Raymonde
I wonder if there will be a name for what is happening to us – slavery, for example, colonialism, socialism, Marxism which I am well conversant with. Arrested for my political activities and for being a Jew by the Nazis and transported to this camp, I have spent 9 months here. I remember being herded into a rickety rail car and shipped like so much cattle and how all of us had one pail for our offal. It is not the smell of shit that wrecks our minds. No, not that alone. It is the breakdown of social codes, of cultural order, of shitting into a pail with all the splattering that entails, the bowel noises – our most private symphonies, all before others in open sight. It is to experience an abysmal negligence in that we swiftly, out of necessity, overcome personal shame. We try to put out of mind all the shit that came before us in that same hefty pail, remains of the daily self. By the time we disembarked very late at night from the transports, there wasn’t a man or woman, not a child, who had not given up some invaluable measure of intimacy. Privacy had been shattered. So we overlooked (did we really?), not denied, colluded fraternally in what we had seen, what we had experienced. Shit-giving broke us down in ways that I am still experiencing, for it was my first camp tutoring, the primer for what the guards would instruct us about human suffering.
While squatting on the pail, I recall, I saw one young man take a quick look at my splayed legs as if he could catch a glance of my delta of Venus; a much older man saw me shitting and his response was one of enormous ennui, as if he had resigned himself to such a state of affairs. By the time we had arrived, shitting, pissing and farting on the pail was just that – discharge, freed from rules of hygiene and privacy. We had made a surly peace with it.
After days on the rail a circle of fecal matter saturated the hay that surrounded the pail as its fitting corona. When it was filled usually a man, sometimes a woman as if cleansing her house, waited until the train slowed down at a curve or crossing, and threw its contents out. Since we had no toilet paper, we each made choices about how to go about wiping ourselves. I chose not to wipe. Others ripped pieces from the clothing they had on and wiped. I observed our most personal idiosyncrasies. After a while, I imagined each hand in the rail car was inflamed with bacteria. Cleanliness did not prevail at all. Our hands were stigma to be avoided.
I cannot share the unimaginable with anyone, much less you. And why is this so? I cannot convince myself that what is happening to me each and every day is real, as if I could pinch it by its buttocks and it would screech. I feel it is, therefore, unimaginable. This fantasy is brief when I encounter the hard hours when there is little food and constant thirst.
So the unimaginable is as acute as a stabbing needle. It is imaginable. It does exist. I once read Moby Dick translated into German. I could not identify with Ahab, but I found the great white whale profoundly evil, self-contained, unrelenting, like a planet set forth into its orbit by no hand at all. I concluded that the whale was monolithic, a system into himself and absolutely unaccountable to anyone else. Poor Ahab! He thought revenge would do it. In this camp revenge is disavowed, verboten, not permitted – and redemption, which does not exist, is a ridiculous conceptualization to own.
When my mind falls into an irrefutable dither, I will have finally succumbed. My dear, dear mind, what is left of it, at one time was analytic, philosophical, layered in theories and concepts, for I had been a college instructor. My mental thinking processes revealed themselves in such a way that I may be bold to say that they evinced a passion of the mind, much as we can speak of Freud’s body of work. A man who had labeled himself more of a conqueror than a medical doctor, a conquistador, you might say he was a doctor of the soul.
When I can think, which is rare in the camp, for thinking is detritus here, absolutely dreck, I cherish and recall the moments when I had read Freud (I wonder if he has escaped Germany). What I do recall I use as self-armor to help me to get through one more day, but even here Freud would intellectually tremble in sight of systems that man devises to destroy his own species. Like food I savor in Freud his pessimism. He didn’t think much of his fellow man. The camp confirms his prescience.
Although each day brain cells drop from me like dandruff, I try intellectually to cope with this unbearable existence. I do not, ironically, use too much reason, for reason is not the patois of the camp. Randomness is our Esperanto. Hours do not exist. Time is not extant. Fractions of minutes rule and order us. We are chivied, rushed, pushed, kicked along, shoved, brutally whipped and sped from one moment to another. All thinking is left to the guards. We are just a herd.
All I do to keep myself from going mad, to be mentally intact, is to observe.
To allow myself to experience sorrow, fear, the clenched fist is a sweet and lush feeling, a personal pomegranate and very dangerous. To observe is safer, guarded and private, no wordage. No reflection. To observe is just to gather data. To hypothesize, to conceptualize is beyond the pale. I have no time for deep reflection unless late at night in my pallet, and then to think tires me out and I quickly fall asleep. If I see a woman abused which is a daily occurrence, a guard squeezes her ass or knees her in the crotch, for example – although Germans are sickened at the thought of touching a Jewish woman, sometimes their pricks speak for their nether desires. As I say here, I observe this, I do not ascribe values or judgments. I am only a rain barrel here. I collect runoff.
At times I forget my gender. I am not woman. What I am I cannot say. Sometimes I find it peculiar when I shed my womanhood, me, who had several lovers over the years and was much the free spirit. When I observe a “little” murder as a woman, it does color the observation. When I forget or it forgets me – being a woman, the observation is very much neutral, with little or no affect. I prefer to have the same semblance of personal humanity, my I AMness if you will, and that is what happens when I observe through the eyes of a woman. We are all differently dealt with in the camps, we are all dealt in the same way in the camps, but the woman is the lowest, especially a Jewish woman who births Jews. We are hated because we are mothers, the fluttering Jew moth in the clothes closet.
If I had as a woman the vitality and physical strength of a man with his mind installed in that body, what a person we might have. Ecce Homo! The obverse is repellent to me, a man’s mind in a woman’s body. It would not work at all, for any man is a proto-woman, a pretender. Each time I see a woman inmate die of starvation, die at the hands of a guard’s hands I feel the loss of our womanly species, so different, so maternal, so connected to other women unlike man whose life, as I observe in this camp, consists of physical brutality, sperm, and savagery.
What I will give here now are things and events I observe as a woman. Realize that I do not believe I can be subsumed simply under gender. I am so much more than the bivalve of man. I am no Adam’s rib – horrifying biblical shit. But I stray, although religion created all the camps.
I see that I go about protecting myself from all these horrors. And that Great Wall of China that surrounds me is self-imposed and observation is its name. I see all the women about me. And what I see are relics of humanity. Some women have lost their menstruation cycle, have gone “dry.” The nest cannot be created, to be a potential mother has been driven out of many of us. Without one’s period, brought about I imagine by overt stress, and the lack of proper nutrition, are pushed decades ahead into a kind of early and sterile menopause.
I should add here that I see that observing keeps me safe, for it is passive and non-disruptive. I daresay I resist in this manner of “being.”
Although women in normal life share and want to be connected to other women, an observation I experienced long before internment, I also see that women often do not speak to one another – it is greatly disallowed in any case in camp – but gesture and a woman’s repertoire of gestures and gesticulations has a wide range of nuance and subtlety. A woman’s knitting eyebrows as a response can say much, whereas a man’s eye lace straight eyebrow is just a coverlet for his eyes, not much to be learned here. I know a woman’s gestures contain ore and I observe how I and others need to extract the meaning therein. I can tell when a camp inmate is no more than a day or two away from dying.
Think about it. Even observing one’s self as I do minute to minute keeps my intelligence intact, seeing my place in this hell is fatiguing but not tiresome to my mind. It is a task I give myself to survive. As our shabby ranks are thinned out daily from starvation, penal work and guard brutality. Often chubby and fat, well-fed women guards club us to death if we become immobile (how they hate being women). We are winnowed out and the Nazi state machinery applies its immense scythe to us all in fell swoops. When they are done with us, there will be nothing to glean. I will be gone soon, I know it, I see it. I have overstayed my welcome here.
I observe how I have withered. I dread any mirror or a reflection in a rain puddle, I tried again to count to fifty and just got up to forty when my mind once again disassembled itself and lost content. I trembled. I “felt” fear. For the life of me, after several failed numberings, I distracted myself because such failure to count to fifty frightened me very much. Much like trying to grab a doorknob with an embalmed hand, it had no idea of what to do. I felt my mind turned to slurry after forty. I observed that.
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