and total idiocy. But the worst sadists, the originators of the game, were Hinkelmann and Blank, and more inhuman creatures I have never met to this day. As was the case with all the guards, they had been professional criminals before the war—real ones—and to keep them out of trouble, Koch posted them permanently in the quarry. I used to thank God I was adept at hiding behind the other prisoners, for evading the notice of Hinkelmann and Blank was one’s only hope of surviving each day.
The sole benefit of quarry detail—and it kept some of the men alive long past the point at which they would have otherwise perished—was that bread was left for us just beyond the sentry line. It was sometimes possible, when the guards were involved in their sport, for one of us BVs to steal over and retrieve it and conceal it in our trousers. This duty often fell to me, since I was relatively small in stature and good at not calling attention to myself. Two women from Weimar, Aryan civilians, hid rolls for us in the hollow trunk of a large pine. They did this at great risk to themselves, of course, since füttern den Feind—feeding the enemy—was also punishable by death. We revered them; we called them die Bäckerei Engel, the Bakery Angels. Those who were religious prayed for them every night.
That was a miserable winter, but I managed to squeak by, and in the spring of 1941—
Q: Mr. Pfeffer, can we backtrack for a minute? Can you tell me more about the Bakery Angels?
A: Certainly. Let me see...Well, they made these Special Deliveries—as they were known—every Wednesday. And at the same time, they would collect messages we managed to smuggle out of the camp. We did so in a most unsavory way, I’m afraid; we wrote on tiny sheets of paper and hid them in prophylactics. I will leave it to you to imagine where the prophylactics were concealed. We were hoping to get word to the Outside about what was happening in the camp, so that it might be sent through the Resistance network to Israel or America. In the early days, before the SS put a stop to it, film was also left by the tree in this way. There was a photography department in the camp, and some of the more enterprising Red Triangles managed to use its equipment to take photographs for evidence. It was then up to the Angels to ensure that it got out.
I remember one poor fellow in particular who had been arrested for