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By Root 987 0

shit!” Someone must have gone to squeal to the Wild Boar, because a minute later we saw him walking toward us looking mad as hell. He grabbed the guilty student and started beating him savagely, first punching him with his clenched fists, then kicking him. Battered and wobbly-legged, the boy fell into the septic tank, where he remained trapped for a long time, unable to find a foothold or get anyone to reach in and help him. Content with his work, the teacher lost interest and walked away. After a long struggle, my friend managed to reach the edge and climb out, but he was in such a sad state that no one wanted to help him wash up or bandage his wounds. A few days later he died. We never quite knew of what. But the story has an epilogue: a few days later, his mother went to see the teacher, weeping and asking for her son back. The Wild Boar calmly replied that the boy had said revolting things and deserved what punishment he got. As for his death, well, that wasn’t his responsibility. And then he kicked the mother out!

The Wild Boar treated us more like animals than children—which, he never failed to remind us, was already a considerable indulgence on his part: “Since your parents are counterrevolutionaries, they deserve to die, and you, their children, along with them. Fortunately for you, the Party is kind and its Great Leader magnanimous. He has granted you a reprieve and the chance to redeem yourselves. You should be grateful, but instead you commit further offenses! Commit too many and you will not be forgiven!” We would all lower our eyes, wishing for our torturer’s death. Boys and girls were equal beneficiaries of his undiscriminating brutality and his favorite punishment, which consisted of ordering a student down on all fours and making him or her crawl in front of the class, saying, “I’m a dog . . . I’m a dog. . . .”

Our two women teachers were considerably less rough. We christened one of them, a rotund lady in her fifties, the Chinese Cabbage. Though she was stronger than almost any of the male teachers, she was less severe in her beatings. She did have her forte, however: a nasty pinch that left a big blue patch on your skin. The desire to practice her little specialty could overtake her at any moment, which taught us always to keep out of her reach. The other woman teacher was younger, around thirty years old. She wasn’t mean, but she tried to make it seem as if she was. She often yelled at the students, but there was rarely any anger in her voice. To punctuate her shouting frenzies, she would sometimes hit us on the hands with her ruler, but her blows had no more weight than her yelling. Alas, she left the camp after two years to bring a child into the world. Apart from these women and another teacher I’m still grateful to, the teachers were all brutes. The Wild Boar, with his beatings and his outbursts of unbounded rage, was truly disturbed. The Old Fox, for his part, practiced a cruelty that was nothing short of sadistic. He battered us with method, an adept technician of suffering, always searching for a way to maximize pain. When our hands were stained black from peeling walnuts, for example, he would make us clean them by rubbing them back and forth across the ground. And if ever we didn’t rub hard enough, he crushed our hands beneath his boot.

Trust between student and teacher was utterly impossible under such conditions. As for the teacher who caused our friend’s death, the only feeling that connected us to him was unalloyed hatred. We couldn’t stand the arrogance of these would-be pedagogues, their ridiculous vanity as they tooled around the camp perched on their bicycles. I remember the winter day when we saw the teacher we called the Youngster arrive in the courtyard on his brand-new bike. He tried to show off by coming to a skidding stop, but instead slipped and went flying into the mud. We laughed to high heaven. Crimson with rage, the idiot started chasing us around with a stick—as local custom demanded. All the guards had a right to one of these bikes, which were called Seagulls. Owning a