DARK HORROR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 April 1943, Page 6

DARK HORROR

LIFE IN NAZI CONCENTRATION . CAMP. “I was in a German concentration camp for thirteen months. I’m really quite young you know —thirty-one —my grey hair deceives. That’s one of my souvenirs. It’s useful too. Every time I look in a mirror I remember—that’s what I want to do. . . . That boy at my camp —Josef was his name. He was twenty-one when I met him at the camp. He had been there ever since Hitler came to power. They took him when he was fifteen-and-a-half. The Storm Troopers had paralysed his right arm, and he was suffering from consumption —undernourished. They had broken him—l mean mentally and spiritually. There was nothing left: no fear, that’s true, but no will to live either. . . .That journalist who survived the most brutal tortures and became hard. That is, he was quite mild to talk to, but when you were in trouble he seemed to have an unlimited resource of strength and vitality. In all those thirteen months I’d never known him despair one moment, must leave it to you to imagine how these people got broken or stalled as they were; it’s too obscene to be told . . . here are millions willing to die in German Europe, but the very idea of a concentration camp holds many of the bravest in unspeakable terror. Concentration camp—where men pray for the hour of their death, and are not allowed to die.”—An escaped prisoner speaking in a 8.8. C. feature on a German concentration camp.