Finally, we arrived at the camp, which was a selection of dilapidated gray wooden buildings surrounded by two barbed-wire fences, and remarkable only because next to the main gate was the steeple of a nonexistent church—one of those sharp, metallic-roofed Russian church edifices that looked like some old Junker’s Pickelhaube helmet. There was nothing else for miles around—not even a few huts that might once have been served by the church to which the steeple had once belonged.

We trooped through the gate under the silent, hollow eyes of several hundred men who were the remains of the Hungarian Third Army; these men were on the other side of a fence, and it seemed we were to be kept separate from them, at least until we had been checked for parasites and diseases. Then we were fed, and having been pronounced fit for labor, I was sent to the sawmill. I might have been an officer, but no one was excused from work—that is, no one who wanted to eat—and for several weeks I spent every day loading and unloading wood. This seemed like a hard job until I spent a whole day shoveling lime, and returning the next day to the sawmill, half blinded by the stuff blowing in my face, and blood streaming from my nose, I told myself I was lucky that a few splinters in my hands and a sore back were the worst I had to suffer. In the sawmill I befriended a young lieutenant called Metelmann. Really he was not much more than a boy, or so it seemed to me; physically he was strong enough, but it was mental strength that was needed more and Metelmann’s morale was at a very low ebb. I’d seen his type in the trenches—the kind who awakes every morning expecting to be killed, when the only way of dealing with our predicament was to give the matter no thought at all, as if we were dead already. But since caring for another human being is often a very good means of ensuring one’s own survival, I resolved to look after Metelmann as best I could.