J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [71]
When Kenneth enters the water at “Wise Guy Rock,” he knows he is about to die. Vincent tells us that he became triumphant and taunted death for its lack of real power over him. “If I were to die or something, you know what I would do?” Kenneth asks. “I’d stick around,” he said. “I’d stick around a while.” Salinger reinforces Kenneth’s spiritual acceptance of death through Browning’s poem much in the same way as he confirmed Babe’s faith through the poems of Blake and Dickinson in “A Boy in France.” His declaration of “sticking around” is in stark contrast to his brother Holden, who will later live in terror of “disappearing.”
Perhaps the relative calm of the race through Germany in early 1945 enabled Salinger to begin dealing with what he had endured since D-Day. “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” shows the author grasping for a spiritual recourse to deny the existence of death, or at least its power. What Salinger could not have imagined at the time was that true hell had yet to come and that he stood only at its doorstep.
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It was Salinger’s intelligence duties that delivered the final horrors of the war. Five months before, the Counter Intelligence Corps had compiled and disseminated a confidential report to its agents entitled The German Concentration Camps. The document named, described, and located fourteen major camps within greater Germany as well as more than a hundred connected subcamps. CIC officers were instructed that upon entering an area suspected of containing one of these camps, it was their duty to make straightaway for its location, where they were to assess the situation, interrogate the inmates, and file a report with headquarters. In addition, any troops not related to the CIC who encountered such places were to contact the nearest counterintelligence agents.
On April 22, after a surprisingly difficult fight for the town of Rothenberg, the path of Salinger’s division brought it into a triangular region approximately 20 miles on each side, situated between the Bavarian cities of Augsburg, Landsberg, and Dachau. This territory held a series of 123 internment camps that together formed the Dachau concentration camp system, places whose stench, according to eyewitnesses, could be smelled 10 miles away. As the 12th Regiment swarmed into the area at the end of April 1945, it inevitably came upon those camps.
On Monday, April 23, Salinger and his regiment were in Aalen and Ellwangen, villages recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as having contained a subcamp of Dachau. On April 26, the 12th reported from Horgau, where another Dachau subcamp was located. On April 27, the regiment stood on the west bank of the Lech River across from the city of Augsburg, the site of two more camps.
On April 28, after traveling through Augsburg, Salinger was likely stationed at Bobingen, the site of both division and regimental headquarters, just 12 and 9 miles north of the infamous camps at Landsberg and Kaufering IV.
On April 30, the day Hitler killed himself in Berlin, the 12th Regiment crossed the Amper River at Wildenroth, midway between Landsberg and the main death camp at Dachau. This route brought Salinger’s division through the area of Haunstetten, the site of one of the largest subcamps in all of Germany and the location of a huge Messerschmitt factory worked by slave labor.
At the time most of Salinger’s fellow soldiers were baffled by what they had discovered. Sensing the war was