Will we ever get it?
The Seventh Cross
Written by Anna Seghers
Translated from the German by James A. Galston
Little, Brown And Company, Boston
1942
"Never perhaps in man's memory were stranger trees felled than the seven plane trees growing at the length of Barrack III. Their tops had been clipped before, for a reason that will be explained later. Crossboards had been nailed to the trunks at the height of a man's shoulder, so that at a distance the trees resembled seven crosses.
The camp's new commander, Sommerfeld by name, immediately ordered everything to be cut up into kindling wood. There was quite a difference between him and his predecessor, the gallant Fahrenberg, conqueror of his own home town, Seeligenstadt, where to this day his father runs a humble plumbing shop on Market Square. The new commander had seen service in Africa as a colonial officer before the war, and afterward he had marched upon Hamburg with his old major, Lettow-Vorbeck. All this we learned much later. The old commander had been a fool given to unpredictable fits of cruelty; the new one was a methodical, matter-of-fact fellow whose every action was dictated by cold calculation. Whereas Fahrenberg might suddenly have had us all battered to bits, Sommerfeld would have the men lined up and every fourth one beaten to a pulp. That, too, we did not know as yet. What if we had known it? What would it have amounted to, compared with what we felt when the six trees, and finally the seventh one, were cut down? A small triumph, assuredly, considering our helplessness and our convicts' clothing; but a triumph nevertheless -how long was it since we had felt the sensation? - which suddenly made us conscious of our own power, that power we had for a long time permitted ourselves to regard as being merely one of earth's common forces, reckoned in measures and numbers, though it is the only force able suddenly to grow immeasurably and incalculably."
(to RWL, with abounding love, my brother!)