“Washing each other” is an inhumane “purification” ritual for men…

“Washing each other” is an inhumane “purification” ritual for men…

“Cleanliness is close to holiness,” says the proverb. We wash to feel good, to feel human. But what happens when the act of washing becomes a weapon? In the concentration camps, men marked with the pink triangle suffered particular hatred. For the SS, they were not only prisoners; they were living filth. And the dirt had to be cleaned with a hard brush to the bone.

The story of Antoine is that of a shower which does not wash, but scratches. A story where clear water is tinted with a color that you will never forget. Before entering this cold tiled room, I ask you to subscribe. It’s a free gesture, but it weighs heavy in the balance against oblivion. Activate the bell and tell us in the comments where you are watching this video from. From Paris, from Dakar, from Berlin? Your presence is our strength.

Get ready. What you are going to hear will scratch your soul.

“Please, my lord.”

Part 1: The Dog-Teeth Brush

My name is Antoine. I am 92 years old. I don’t have a brush in my house. No clothes brush, no shoe brush, not even an electric toothbrush that vibrates. I use sponges, soft fabrics, foam. If my fingers accidentally touch rough hairs, my heart stops. I am instantly carried back into the stifling steam atmosphere of Sachsenhausen in 1943.

I was a musician, a violinist. My hands were my treasure. They were insured for a fortune. But at Sachsenhausen, my hands were worthless, or rather, they were only worth what they could destroy. I was a 175, a pink triangle. In the hierarchy of the camp, we were the untouchables. The criminals despised us, the politicians ignored us. For the SS, we were biological errors, a social plague that needed to be cured by forced labor or extermination.

That day was Sunday, the day of the Lord, the day of rest. For us, it was the day of the big toilet. The Blockführer who commanded us, his name was Klaus. Klaus was not a man who loved a dirty scent. He loved order; he loved clinical cleanliness. He often said, “A healthy body houses a holy spirit, and your bodies are rotten by vice.”

He made us walk to the showers. There were five of us, naked, thin as nails, with gray skin and protruding ribs. We were shivering not only from the cold, but from atavistic terror. The showers in the camps were Russian roulette: sometimes water, sometimes gas. But that day, it was water.

Klaus took us into the large white tiled room. The steam was already rising, creating a dense fog that smelled of sulfur and black soap. In the center of the room, there were wooden barrels filled with soapy, icy water. And next to the barrels, there were the tools. It wasn’t a pair of washcloths; it was four brushes. Large rectangular wooden brushes with hairs like dog teeth—roots hard like reinforced wire, bound by thin metal rods. These were brushes made for scrubbing concrete floors, for removing engine grease, for cleaning stables, not for human skin.

“Get into twos,” Klaus barked.

I found myself face to face with a young man. His name was Thomas. He was 19 years old. He had arrived three weeks earlier. He still had that glow of incomprehension in his eyes, a broken innocence. He was handsome despite his thinness. A fragile beauty which here was a death sentence.

“Take a brush each,” Klaus ordered.

I took the object. The wood was heavy, full of water. The hairs were stiff, aggressive. I ran my thumb over it. It stung. It was abrasive like coarse-grit sandpaper. Klaus walked among us, his boots clicking on the damp tiles.

“You are dirty,” he said in a calm voice, almost educational. He didn’t mean mud on our feet. He was talking about our essence. “Your vice is stuck to your skin. It’s a deep filth, a stubborn dirt. Water is not enough, soap is not enough.”

He stopped in front of me and Thomas. He looked straight into my eyes.

“To become honest men, you have to rub. It is necessary to remove the rotten layer.” He pointed at Thomas’s chin. “You, the violinist, you go wash your comrade.” Then he looked at Thomas. “And you, you will wash the violinist.”

The silence in the room was absolute, only troubled by the drip from the showerheads.

“I want to see the skin change color,” Klaus continued. “Vice is black; purity is red. Red like new blood.”

He took his pistol out of its case slowly and placed it on a dry table in plain sight. “Start. Rub the impure areas: back, thighs, and especially the crotch. That’s where the devil hides.”

I watched Thomas; he was trembling in all his limbs. I looked at the brush in my hand. I had to transform this child into live meat. If I didn’t, Klaus would kill us both. I lifted the brush.

“Sorry, Thomas,” I whispered without moving my lips. “Do it,” he breathed, his eyes closed. “Do it quickly.”

I put the brush on his skinny shoulder, and the nightmare started. I moved the brush onto Thomas’s back. It was a child’s back, where each vertebra drew a hill under the thin, white skin. I started rubbing gently. I made circles as if I were passing a sponge. I was trying to use the brush to lather the little bit of gray soap that we had been given without pressing the metal tips against his flesh. Thomas stood stiffly, hands leaning against the wall, head lowered. He didn’t move. He understood my game. We were accomplices in this simulation.

Around us, the noise began. Rub, rub. The sound of stiff brushes hard on wet bodies. A rhythmic sound suffocated by steam. But we could not deceive Klaus. He was not looking at the lather; he looked at the color. He approached us. I felt his shadow before smelling his leather and tobacco scent. He placed his gloved hand on my wrist. A heavy, cold hand. I stopped my movement.

“You are a violinist, yes?” he asked.

I didn’t dare look at him. I fixed my eyes on the drops of water running down Thomas’s shoulder blades. “Yes, Herr Blockführer.”

“I see that,” Klaus continued. “You caress. You are afraid of damaging the instrument.” He squeezed my wrist, crushing my bones together. “But here, Antoine, we don’t play music. We strip, we renovate.”

He let go of my wrist suddenly. “This back is still white. White is the color of disease. I want to see life. I want to see pink. I want to see red.” He leaned into my ear and whispered, “If in a minute this back isn’t lively red, it’s yours that I’m going to open with my riding crop. And your violinist hands, I will crush them under my boot.”

It was an impossible choice. My survival or his suffering. I looked at Thomas; he had heard. He turned his head slightly towards me. I saw a tear rolling down his dirty cheek.

“Go ahead,” he whispered. “Go ahead, Antoine, don’t stop.”

I closed my eyes. I thought of a difficult score, an extremely brutal one. I squeezed the wooden handle of the brush and pressed. This time, it was no longer a caress. The dog hairs, hardened by iron wire, bit into the skin. I dragged it down. Rrrr-scrk! The noise changed. It was no longer a wet friction; it was a dry, rasping squeak. Thomas let out a gasp. His body arched by reflex. His muscles contracted under the impact.

I saw four parallel lines appear on his skin. White lines at first, which instantly filled with red.

“Scrub!” barked Klaus behind me. “More rhythm!”

I started again. I rubbed up and down on the shoulders, on the vertebral spine. With each pass, the brush took away the dirt, then the surface layer of the skin. Thomas’s back, once pale, was beginning to look like a geography map of fire. Red patches were spreading, merging. I felt the resistance of the flesh under my hand. I felt the roughness of the spine banging against the wood of the brush. It was excruciating. I had the impression of sanding a living piece of furniture.

Thomas didn’t shout. He moaned softly, a continuous, serious sound that he was trying to keep stuck in his throat. He was tapping his forehead against the wall tiles to transfer the pain elsewhere. Boom, boom. My hands were shaking. But I couldn’t slow down. Klaus was there. He beat time with his foot.

“There you go, it’s better. It’s starting to look like something.”

Thomas’s back was no longer skin. It was a giant inflammation. The pores were dilated, oozing. Tiny beads of blood began to appear like a macabre dew. The soapy water running down his kidneys was no longer gray. It was red.

“Stop,” Klaus said.

I stopped dead, my arm numb, my breath short. I took a step back, horrified by my work. Thomas’s back was almost smoking. It radiated a feverish warmth. Klaus approached. He inspected the work as a controller verifies a sanded wall. He ran his gloved finger over a scratch. Thomas flinched violently.

“The back is acceptable,” Klaus judged. He turned to me with a carnivore’s smile. “But cleaning doesn’t stop there. Vice does not fit into the back, Antoine. Vice lives in front.” He gestured towards Thomas. “Turn around.”

Thomas turned around slowly. He was livid. His lips were blue. He protected his lower abdomen with his thin hands. His eyes begged me. Klaus pointed to the brush that I still held, whose hairs were now tinged with red.

“The genitals,” ordered Klaus. “This is where the infection lies for your species. Rub until it’s clean.”

I almost dropped the brush. The back was taut, resistant skin, but the front was soft, sensitive, intimate flesh. Passing this wire brush over a man’s penis was butchery. It was slow castration.

“I… I can’t,” I stammered.

Klaus took his pistol. He didn’t point it at me; he pointed it at Thomas’s forehead. “You have three seconds to start rubbing. One.”

I looked at Thomas. He closed his eyes and spread his hands. He offered himself to the sacrifice so as not to die right away.

“Two.”

I raised the brush. My violinist hands, which had played Mozart and Bach, were to commit the irreparable. I closed my eyes—not to pray, for God had left Sachsenhausen a long time ago—but so as not to see. I lowered my hand. The contact of the brush on Thomas’s groin was like an electric discharge for both of us. It was an area of thin, tender, hidden skin. An area made for softness. The brush bit into it. I started rubbing. I had no choice. If I didn’t rub hard enough, Klaus would pull the trigger, and Thomas’s brains would end up on the tiles. So, to save his life, I had to torture him. It was the Nazi equation.

On the first pass, Thomas released a sound that I will never forget. A sharp whistle like a kettle exploding. His legs gave out. He slipped against the wall, his knees slamming against each other. I held him by the shoulder with one hand and, with the other, I continued.

“Louder!” Klaus encouraged like a sports trainer. “It has to foam.”

The foam was not white. The black soap mixed immediately with blood. It was excruciating. The brush acted like a rasp on a ripe peach. The skin became inflamed, beaded with blood, then tore superficially. I felt the hairs digging in to hang on. I felt the texture of the flesh change under my hand. It was getting rough, hot, slippery. I was crying. My tears fell into the dirty water of the barrel.

“Forgive me, Thomas, forgive me.”

He no longer spoke. He was gone. He had thrown his head back, mouth wide open in a silent scream, eyes rolled back. He bit his lower lip so hard that a trickle of blood ran down his chin, joining the blood from his body. It was a nightmare scene. A violinist rubbing a boy’s penis with a floor brush under the clinical look of an SS officer, in the steam of a shower that smelled of death.

“That’s good,” Klaus commented, getting closer to see the details. “Look at this color, it’s the color of purification. The dirt leaves.” He looked at the water flowing down Thomas’s legs. It was clear red. It swirled towards the siphon on the ground. “We wash away sin,” he said with satisfaction.

Suddenly, Thomas collapsed. His legs could no longer carry him. The pain had saturated his nervous system. He fell to his knees in the soapy water and blood that covered the ground. He lay there curled up, protecting his crotch with his hands like an injured animal. Klaus gave a little push with his foot to Thomas’s thigh.

“Get up! It’s not over!”

Thomas tried to get up. He slipped. He fell back. He had no strength left. Klaus sighed, annoyed by this weakness. “Too bad,” he said. “The cleaning is sufficient for now.”

He turned towards me. I was standing with my blood-covered brush in hand, trembling all over my body, my heart on the verge of implosion. I thought that it was over, that I had passed the test. Klaus smiled. That smile that never reached his eyes.

“You have worked well, Antoine. You have a firm hand.” He paused theatrically. “But equality is a virtue, isn’t it? You washed him, now he must return the favor.”

The blood froze in my veins. “No.” I looked at Thomas curled up on the ground, half-dead from pain. “He… he can’t,” I said. “Look at him. He can’t get up.”

“Then help him,” Klaus replied coldly. “Give him your brush.” He pointed his gun at me this time. “Your turn, musician. Put yourself against the wall.”

I dropped my brush. It fell with a dull, damp thud. I helped Thomas get up. He weighed as much as a feather, but he was burning with fever. His eyes were glassy. He almost didn’t recognize me. I put the brush in his hand. His fingers wouldn’t close. He had no grip.

“Hold it here,” shouted Klaus, “or I will cut off your finger to teach you how to hold a tool!”

Thomas squeezed the brush in a reflex of terror. I put myself against the wall. I raised my arms. I spread my legs. I was naked, vulnerable, waiting for the pain that I had just inflicted. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew the biting hairs. I had felt it through the handle. Now I was going to feel it in my flesh.

Thomas approached; he staggered. He was crying slowly, a mixture of snot and tears on his childish face. He lifted his hand. His hand was shaking so much that the brush danced in the air.

“Rub, Antoine,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” “Rub,” I told him gently. “Do it, otherwise he will kill us.”

He placed the brush on my chest. He had no strength. He barely pressed. It was like a clumsy scratch. Klaus was not satisfied.

“Are you making fun of me?” he roared. “You caress him? Do you want me to come help you?”

Klaus took a step towards us, raising his heavy boot. Thomas, terrified, found a desperate reserve of energy. Fear gave him a strength he didn’t really have. He pressed and started rubbing. The brush, already stained with his own blood, entered my skin. The pain was immediate, dazzling. The metal tips tore apart my epidermis, but it wasn’t the physical pain that was killing me. It was the horror of seeing this child, whom I had myself mutilated a few seconds earlier, forced to mutilate me in turn.

We were trapped in a loop of infinite violence. Thomas’s blood mixed with mine on the brush. Our impure blood mixed. And Klaus watched fascinated. For him, it was not torture; it was social hygiene. He watched two men destroy each other, washing away their fault in their own hemoglobin.

Thomas rubbed. He cried while rubbing, and suddenly the brush slipped from his hands. It fell to the ground. Thomas collapsed on top of me, his head hitting my shoulder. He didn’t move anymore. He had fainted. Klaus approached. He gave a kick to Thomas’s ribs. The inert body rolled onto its side, splashing red water.

“Fragile,” Klaus spat. He looked at me. My torso was bloody. I could barely stand. “The session is over,” he declared, as if closing a file. “Take him away. If he can’t walk tomorrow, he will go to the chimney.”

He put away his weapon, adjusted his perfect cap, and got out of the shower without a backward glance, leaving behind fifty flayed-alive men and water which had definitively changed color. Silence fell on the shower room. A heavy silence, disturbed only by the lapping of water. Klaus was gone. We were alone, fifty shadows flayed in the steam.

I looked at Thomas. He was curled up in the fetal position, trembling with violent spasms. His skin, the place where I had rubbed, was no longer skin. It was a red pulp, shiny, swollen.

“Thomas! Thomas, get up.”

He opened one eye—glassy, full of terror. “Is he gone?” he whispered. “Yes. We have to go. If we stay here, the Kapos will beat us.”

I helped him stand up. As soon as he moved his legs, he pushed out a muffled cry. The skin on the inside of his thighs rubbed against each other. It was like fire on fire. He held onto my hand. I supported him by the waist. My own chest burned horribly where he had brushed me. But my pain was bearable compared to his. I had scratches. He had been passed through steel wool.

We went out into the locker room. Our clothes were thrown there in a pile. Our scratched pajamas. It was a coarse blend of cotton and dirty rough wood fibers. We had to put them back on over raw flesh. I saw Thomas hesitate. He looked at his pants as one looks at an instrument of torture.

“I can’t,” he cried. “I can’t put that on.” “You have no choice,” I said hard. “Outside, it’s freezing. If you go out naked, you die. Put it on.”

I helped him. Putting on these pants was a reverse surgery. The moment the rough fabric touched his wounds, he turned white. He bit his hand so as not to scream. The fabric acted like a second brush. It snagged on emerging crusts. It drank the blood and lymph. In a few seconds, two dark spots appeared at the crotch of his pants. The blood was already seeping through.

We went out. Crossing the Appelplatz was an ordeal. The icy wind got under our clothes, drying the blood, sticking the fabric to the skin. I was almost carrying Thomas. He walked with his legs apart like an incontinent old man, grimacing at each step. The other prisoners watched us pass. The red triangles (politicians) turned their heads. The green triangles (criminals) sneered.

“Hey, the queers have taken their bath!”

No one helped us. Camp solidarity often stopped at the color of the triangle. We were the outcasts of outcasts.

We arrived at the block. The smell of heat, sweat, and latrines welcomed us. I hoisted Thomas onto our lower bunk on the third level. He collapsed on wet straw. He was shaking so much that the wood of the bed was vibrating. His fever was going up. The inevitable infection was already galloping in his blood. You don’t rub skin until it bleeds with a dirty brush without inviting death.

I sat next to him. I tore off a piece of my own shirt, the least dirty part on the back, to try to dab his wounds. But it was useless. The blood continued to ooze, mixed with a clear liquid. Thomas grabbed my hand. His palm was hot.

“Antoine,” he said in a whisper. “I am here.” “Antoine, my hands.” He looked at his delicate hands, his pianist’s fingers. He played the piano, not the violin. I had forgotten. “I hurt you, Antoine. I hurt you with the brush.”

He didn’t cry for his own pain, but for mine. He was worried about scratching my chest. That was Thomas: a pure soul in a rotten world.

“No, my friend, you haven’t done anything to me. You had no strength. It’s just a scratch.” I showed him my torso; the traces were red and swollen but superficial. “Look, it’s nothing.”

He seemed relieved. He closed his eyes. “I am cold, Antoine. I’m so cold.”

I lay against him. It was dangerous. If a Kapo saw us stuck together, two pink triangles, it meant immediate death for indecent behavior. But he was going to die of cold. His body could no longer regulate its temperature. So, I took the risk. I put my back against his to give him my heat without touching his skin.

Night fell on Sachsenhausen. In the blackness, I heard Thomas’s breathing change. It became wheezy, fast. The delirium began.

“Rub!” he murmured in his sleep. “Rub again, it’s dirty. It has to be red.” He moved his hands in the empty air, mimicking the gesture of the brush. He was cleaning an imaginary body. I took his hands to make him stop. I looked at the wooden ceiling above us. I thought of Klaus, of his cleanliness, of his impeccable uniform. He had succeeded. He didn’t need a gas chamber for us. All it took was a brush and a little soap. He had transformed our intimacy into gaping wounds. He had made our own bodies our tombs.

Around 3:00 a.m., Thomas screamed. A short, terrible cry. He woke up with a start. “It burns! It eats me!”

I tried to calm him down, but when I touched his forehead, I withdrew my hand. He was a furnace. Sepsis. The poison had entered through the thousands of doors that I had opened with the brush. And we had nothing. No aspirin, no clean water, nothing. I knew he wouldn’t see the sun rise. Or maybe tomorrow’s, but no more. And the worst part was that it was me. It was my hands that had opened the door to death. I was his murderer, disguised as a comrade.

The awakening at the camp was not for a moment; it was a shock. At 4:00 in the morning, the siren screamed, a shrill sound that tore the nerves apart. In the block, the Kapos came in shouting, hitting the bedposts with their clubs. Aufstehen! Raus! Standing! Outside!

I shook Thomas. “Thomas, wake up. It’s roll call.”

He didn’t move. His body was a burning stone. I ran my hand over his forehead. He was drenched in a cold, sticky sweat.

“Thomas.”

He opened his eyes. It took him a while to see me. His pupils were black, dilated, eating all the blue from his iris. “I am thirsty,” he whispered. “Antoine. Water.” “We don’t have any water. We have to get out. If you stay here, he’ll kill you.”

I tried to raise him. The moment I sat him down on the edge of the bunk, his pants pulled on his skin. He let out a choked howl, biting his lip. I looked at his legs. The striped fabric was stuck to the inside of his thighs by a dark, hardened substance. The infection had galloped during the night. Klaus’s “cleanliness” had opened the door to all the bacteria in the rotten bunk.

“Come on, come on, lean on me.”

I took him down from the bed. He couldn’t walk. His legs refused to move apart. The inflammation in the crotch was such that the slightest friction was absolute torture. He walked like a disjointed puppet, stiff legs dragging his feet.

We went out into the freezing night, to the Appelplatz, the roll call square. Thousands of men lined up in rows of 10. It was necessary to stand at attention. Head held high, motionless. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for four. I put Thomas next to me in the middle of the row to hide him. I held him by the elbow. I felt his tremors transmit to my own body.

“Hold on,” I whispered to him. “Hold on. Klaus is going to pass. If he sees that you’re faltering, it’s finished.”

But Thomas no longer heard me. He was delirious. “The brush,” he muttered. “It’s quite red. This is why it’s red, Mom.”

The minutes passed as heavy as lead. The day dawned gray and dirty. And Klaus arrived. He walked slowly ahead of the ranks, his crop tapping his boot. He was inspecting his flock. He stopped in front of our group, the pink triangles. He looked for eyes. He knew who he was looking for. He saw us. He smiled. He approached Thomas.

Thomas was pale as laundry, eyes ringed in black, mouth half-open, drooling slightly. He was only standing because I pinned him with my shoulder.

“Here,” said Klaus, “my bad pianist.” He turned towards me. “Did you wash him badly, Antoine? Or maybe he washed you too?” He held out his whip and lifted Thomas’s chin. “Look at me.”

Thomas did not react. His eyes rolled in their sockets. Klaus looked down at Thomas’s pants. He saw the dark, wide spots which stained the fabric at the groin level. The smell was noticeable now. A sweetish and sickening smell. The smell of corrupt flesh.

“Rot,” said Klaus with disgust. “I told you, vice is in the blood. I tried to clean it, but you rot on your feet.” He backed away one step so as not to be contaminated by the air that Thomas exhaled. “He is unfit for work.”

His words were a death sentence. Thomas, in a last burst of lucidity, understood. He grabbed onto my sleeve. His fingers didn’t have strength, but the will was there.

“No,” he whispered. “I can… I can work. Antoine, tell him.”

I looked at Klaus. I wanted to beg. I wanted to say that I would work for two. But Klaus raised his hand.

“Komm her!” he shouted.

Two nursing inmates, brutal Kapos, arrived with a wooden stretcher. They seized Thomas. I tried to retain him. “No, wait!”

Klaus hit me in the face with the handle of his riding crop. A sharp, precise blow on the cheekbone. I fell to my knees. “Stay in your place, violinist,” he said coldly. “Or do you want to take the same path?”

I looked up helplessly from the ground. They threw Thomas on the stretcher like a bag of waste. Thomas screamed when his pelvis touched the wood. A cry that broke through the morning fog. He held out his hand towards me.

“Antoine, don’t leave me! Antoine!”

I saw his eyes. His eyes that had looked at me the day before in the shower, begging me to rub to save him. Today, I had killed him. It was my work. It was my hands which had created the wounds by which death had entered.

The stretcher-bearers took him to the infirmary barracks, the Revier. We knew what happened there. They weren’t caring for people. They gave injections of phenol into the hearts of the unfit. It was quick and economical.

I remained on my knees in the frozen mud. Klaus leaned towards me. “You see, Antoine,” he said softly. “Cleanliness is demanding. It separates the wheat from the chaff. He was too weak to be clean. Stand up in a column for work.”

I got up. I was an automaton. I walked towards the factory. I no longer felt the pain of my own flayed torso. The physical pain had disappeared, replaced by something much worse: the gangrene of remorse.

All day I worked on the assembly line, assembling engine parts. My hands were moving, my agile musical fingers screwing in bolts. But I didn’t see the bolts. I saw the brush. I saw the dog hairs red with blood. I felt the vibration of Thomas’s skin tearing itself apart under my palm. I repeated to myself over and over: I had no choice. Klaus was going to shoot. I wanted to save him. But another, stronger voice replied: You rubbed. You obeyed. You destroyed what you owed to protect.

In the evening, I returned to the block. Thomas’s place on the bottom bunk was empty. There was only crushed straw and a small dark stain where he had slept. Nobody talked about him. A pink triangle less—it meant a ration of bread more for the others. I lay down in his place. I put my head where his was. I closed my eyes and waited for my turn to come. I was hoping that my infection was getting worse. I was hoping the fever would take me away too. I wanted to join him, but my body was treacherous. It was solid. My superficial wounds dried up. I was healing, I was going to survive, and it was the worst punishment.

I survived. It’s a strange verb. We imagine it’s a victory. We imagine fanfares, flags, reunions. For me, surviving was a long punishment. In April 1945, the Soviets entered Sachsenhausen. I was sitting against a wall, skeletal, looking at the passing tanks. I didn’t even have the strength to lift my hand to greet them. A Russian soldier gave me bread. I ate. My body accepted the food, but my mind was stuck in the shower room.

When I returned to Paris, six months later, I tried to resume my life. I found my apartment miraculously spared. I found my violin case. It was there, covered in dust. My old companion, the one with whom I had played Mozart, Debussy, Ravel. I opened the case. The smell of varnished wood and rosin grabbed me. It was the smell of my old life.

I took out the instrument. I tightened the bow. I placed the violin under my chin. I raised my left hand to place my fingers on the strings—my musician’s fingers. And there, I found myself frozen. I looked at my right hand, the one holding the bow. It was not a bow that I saw; it was the coarse wooden handle of a stiff brush. And I didn’t see the strings of the violin. I saw Thomas’s red and torn skin.

I tried to play. I drew the bow, but the sound that came out was not a note. In my head, there was grinding. Rrrr-scrk. The sound of metal bristles on flesh. The sound of cleaning.

I let go of the violin; it fell on the carpet. I ran to the bathroom. I turned on the tap. I took some soap. I rubbed my hands. I rubbed them again and again. I wanted to remove Thomas’s blood. I wanted to remove the sensation of his skin tearing beneath my palm. But the blood was invisible, and you can’t wash what’s in your memory.

I never played the violin again. I sold the instrument the next day. My hands had served to torture a child I loved like a brother. They didn’t deserve to create beauty anymore.

Klaus, the Blockführer, was never found. He disappeared in the chaos of the end of the war like so many other rats who fled the Nazi ship. He probably rebuilt his life. He may have become a respectable family man, a loving grandfather who taught his grandchildren to wash their hands well before sitting at the table. He died of old age, probably in a clean bed. I carry his signature on my torso.

Today, at 92 years old, my scars are still there. They have whitened over time. They look like the scratches of phantom tigers. I never go to the beach. I never take my shirt off. Some lovers after the war, I didn’t let them touch my torso. The area had become forbidden, sacred, and cursed.

The most terrible thing is that society did not welcome us as heroes. We, the pink triangles, were the forgotten ones of deportation. In France, in Germany, homosexuality remained a misdemeanor. Some of my comrades, barely released from the camps, were sent back to prison to finish their sentences according to the penal paragraph. We were told, “You deserved it.” They continued to treat us like dirt.

So I kept quiet. I hid my story. I hid my hands.

But every morning, under the shower, the ritual begins again. I never use rough washcloths, never a brush. I use a very soft natural sponge, full of lukewarm water. I wash slowly with infinite precaution. And when I pass the sponge over my chest, over the trembling scars from Thomas, I close my eyes. I talk to him.

“It’s over, Thomas. We are clean. We were never dirty.”

The Nazis wanted to purify us. They thought that our love was mud. They were wrong. The mud was their hatred. The mud was that brush. My love has remained intact. Thomas died in filth and blood, but his soul was purer than Klaus’s immaculate uniform.

I look at my hands today, stained with old age. They tremble a little, like Thomas’s did that day, but they no longer hold weapons. They hold a pen to write this story. Just so you know: cleanliness is not a question of hygiene; it’s a question of conscience. And my conscience is at peace because I will carry the memory of Thomas until the end.

(Epilogue)

The sound of a violin hesitantly tuning, then a very pure, very sweet melody rises and stops abruptly with a sharp clicking noise.

The story of the pink triangles is one of the most tragic of the Second World War. Considered degenerates to be re-educated through work and torture, thousands of men suffered unimaginable abuses aimed specifically at their privacy and identity. The myth of healing through pain shattered lives far beyond 1945.

Antoine will never play again, but his voice now resonates for those who died in silence. If you looked at your hands during this story, if you felt the weight of this imaginary brush, leave a message. Write the word “hand” in the comments to honor the hands of Antoine and Thomas. Hands that were forced to do evil, but which were actually made for good.

And above all, subscribe. It’s vital. Share this video so that no one can ever say, “I didn’t know about the clean history of these lies.” Thank you for having listened. See you next time for history.