Hemingway's wife Martha spent her life as a true war reporter, covering almost every major world war, beginning with the Spanish Civil War, documenting the civilian life caught between politics and warfare.
In 1944, because women were not allowed on the front lines, she slipped aboard a hospital ship and landed with the Allies in Normandy. A year later, she was one of the first journalists to enter the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.
"We've seen so much, so many wars, so many violent deaths, hospitals that look like abattoirs, bodies piled up everywhere, but this is one of a kind. Never has war shown itself so mad and evil." Martha made no secret of her hatred of German fascism in dachau.
"The truth is subversive," she once said.
That makes Martha's report on Dachau all the more precious.
"No one will believe what happened to us."
We left Germany aboard a C-47 military transport plane full of newly freed American prisoners of war. Passengers sat in the shadow of the wings as the plane sat on the grass at the airport in Regensburg, Germany, not daring to stray too far from the plane because no one wanted to miss the trip. When the crew chief called everyone aboard, we scrambled into the cabin as if escaping from a fire. Flying over Germany, no one looked out of the window. No one wants to see Germany again. Everyone left with hatred and loathing for the land. At first, no one spoke, but when they realized they had really left Germany for good, they began to talk about their incarceration. We didn't say anything about the Germans -- it's water under the bridge, there's nothing to talk about. "No one will believe what happened to us." "Said one of the soldiers. It was all agreed. No one would believe it.
'When were you arrested, miss? One of the soldiers asked me.
"I was just hitching a ride. I've come to see Dachau."
Suddenly, one of them said, "We need to talk about Dachau. We need to talk. Whether people believe us or not."
Desperate survivors were found in a pile of bodies
Behind the wire grid sat a group of scrawny men in the sun, searching for lice. Age and face were indistinguishable; they all looked the same. If you're lucky, you'll never see someone like this again. We walked through the crowded, dusty cells to the hospital. In the lobby of the hospital sat more scrawny men, their bodies reeking with the smell of disease and death. They looked at us, motionless, with no expression on their faces, which were nothing but yellow, stubbly skin over their bones.
A man stumbles into the doctor's office. He was Polish, 6 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. He was wearing a striped prison jumpsuit and boots with loose LACES, his lower half barely concealed by a blanket. His eyes were large and eerie, sticking out of his face, and his jaw bone looked as if it were poking through his skin. He had been held in Buchenwald, and had taken the last death train to Dachau. Outside the camp lay 50 carriages filled with his comrades who had died on the journey. For three days, American troops have been driving residents of dachau to bury the bodies. When they first arrived, the German guards locked the men, women and children in the carriages, leaving them slowly to die of hunger, thirst and suffocation. They screamed and tried to break through the cage. From time to time the guards fired into the carriage, and the noise gradually subsided.
The man in front of him survived and was found under a pile of bodies. Now he was standing on his bare legs, talking. Suddenly, he began to cry. "Everyone is dead." "Not one of them is left. They're all dead," he said. I can't help it. I'm done. Everyone died."
The doctor was Polish and had been a prisoner here for five years. He said to the man, "In four weeks' time, you'll be a good young man again, and everything will be fine."
Perhaps this man's health and strength can be restored, but his eyes will never be the same as anyone else's.
Reviewing what he had seen in the hospital, the doctor spoke in a remarkably sober tone. He saw German violence, but was powerless to stop it. The prisoners spoke as calmly as he did, with an odd smile, as if they were sorry to talk about such terrible things to someone who lived in the real world and had trouble understanding Dachau.
A "special trial" with a 100% mortality rate
"The Germans conducted some special experiments here." "They want to know how long a pilot can live and how high he can fly without oxygen. So they sealed up a car, put the prisoner inside, and drained the oxygen out of it. It was a quick death, no more than 15 minutes, but a terrible death. They didn't kill that many people in this experiment, 800 or so. They came to the conclusion that you could fly up to 36,000 feet without oxygen."
"Who do they choose to do an experiment like this? I asked.
"Any prisoner, as long as he is healthy." "They pick the strongest men. Of course, the mortality rate is 100 percent."
"Interesting, isn't it? "Said another Polish doctor.
Our eyes didn't meet. I don't know how to describe my feelings, apart from the intense anger I felt, I also felt shame. I am ashamed of the human race.
"There's another experiment that involves water." The first doctor added, "It was to see how long the pilot could survive in the water after the plane was shot down. To find out, German doctors had prisoners stand in buckets of water up to their necks. Eventually they found that humans could last two and a half hours in -8 c water. 600 people died in the experiment. Sometimes a prisoner suffered three times, because he fainted at the beginning and was brought back to life for the experiment a few days later."
"Don't they scream? Can't you ask for help?"
The question made him smile, and he said: "There's no use screaming or crying for help in this place. It doesn't work for anybody at any time."
At this moment, a colleague of the Polish doctor came into the room. He knew about the malaria experiment. The German army's director of tropical medical research used Dachau as a laboratory to try to find a way to make the German army immune to malaria. He infected 11,000 prisoners with stage iii malaria. There are not many deaths due to malaria, which simply weakens prisoners with fever and makes them more vulnerable to starvation. One day, however, three people overdosed on pilamitol, which was being experimented with in Germany for some reason. All the while, they failed to find a cure for malaria.
Across the hall and into the operating room, the Polish doctor pulls out his medical records and checks the ss doctor's surgical records. They had been castrated and sterilized, and prisoners were forced to sign an agreement beforehand that they would voluntarily "self-destruct." Jews and Gypsies had to be castrated, and any foreign slave worker who had sex with a German woman had to be sterilized. German women were sent to other camps.
Now, the Polish surgeon only has four front teeth in the top row. The rest were knocked out one day by a guard. The reason is, the guard just happened to want to play with someone's teeth that day. Such behavior is nothing new for doctors, or anyone else. There was no barbarism they had not seen. They are used to the organized cruelty that has been going on in this camp for 12 years.
The doctor mentioned another experiment, which he said was the cruelest and useless. It was the polish priest's turn to be the guinea pig. German doctors injected streptococcus into the prisoners' thigh muscles and bones, causing massive abscesses accompanied by high fever and excruciating pain. The Polish doctor said he knew of more than 100 cases, but the actual number was probably much higher. He had 31 deaths that took two or three months of agonizing pain before they died, followed by several more operations. These operations are further experiments to see if dying people can be saved -- and the answer is, of course, no. Some prisoners made full recoveries because they were lucky enough to receive medication that had long been proven to work, but others were left permanently disabled and now limp through the camps.
"Night" and "mist" in captivity
By this point, I couldn't listen any more, so my guide (a German Socialist who had been imprisoned in Dachau for ten and a half years) took me through the camp to the prison. In Dachau, if you want to get away from one fear, the best way is to approach another fear. The prison was a clean rectangular building with small white cells. The inmates were known as NN (short for the German words Nacht and Nebel, meaning "night" and "fog"), which, in less romantic terms, meant that the people in these cells saw no one alive, could not speak to anyone, and never saw light or fresh air. They were held incommunicado, surviving on only "water soup" and a piece of bread a day - the camp's "diet". They were naturally in danger of going mad, but in the years of silence no one knew what had happened to them. The Americans entered Dachau on Sunday, the Friday after the SS sent 8,000 people, including those in solitary confinement, on the last death train from there. They were never heard from again. Now, in this clean, empty prison, a woman still refuses to leave her cell, screaming in a single, horrible tone, occasionally silent, then screaming again. One of these days, she went crazy, and we were too late.
At Dachau, a prisoner caught with a cigarette butt in his pocket received 25 to 50 lashes. If the prisoner did not stand at attention and take off his hat six feet away when the SS passed by, he would be tied behind his hands, hooked and hung from the wall for an hour. If the prisoner did something else that annoyed the guards, he would be stuffed into a box. The box is about the size of a telephone booth, and its sturdy structure makes it impossible for a single person to sit, kneel, let alone lie down, while four people are often crammed into a box.
They will stand inside for three days and nights without food, water or sanitation. When the punishment is over, they will return to 16 hours of hard labor a day, again on a diet of "water soup" and a slice of stucco bread.
What kills the most people is hunger, which is routine. It's unimaginably crowded for a man to work at such a high intensity, eating so little a day. With so many people crammed into tight, airless barracks, he woke up every morning feeling weak and dying. In the 12 years since the camp was built, an unknown number of people have died there, including 45,000 in the past three years, according to those who know it. Two thousand people died in the gas chambers in February and March last year. They were too weak to work, but they had not yet died, so someone had arranged their own deaths.
The families of Nazi officers lived happily in front of the morgue
The gas chamber is part of the morgue. The morgue was a brick-walled building on the outskirts of the camp, surrounded by pine forests. As a Polish priest volunteered to lead us to the morgue, he said, "I nearly starved to death twice, but I was lucky enough to get a job as a mason when I started building this house, so I got some extra food and survived." Then he said, 'Have you seen our chapel, ma 'am?' I said no, and my guide said I couldn't, because there were 2,000 typhus patients in the area, and they were basically quarantined. "Too bad." "We finally have a chapel where we say mass almost every Sunday. The mural inside is very beautiful, but the man who painted it died of hunger two months ago."
Now we come to the morgue. "You have to cover your nose with a handkerchief." The guide reminded me. Suddenly, unbelievably, I saw dead people, everywhere. Bodies piled up in the incinerator, but the SS didn't have time to burn them. There were piles of bodies in doorways and outside buildings. The dead were naked, their ragged clothes neatly stacked in the back of the morgue: shirts, coats, trousers, shoes, to be disinfected and ready for reuse. The clothes were in perfect order, but the bodies were discarded like garbage, rotting in the sun until only yellowing bones remained. Without flesh and blood, the bones were huge. Terrible, hideous, shocking bones, and the sickening smell of death.
We've seen so many wars, so many violent deaths, hospitals that look like abattoirs, bodies piled up everywhere, but we've never seen anything like this. War had never shown itself so mad and evil as these starving, ravaged, naked, nameless corpses. Behind a mass of dead prisoners lay the well-dressed, healthy bodies of German soldiers. They were killed when US troops entered Dachau. And seeing them, for the first time in my life, I was happy to see a dead person.
Just behind the morgue was a large, modern conservatory. Here the prisoners planted the ss officers' favorite flowers and plants. Next to the greenhouses were lush fruit orchards where starving prisoners cultivated vitamin-rich food to keep the SS strong. But if a starving prisoner secretly pulled up a head of lettuce and devoured it, he would be beaten until he was unconscious. In front of the morgue, separated by a garden, was a row of spacious, beautifully built houses. It was the home of ss officers, their wives and children enjoying themselves as the smoke of human ashes rose from the chimney of the morgue.
The meaning of this war is to make Dachau, the place like Dachau, everything that Dachau stood for, disappear from the world forever
The American soldier on the plane said, "We need to talk about this." In fact, you can't talk about it because you can't bear to recall what you've seen or heard because of the fear that haunts you. I did not mention the women who had been transferred to Dachau three weeks earlier from other camps for the "sin" of being Jewish. One of them is a girl from Budapest, tortured but cute. The woman with the crazy eyes who watched her sister walk into the gas chamber at Auschwitz and was stopped when she tried to rush in to die with it; Another Austrian woman calmly pointed out that they had nothing but the shoddy dress they were wearing... They still had to work 16 hours a day outside during the long winter months and receive what the Germans call "corrections" when they made mistakes, real or false.
I did not talk about the day the American troops entered Dachau, although the prisoners had told me about it. Many prisoners, overjoyed at their freedom and eager to welcome the Allies, ran to the electric barrier and were electrocuted; There are those who die in rejoicing, because the great happiness is too great for their bodies to bear; There were also those who died when they had food, who devoured it and could not be stopped, who were propped and choked to death. I can't find the words to describe someone who has survived this horror. They survived three years, five years, ten years, but they were as clear and fearless as the first day they stepped into this hellish cage.
I was in Dachau on the day the Germans announced their unconditional surrender to the Allies. The scraggly, scrawny man who had been dug out from under the dead staggered into the doctor's office again. He said something in Polish, his voice barely audible. The Polish doctor clapped his hands and said, "That's great." I inquired what they were talking about.
"The war is over." "Germany has been defeated."
We sat in the room, in this cursed tomb of a prison, and no one said anything more. Still, I think Dachau is the best place in All of Europe to hear about success. Because the point of this war is to make Dachau, and other places like it, and everything that Dachau stood for, disappear from the world, forever.
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