By Gustav’s reckoning, fifty to sixty people a day were dying of starvation and abuse—“the perfect bone mill.” But there was a grit in him that even now would not submit. “One can scarcely drag oneself along,” he wrote, “but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi, the Indian freedom fighter, as my model. He is so thin and yet lives. And every day I say a prayer to myself: Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth—the SS murderers must not beat you.” He thought of the line he’d put in his poem “Quarry Kaleidoscope” five years earlier: Smack!—down on
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