by Alan Spencer, Mary Immaculate Secondary School, Lisdoonvarna
Senior Category – First Prize

I looked out through the grimy, frost-glazed window of a small office, trying to imagine the best way to put a certain sentence in a letter I was sending to my mother. She was a stickler for punctuation and grammar, and I was not always the best of writers. So on I struggled, occasionally leafing through the mental- dictionary all those years of home schooling by her had implanted in my head.
Always start with the heading, she had said. Sender’s address first.

Hauptcommandburo von Unit d/506,
Dachau, Bayern,
21/10/43.

‘Dearest mother,
How are you? It has been a long time since I wrote, I hope you have not been worried. Things are all right here. I have been in the factory now for two weeks, guarding the workers. It is not bad work. Any rebellious moods they may have had have long since been beaten out of them.’

‘No,’ I thought, ‘the censors wouldn’t like that…..’ ‘reasoned out of them.’ Much better. I wrote another few lines and glanced out the window again. Was that..? Yes, a snowflake drifted past the window and landed on the car outside. It was very early for snow; then again, it was a particularly cold winter. My itchy wool uniform was no good at keeping out the cold. Then again, the strain of carrying my gear around helped me forget the temperature. Helmet, ammo pouches, bayonet, the extra fancy peaked cap for the off-duty wooing of the ladies, polished steel-buckled belt, pistol with leather holster, heavy leather jackboots polished to a mirror shine; with socks only every two days due to shortages. Occasionally, I had my rifle replaced with a sub-machinegun, which was even heavier.

The factory was never heated and I knew that the must have been even colder than I was. It pitied them often. Every inmate in the camp leapt at the chance to do factory work. It got them away from the filth and the squalor of their huts, from the typhus and cholera, from the lice-infested blankets and the maggot-ridden bread that they were served. ‘Poor bastards,’ I thought. ‘Of course, I only ever thought it – to say it would be suicide.’ Still, at least they weren’t at the front with our boys, freezing to death in the snows of Russia while the Reds ploughed on and on, pushing our men further and further back towards the Fatherland. That was the real suffering, to face death every day. ‘At least, they weren’t fighting for their lives,’ I thought. Some were afraid of the Russians, but I wasn’t. ‘We’ll beat them back,’ I said. We always did. ‘Remember 1917? We beat them then. We’ll beat them now.’

Outside the snow was falling heavier. I went on with my letter. ‘Please tell Maria and Paul I will see them soon. They are only a couple of miles away in Munich, no? I have leave in another three weeks. I will make a point of visiting Maria in the art school. How is she doing? Better than me, no doubt, Is Paul still enjoying the HJ? He seems to fit in well.’

I sat back on my chair and pondered on what next to write. In the corner of the small, dingy office my rifle stood against the wall. Outside the heavy oak door I could hear the SS men screaming insults at the workers over the incessant droning of the machinery. I shook my head. The SS men were madmen. The stories from the camp were enough to turn you against them. We all feared them in the army. Occasionally, I would hear a shout of, “Jewish filth!,” followed by the thud of a rifle butt hitting someone’s face.

One of the workers obviously thought of answering back. Idiot. New he was most likely on the way back to the camp. Maybe the guards would set their dogs on him and bet on how long he could run before they caught him and ripped him to shreds. ‘That was a favourite,’ I tell you. ‘We all had a great laugh at the fool, running like a clown. Whoops, better finish this damn letter.’

‘Anyway, dear mother, I look forward to hearing from you soon. All my love to Klaus, Johann and Laura. Deine heissgeliebter Sonne, Uberleutnant Jan Schaunaur.’

‘Yes, that was good enough.’
Outside the snow fell heavier than ever. That was definitely strange. I got up and slung my rifle, folding the letter into my pocket. I plonked my heavy helmet onto my head and left the room. The factory was noisy as usual. The workers were all lined up, being yelled at by the commandant, no doubt for their compatriot’s insolence. I watched for a while as they stuttered replies to the commandant’s stupid questions before he’d smack them across the face, before turning and leaving.

Down the corridor; right, past the storage rooms, down the next corridor; left, down the short stairs, past the Swastika flag on the wall; left again, down another stairs, and there was the front door, a thick steel plate bolted to an iron frame, rusting all over and riddled with dents. It creaked and groaned as I opened it, the un-oiled hinges coating my boots in a rusty powder.

Outside I walked into a blizzard of snow. But it wasn’t like any snow I’d seen before. It got in my eyes and my ears, it coated my face, it choked me. It smelled of sulphur and smoke and tasted like….like ash. Holding my hand in front of my face, I walked past the cars coated in grey dust, past the grey coated lamp posts with their light completely blocked out by the blizzard, until I reached the corner.

I could just make out the silhouette of the wrought iron gate leading to the camp, with its ominous inscription, “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Work makes you free. Slowly, the horror dawned on me. This was no lave labour camp. Those who couldn’t work were kept in the camp and fed, weren’t they? ‘No,’ I thought, as I followed the swirling mass of ash and dust up, up over the fifteen foot walls with barbed wire tops, up over the guard towers with their machineguns, up, up the concrete and redbrick chimneys that looked down over the entire complex. It was from those soot-encrusted chimneys that my ‘snow’ was coming. It was there that those who couldn’t work went free.

I recalled at that moment and SS man’s laughing quote to a worker, “The only out of here is up!” I was blissfully detached from the world of those camps. ‘Do your job,’ I told myself. ‘Guard the workers, ignore the rumours, and get home safely at the end of it all.’

That world, the world behind the wire, was always separate from mine. I made a point of forcing it to be. But now, as the remains of those whom I guarded coated my uniform and the inside of my mouth, as I tasted and smelled the fate of the thousands whom I had checked off my clipboard as “unfit to work.” Everything in that world and mine had, at that moment, changed beyond imagination or recall.