The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  It wasn’t easy to keep the children together because they played hooky and ran to the kitchen or the potato room where they scavenged for food. They were wild and even cruel, and Himmelblau would often call the culprit into his cubicle and threaten him in his poor Czech.

  ‘I will you a box on the ear give, you horrible pest.’ He waved his hand in the air, but he only beat Foltyn the door boy once.

  In the mornings the Block was full of clandestine activity because Marta Felix and Felsen and even Beran taught forbidden geography, history and politics. They felt secure because Foltyn the guard would warn them at the approach of any SS sentry, so they would switch to a game or a story. That day, however, the boy left the gate unguarded. He was listening to Marta Felix’s lesson and didn’t notice that the Priest, the SS Blockfuehrer with the low voice and hands in his sleeves, had entered the Block.

  He stopped here and there, inconspicuous as a grass snake, and listened to the children. He didn’t understand the language and it took him some time to discover what they were doing. It was fortunate that Fabian noticed the soldier and called out: ‘Attention, attention.’ The children hid their charred splinters and scribbled-on papers and stood up before the SS man could see the reading and writing and the map of Europe that Felsen had drawn for his pupils.

  The door boy was tall for his age, almost a man, and he begged for a different punishment.

  ‘I’ll take anything,’ Foltyn said. ‘Send me to a commando – I’m not afraid of work – but don’t flog me in public.’

  ‘You have done a terrible thing,’ said Himmelblau,’ and you’ll take the consequences. I’ll think about your punishment and tell you tomorrow.’

  He waited a day to let his anger abate, but in the end decided that the culprit had to be punished. He locked the door of his cubicle and beat the boy with a piece of plywood until the youth was bruised and Himmelblau’s hand tired.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he justified himself to Miriam the matron, ‘there is no choice.’

  He thought about the clandestine newspaper which Felsen the communist hung on the back wall, the books, the scraps of writing paper and the rehearsals for the approaching holiday. He thought about the many dangers and he was scared. The children were like quicksilver and always planning some mischief. He knew that the teachers spoke about an escape and a mutiny, but if anybody was caught, it would be he who would be held responsible and punished.

  ‘The Germans,’ he said, ‘might dismantle the Block and send the children to work. The service boys will see Foltyn’s face and be careful. The beating he will forget, but if I send him on the road he will die.’

  He worried about the children but he was also scared for himself, because he knew he wouldn’t live long on the road gang or in the ditch commando. At night he couldn’t sleep and smoked a cigarette, because he was ashamed of his faintheartedness and he felt contrite for beating the boy.

  * * *

  As there were no stories, no adventure books and no fairy tales in Dasha’s tattered pile, the instructors invented what Marta Felix called a walking library. The teachers recalled novels they had read before they were taken to the camps. They prepared a list of books, which they would tell the children in daily instalments. Magdalena was good at Nils Holgersson and his flight with the geese; Shashek told tales about Indians and adventure; and Dezo Kovac, who had attended a religious school, taught stories from the Bible.

  Before the camps Alex Ehren had been a fervent reader. He was the kind of reader to forget the world and lose himself in a book, a trait which enabled him to recall the memories. However, the children preferred Fabian, whose voice rose and fell and turned into a whisper in accordance with the plot. There was a waiting list for his stories and while the children begged Fabian not to stop but go on, they chose Alex Ehren only when no other walking book was available. There were no partitions between the stalls and the children heard the voices on their left and on their right. Sometimes they even forgot to listen to Alex Ehren, because they were so intent on Fabian’s voice from the adjoining group.

  ‘What’s wrong with learning two lessons at once?’ Himmelblau winked. ‘The more they hear the more clever they will be.’

  Alex Ehren didn’t know whether it was a joke or a comment on his inability to hold the children’s attention, but he felt inferior and envied Fabian’s popularity.

  Himmelblau took Dezo Kovac onto the Block after the musician wasn’t accepted into the camp orchestra. The new Children’s Senior loved music and before the war he and Heda, his wife, spent their evenings listening to records of Mozart and Beethoven and even modern composers like Bartók and Schoenberg. Once a month they would dress in their best clothes and travel to Prague to attend a concert. The whole next week they discussed the programme, the soloist and the conductor’s interpretation of Brahms.

  Himmelblau had dreamt of becoming a musician but he was unable to hold a melody and when he sang he was hopelessly out of tune. He went to the best teachers, learned to read notes and, to the dismay of his neighbours, spent much of his free time practising. He tried the piano and the flute, the trumpet and even the percussion instruments. He repeated the same piece a hundred times, but somehow the music never came out right – the tune, the rhythm, or the syncopation – and after a while he gave up entirely.

  ‘Not every music lover can be a music maker,’ one of his teachers had said and Himmelblau repeated these words to justify his inability to sing in tune.

  ‘You can work on the Block,’ he told the violinist.

  He remembered how sad he’d been when he had to hand over his records and the gramophone. Under German rule, Jews were not supposed to listen to music. He was lucky, he thought, that his gentile friends had formed a string quartet to which he and his wife were invited.

  He listened to Dezo Kovac and his heart went out to the violinist.

  ‘Never mind the audition,’ he said to Dezo. ‘What we need is a music teacher.’

  The camp orchestra that wouldn’t take Dezo Kovac rehearsed on the Women’s Block. The musicians sat on a wooden platform and played the same music over and over until the women complained and asked to be moved elsewhere. At the beginning all the musicians were prisoners from the September transport, but when they were put to death in the gas chambers, Jagger the Capo locked the three trumpets, the cello, the saxophones, the drum and the violins in his room. A week later the hunchback found a composer of international fame among the December transport people and appointed him bandleader.

  ‘Start a new orchestra,’ he said, ‘and I’ll get the players a second helping of soup.’

  The musicians stood in the cold and waited for their audition. They were desperate to join the orchestra where they would not only be sheltered from the rain but would also get an extra portion of soup. There was a rumour that at the Camp Senior’s parties the conductor and the Capo drank wine and danced with naked women. They needed music and paid the fiddlers with bread and sausage, which they stole from the prisoners’ rations. Some of the inmates in the queue were dabblers who had played the violin for a year or two during their school days, but others were genuine artists. All of them, however – the dilettantes and those with the soul of a musician – jostled in the mud of the camp road. Never before had there been a more serious competition, because the prize wasn’t mere fame or money but half a bowl of beetroot soup. In the past the pianists, the concert violinists and the cello players would have laughed at such a competition. But nobody laughed now, because in the camp trifles grew out of proportion and turned into absolutes. They were more intent on winning a place in the orchestra than ever before, because a second helping and a workplace under a roof were a watershed between life and death. The auditions lasted two days and at the end the orderly sent the rest of them away.

  ‘No more,’ he shouted. ‘No more musicians for the orchestra; all the places are taken.’

  There were still many, perhaps fifty more applicants, to whom the conductor hadn’t listened
.

  He couldn’t take all, thought Dezo Kovac, because there were only fifteen instruments.

  ‘An audition wouldn’t have made much difference,’ said Fabian. ‘He wasn’t looking for a virtuoso. He chose the musicians from among his friends and relatives.’

  The orchestra played only three tunes because these were all the Camp Senior knew and he refused to change the repertoire.

  And thus it was ‘Marinarella’, and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘Wir fahren gegen Engeland’ again and again until everybody in the camp knew the melodies by heart.

  Alex Ehren stopped with his children in front of the Women’s Block to listen, and Bubenik, who had a gift for rhythm, drummed the beat on his soup bowl. Sometimes Eva climbed on a crate and moved her hands in imitation of the conductor, and then they marched in time with the music back and forth in front of the women’s barracks. The children were full of energy and, though they got up very early, they never seemed tired. There was no place to play or be alone without supervision. Sometimes Alex Ehren ran out of ideas for how to keep them occupied, and with no new and exciting activities they got bored and ran out on the road.

  The camp orchestra performed twice a day. They stood next to the camp gate and when the inmates marched to work they fiddled away at their pieces. When the prisoners returned, carrying their dead among them, they played the same tunes again. The mating of death and music was obscene, and Alex Ehren wondered at the mind that had spawned such an idea.

  * * *

  Lisa Pomnenka painted the wall and as the children followed the colours grow and merge into a shape, they felt as if they really saw a meadow and a copse of birches. The painter added flowerpots with red geraniums that spilled over, alive and blooming, towards the ground. The two girls Eva and Hanka asked her to paint Snow White and Dopey, one of the dwarfs, but the figures were out of proportion because she had never painted on a perpendicular surface before.

  There were no birds to see in the camp, not even common sparrows that can live on nothing and are usually everywhere. Neither were there stars because in their first weeks the prisoners were not allowed outside the barracks after dark.

  Later when Alex Ehren marched the children to the washroom, they lifted their heads and did see the morning star among the clouds. Yet there were certainly no birds. At first he thought that they had moved elsewhere where they could find food, but then he noticed that they died on the electrically charged fences. He had seen a bird once, a blackbird or a starling, which flew in over the roofs and touched two wires. There was a spark, blue and fleeting like a whisper, and the bird fluttered and fell to the ground.

  I’ll paint the things that we miss, Lisa Pomnenka thought, and on the birches she drew pigeons and larks and even a stork in flight. The children stood in front of the wall and counted the birds one by one, in the sky and on the pines, on the birches and in the hazelnut bush. The coloured wall spread and grew and transformed the Block into a place bright with make-believe trees and flowers and birds.

  She spent her free time with Alex Ehren. They stole a quarter of an hour in the morning before the groups gathered in their stalls and they sat together at noon when the children were eating their soup. Yet above all they looked forward to the late afternoons, the free hour before the evening roll call, when the Block was dark and half empty. They were never alone because even when the children left to meet with their parents, the instructors argued about politics and the world after the war.

  The lovers were happy when they sat next to each other in their open stall, ate their bread and drank the bitter brew they called tea. Sometimes they talked little because there was no need to say insignificant things or be romantic. But when they held hands or when he brushed his face against her cheek they almost forgot where they were.

  One day the German doctor summoned the girl. ‘You said you could paint a portrait.’

  ‘You see I can.’ She pointed with her chin at Snow White and the lopsided dwarf.

  ‘You’d better,’ he said. Tomorrow I need you in the Gypsy Camp.’

  Next morning a sentry took her away to paint a Gypsy girl with strange spots on her skin.

  ‘She is very beautiful,’ Lisa Pomnenka told Alex Ehren later that day. ‘Smooth and wild like a cat. She was totally nude but she wasn’t ashamed in front of the doctor or the pockmarked SS sentry who brought me in.’

  She worked on the Gypsy painting for three days and each evening returned with a loaf of bread and some sausage. It was good to sit close to each other with a full stomach, and they felt richer and happier and more content than they’d felt for a long time. Yet even in their closeness she wouldn’t speak anything else about the secrets of the Gypsy Camp and kept her knowledge to herself.

  * * *

  Twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, the children produced a show. They prepared a play, a charade, a dance or a song, and, at the end of the performance, Miriam, the head matron, distributed cake crumbs from the abandoned parcels. Wednesdays were more important than Mondays, because there was also a competition and Himmelblau handed out prizes to the winners.

  The competition was a game but then everything on the Block was disguised as a game, even the things that mattered and were of great importance. It was difficult to fight filth and vermin. The sweepers sprinkled the floor three times a day but as soon as the water dried the dust rose into the air and settled on the children’s clothes and skin. There were too many of them, scores of little boys and girls crowded into one wooden stable, and their faces were constantly covered by smears of dirt. The matrons washed their clothes under the taps but the water was dark with sediment and the wind so loaded with soot that the rags were not any cleaner after they had been washed. There was nowhere to hang the tattered shirts and the children held their clothes against the wind or spread them on the tepid chimney where they gathered more dust.

  Yet even worse were the sleeping quarters, which the children shared with the grown-ups. The dampness and overcrowding bred lice and outlandish boils that spread from one child to another. The wounds festered under their scabs and when they healed they left behind blue scars. There was also the smell, the stench of rot and stale soup and excrement, the odour of too many unwashed bodies, and the decay of the dead at the back of the barracks. It was a smell that pervaded the whole camp, from the entrance gate to the Hospital Block at the far end of the road. The Children’s Block was better because the instructors played the game of cleanliness and the children scrubbed their stalls to win the weekly prize. They washed each morning and as they spent most of the time under the roof, their clothes were less filthy than those of the people who worked outside.

  Even Mietek the Pole, who from time to time stole books for the children, sniffed and shook his head. He was a perseverant suitor and though Magdalena laughed off his small gifts, she looked forward to his visits. He came and went freely because there was always a leaking roof to be mended and thus he was a link between the Block and other camps.

  ‘How strange.’ He looked at the wall with its meadows, trees and geranium flowers. ‘They even smell like a garden.’

  ‘Wrong?’ said Fabian. ‘It’s the turpentine Lisa Pomnenka mixes with her paints.’

  * * *

  The children competed not only in cleanliness and mathematics and geography, but there was also a prize for the best drawing, for a short story or for a poem. Himmelblau perambulated among the groups and checked on the children’s reading, their writing and their handicraft. He took down his findings into an old notebook, and towards Wednesday summed up the results. Alex Ehren’s children were angry with Adam, who made them lose points because he played hooky and disturbed the lessons. However, he was an asset in soccer, which they played with a rag ball. He was ambitious and whenever Alex Ehren’s Maccabees lost, he quit the field and sulked. He spent much of his time with Jagger, the hunchbacked Capo, whose runner he had become. Yet he needed children’s company and occasionally came back – small, fierce and dressed
in good clothes and real shoes. He sat among the children but he was restless and created a commotion during the reading sessions. He wouldn’t read but jeered at other children’s mistakes, pulling Majda’s hair until there were tears in her eyes and picking a fight with Bubenik. He was worse than ever, tense and nervous, his eyes burning with anger. When Alex Ehren tried to separate the fighting boys Adam jumped back, and hunched like an animal, drew his sharpened spoon.

  ‘Just keep away, you bastard. You come closer and I’ll cut off your prick.’

  There was a circle of fear around the child and even boys from older groups treated him with respect, not only because he was Jagger’s runner, but also because of his sudden flare-ups and his scimitar-like spoon handle. The boy was at the same time a menace and a mockery, a small child dressed like an adult and wielding power through his master. He spoke in a high childish voice, but the words he used were those of a seasoned crook. Alex Ehren tried to see him as he was, a little boy with a sweet face and clear eyes, even though his mind was infected and his mouth corrupted by filthy words. Most of the time the boy was his enemy, a torturer who wouldn’t let him teach and made him angry. He was like everything in the camp, Alex Ehren thought; good and evil, black and white, and nothing in between.

  He sat with the boy after school and held out a card he used for reading drill.

  ‘Read,’ he said. ‘We won’t lose every week because of one lazy brat. Today you will learn to read.’

  ‘Who needs reading?’ Adam struggled to get his arm free. ‘Reading won’t get me a potato peel. I spit on your school. I get more bread for my errands than all of you together.’