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Chapter 31 Mail censorship We all awaited Saturdaywith great excitement and impatience. This was the only day of the week on which the mail for the prisoners was distributed. The block elder picked up the letters, which had been laid out for each block in the roll-call room of the overseers, which was next to the office of the chief overseer. It is certainly understandable that I quickly leafed through the letters and packages meant for Block II every time, to see if something was there for me. And if there was a letter for me, then my heart beat wildly withjoy; if, however, nothing was there, as happened so often—for we were onlyallowed to receive one short letter offifteenlines everyfour weeks—then my disappointment was great. When I received myfirstletter in the concentration camp from our poor, sick mother, which was so full of worry and goodness, such as only a mother can write, I cried bitterly, out of profound melancholy, for a long time. Now the good woman knew everything, and probably bore my fate even harder than I did. Once I received from dear friends a postcard with the Miinster Cathedral on it. In the background was dear old Miinster, my hometown. Although we were obliged to rip up our mail, I never parted with this postcard until my release. Yes, I can confess without shame that I slept with this card every night and looked at it for a long, long time every evening. "I greet you from far, far away, dear home, I greet you!" My eldest brother wrote to me regularly, reporting all the news from our large family. Unfortunately, I never received some of his letters. For months on end, I went through a period ofwild emotions, when I was especiallyworried about everything dear to me, without receiving one single line. The letters were often cut up, whole parts were scratched out with a knife, other sentences crossed out with a thick red or blue pen mark. My mother, who always commended God's protection on us children in all of her letters, had written in her first letter the sentence: "God bless you, my child!" This simple wish of a deeply religious mother for her poor, tormented child in banishment had been thickly crossed out by the mail censorship office with a red pen, 188 The Blessed Abyss and next to this, in large letters, was the word "Rubbish!" That they would dare to debase so profoundly the most heartfelt feelings of a mother who had raised twelve children, ofwhom five sons were now stationed at all different fronts! But similar comments could be found in almost all letters in which the name of God was simply mentioned. The prisoners often had only a completely empty envelope handed over to them. The letter had simply been taken out. Oh, it was shameful, and there was much crying on these Saturdays after the distribution of the so ardently desired mail! Others received perhaps two complete lines; everything else had been cut off. This also happened to me. Oh, first thejoy of having a letter, and then this disillusion. It would make you cry! And these letters often held very sad news. Many an inmate lay bent over the table crying: one's mother had died; the husband or brother of another had fallen in action; a child at home was deathly ill; a brother was missing or wounded. These evil tidings were quite diverse. Since we had some Gypsies in Block II, almost all of whom could not read or write, they came to me: "Please, read the letter to me!" So I had to be the bearer of joy and sorrow, mostly sorrow, and I had to bear it along with all of them, comforting the crying women. They all wished that I would take part in whatever was upsetting them, and I did it gladly and as a matter of course, for it helped strengthen the community spirit among us. Just as I had to decode and read aloud the newly arrived mail of the illiterates, a whole group of people came to me and asked me to write their fifteen-line letters to their relatives, which were due every four weeks. Then theywould put their three little crosses or their name at the bottom. On these writing days I sometimes wrote sixty or eighty letters, long into the night, and was inaugurated in this way into the most...

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