Goldstücke as a category. The guards had another name for them: Schmuckstücke, by which they meant useless, dirty ‘pieces’.* In fact these prisoners were simply the poorest of the poor in the camp. Denise Dufournier, a French prisoner who arrived in 1944, described the Schmuckstücke as ‘the most wretched, dirty, and ragged’. Always holding out empty mess tins, ‘they resembled the poor of every country in the world’.
