Survival is not all there is
M. R. D. Foot
This book is both fascinating and appal- ing. It explains, in precise retrospect, what happened to its author, a young Dutch solicitor who was arrested by the Nazis in April 1942 and was still just alive when Dachau was freed from them in April 1945. Floris Bake Is bases it partly on recollection and partly on diaries he man- aged to keep and to hide at the time, and to recover later.
He survived the bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940, that brought on the Dutch surrender, though his office was burned out. He restarted work, conforming as best he could to the new rules. One of his clerks started up a resistance movement, without telling him; and was betrayed by a double agent. The whole staff of the office were arrested.
He spent three months in the SS prison at Scheveningen, just north of The Hague, awaiting trial; he can still hear the whistling buoy that broke from time to time into his boredom. To have lost his liberty was a shock and a humiliation; much worse was to come. He was shifted to the political transfer camp at Amersfoort, where he was half-starved and put to hard labour. Nine months in a Wehrmacht remand prison at Utrecht were holiday by comparison, but he was still not a free man He was then packed off to Natzweiler, high in the Vosges, a proper concentration camp, where the staff's aim seemed to be to work the prisoners to death. This was life on another planet: no normal rules of conduct applied.
Death in Natzweiler became common- place. BakeIs several times saw a fellow prisoner being kicked to death. The whole camp was paraded, now and again, to watch a public hanging. One Polish lad spent forty-five minutes on the scaffold as he strangled to death. On this one occasion, the prisoners made a collective gesture: ordered as they were marched away to salute the commandant with a smart 'Eyes Right!', most of them gave 'Eyes Left!' to the body instead.
Otherwise, it was each man for himself. They slept on bare planks, arranged in three tiers. Wily prisoners soon learned — BakeIs learned with them — how useful it was to sleep on the topmost tier; so that diarrhoea and urine did not drip down on one from one's fellow sufferer during the night.
He had still not quite reached the bottom; which he touched in some sub- camps, where the numbers were smaller, the guards even fiercer; and as they marched out to work, the local inhabitants mocked them. Finally, in early April 1945, he was sent to Dachau, where he was kept for some hours standing naked out of doors, in a crowd and in pouring rain, for a start; even that he survived, and he picked his way home through ruined Germany by the end of May.
What made it all bearable to him was that in the camps he rediscovered God: faith, as well as strength, pulled him through. This does not make his book easy to categorise: it is both war autobiography and religious discussion. It is formidably well written, beautifully translated by Herman Friedhoff, and perfectly relevant to the present day: as BakeIs rightly says, 'this scum should never be allowed to rise again.'
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