Before descending into the depths of human humiliation, where the smell of death mixes with that of shame, I have a question for you. How far would you go to survive one more minute? Would you be ready to lose your humanity to keep your breath? This story is that of the Scheißekommando, the most dreaded commando in the camps, the one of whom we never speak.

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What you are going to hear does not concern heroes of war. It concerns a man alone, facing a cesspit and the whim of a guard who was bored.

Title: Dive until you find it, breathing the smell of hell.

“Why am I doing this, God?” My name was Alexei. I was 23 years old in 1944. I was a Red Army lieutenant captured near Kharkov. Formerly, I was a teacher. I taught the literature of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I loved the smell of old books and creation. But at the Mauthausen camp, I had forgotten these smells. Here there was only one smell—a thick, heavy, greasy smell which stuck to the skin, to clothes, and even to the soul. The smell of the pit.

I had been assigned to the Scheißekommando, the latrine commando. It was the ultimate punishment for Soviet prisoners. The Germans considered us Untermenschen, subhumans, and they thought it made sense that we lived in excrement. Our work consisted of emptying the cesspits of the camp. Not with pumps, not with machines, but with buckets. And sometimes, when the buckets were missing, with rusty pans.

It was a morning in November. The sky was a low, dirty gray, like a worn cloth. It was cold, a damp cold which penetrated to the bones. There were six of us on the edge of the main pit. It was a gaping hole four meters deep, filled with a blackish mass, seething with gas and flies despite the freezing temperature. The smell was so strong that it burned my eyes. It was a mixture of ammonia, sulfur, and rot.

The new ones vomited when they arrived. We, the ancients, had learned to breathe through the mouth in small gulps so as not to smell. I held a long wooden pole, trying to break the jelly-like crust that had formed overnight on the surface of the pit. My bare hands were covered in sores and indelible stains. I didn’t look at them anymore. I didn’t look at myself anymore. I had become a stinking shadow that the other prisoners avoided. Even pity stops where disgust begins.

Around 10 a.m., the silence of our work, punctuated by the filthy splashing, was broken. “Achtung! The Oberscharführer Kurt has arrived.”

Kurt was not an old man. He was my age. He was beautiful in a classical Aryan sense: blond, blue eyes, smooth face. He wore an impeccable, tailor-made uniform. His black boots shone like mirrors. But Kurt had a problem: he was bored. Mauthausen was far from the front. There was no glory here, no battle, just human herd management. So, to kill time, Kurt played.

As we were seated, he approached the pit. He took out a perfumed handkerchief that he pressed against his nose with aristocratic delicacy. “It stinks of death here,” he said in German, his voice muffled by the fabric. “But it’s your natural smell, isn’t it, Bolsheviks?”

We did not respond. We continued to work with our heads down. The golden rule: become invisible. If you are invisible, he doesn’t see you. If he doesn’t see you, you live. But today, Kurt wanted to see. He stopped right at the edge of the pit, where the wooden planks were slippery. He took out a pack of silver cigarettes, patted one, put it to his lips, and then reached into his pocket to pull out his lighter.

It was a magnificent lighter, engraved solid silver. A luxury item that glowed strangely in this miry setting. He activated the wheel. Click! The flame burst forth, small and yellow. He lit his cigarette, took a long breath, and blew the smoke towards us. He played with the lighter. He tossed it up into his leather-gloved hand.

“A gift from my fiancée!” he said, as if he spoke to a friend. “From Munich, of pure silver.”

He was looking at me. He had spotted my broken glasses, my only vestige of an intellectual. “Herr Professor,” he said, “do you know how much this lighter is worth? More than your life. More than the life of your entire commando assembled.”

He threw the lighter in the air, catching it in mid-air. Once, twice. My stomach sank. I knew this game. I had seen cats play with mice before breaking their necks. On the third time, his gesture was deliberately awkward. The lighter hit the end of his gloved fingers. It slipped. I saw the silver object describe a perfect arc in the gray air. It swirled, shining one last time, then it disappeared.

Plop!

A dull, disgusting noise. The lighter had pierced the black surface of the pit and sank.

Kurt shouted theatrically. “Scheiße! Shit! My lighter!” He leaned over the hole, feigning distress. “This is Greta’s gift. I can’t lose it.”

He stood up slowly. His face changed. The mask of surprise gave way to a cold, cruel smile. The smile of a predator who has just found a reason to bite. He pointed his finger at me. His immaculate, gloved hand pointed out the Russian professor covered in filth. “You.”

I froze.

“Yes. You, the Russ, did you see where it fell?”

“Yes, Herr Oberscharführer, in the pit.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

I looked down the four-meter-deep pit, a liquid, toxic, deadly mass. I looked at Kurt.

“Come on,” he ordered gently. “Go get it.”

“But Herr Oberscharführer, I don’t have a pole long enough.”

He laughed. “Who talked about a pole?” He took his gun out of his holster. The movement was fluid, accustomed. “I don’t want anyone to damage it with wood. You go get it with your hands.”

I took a step back. The horror of the request took a few seconds to reach my brain. He didn’t want me to empty the barrel. He wanted me to enter. He wanted me to dive.

“You have 3 seconds, Alexei,” he said, reading my mental state. He cocked the hammer of the gun. The choice was simple. A bullet in the head, right now, clean and fast, or liquid hell.

My body chose for me. The survival instinct is a curse. It makes us accept the unacceptable just to continue breathing, even if the air is poisoned. I put down my pole. I moved towards the edge. The smell became unbearable, and a voice whispered to me: “Don’t forget, if you come back without the lighter, I’ll shoot you. Dive until you find it.”

I approached the edge. The boards were slippery, covered in frost and residue. Below, the black surface was calm and oily. Gas bubbles burst from time to time with an obscene little blop noise. I looked at my comrades. They had stopped working. They looked at me with a mixture of terrified pity and relief. They prayed for me, but they thanked heaven it wasn’t them.

“Schnell! Quick!” barked Kurt, firing a bullet into the air. The sharp crack made a cloud of crows fly away from the neighboring trees.

I didn’t jump. We don’t jump into hell; we slip into it. I sat on the edge. I let my legs dangle. The cold grabbed me as soon as my boots touched the material. It wasn’t water. It was a paste, a dense, heavy, icy mass. I let go. I fell.

The thick liquid swallowed me up to the chest. The thermal shock was violent, but the olfactory shock was worse. Upstairs, the smell was in the air. Here, I was in the smell. It entered through my eyes, through my clothes. It was a chemical burn. Ammonia stung my eyes and burned my throat. I had an immediate heartbreak. My stomach contracted violently. I vomited up my meager morning ration of soup. It fell in front of me, mingling with the remains. A drop of water in the ocean of defilement.

From above, I heard Kurt laugh. It resonated strangely, distorted by the walls of the pit. “It’s good, you’re in your element, Russian! Now, search!”

I tried to move, but it was difficult. The mass stuck to my legs, hindering every movement. I was floundering in the droppings of 3,000 men. I fumbled with my feet. The bottom was soft, muddy. The lighter was small, and the pit was big.

“I don’t feel anything with my boots!” I shouted, my voice broken by panic.

Kurt leaned over the hole. I saw his silhouette silhouetted against the gray sky. He looked like a giant. “With your boots? You think you’ll find a silver lighter with your boots?” He pointed his gun down. “Dive!”

“What? Head underwater?”

“With your hands. Look for the bottom.”

I looked at the black surface 10 centimeters from my chin. To put my head in there, my eyes, my ears, my mouth—it was social death. It was the end of all dignity. If I did that, I would never be clean again. Even if I survived, I would feel that for eternity.

“No, please!”

A bullet hit the wall right next to my ear. Shards of earth and feces splashed into my face. “The next is between your two eyes,” Kurt said. He no longer laughed. He meant it.

I took a deep breath, a last breath of pure air, or almost pure. I closed my eyes so tight that I saw stars. I pinched my lips, I blocked my nose with a hand covered in grime, and I plunged into silence.

As soon as my head went under the surface, the world went quiet. No more crying, no more wind, no more laughter. Just a heavy, crushing pressure on my eardrums. The cold was excruciating. It bit into my skull like a vice of ice. I opened the fingers of my free hand. I groped in the pitch black. I hit rock bottom. It was slimy. I felt indefinable shapes: tissues, stones, bones.

Panic was rising. My heart was beating so hard my chest felt like it was going to break my ribs. I was looking for cold, smooth metal. I found only soft and rotten things. My lungs were burning. I needed air. I stood up. I pierced the surface. I sucked in the air loudly, spitting out the mud that had infiltrated between my lips. I wiped my eyes frantically to see. I held something in my hand. I looked—it was a stone, just a stone covered with slime.

Upstairs, Kurt shook his head. “That’s not it.” He looked at his watch. “You’re wasting time. Greta will be disappointed. Go back.”

I was shaking all over. My teeth chattered. Cold and disgust mixed to form an uncontrollable convulsion. “Let me out! I’m going to die here!”

“If you come out without the lighter, you die. If you stay without searching, you die.” He crouched down. “Do you want to live, Alexei? Then become an earthworm. Earthworms don’t fear the mud. Come on, dive!”

I looked at my hands; they were black. I thought of my students, of my books. Man is a thinking reed, said Pascal. At this moment, I was nothing more than a reed covered in shit. But I wanted to live. So, I dove again.

Second immersion. This time, I went deeper. I scraped the bottom with my nails. I was swimming in the fetid darkness. I was sweeping the floor of the pit, left and right. Suddenly, my fingers hit something. Something hard, rectangular. I tried to grab it. It slipped. My fingers were numb from the cold. I caught up with it. I squeezed it in my fist. It was metal.

I lifted myself up, propelled by the desperate hope of the condemned. I burst from the surface, covered with a black layer, shining like a statue of tar. I raised my hand high.

“I have it!” I shouted. “I have it!”

I wiped the object with my thumb. Under the layer of dirt, a silver shine appeared. The lighter. I had succeeded. I had conquered the pit. I had saved my life. I lifted my eyes towards Kurt, waiting for the order to get out. Waiting for clemency.

Kurt looked at the object in my hand. He smiled. Then, his smile transformed into a grimace of disgust. “You found it? Good.” He stood up and dusted off his impeccable uniform. Good that he didn’t touch me. “But look at you, Alexei, you are disgusting. Do you really think I’m going to take this lighter back now? It was touched by your hands. It’s been in there.” He made a hand gesture as if chasing away a fly. “It is soiled, like you.”

My heart stopped. “What? But you said…”

“I said find it. I didn’t say I wanted it back.”

He took a cigarette out of his package. He turned to another guard who had just arrived. “Hans, do you have a light? Mine fell in the toilets. It is unusable.”

He returned to me one last time. “Keep it, it’s your treasure now. The king of shit and his crown.” He laughed, then added the sentence which sealed my destiny for the day. “Now clean yourself, but not outside. You stay in there until the evening roll call. If you try to get out first, I’ll shoot you like a rabbit coming out of its burrow.”

He left. I stayed there in the middle of the pit with the silver lighter clutched in my hand. It was half past ten in the morning. The evening roll call was hours away. I had to spend the day standing in excrement, freezing, clutching a useless luxury item that had just cost me my soul.

The first few minutes, the adrenaline of survival kept me warm. I had found the lighter, I was alive. But when the sound of Kurt’s boots faded away, the chemical and physical reality of my situation hit me hard. I couldn’t get out. The walls were too slippery, too high. And anyway, the sentries in the watchtowers had received the order: If the black head protrudes from the hole, shoot.

I was doomed to wait. A day’s work, a night’s sleep, a train journey—these are long. But in an open-air cesspit at -5°C, eight hours is a geological eternity. The cold began its undermining work. The material around me, stirred by my dive, began to freeze again. A crust reformed, imprisoning my chest like a corset of frozen concrete. My legs no longer felt anything. The blood had deserted my extremities to protect my vital organs. I didn’t chatter my teeth anymore. I had passed to the next stage: convulsive rigidity.

But the cold wasn’t the worst part; it was the silence that wasn’t silent. The pit was alive. The gases rose—methane, ammonia. My head was right above the surface. I was breathing this pure poison. My head started to spin. Black dots danced before my eyes. I started to become delirious. I thought of my classroom in Kharkov. The walls weren’t green, but the glass flowed, melted, became brown. I was trying to recite a poem by Pushkin to keep my mind hooked to something beautiful. I loved you, and my love perhaps… but the words tasted like ashes and excrement. I couldn’t defile poetry with that mouth.

Towards noon, the social ordeal began. It was break time for the Quarry commando. I heard heavy footsteps on the boards above me. The disjointed, separated boards which served as a latrine. Tired steps, sighs. The prisoners came to relieve themselves. They didn’t know that I was there, just below. Or maybe they didn’t care. Dysentery does not warn.

I saw a shadow above me. The light was blocked by a crouching figure. I wanted to shout, No, wait, there is someone! But what right did I have? They were sick. They were terrified of the Kapos who timed their trips to the latrines. They didn’t have a choice. I pressed myself against the muddy wall. I lowered my head. I turned up the collar of my soiled jacket to cover my hair and waited.

What fell from above was not rain. It was the final humiliation. The man above groaned in pain. He had the bloody diarrhea of the camp. And me down there, I received everything. I cried quietly. My tears traced white furrows on my blackened face. I was no longer a man. I wasn’t even an animal anymore. Animals don’t do that to their fellow creatures. I had become the receptacle, the living trash can of the Third Reich.

The man got up, adjusted his pants, and then looked through the cracks in the boards. He saw something moving downstairs. He saw my eyes shine in the fetid darkness. He jumped.

“My God!” It was a Frenchman. I recognized him by his accent. He leaned down. “Hey, there is someone downstairs!”

“Shut up!” I whistled, finding the strength to speak. “Shut up, or they are going to shoot!”

He remained frozen. He understood the horror of what he had just done involuntarily. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry, comrade, I didn’t know.”

He reached into his pocket. He dropped something. It wasn’t a stone; it was a piece of bread. A small hard crust, as big as a walnut. The bread fell into the mud 10 centimeters from my shoulder. It floated for a moment on the crust. I looked at this bread. I had hunger, a wolf’s hunger, but the bread touched death.

The Frenchman left, chased by a Kapo. I was left alone with the soiled piece of bread. I reached out my hand. I took the bread, I wiped it on my sleeve—a ridiculous, absurd gesture—and I ate it. I ate the bread covered in shit because I wanted to live. Because eight hours is long, and my body burned those last few calories to not freeze.

As I swallowed, I felt something break permanently inside me. The teacher was dead. The one who remained was a creature capable of anything.

Hours passed. The sun began to decline. The cold intensified. I no longer felt my limbs at all. I didn’t even know anymore whether I stood or floated. I still held the silver lighter in my left hand. It had become hot, warmed by my palm. It was the only clean thing, the only precious thing. I was talking to it. You are beautiful, you shine. You are silver. I was going crazy. I was talking to a lighter so as not to scream.

At 5 p.m., the light changed. The winter twilight made the pit even darker. I started to fall asleep. It’s a sweet death, hypothermia, how it rocks you. You feel well, you’re hot, you want to close your eyes and let it flow. Sleep, Alexei, a voice told me in my head. Let go, it’s over. You have struggled enough.

My knees buckled. Liquid came up to my chin. I was going to drown in excrement, gently, without making noise.

Suddenly, the siren screamed. Roll call. The strident sound pierced the fog of my brain. Roll call. You had to be there. If we were not there, we were considered escaped. And if we were considered escaped, they would kill ten men from our barracks. Ten men. My friends. Ivan, little Misha, old Sergei. I couldn’t kill them with my weakness.

I opened my eyes. I screamed a changed scream to wake up my muscles. Stand up! Stand up, carrion! I tried to move. My legs were caught in brown ice. I had to break it with my fists. I moved towards the edge, centimeter by centimeter, haltingly. I reached the rotten and slippery wooden ladder that hung to the side. I raised my arm, grabbed the first bar. My hands were slipping. I no longer had any grip strength. I used my teeth. I bit the wood covered with filth to hoist myself up.

I was going up. I was coming out of the grave. When my head went over the edge, the icy wind slapped me. It was the most beautiful feeling in the world: fresh air. I rolled onto the frozen ground next to the pit. I was a shapeless mass, stinking, shivering.

A guard saw me. He wrinkled his nose. He didn’t even point his weapon. He just went back three meters. “Raus! Out!” he shouted, pointing towards the camp. “Go get in line, pig!”

I tried to get up. I fell back. I got up again. I walked. I was walking towards the Appellplatz. I left behind me a black trail on the white snow. The other prisoners moved aside as I passed as if I were the plague incarnate. The Red Sea opened before Moses. But it was a sea of disgust.

I was alive. I had the lighter in my pocket. But I knew the hardest part was not finished. The hardest part would be this evening at the barracks, when I would have to wash without water, when I would have to sleep with this smell, when I would have to face the gaze of others who had seen what I had become.

The evening roll call was static torture. I stood in the last row. The cold of the night had frozen the layer of filth on my clothes, forming a rigid shell that burned my neck skin with every movement. Around me, a two-meter void had formed. The guards passed by, holding their noses. Even the police dogs, usually aggressive, retreated growling, disturbed by this smell which was not that of prey, but that of carrion.

When the order to break ranks was given, I headed towards Block 20, my refuge, my home. I dreamed of heat. I dreamed of collapsing on my pallet between Ivan and Sergei and sleeping until death. But when I crossed the door of the barracks, the dream broke. The warmth of the room, instead of comforting me, melted the ice on my clothes. The smell that was contained by the frost exploded. In a few seconds, the confined air of the dormitory became unbreathable. A dense, hot, suffocating stench invaded the space. The 300 men choked.

Then the whispers started. Whispers of anger. “It’s the Russian. It’s Alexei. Good God, get out of here, we can’t breathe.”

I moved forward to my usual place on the third bunk level. Ivan was there. My friend Ivan. We shared our bread. I supported him when he had typhus. He looked at me when I arrived. He put his arm in front of his face. I saw him crying. Tears of shame, but also of rejection.

“Don’t come here, Alexei,” he begged. “Please, we’re going to vomit. We won’t be able to sleep.”

“Ivan, it’s me. I’m cold.”

“I know!” he shouted, a note of hysteria in his voice. “I know it’s you, but you smell like death. Go away.”

The block leader, a Polish political prisoner, approached with a stick. He didn’t hit me. He pointed to the door. “Not on the beds. You are going to contaminate the benches where we sleep? Sit near the door, where there are drafts, and if I hear you move, I’ll throw you out in the snow.”

I looked at my comrades. Nobody held my gaze. They lowered their eyes. They were ashamed to reject me, but their physical disgust was stronger than their loyalty. The Oberscharführer Kurt had succeeded. He had broken the brotherhood without even lifting his little finger. He had made me an outcast among the outcasts.

I went near the door. The floor was raw, frozen concrete. The wind passed under the poorly adjusted shutter. I sat down. I squeezed my knees to my chest. I couldn’t sleep like that. I felt dirty all the way to my bones. I had to wash. I waited for silence to fall on the block. Towards midnight, I got up slowly. I went out. It was minus 10 degrees. The moon illuminated the camp with a pale light.

There was a pile of dirty snow near the wall of the barracks. I undressed. I took off my cardboard jacket. My rigid pants. I found myself naked in the polar night. My body was a white skeleton covered with black spots. I took handfuls of snow and I scrubbed. The snow was abrasive like sandpaper. I rubbed my chest, my arms, my legs. I wanted to snatch off this second skin that my body had been given. I rubbed until the skin turned bright red, until I was bleeding. Blood flowed onto the snow. It was good. The blood is clean; the blood is noble.

But the smell remained. It was embedded in my pores. I had the feeling of being branded red. I was shaking so hard that my bones collided. I put my clothes back on. I had no choice. This was what it was like to freeze to death. I put the soiled fabric on my raw skin. It was torture. I entered the barracks. I curled up in my corner near the door. I couldn’t sleep.

I searched my pocket. My fingers touched the cold metal: the lighter. I took it out in the moonbeam that passed through the door slot. It was shining. A little rectangle of pure silver, engraved with Gothic initials. It was an object from another world, a world of heated living rooms, of cigars, of women in silk dresses. It belonged to Kurt, to the man who had looked at me, laughing. Kurt threw it away because I had touched it. To him, I was contagious. My subhuman taint had destroyed the value of silver.

I stroked the metal with my skinned thumb. I pressed the dial. Click. A small flame appeared. Straight, blue at the base, yellow at the top. I fixed my eyes on this flame. Fire is purifying. Fire never gets dirty. Whether it burns wood, coal, or garbage, fire remains fire. I brought my hand closer to the flame. I felt its tiny warmth.

A dark idea sprouted in my numb mind. I will not sell this lighter. Nobody would buy it anyway. I won’t throw it away. I will keep it. Not like a memory, but like a weapon. Kurt thought he broke me. He thought that I was going to die of shame or cold this night. But he had given me, without knowing it, the means to hate him concretely.

I looked at the dancing flame. You think I’m shit, Kurt? I whispered to the flame. But it’s you who’s rotten. Me, I am just dirty. The dirt will go away. But you, your rottenness is eternal.

I closed the flap. Snap! The darkness came back. I squeezed the lighter in my fist like holding an unpinned grenade. I was no longer cold. Hatred kept me warm. I swore to myself to survive just to see the day when men like Kurt would be dragged through the mud in turn.

But destiny, this tragic joker, had another plan for the next day. Because you do not dive with impunity into the bowels of disease. In the early morning, when the siren screamed, I couldn’t get up. It was not the cold; it was an inner fire: typhus. I didn’t live to see the end of winter.

Typhus is a voracious beast. It devoured me from the inside out in three days. I remember the fever. It was gentle compared to the cold of the pit. I remember Ivan, my friend, who braved his disgust to come and sit next to me, braving the orders, braving the stench that emanated from my pores.

“Forgive me, Alexei!” he cried, wiping my forehead with a damp cloth. “I was scared. I left you alone.”

I couldn’t speak anymore. My throat was swollen, dry as old leather. I looked for his hand. I slipped the cold object into his palm. The lighter. He looked at it, horrified.

“Throw that away!” he whispered. “It’s cursed.”

I shook my head. I gathered my last breath to whisper. “Keep it! That’s his name. This is the proof.”

I died on December 12, just before dawn. My body was thrown into the mass grave, joining thousands of anonymous others. But the lighter stayed. Ivan kept it. He hid it in his boot against his skin, burning like a secret.

5 months later, Mauthausen fell. American tanks crossed the gates. The stone eagles were felled. It was chaos. The SS were fleeing towards the forests, changing uniforms, burning documents. The Kapos were lynched by the prisoners, drunk with vengeance.

Ivan was still alive, skeletal, haunted, but alive. He stood near the main entrance, looking at the columns of German prisoners captured by the Americans. US soldiers were sorting the captives. SS to one side, Wehrmacht to the other. Most Germans raised their hands swearing that they were just simple cooks, drivers, or accountants forced to work there.

“Nix Nazi!” they shouted. “Nix SS!”

Suddenly, Ivan froze. In a line of men in Wehrmacht outfits—the regular army, less suspect than the SS—he saw a familiar silhouette. The man no longer had his impeccable black uniform, to be sure. He wore a soldier’s jacket that was too big, dirty, and torn. He had rubbed his face with dirt to appear miserable. But Ivan recognized the walk, this arrogant way of walking even in defeat, and especially his cold blue eyes, which scanned the crowd with contempt: Kurt.

He was trying to blend in with conscripts to escape judgment. He was telling something to an American GI, miming that he had been injured on the forehead. The American soldier seemed to hesitate. He was going to let him pass into the line of ordinary prisoners.

Ivan ran. His weak legs barely carried him, but rage gave him wings. He jostled the other deportees. He crossed the safety cord.

“Stop!” he screamed in Russian, then in bad German. “Halt! Das ist kein Soldat! It’s not a soldier!”

The GI raised his M1 Garand rifle. “Back off! Back off!”

Kurt turned around. He didn’t recognize him. To him, all the prisoners looked the same: shaved heads, empty eyes. “This madman is attacking me!” shouted Kurt in German. “I am a simple corporal. I have never set foot in the camp.”

Ivan stopped two meters from him. He was shaking. “You’re lying,” said Ivan. “You are the Oberscharführer Kurt. You were the master of the pit.”

Kurt gave a nervous but confident laugh. “The pit! What pit? You’re crazy, my old man! Look at my hands. I am a fighter, not a toilet guard.” He showed his hands. They were dirty, blackened by the earth. “I have no proof on me. No tattoo, no papers. It’s my word against that of a delusional Bolshevik.”

The American soldier watched the two men, undecided. Without proof, he could not execute a prisoner of war. Kurt smiled. That same smile he had when he threw away the lighter. “Let me pass,” he told the GI.

It was then that Ivan rummaged through his boot. “Wait,” said Ivan. He brought out the object: the silver lighter. Even dirty, even tarnished by the past months in a boot, it had kept its nobility. Ivan held it out towards Kurt. “You lost something, Herr Oberscharführer?”

Kurt’s face decomposed. He looked at the lighter as if he saw a ghost. He recognized the engraving, the intertwined initials, the gift from Greta, his fiancée from Munich.

“Where? Where did you get this?” he stammered, instantly losing his mask of an ordinary soldier.

“A friend went to look for it for you,” said Ivan with an icy voice. “He dove into the shit because you ordered him to. He died for that.”

Kurt had a stupid reflex, an owner’s reflex. He stretched out his hand to take back his property. “It’s mine. Give it back to me.”

The American soldier understood. Kurt’s gesture was a confession. Only a rich man, an officer, could possess such an object, and only the owner could claim it with such arrogance. The GI grabbed Kurt by the collar of his jacket. He threw him to his knees in the mud. “Gotcha, you son of a bitch.”

The other prisoners who had observed the scene approached. They recognized Kurt. The circle closed.

Kurt screamed. “No, it’s a mistake! Greta!” He looked at Ivan. “Help me, I’ll give you the lighter! I’ll give you everything!”

Ivan looked at the man on his knees. He looked at the lighter in his hand. He turned the dial. Click! The flame burst forth. Ivan approached Kurt. He brought the flame close to the face of the Nazi, who retreated in terror.

“You’re right, Kurt,” Ivan said. “It’s your lighter. But the flame… the flame belongs to Alexei.”

He blew out the flame, then he threw the lighter at Kurt’s feet. “Keep it,” he told the prisoner, who was now advancing alongside others armed with stones and iron bars. “He is all yours.”

Ivan turned around and walked away. He didn’t look at what happened afterwards. He just heard the screams. Screams that sounded strangely like those of a man drowning, not in a pit, but under the weight of his own crimes.

Epilogue: The Eternal Flame.

Ivan returned to Russia. He became an engineer. He never talked about the war. But every year, on December 12, the day of Alexei’s death, he lit a candle on his windowsill. He watched it burn to the end.

They say that hell is a place of fire. But those who lived through Mauthausen know that hell can be cold, watery, and smelly. Alexei was not a fallen soldier in a fight. He didn’t get any medals. He died because a man was bored and wanted to see how far another man could lower himself.

However, it is Alexei who won. He kept his humanity deep down in the pit. He transformed the object of his humiliation into an instrument of justice. He proved that even covered in filth, the soul remains clean if the cause is just.

Today, if you visit the memorial, there is no more smell. Grass has grown back. But if you listen to the wind, you may hear the click of a silver lighter. The sound of memory that refuses to go out.

This was the story of the Scheißekommando. A story which reminds us that dignity does not depend on the cleanliness of our clothes, but on the strength of our minds. If you want to honor the memory of Alexei, this professor who plunged into hell to leave us a lesson, do a simple gesture. Write the word “flame” in the comments to let its light shine brighter than the darkness of the pit.

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