CHAPTER 6To Choose a Blade of Grass
ere is always a worse hell. at is our reward for living. When we
stop marching, we are at Gunskirchen Lager. It’s a subcamp of
Mauthausen, a few wooden buildings in a marshy forest near a village,
a camp built to house a few hundred slave laborers, where eighteen
thousand are crowded now. It is not a death camp. ere are no gas
chambers here, no crematoria. But there is no doubt that we have
been sent here to die.
It is already hard to tell who is living and who is dead. Disease
passes into and between our bodies. Typhus. Dysentery. White lice.
Open sores. Flesh upon Ęesh. Living and rotting. A horse’s carcass half
gnawed. Eat it raw. Who needs a knife to cut the Ęesh? Just gnaw it
away from the bone. You sleep three deep, in the crowded wooden
structures or on the bare ground. If someone below you dies, keep
sleeping. No strength to haul the dead away. ere’s a girl doubled
over in hunger. ere’s a foot, black, rotted through. We have been
herded into the dank, thick woods to be killed in a giant blaze, all of
us lit on ĕre. e whole place is rigged with dynamite. We wait for the
explosion that will consume us in its flame. Until the big blast there are
the other hazards: starvation, fever, disease. ere is only one twenty-
hole latrine for the entire camp. If you can’t wait your turn to defecate,
they shoot you right there, where your waste has pooled. Trash ĕres
smolder. e earth is a mud pit, and if you can ĕnd the strength to
walk, your feet spin in a pulp that is part mud, part shit. It is ĕve or six