Skip to content 
These long and flexible muscles did not have the necessary brute force to lift granite blocks. His delicate hands, accustomed to gestures graceful, covered themselves with blisters then of calosity. His back, so straight and proud, began to collapse under the weight of the stones. But it dyes by pure will, by refusal to die.
Three weeks later When he arrived, something changed. A morning, instead of being sent to the career, Fernand was summoned by a guard. He was taken to a building away from the camp. A building that other prisoners called Das Whouse, the home of horse riding. Inside, a large empty room with a concrete floor.
And in the center of the room, a strange object. It was a horizontal wooden beam mounted on two supports. She was about 2 m tall. long and 30 cm wide. The top of the beam was not flat. He was cut into an edge, forming a crest acute which ran along the entire length. It looked like a pommel horse gymnastics, but in version nightmarish, in a version designed for hurt.
An officer was waiting in the room, tall, slim, with hair gray and round glasses. He wore the SS uniform with the insignia of Aupsturm Fury. “I am Hans Schreibber,” he said. I was told about you. Fernand remained silent, his heart beating. You are a dancer, it seems. Schreiber approached, examined him in detail. head to toe.
Yes, I see the body of a supple, graceful dancer. He smiles, a cold smile. He pointed to the beam of wood. Do you see this device? We let’s call him from Aspferde, the horse. It’s a rehabilitation tool specifically designed for men like you. Fernand looked at the beam, the sharp edge on the on it. He began to understand with a growing horror to what this object was intended.
“The principle is simple,” Schreiber continued. “You will sit on the horse in Califorchon, stop it between the legs and you will sit as long as I can decide.” Fernand felt his legs weaken. For what ? Schreiber smiles. Because that’s where the problem lies, isn’t it? Between your legs. It’s there your perversion was born.
This is where we must strike to heal you. He gestured to the guards. Undress him. What followed, Fernand described in his testimony of 199 painful precision. He was forced to take off his clothes. Completely naked, he was led towards the wooden beam. They made him climb on it, one leg on each side, the sharp stop directly under his crotch.
Then we made him sit down. The pain was immediate. The wooden edge, hard and sharp blade sank into the flesh more sensitive in his body. His own weight, even if he was skinny, even if he did not weigh more than 60 kg, was enough to create unbearable pressure. Now, said Schreibber, you will stay like that.
If you try to lift, we will attach weights to your ankles. If you scream, we’ll bayonet you. If you pass out, we’ll wake you up. Fernand gritted his teeth. The pain radiated throughout his pelvis, went up along his spine spinal, went down to his thighs. Every second felt like an eternity. Schreiber sat down in a chair facing him. He took ou
and started to read as if nothing had happened. The Minutes passed, maybe hours. Fernand lost track of time. The pain became his whole world. There is no had nothing else left. No more thinking, no more memories, no more hope, just pain. At one point he faints. We woke him up with a splash of water cold. He was put back on the horse.
When Schreber finally decided that it was enough, Fernand could no longer move. They carried him out of the room and thrown into a cell. He remained lying on the concrete floor, unable to close legs, unable to sit, unable to do anything, except moan pain. The next day, a prisoner doctor came to examine him. He noted severe bruising, tissue damage, damage to basin waters.
“Nothing that will heal not,” he said, “my nothing that will heal completely either. You will be in pain your whole life. That’s what they want. That you remember, that every time that you sit down, every time you you squat, you remember this what they did to you.” Fernand was sent back to block 17 after 3 days. He could barely walk.
Sitting down was impossible. He had to remain standing or lying down. But this was just the beginning. Over the following weeks, Fernand discovered that the wooden horse was not a single punishment. It was a program. Schreber had developed a system of progressive session. Homosexual prisoners were submitted to the horse regularly.
Once per week, sometimes more. Each session lasted longer than the previous one. The damage was accumulating and there had variations. Sometimes we attached weights to the ankles of prisoners, increasing the pressure on the wooden edge. Sometimes we did swing the horse, creating movement of excruciating friction.
Sometimes we replaced the wooden beam by an even more metal beam hard, even more painful. Schreber took meticulous notes. He measured the time that each prisoner could endure before faint. He documented the injuries, after-effects, reactions as if he was conducting an experiment scientific. Maybe he believed really that he healed the homosexuals? Maybe he thought that pain could change sexual orientation, or perhaps, more likely, he didn’t believe it at all everything and it was all just an excuse to satisfy his own sadism.
Whatever his motivation, results were the same. Men broken, damaged bodies, trauma that would last an entire life. Fernand undergoes the wooden horse seven times during his first year in Flosenburg. this session of pure torture. This time where his body was broken and poorly repaired, that time when he thought he would die and sometimes wished to die.
But he didn’t die and over time, something in him changed. At the beginning, each session left devastated, unable to think, unable to feel anything other than pain, unable to be anything else than a victim. Then gradually, he developed a form of resistance. Not physical. His body was becoming more more and more fragile, more and more damaged.
But mental, spiritual. During the sessions on the horse, he learned to escape. Not physically, it was impossible, but mentally. He closed his eyes and he danced. In his mind, he was back on stage. The lights were shining. Music played and he danced free, light, graceful. The movements he knew by heart, which he had repeated thousands of times passed through its memory.
His muscles remembered, even though his body was immobilized on this beam of torture. It was his way of resisting, of not give them his soul, even if he destroyed his body. Schreiber noticed this change. One day, during session, he observed that Fernand had the eyes closed, face almost serene despite the obvious pain.
“Where are you?” he asked. Fernand did not answer. He was elsewhere, on an imaginary scene dancing a solo that he had created years ago. Schrebert stood up, approached, slapped him violently. “I asked you a question. Where are you?” Fernand opened his eyes, looked at him and smiled. Somewhere where you can’t reach me, it was the only time Fernand openly challenged Schreiber and he paid dearly for this audacity.
The session was extended by two hours additional. We attack him, he had to be carried out of the room. He could no longer use his legs everything, but something had changed in Schreiber’s gaze, a form of respect perhaps or frustration. He hadn’t succeeded in breaking this man completely. The months passed, war continued.
The news that filtered into the camp were more even worse for Germany. In block 17, the prisoners supported as best they could. They shared their rations, cared for their wounds, watched over the most weak. It was a community of suffering, but it was a community. Fernand befriended a man named Klaus, a German homosexual, former music teacher in Munich.
Klaus was older, wiser and he had survived three years in the camp. He knew the rules, the dangers, the means to stay alive. One evening, after a particularly session brutal, Klaus came and sat down next to Fernand or rather lie down next to him, because neither of them could sit down.
“You know why Schreiber does that?” Klaus asked. Fernand shook his head. Speaking was difficult. The pain radiated into his whole body because he is like us, said Klaus. Fernand looked at him incredulous. I saw it 2 years ago Klaus continued before he became what he is now. He came to block 17 at night. Sometimes he looked the men slept, he did nothing.
He just looked with a look that I know well. You mean he I want to say that he is exactly like us, but he chose the other path. He has chose to hate what he is, to hate him destroy in others because he cannot destroy it in him. Klaus fit a break. That’s why he’s so cruel. It’s not pure hatred, it’s self-hatred directed towards the exterior.