Status Updates From Atemschaukel

Because in the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference, and lose all sexual drive. Of course you go on saying HE or SHE but that’s merely a grammatical holdover. Half-starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.

In any case, the violence meted out by bread justice is different from hungerless violence. You cannot approach the bread court with conventional morality.

Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.

The hunger angel looks for traces that can’t be erased, and erases traces that can’t be saved.

In terms of mathematics, the results could be horrifying: if each person has his own hunger angel, then every time someone dies, a hunger angel is released. Eventually there would be nothing but abandoned hunger angels, abandoned heart-shovels, abandoned coal.

Monstrous tenderness gets tangled in guilt differently from intentional cruelty. More deeply. And for longer.

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don’t expect from them.

Fear of death can become a kind of trance if you try to master it but don’t quite succeed. Even the icy cold that keeps you from moving softens the horror. Death by freezing lulled me into a state where I could surrender to death by shooting.

In the evening, in the shuffle of footsteps on the way home, I often thought: There’s less and less cement, it can disappear all by itself. I’m made of cement, too, and there’s less and less of me. So why can’t I disappear.

And apart from hunger, the only thing in our minds that’s as quick as cement is homesickness. It steals from you the same way cement does, and you can drown in it as well. It seems to me there’s only one thing in our minds quicker than cement, and that’s fear.

Occasionally the objects from the camp attack me, not one at a time, but in a pack. Then I know they’re not—or not only—after my memory, but that they want to torment me.

But however they did it, people always managed to create a lid out of something. And even though it was never really a lid except in words, they kept repeating: That pot needs a lid. Perhaps memory has put a lid on itself when you can no longer say what the lid was made of, and when there was never but always a lid, no matter where it came from.

No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.