A commandant in Sesnovakia ran his camp on the Scheherazade principle. Entertain me every day and your life will be spared. Fail to lighten my boredom and you will be thrown down the latrines, into the dog-pound, under a train, onto the electric wire; the commandant could be inventive with his punishments. But the Scheherazade principle was only a principle. Story-tellers were not in fact in demand in the camp, because the commandant was a xenophobic, German-speaking Czech, and his command of foreign languages was limited. All his guests were foreigners, mostly Poles and Russians and assorted Balkan peoples with a few gypsies and an irregular supply of Dutch. He did have three German speaking Austrian homosexuals under his jurisdiction, one of whom was mute and therefore not the best of story-tellers. The Scheherazade principle was adapted to work in other ways; entertain me with a song, or a dance, or a recitation or a striptease, or an obscenity or an act of cruelty against your fellow inmates, and you can live another day. Most people have one small trick, even if it is only employed to amuse children. Pull a foolish face, fart rhythmically, de-stone cherries with your toes, speak the Lord’s prayer backwards, juggle milk bottles, whistle through your nose, sing falsetto, bray like a donkey, do a card trick, spin a plate, count in threes. Those tricks that could be performed visually and without exotic props worked best in Sesnovakia, but even so, few people can satisfactorily continue to amuse day after day with only one small modest entertainment. So these people with a limited anti-tedium vocabulary went to the wall, or rather the fence, quite quickly, unless they could offer something else. That something else in some cases was a little gold.

Difficult to know where the gold came from. But when you are desperate to sleep another night in a below-freezing hut on a splintered wooden bed covered in vomit without a blanket, scratching yourself down to the bone because of the jumping lice, it is amazing what resources you can stoke up from the recesses of your abilities.
Realising that his guests could produce such golden miracles, the commandant permitted the socially under-talented to pay off their entertainment-dues with gold. Needless to say in stories like this, the commandant grew greedy, stepped up the pressure and became more inventive with the sadism. His, as it were, now paying guests became more inventive, meaner, more competitive, rasher, doing great injury to one another to see another foggy day in this paradise of North Poland in the Winter-time. Bring me a ring a day.

Bring me two rings a day. Bring me five rings a day.

Work parties sent out at dawn to dig sewage trenches near a village with one deserted church and two small farms and a cobbler’s shop amazingly returned with gifts for the commandant. The smallest dental work of the camp’s inmates was relocated. The woman’s quarters became suddenly a rich mineable source, and the segregation laws became curiously lax. Even more curiously, the guard huts were not so completely out of bounds. The commandant, by inference, was allowing his guests to steal from their jailers. He found himself becoming a richer man. He placed half his wealth in the Deutsche Bank, the other in his own particular no-questions-asked bank situated in a black trunk under his bed.

The mute, Austrian, homosexual performed his Scheherazade tribute as obscene tricks. He was quite dependable as an innovator. He performed expressionlessly, which encouraged those who doubted he was truly mute to reassess their prejudices. He kept a wedding ring on his person but not on his finger. One day it fell out of its hiding place and rang tinkling on the concrete floor of the bath-house where the commandant and his closest cronies had assembled on one of their regular Scheherazade candle-lit evenings, accompanied by the very best gold-paying guests whose breath and bodies warmed the bath-house just a little. Nothing was allowed to go to waste in a work camp. When the metallic sound of the spinning ring ceased to reverberate, three sets of people pounced. First, the Commandant who now knew no shame as far as gold was concerned, second, those inmates who had failed to find the day’s gold quota, and third, the Austrian performer himself. If the Commandant and his eager gold digging guests had learnt ferocious cruelty that is rarely seen outside the gates of Hell, then the Austrian surpassed them. His life was in the wedding ring. He killed the Commandant with a shower pipe ripped from the wall, forcing it into his mouth and his throat in a no-doubt ironic attempt to make the Commandant like himself, first mute and then dead. The Austrian and forty-nine camp guests were butchered to death in six minutes. The fallen wedding ring disappeared.

The Commandant’s gold in the Deutsche Bank was safe enough, but the gold in his trunk under his bed was soon pilfered. First, wrapped in a cement sack, this gold journeyed to Warsaw and then to Vienna, transported in an armoured car. It stayed in an apartment belonging to a blind man opposite the SemperDepot for six months, until it was smelted down in September 1943, and, as an oversized shining gold bar, predate-stamped May 1939 to confuse any snooper, it was taken to Cologne and then Baden-Baden where Karlheinz Brockler managed the Gestapo treasury of Baden-Wurttemberg. It stayed there almost for the duration of the war. In fact it was removed from the bank cellars only on May 4th 1945 by Corporal Guelferle, who was acting on orders from Sergeant Hans Doppleman who was fulfilling the directive of Karlheinz Brockler’s brother-in-law Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch who had urgent need of this gold bar along with 99 other gold bars that had been idling there, awaiting events, like all gold awaits events. All gold has a future and patiently waits transformation. The 99 gold bars were packed tightly and neatly in two sturdy black leather suitcases. Most of them were taken on a four day journey to Bolzano in North Italy where the citizens cannot cook a good spaghetti to save their lives, their purses or their moral reputations.