Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

harder . . . .‘Canada’ was the root, of course: the solution—the salvation— and the problem . . . ”
    “Canada” was the building and its outskirts where—under SS guards—inmates sorted through the vast array of belongings taken from those arriving on the trains. It’s almost impossible to describe the house-high heaps of suitcases, clothes, shoes—the mountains of spectacles or Jewish prayer books or felt hats alone, could each have filled an Olympic pool. Anything could be—and was—found by inmates who not only catalogued and heaped up the valuables and the dross from all Europe, but were taught to rummage and snip linings in coats, hidden pockets in books and valises. It was all there: jewels, money, photographs, candlesticks, pacifiers, toys, rings, bracelets, mezuzot —meant to bless now-empty Jewish homes—necklaces, brooches . . . and the food, I thought, instantly feeling saliva womb my tongue. Inmates in just about every lager were fed a five- to seven-hundred-calorie-per-day diet that consisted of watery ersatz coffee, a few ounces of bread—often moldy—and plumped with sawdust, soup enhanced with weeds and nettles and surprises like mice or insects. Two or three times a week the bread was daubed with a smear of margarine or sugar beet jam; once or twice a week a thin slice of derelict sausage was handed round—nobody bothered to chalk the day’s special on a blackboard like a Viennese café on the Strauchgasse , that was for sure.
    Food haunted us. Not just recollecting ordinary table fare or while dreaming of banquets—though of course it permeated those atmospheres—but during every waking moment. Starvation turned us into ravening animals—just like wealthy, cynical John Slake says in that old primary school story, “Elementals” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Love almost never triumphed. People would—and did—snarl, fight, and kill for a crust of trampled mud-covered bread or a rotting potato hidden in a latrine bucket. So “Canada” created a huge, thriving black market—not just for the food smuggled out, but for everything, anything. Since all this “bounty” was supposed to go to the Reich, technically the SS posted to “Canada” were stealing, which meant that on a very small scale they overlooked what inmates pilfered, or they made deals with their favorites that went more or less like this: “You find me five high quality diamonds or twenty-five natural pearls, I’ll pretend that the wool coat (with its pockets stuffed with who knows what) is yours and it didn’t arrive by transport because you’ve been wearing it since you left Minsk.” There were endless permutations of these deals and bargains because everything had a price: a pitcher of water, a bottle of iodine, a neck scarf, a pair of socks, a can of sardines, a slice of fatty, tinned sauerbraten, a cigarette— a puff on a cigarette . Stealing from the Reich was called “organization” by the prisoners—no one considered it a moral lapse because it was all stolen from us—from the displaced, brutalized deportees—to begin with anyway. More importantly—to use Nazi doublespeak—this re-allocation of goods saved lives: the camera that became rayon underwear that became aspirin that became half a foil-wrapped marzipanstollen —the traditional cake embedded with dried fruit and dusted with powdered sugar—saved lives. It really did.
    “‘Canada,’” I told Miss Johansson, who’d left off scribbling down clerical notes some time before, “gave the inmates a tiny—no, infinitesimal chance. What could we have bartered otherwise? Dirty, vermin-infested striped smocks? Broken heel-less boots?” I shook my head. “The plunder from ‘Canada’ meant you might have your morale lifted to the point where you could have a ragged form of hope—maybe for one whole day you didn’t think about running into the wires of the electric fence or volunteering for the gas chamber.” I caught her glance, and she