The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  * * *

  Neither was there shame. Each morning Alex Ehren took his children to the washroom where they saw men and women in their nakedness. At first the boys were curious about the women’s breasts, their bellies and their thighs. The little girls giggled and turned their heads at the sight of men’s private parts, but by and by they got accustomed to the lack of privacy and weren’t curious any more. There were young women in the washroom, and Alex Ehren ached for Lisa Pomnenka whom he loved. He wanted to feel her body against his, sweet and firm and yielding. The weather was better now and though the earth was still muddy there was no frost at night and at noon the sun was warm.

  He learned to cope with the children, some of whom could read whole sentences from a book he borrowed from Dasha’s library. Adam was away with Jagger most of the time and he conducted his lessons with relative success. The boy slept on the doorstep of the Capo’s cubicle, but occasionally he did appear on the Block, well dressed and with the armband of a runner. Alex Ehren didn’t know how to speak with the brat. Was he still one of the Block children or did he belong among the privileged, who were beyond Block regulations? Sometimes the boy stayed to play marbles or a game of tug o’ war or to watch a performance, but he wouldn’t attend any of the lessons. He was relieved when the boy left because he was like a rotten apple in a barrel, and he started a fight or broke up a lesson or teased the girls until they cried. He obeyed no one, came and went whenever he pleased and didn’t let off until he had caused some mischief. When Alex Ehren cornered him for a talk, he laughed in his face.

  ‘Who needs reading and writing?’ he sneered. ‘I work for the Capo. Why should I come back among the little children?’

  He was a pimp, cocky and thoroughly depraved. The food and the fine clothes, which, he showed off, made him a leader and he dragged Lazik into his evil adventures.

  One day Alex Ehren caught him in the privy block.

  The latrine was a terrible place; murky and ominous, it stank of excrement and the quicklime that the Cleaning Commando threw into the cesspool. The prison food caused diarrhoea and the inmates waited in long, painful queues for an empty place in the privy. There were six concrete rows in the barracks, each with sixty-six seats, but the holes were soiled and swarming with maggots and the ground was muddy with spilled urine. The SS sentries never stepped in and thus the latrines were a good place for barter in stolen goods and whispered talks about the mutiny. The block had male and female sections, which were separated by a strip of jute. The screen was so narrow that it hid only the middle part of the body.

  It was noon when most of the inmates were at work and the latrine was empty. The two boys crouched in ambush until Adam saw a victim for his prank. She was young, almost a girl, with a prominent nose and the dark face of a Sephardi.

  Adam and Lazik followed her stealthily at their side of the screen like two thieves. When she lifted her skirt the two brats broke out into shrieks and threw stones into the cesspit. They used language so lewd and obscene that Alex Ehren barely understood. Yet he knew that the words dealt with excrement and human procreation. The young woman tried frantically to arrange her soiled clothes, her coat, skirt and her underwear, yet the two urchins followed her along the partition, hooting insults and obscenities.

  ‘Go away,’ exclaimed Alex Ehren. ‘Go away this instant.’

  He was angry and would have beaten them had they not escaped through the rear door and along the fence. He wanted to punish them, to mete out some kind of reprisal on the boys, but Adam worked for the Camp Capo and was beyond any rule or punishment.

  * * *

  By the end of April Lisa Pomnenka finished weaving the rope. It was rough and strong but at the same time flexible like a live snake.

  ‘What kind of game will it be used for?’

  He had never told her of his assignment but sometimes he wondered how much she knew from the seamstress or from the people who gave her the bottles of kerosene. She looked so innocent and fragile that she might have been mistaken for a child or for one of the youth assistants. Yet he knew that she had a will of her own and that under her smooth face she was strong and determined… probably stronger than himself.

  ‘What if I fail?’ he asked Felsen. ‘What happens if I don’t manage to cast the iron over the wires?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he answered. ‘Somebody else will take over.’

  Alex realised that Felsen was talking about his death as if he were speaking about a stone thrown into water. He knew that in the context of the mutiny his life was unimportant and yet he was taken aback at Felsen’s indifference. The communist saw only the goal and the end result; the fate of the individual was of no importance.

  ‘It’s the only life I have,’ said Alex Ehren.

  ‘Yes—’ Felsen pulled his head into his collar ‘—we all have only one.’ He shrugged and looked at Alex Ehren. ‘If you are afraid I’ll find a substitute. Better quit now than later.’

  He was full of suspicion of the young people who spoke about Palestine but were blind to the needs of the present.

  ‘We’ll make our revolution when we come to Palestine,’ they said. But what they really wanted was just to talk and postpone their decision. He thought about Fredy, who was supposed to blow the whistle but lost his nerve and died of too many sleeping pills.

  ‘No,’ said Alex Ehren hastily to Felsen. ‘It’s what I asked for. No need to look for somebody else.’

  He gave the rope to Pavel Hoch, who hid it, together with the bottles of kerosene and petrol, among the ragged prisoners’ clothes.

  * * *

  Sometimes the iron anchor emerged in his dreams. It was an inanimate thing and yet it moved and wriggled like an animal. The room was filled with Mengele’s medical instruments, the spatulas, scalpels, gauges and probes. It was eminently urgent to extricate the anchor from under the bed and to start the mutiny, but the harder he tried the heavier and more unwieldy it became.

  ‘Run,’ he said to Lisa Pomnenka, ‘run and save yourself.’ But she wouldn’t budge and waited for him to move the iron.

  He knew of the SS doctor’s operations. He would cut into a woman’s belly and excise her organs, leaving her screaming in pain. The girl was on the bed now, white, exposed and lovely as a spring morning, but he was unable to lift the anchor and save her. He tugged and tore but his hands were helpless against the thing of iron. He cried out and Beran, his bunk-mate, shook him by the shoulder.

  ‘I had a dream,’ Alex Ehren murmured sitting up with a start.

  ‘What dream?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He fell angrily back on his mattress.

  The dream haunted him for several days and he avoided the eyes of the girl, of Beran, Fabian and Felsen, as if he had indeed betrayed their trust and their chance to stay alive. There were still two months left and he was scared of the running time, though he also hoped for a miracle.

  The Germans kept the inmates in darkness about their future. They promised one thing and did another in a cruel merry-go-round of hope and frustration. They played a game with the prisoners like little boys who trap a bird and enjoy its attempts to get free. They followed no rules, no laws and no commitments and that made the SS sentries, the carpenters, the butchers and the farm hands feel godlike and free from their own human bondage.

  * * *

  The Children’s Block was the last in the row of sixteen barracks and there was a piece of grassy ground between the wooden wall and the fence. By the end of April the ground sprouted pale grass and some of the inmates, the most starved, who looked like cranes, collected dandelion leaves. Their stomachs could not hold the weed and they fell ill and died.

  When there was no rain Magdalena conducted her gym lessons in the open and taught the girls a dance. She offered to take the boys also but they refused and sulked.

  ‘Dancing is for girls,’ said tiny Neugeboren. ‘What good will it do if I dance?’

  The boys were eager to show their pluck because they adm
ired the brutal force and insensibility of the Capos and the Block Seniors.

  The gym teacher beat the rhythm on a piece of corrugated iron and the girls moved their arms, walked on tiptoe and turned around with the tune they hummed.

  ‘Now we are birds flying over a lake,’ said Magdalena, and the little girls flapped their arms in pretended flight.

  ‘And now we are bears and amble through the wood. And now we are bees who gather honey, and now flowers that bend their petals in the wind.’

  The children had no recollection of birds flying over a lake and they had never seen a bear, though they had seen a flower or a stray bee in the ghetto. They danced not according to what they remembered but to what they imagined to be the flight of a bird, the ambling of a bear or the bending head of a flower, and yet their movements were true and graceful. It was strange, thought Alex Ehren, that their imagination was almost as good as reality but, then again, wasn’t the entire Children’s Block imagination and make-believe? It was a fiction, an absurdity and a denial of logic. The teachers, the matrons and the instructors together with the children lived in a small, closed world outside time, which, like a child in its mother’s womb, fed not on what was now but on what had been in the past.

  The boys wouldn’t dance and Alex Ehren took them aside to do push-ups and calisthenics. At the end of the lesson they ran around the Block until they were tired and panting. He still exercised with his rock and he could lift the stone three times in a row. He practised every day until the gym teacher noticed.

  ‘Want to win a prize in weightlifting?’ Magdalena didn’t know but she might have guessed his purpose, because in some way or another they were all involved.

  There were other triads on the Block and Felsen talked to strange men in Himmelblau’s cubicle. He wondered how many people in other barracks were involved – ten, fifty, a thousand? The hospital orderly certainly knew about the anchor hidden in the spare room, Pavel Hoch kept the kerosene bottles among bales of old rags and the seamstress, who directed Lisa Pomnenka, must have been a pivot of the plot. Alex Ehren thought of the girl who could be caught every day and his heart skipped a beat.

  In the last weeks he felt strong and alive. His running, the push-ups and the rock lifting made him aware of his body and when he held hands with the girl and touched her shoulder he was consumed by fire.

  The thought of mutiny was constantly at the back of his mind. The idea of fighting the Germans was like a pendulum of a clock; it was at the same time a cause of fear and of exhilaration. For five years he had been conditioned to obey German regulations. The Germans were the conquerors of the world. First it was Austria then Czechoslovakia, then Poland and later Belgium, France and Holland and even Russia, until they ruled over all of Europe. There was no way but to bend and wait until the storm blew over.

  At the very beginning, when the Germans had occupied his city, Alex Ehren had tried to retain his self-respect but the longer he lived under Nazi rule the lower he sank. First he was expelled from his school, then his family was robbed of their possessions and home. He was forbidden to use a train, attend a theatre or a concert, to own a carpet, a painting or a fur coat. The Germans closed streets and squares to him and the only green place he could visit was the Jewish cemetery with its stately tombs, overgrown with ivy. And then when he had nothing more left, he was shipped to the ghetto and from there to Birkenau to be put to death. Why was it that they accepted the Germans as masters of their lives, the lawful confiscators and executioners, as if they were a preordained cosmic phenomenon? Were the Germans perhaps the Satanic principle of the Book of Job against which there was no recourse? It was difficult to defy God but it took seven times more courage to stand up against Satan.

  And there were questions.

  ‘Why do they hate us?’ asked the children. ‘Why do they want us dead?’

  They were more curious to know than scared.

  It was a hydra of a question and each time he cut off one head there was another that grew in its stead.

  ‘I used to live in Germany,’ said Himmelblau. ‘My uncle was a school teacher in a village on the Mosel. The farmers called him Herr Professor and at vintage time they presented him with a basket of grapes. I played hide-and-seek with the German boys and when the game was over we had coffee and cake in my aunt’s garden. Yes, we had fights as boys do, but they never called me a Jew. On Sundays when the other boys went to church, we took a walk among the vineyards, and though I was tempted to steal a bunch of grapes, I never did. Solid German honesty. I never harmed anybody, paid my taxes and drank beer in moderation. And saved. Was like everybody in town. Strict rules and order. But so were they all, my schoolmates and their parents. Decent people. Why would they want me dead? Maybe it’s a virus on their brain. An illness like mumps.’

  ‘If it is,’ said Marta Felix, who knew history, ‘it has been endemic in Europe for a long time. During the Crusades the knights stormed the ghettoes of Frankfurt and Worms and Regensburg long before they laid siege to Acre and Jerusalem. Practice makes perfect, they said, and the Jews were an easy target because they were their neighbours and were forbidden to carry arms. The plague? Whenever the pestilence flared up they accused us of poisoning the wells and of practising black witchcraft. They didn’t notice that the Jews in their overcrowded ghettoes died even faster than they themselves. Whenever there was drought or flood or an earthquake, disasters brought about by nature or by man, it was the Jews who were blamed and they paid for it with their lives. Nothing has changed even today. Doesn’t Hitler blame the Jews for starting his wars?’

  She laughed angrily and went on.

  ‘Rape and pillage and burning of the Jews has always been a pastime because there isn’t a better scapegoat for failure than a Jew. The Jews are different. They pray in a secret language, they eat different food and obey their own laws. And if, like in our times, the Jews look like everybody else, eat the same food and have forgotten the secret language of their prayers, the Germans make them wear the yellow star to separate them from others. With one difference. In the Middle Ages they burned us alive and today they choke us by gas first.’

  Marta Felix’s voice was bitter because there was no sense or reason in their suffering and death.

  ‘There are good dead and there are bad dead,’ she said after a while. ‘There are dead who die for a reason. Trees die and out of their rotten wood grows a new forest. Animals die to feed other living things, vermin and bacteria. Old people die to make room for their children. But we—’ she looked at her friends ‘—we are the bad dead because we die for nothing.’

  She paused and scoffed.

  ‘Not even for an illusion like God’s greater glory. Not for king, fatherland or an idea.’

  There was silence and Dezo Kovac moved his hand in a narrow gesture.

  ‘Maybe it’s their religion.’ He hesitated. ‘The Nazis brought back their pagan gods. Thor and Wotan and Freya.’

  ‘Most of the Germans are Christians,’ said Himmelblau.

  ‘There is hardly a village without a church and the boys of my youth attended Mass every Sunday. Christianity teaches love. Religion has nothing to do with Birkenau and the killing of children.’

  ‘Maybe it does,’ said Dezo Kovac, rocking forwards and backwards as if in Jewish prayer. ‘It is a matter of balance. There is the Holy Trinity – God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hynek Rind, ‘but what has all this to do with hating the Jews?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? The Holy Trinity is a triangle. But a triangle is incomplete and can be toppled and turned over. There has to be another angle to give it a firm basis and make it rooted in space. Another angle will change the triangle into a square and the Holy Trinity into a Holy Quadrinity and thus make it whole.’

  ‘The Jews, you said. Aren’t we talking about the Jews?’

  ‘We are,’ said Dezo Kovac, his mouth twisting into a sneer. ‘What is the missing angle? The lower angle and the lower
base? The Antichrist principle in the Christian universe, hell, darkness and the Devil. Don’t the villagers believe that Jews have horns and a tail? Don’t they speak of the Jewish smell, the foetor Judaeorum? And didn’t the Jews deny and kill the Messiah, the living God?’

  ‘If the Germans get rid of us, where is their whole? Don’t they need to close the circle?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Dezo Kovac, touching his face with the back of his hand. ‘We may die in the flesh and prevail as a principle. The dinosaurs died out a million years ago and survived in our fairy tales and nightmares as monsters and dragons. Destroy the Jews and the world will be paradise again.’

  ‘Too simple,’ said Hynek Rind. ‘They can’t believe such nonsense.’

  ‘Can’t they? It’s so easy to see the world in black and white.’ He looked around in silent despair.

  ‘The Germans collect Jewish religious articles, to show their children the remnants of an extinct race. I know,’ he said, ‘because they made me work at the museum. Each day came a carload of Hebrew scrolls and candelabra from the communities that had been shipped to Birkenau. They looted the empty synagogues and I carried the books, the prayer shawls and the silver lamps into the vaults of an old house in Prague. They destroyed the Jews but kept the principle alive.’

  He stopped and his voice trailed into a memory.

  ‘When I was a child I saw the skeleton of a dinosaur. How glad I was that no monsters roamed the backyards of my childhood and survived only in my dreams.’

  * * *

  Even in the camp there was spring. In the morning, when they returned from the washroom, Majda pulled her thumb out of her mouth and pointed to the sky.

  ‘Birds,’ she said. They stopped in the middle of the road and lifted their heads to the seams of the clouds. There was a flock of birds, geese probably, flying in an arrow-shaped formation toward the north. And as they watched there was yet another arrow, larger and sharper and lower, so that the children could see their flapping wings and long necks.