“And Dunevitz? Don’t you have anything on Dunevitz?” I can’t get rid of the impression, a plea served up from the depths, something in me knows the name — Hermann Dunevitz.
“No, I told you I don’t. But we had one in our camp too. Oh, if I could get my hands on him…but in our camp we were mainly afraid of Obersturmführer Jürgen Licht himself. He was our Angel of Death. I had to be close to him most of the time because I was the voice of the puppet theater. Every evening we put on a show for him. He built himself the theater on a little hill overlooking the Appellplatz, and the entire hill was covered with lovely rugs like a Persian palace; he put an armchair in the middle of all the rugs. We put on classical plays, adapted to fit the times, and plays that a German political prisoner wrote for Licht on topics he commissioned. I remember we put on a dramatization of Wenn ich der Kaiser Wär—If I Were the Emperor — which I knew from before the war. We did other plays too, it doesn’t matter now. It was all for Obersturmführer Licht. Sometimes he would invent a protagonist and we had to make the puppet and give it a part in the play. It didn’t matter, because he was the only spectator anyway, and if he was happy the evening finished without trouble. He especially liked a knight character he had invented, called Zibrus the Knight. We had to build ugly puppets with defects, in our own images, so that Zibrus the Knight could heroically save young German girls from us.
“One evening there was a disaster. Obersturmführer Licht invited the regional commander, Sturmbanführer Hes, to the play. Hes did not like puppet theater, and all throughout the play I could see him glaring at the carpeted ground. At the end of the play he politely refused to accept the Zibrus puppet and gave Obersturmführer Licht an odd look. I was at the front and I saw everything. I knew there would be trouble, I just didn’t know what kind. The next day all the puppets were ordered burned, the stage too, and the wooden frame; everything. All the theater workers were called for roll-call, and Obersturmführer Licht walked among us. I was first in line, and he walked past without looking at me, and for a moment we thought nothing would happen. But the man next to me was a puppet maker and he shot a bullet into his head without even hesitating. Then he kept walking and stood by different people. Sometimes he lingered, standing pensively. When he finally made up his mind he either shot the man or kept going. And it went on that way. He shot the expendable ones. That was it. In the morning, the kapos came and took all the remaining theater workers to regular jobs with the rest of the prisoners, and for almost a week we didn’t hear from Obersturmführer Licht. There were no plays and we didn’t see him. The hunger came back, the beatings, the desperation, and once again I thought I would not survive. Every evening we would go back to the camp and see his empty armchair up on the hill. We hoped something would happen, that the theater would be revived. After all, there must have been a reason why he had left some of us alive — we had a use.
“Day after day went by and not much hope was left. But late one night after a week, the head of my hut told me to go to Obersturmführer Licht’s office. My heart sensed disaster. He had already summoned someone to his office once, a typist, and had dictated an entire letter to him and then shot him in the head. What did Obersturmführer Licht want of me? They took me into his room. It was warm in there. A nice fire was burning, and there were dogs lying on a rug. My body was stiff as a rock. In front of the desk where Obersturmführer Licht sat was an empty chair. Was I supposed to sit down? Greet him? Salute? His adjutant handed me some papers. Obersturmführer Licht had written a play about his childhood, and my job was to read the pages out loud for him.
“His play was called Verbrecher—Criminals — and it recounted the story of an affair from his school days — some incident where he was assigned the duty of carrying the flag on a holiday parade, but something happened and the teacher let another boy carry it. Obersturmführer Licht gave precise instructions for making the puppet that would represent the teacher. It had to have small, Communist, Jewish eyes. He spent half a page on how to make the puppet of the other boy. And the kids who laughed at little Obersturmführer Licht. And the Jewish headmaster. And the priest. All of them. Lots of instructions in German. How the puppet makers managed to finally build the marionettes the way he instructed, God only knows. Perhaps they were helped by the fear of death. After the teacher and the headmaster and the priest, on a fresh new page, there were instructions on how to portray his beloved mother’s voice; there was to be no puppet representing her body. Then there was Zibrus the Knight, who in Obersturmführer Licht’s play had to appear and put a stop to the parade, take the flag away from the other boy and give it to Obersturmführer Licht.
“Obersturmführer Licht had poured many words onto paper, and I was required to read the lines aloud, to pleasure his ears with his own composition. I did the best I could, acting the parts out as I read. I cackled evilly when the teacher — who was a traitor, a Jew and a Communist — tripped up Obersturmführer Licht in class. I was emotional when the flag was given to the other child. And then Obersturmführer Licht the boy got up from his seat in class to make a speech. That was how it went in the play. He had written himself a long speech and as I tried to deliver it expertly, Obersturmführer Licht the commandant sat at his desk and, with his eyes shut and his hands beneath his chin holding a little pencil like a baton, instructed me to repeat my lines, make corrections, slow down the pace.”
“How did you understand what he wanted?”
“I understood. Believe me, I understood. I was so scared, I almost went in my pants. I followed the pencil beneath his chin and understood everything Obersturmführer Licht wanted.”
“And what happened in the end?”
“I got to the point where the voice of little Obersturmführer Licht’s mother was supposed to come from behind a screen. She was to try and persuade the Jewish headmaster to reverse his terrible decision. I recited her noble pleas, some of which he had found, I believe, in party propaganda, and some of which were the sorts of things mothers really would say. The headmaster refused to listen to the mother’s reasoning because little Obersturmführer Licht had a mark for misbehavior on the class roll, because he had thrown a spit-ball. I remember the headmaster’s response to her: ‘In our regime, as it is designed at present, in the year 1922, I am the one who decides which pupil shall march with the flag in the parade, and I am the one who decides that your son is not worthy of this great honor because he threw a spitball!’”
Attorney Perl does not need to recite the play for me. The tearful voice of a wronged child comes through amply in the space of the room: “But it was Heinrich who threw the spitball!” The mother’s response is also superfluous. It is obvious that the headmaster, for whose puppet the prisoners will have to find a thick log of wood, will throw her out of his office. Obersturmführer Licht’s lines need not continue either.
“He held up his hand: ‘Stop!’ and the play recitation ceased. The dogs perked up their ears and looked at me. The adjutant gave a brisk order and two guards came to take me away and deliver me back to the head of the hut. From the next day onwards, the whole camp was busy setting up the new theater and producing Obersturmführer Licht’s play, Verbrecher.”