Buried Alive

FROM DAY TO DAY (485 pp.)--Odd Nansen--Putnam ($5).

At 7:30 p.m., Jan. 13, 1942, a Norwegian sheriff and two Germans walked up to Odd Nansen's house and arrested him. Odd was the son of Fridtjof Nansen, the famed Arctic explorer,* a well-known architect and a friend of Norway's royal family (which was his crime).

For nearly 3 1/2years thereafter, Nansen descended the scale of German prisons. From the county jail, he was taken to the Gestapo prison in Oslo, thence to Grini concentration camp near by, and finally to sinister Sachsenhausen in Germany, where he existed for a year and a half. It was May 1945 before he got back to his wife and their four children again.

"A Few Shots . . ." Out of this night he brought, incredibly, a diary. He wrote it, at unthinkable risk, on fine paper captured from the Russians and used in the camp as toilet tissue. He concealed the diary in a succession of common breadboards, split into thin halves, hollowed out inside, and glued together again. He began the diary in the expectation of some day showing it to his wife, but soon "it became a private manner of forgetting."

The diary has been published in a book which the publishers call "a classic of World War II." In a way it is. Certainly it contains one of the most frightful stories ever printed. A few of his notes suggest the unvarying tone of the whole.

Oct. 14, 1943 (at Sachsenhausen). "A transport of prisoners reached the camp. As usual they were counted . . . There were two men extra . . . and German figures must and shall come right. A few revolver shots . . . worked out the sum . . . the two were carried away . . ."

June 27, 1944 (at Sachsenhausen). "A Ukrainian boy of 19 was hanged before the gateway . . . last night. [He] had been employed in the shoe factory. There he had taken two leather bags and cut shoe soles out of them. For which he was now to have 50 blows and then be hanged!"

Feb. 12, 1945 (on the Jewish quarter at Sachsenhausen). "Dante's Inferno couldn't be worse. There were more than a thousand Jews; that is, they had once been Jews and human beings, now they were living skeletons, beastlike in their mad hunger. They flung themselves on the dust bins, or rather plunged into them, head and shoulders, several at a time; they scratched up everything, absolutely everything that was lying in them, potato peel, garbage, rottenness of every kind . . . The whole time, without a break, the blows from rubber truncheons were hailing down on them . . ."

March 24, 1945 (on a camp at Bergen-Belsen). "It was a common thing to get hold of a corpse to sleep on, so as to keep dry. Nor was cannibalism a rare phenomenon. One Norwegian saw a prisoner cut the liver out of a dead body and eat it."

March 31, 1945. "For many it was too much altogether . . . When they saw the white Red Cross busses [which they took to mean liberation] they collapsed and died--literally--of joy!"

There seemed to be some direct connection between the captors' increasing use of violence and their failing power. Humiliating and depressing though it was, the imprisonment in Norway had been mild by comparison with the hell of Sachsenhausen. Once the routine was broken with what seemed almost a pastoral interlude; the prisoners were sent to the extreme north to build snow tunnels to keep the roads open.

At Grini, Nansen and his friends had a favorite joke; they talked like old men, and pretended that they had been in the camp 40 years. It maddened the German guard, who could not understand at first that it was supposed to be funny. The German would ask darkly, "What has happened to your voices?"

Brothels & Bach. The combination of the Nazis' unearthly ruthlessness and idiotic efficiency makes the last scenes at Sachsenhausen unforgettable. Around & around the square a patrol of prisoners marched, singing and whistling, pepped up with some new energy pill that was being tested; the condemned men, with crosses on their cheeks and foreheads, were led off to the gas chambers, checked off and counted with precise accuracy. Berlin was in ruins and the Allied armies had crossed the Rhine.

"In the midst of all this wretchedness and horror," wrote Nansen, "we still have [our] Sonderbau, the brothel.* And as an accompaniment to all these 'activities' the loudspeakers thunder, shrill, and bellow around the camp . . . Fifth-rate musical comedy, ditto choral singing, military marches, news, and propaganda, and sometimes, strangely enough, real music--Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann . . ."

Slowly, out of the writhing horror, Nansen himself emerges as a formidable figure: a man of high culture and sensibility, a magnificent observer, a skillful writer, an illustrator of considerable power who sketched as well as wrote what he saw. But what is most astonishing is his oceanic serenity at Sachsenhausen. He rarely lost himself to the horror, frequently found even hell an amusing place. When he came back to the world he was a little surprised and disturbed at having forgotten his home telephone number.

*Who gave his energies after World War I to the cause of displaced persons, and his name to the League of Nations' "Nansen passport" for the use of stateless individuals.

*For prisoners of German stock and others (including the Norwegians) who were considered sufficiently Teutonic by Nazi "race" experts. Sonderbau inmates were prisoners from the Ravensbrueck women's camp who had "volunteered" for the sake of being released earlier.

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