Documentaries and books about the Nazi Holocaust number in the hundreds, if not thousands. Yet very few of these ever focus on the persecution of countless thousands of homosexuals, because the few who survived the death camps themselves continued to be persecuted for decades after their liberation in 1945. This book is the story of an Austrian man who, as of 1971 when he broke his silence, still felt the need to be anonymous. Unfortunately, the shroud of silence has made this major portion of the Holocaust story fall into oblivion. The introductory preface to this book, written in 1994, refers to a study which showed that fully three quarters of the American population had no idea that homosexuals were among the Jews living in the concentration camps and that they were treated just as badly. It also appears to lament the adoption of the pink triangle as a symbol of gay pride. We wear this invention of the Nazis “only because we are not haunted by concrete memories of those who were forced to wear it in the camps.”
The book is written in roughly chronological order, beginning on the day that the narrator is first called in by the Gestapo in 1939. Prior to leaving, the narrator recalls his coming out at home, and the warnings and advice given by his mother at the time, which turn out to be the basis of a lifestyle which allow him later to survive. The book proceeds headlong into life in the concentration camps and does not emerge again until liberation in 1945. Along the way, the horrific details of the worst abuses ever inflicted by men upon other men stack up like heavy bricks. Worse, for those prisoners at the bottom of the pecking order (the gays in their easy-to-spot pink triangles), the abuses did not stop with the German SS overseers. Some prisoners, assigned to and responsible for work details and referred to as Capos, were required to inflict further abuses or face torture themselves and loss of their position.
As if these physical assaults weren’t bad enough, the psychological toil inflicted, particularly on the gays, is unimaginable. The narrator found himself constantly being judged as more contemptible than the murderers and other general criminals (who were the ones most frequently assigned as Capos), and thus more prone to the worst of the tortures and inevitable extermination. Yet, blessed with good genes, a sharp mind, an unquenchable will to live, and some dumb luck, certainly, he managed to avoid both on many occasions.
Unexpectedly, perhaps, the narrator’s need to tell this story seems much more about portraying the absurdity of homophobia than about hoping for punishment for the Nazi perpetrators, or even receiving compensation for himself. Throughout the book, he’ll step away from a story to ask, how did I, imprisoned for having loved somebody, victimize anybody? Indeed, it’s a question that still must be asked today. Also, he frequently wonders how the non-gay Capos, who all have taken male lovers and are thus openly practicing homosexuality, can be considered “normal” and quite different from him, who remains a “filthy queer” in their eyes. In the end, his thoughts are no longer of himself but of the way in which gay people, no matter how decently they live, face the same contempt by fellow humans that they did 50 years prior. “The progress of humanity has passed us by.”
Luckily, he is not completely correct. But his story is one that must never be forgotten, for it encourages us, and it helps us understand that progress, though slow, is worth the fight. This book should be required reading for all.