Just out., July 01, 1990, Page 15, Image 15

I had seen the gas chamber, entered it, stood
where countless wretches, Jews, dissident
Catholics, gypsies and God knows who else,
had been done to death. I had seen the ovens
and the trenches, dug to carry away the blood
of victims when the ground on which they
stood to be shot became too saturated to absorb
more.
Yes, I had been to Dachau, had seen it and
thought I could never know, never comprehend
why the Holocaust had happened.
“I was there,” Hans said.
At first I didn’t know what he meant. There as
a tourist or what?
“There as a prisoner,” he said, quietly.
If he wanted my undivided attention, he had it.
In fact, I will never, ever forget that evening
and every word that he said or the way in
which he said i t
"In 1935,” Hans continued, “I was 1 8 .1 had
a lover. He was so beautiful, so very
beautiful.”
I cannot forget the terrible sadness and
longing in his watery blue eyes as he spoke
about the young man he called Frederick and
the way his fingers caressed the beer stein as if
its smooth surface were his lover’s skin.
He went on, “In the days before the Nazis,
there was much life for us, for homosexuals, in
Germany. It was open. There were many bars
and other places. No one enforced the law.”
As Hans told it, he and Frederick were students
together at the University of Munich. They met
that way, in class, had fallen in love and
determined to live together.
When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in
January, 1933, the effort to exterminate
homosexuals began almost at once.
“We were the first, ” Hans said. “Did you
know that?”
Hans and Frederick were discreet, discreet as
it was possible to be, he said. But, always there
were informers, many of them homosexuals,
who were trying to deflect attention from
themselves, he believed. Hans and Frederick
were arrested by the Gestapo, taken out of
class, in 1935.
They were taken first to Gestapo
headquarters, “a terrible, terrible place,” Hans
said. “All those uniforms, heavy faces, like
stone. We were so scared, so frightened. I felt
like a child.”
Frederick too, so delicate, so beautiful, was
frightened. He looked like “a little bird, driven
to earth by some dark storm.” They had no
chance, no chance at all. They were accused of
being “filthy queers” and “assfuckers.” It was
enough. “They hated us so very much. We
were a disease to them, a threat, you know.”
In some cases, gays received a prison sentence
before being transported to the camps. For
Hans and Frederick, perhaps because Dachau
was so close, it was immediate “Schutzhaft,”
protective custody.
They were taken to the camp in a truck
which was divided into cells, each containing,
according to Hans, 5-6 prisoners. He and
Frederick were put into the same cell. At first,
this gave them comfort in the hope that they
would not be separated. There were three
others there, “criminals of some kind. They
knew we were queers, homosexuals. And
Frederick was so handsome. They took him
and laughed as they forced him to suck them
and they hit him and hit him. His poor broken
face. There was nothing, nothing I could do.
Don’t you see?” he pleaded. “I could do
nothing, not then, not later. I could do
nothing.”
When they arrived in Dachau, the prisoners
were assembled on the parade ground,
surrounded by the SS. “There were many,”
Hans said. “Not all of us pink triangles.” But
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the assfuckers were singled out for special
treatment.
He, Frederick and the other gays (My word.
Hans never used the word gay.) were forced to
strip. Afterwards, in front of the SS guards and
other prisoners, they were shaved. “Not a hair
was left. I prayed they would let us go then,
give us clothes, send us to the barracks, but
they did not.”
Instead, the guards seized Frederick and
dragged him to the front. “They knew we were
lovers,” Hans said, but he did not know how
they knew. Two guards held Frederick while a
third took a pink triangle and stitched it to his
bare chest, right over his heart.
“I could hear him cry as the needle went in
and out of his flesh. Oh, his beautiful flesh!
They did it slowly and I could hear him. I can
still hear him. I will always hear him.”
Then the guards took riding crops and while
two held him, others whipped him savagely.
Hans, his voice shaking, told of the other
prisoners, laughing and calling out obscene
names, urging the SS on.
“They raped him, raped him right there. I
saw it. One after the other, they raped him. I
don’t know how many. I don’t know. I had to
watch. They forced me to see it,” Hans said
over and over again. Over and over again he
repeated, “I could do nothing. I could do
nothing.
“There was a man there, a prisoner, a
murderer, a great hulking man. They called
him ‘The Lithuanian’ and he took a stick, a
great stick and raped Frederick with that. They
forced him on to his hands and knees, facing
me. He looked at me. I can still see his eyes,
his beautiful eyes, full of so much agony, so
much pain, as the stick was rammed into him
again and again. Then the man, the hulk, fell
on him, raped him and tore his throat out with
his teeth. Frederick’s blood, my lover’s blood,
like a fountain, covered that man and drenched
the ground.”
Hans grabbed my shoulders, his gnarled
fingers digging in, “My God! My God! I can
still see it. See him. My God! I can still hear
him scream!”
I held him then, this old man, and thought
how that day I had been there, stood on the
very parade ground where all this had
happened. I thought o f Sajid and of others I
had loved. For the first time, the Holocaust
about which I had read came home to me like a
searing, white-hot iron. This was no abstract
thing that had happened to others, to members
o f groups of which I was not a part. This had
happened to me! I was gay. It could have been
me!
I wanted to run. I wanted to get drunker than
I had ever done before in my life, but I did
neither. Instead, I held Hans until the bartender
came over and said Hans would have to
“straighten up or leave.” He was causing a
disturbance, bothering others. I guess the guy
saw my outraged look, for he leaned across the
bar and said, “Don’t worry about him. These
old ones live the war too much.”
Hans did recover after a bit and ordered
another beer. He apologized for upsetting me
and said nothing more about Dachau or
Frederick that evening. Before he left, I asked
him if he would have coffee with me the next
morning. He agreed and we made an
appointment to meet at the Cafe St. Peter on
the Marienplatz in Old Town Munich. Then he
was gone, leaving me with a million questions
and praying that Hans would be willing to
answer them.
_
(To be continued)
Copyright 1988 by Novo Graphics, Ltd. All
rights are reserved. Reproduction in any form
is prohibited without prior written permission.)
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put out y 15 V July 1990