by Otto Kraus
‘Does it hurt to die?’ The girl held her rag doll close to her side.
‘I don’t think so,’ Alex Ehren said. ‘Like falling asleep, perhaps.’
‘Falling asleep is all right,’ Majda said and sucked her thumb. The Hungarian transports continued far into June, yet often when Alex Ehren watched a procession meander away to the sound of music, he thought of the ten thousand naked women. He remembered the curve of their necks, their breasts, their heads that looked like a field of flowers, and their birdlike voices.
The SS doctor billeted the dwarfs at the Hospital Block opposite the Children’s Block. They were a family of seven but two of them were of normal growth and were their link with the outside world. The dwarfs were artistes of sorts and had toured Europe, sometimes as an independent group on their own and sometimes as members of a travelling vaudeville act. Some of them danced and others performed a wedding ceremony and they played an assortment of musical instruments – a fiddle, guitar, trumpet – but they also made music on wine glasses and on combs wrapped in paper.
They kept to themselves and wouldn’t mix because they considered themselves superior to the Jewish deportees and exempt from their fate.
‘When the doctor finishes his research he’ll let us go,’ said the one called Josef.
How peculiar, thought Alex Ehren, that so many consider themselves exempt from death – Hynek Rind, the Block Seniors and Capos, the craftsmen who came to repair the roof or build a wooden partition, and even the Jewish dwarfs who served Dr Mengele’s research. They all clung to a reason, to an omen, which would save them: one because he was a plumber; the other because his father had served in the Great War; and the third because he was a freak of nature whose hands were malformed stumps. The dwarfs were better fed; they got a double bread ration and ate the thick children’s soup cooked in the Gypsy Camp. One of them came to the Block each noon and was particular about the seven measures of soup, which he carried to the hospital in a bucket.
‘We aren’t Jews—’ he spoke in a strange mixture of German and Hungarian ‘—and we were caught up in a transport by mistake. There is no reason why we should be here.’
Nobody knew who they really were. Lisa Pomnenka worked on their family tree but they changed their story each time the SS doctor asked them. One of them had one version and the other another, as if they had forgotten who they were or were lying on purpose. Once their grandfather was a Gypsy, another time they were the illegitimate descendants of a Hungarian nobleman and yet another time there was a Jewish connection of sorts. They crossed themselves and swore in Polish and in Hungarian that they were telling the truth. Their truth changed from one day to the next as if they were trying to confuse the physician until he let them go. The girl drew a chart of their grandparents, those who were dwarfs and those who weren’t, but they constantly invented new ancestors until there were six or seven charts, though none of them might be the true one.
The doctor, who used to fly into a frenzy at the girl’s smallest mistake, was patient with the dwarfs because he saw in the family of freaks a cornerstone for his racial theory. He kept taking measurements of their size, their body fluids, their skulls and he even cut off some of their hair and nails for some kind of test. He made the girl draw their faces and distorted hands in charcoal and pencil and sometimes they had to strip and he watched the girl as she traced their malformed backs.
However, he still spent most of his days on his official duties and needed less of Lisa Pomnenka’s services. She worked on the wall, the meadow and the potted geraniums and the sky, until the painting covered three of the four Block walls.
‘It will soon be finished, yes?’ asked Himmelblau, who lived by the hour and the day.
‘I don’t know.’ She looked at the dark planks. Himmelblau’s question made her uncomfortable because she disliked commitments. It was not she who painted but rather something beyond her and she was only the tool and the instrument. Sometimes she spoke about it with Shashek, who understood.
There were days when she progressed quickly, but at other times she worked slowly, with relish, eager to taste every stroke of her brush. Sometimes she deliberately put off her painting and occupied herself with another task. There was always something else to be done – the handicraft lessons, the puppets’ clothes and decorations for the performance. Some of the older children had good hands and helped with the work but she never let them paint the wall. She climbed the ladder up to the beams and Shashek held up her brushes and a pot of paint. He found a piece of cherry wood and carved a dog and a cat and a figurine of a woman.
‘Don’t hurry with the wall,’ he said, grinning. ‘As long as it’s not done you can’t lose it.’
‘What can I lose?’
‘The picture, of course. It’s like an unfinished child. Once it’s born it doesn’t belong to the mother.’ He had difficulty in conveying his thoughts and he motioned to the figure he was carving. ‘When it’s done it gets a life of its own. Like God—’ he groped for words ‘—who made the world and lost it.’
He wanted to give her a present but he was shy and postponed the act of giving from one day to another.
* * *
Only Fabian became friendly with the dwarfs. ‘We actors,’ he said, ‘are of the same kind.’
The vaudeville actors became bored in the Hospital Block and they came to see the children’s performances. First came Josef and then another dwarf and then they brought with them the two women, one of whom was Josef’s wife. They didn’t understand Czech but they enjoyed the singing, the charades and Fabian’s satanic voice, which he polished and improved from one performance to the next.
One of the dwarfs was a magician, a prestidigitator who swallowed fire and made things appear and disappear. He agreed to give a show, but as they had lost all their possessions on arrival, it took him three days to prepare his tricks. The dwarfs climbed on the stage, dressed in pied clothes and made music on improvised instruments. They used a comb, soup bowls, Himmelblau’s whistle and even Shashek’s pieces of wood. They performed a mock wedding with Josef and one of the small women. The bride and groom were malformed and their hands and feet looked like seals’ fins. There was nothing beautiful about them. Their faces were prematurely wrinkled and when they walked over the stage they swayed and waddled like waterfowl. And yet they were human. They were small and misshapen, created by a freak of nature or a genetic error. They looked like living jokes, like caricatures of what had been the original purpose, but there was love and affection in the way they held hands and smiled at each other. They had acted out the wedding ceremony a hundred times; in fact, they had earned their daily sustenance by exposing their hunched backs and malformations, and yet even in their predicament they remained human.
The dwarf magician wasn’t an accomplished conjurer, but the children were fascinated by the ball that came and went, by the pieces of cloth he pulled out of an empty hat and by the fire he swallowed. Himmelblau paid the troupe from the orphaned parcels that Mengele kept sending to the Children’s Block. But when the physician learned about the performance, he moved the dwarfs to another compound and they were never heard of again.
* * *
As the days grew warmer, new grass sprouted along the blocks, but it soon withered, trodden by the crowded inmates. However, under the fence the grass survived and even small daisies bloomed in the lime soil. The children counted the flowers, twenty behind this block and fifteen behind that, but they didn’t dare pick them because they grew under the electrified wires. The children were full of spring and when they washed and put on their shirts they teased the old man behind the washroom. He was always there, ancient, bent and poking the smouldering rags with a stick.
‘Sha,’ he said, ‘don’t come near, little children. The rags are full of vermin, which need burning.’ He looked up with his watery eyes and made a quick movement with his hand. ‘Sha, go away. I have the most responsible work in the camp, because if I don’t burn the lice they will eat y
ou all, flesh, bone and skin.’
It was a game between him and the children who came close to the fire and dispersed like drops of water when he chased them away, once and twice each morning.
One day he stood waiting for them some distance away from the fire.
‘A surprise—’ he turned toward the fence ‘—a surprise for the children.’ He was excited and happy as if he had discovered a treasure or a source of food. ‘There is a tree,’ he said, ‘a tree with leaves and branches.’ He moved his arms to show the shape of the tree.
There were no trees and no vegetation in Birkenau. The barracks stood in long barren rows separated by ditches and electrified fences and no tree or bush was allowed to break their uniformity. It was a stretch of land, flat and immense, unbroken by any hill, valley or copse, where a prisoner might hide or idle away the time that belonged to the Germans. Sometimes when the wind lifted the bittersweet smoke, they did see the outline of trees on the horizon, but they were so distant that they couldn’t tell whether it was a forest, an orchard or a row of poplars along a road. The tree lay to the west and the escaped prisoners Lederer and Rudi, the Quarantine Registrar, must have crossed them on their way to the mountains.
Alex Ehren looked at the distant trees and wondered whether he would ever touch the bark of their trunks and see the sun through their crowns.
The old man’s tree was an apple that had taken root between the rows of barbed wire. It was a shy sapling born from a seed brought by water a long time before the Germans had conceived the idea of the camp. Its branches had never been pruned and sprang like unkempt hair, from the stem. It was small and fragile, but now in spring its twigs were full of delicate flowers. It was the only tree in the camp and possibly in the whole complex of Birkenau, but it lived and bloomed despite the smoke, the barbed wire and the electric current that had killed the birds, and the fine ashes that snowed on their branches. The tree was out of place, incongruous, absurd, and yet it was there like a reminder of a different world, a different planet that existed beyond the camps.
The children stood between the washroom and the latrine block and watched the buds, which towards noon opened into pink blossoms, and even the rowdy boys, Bubenik and Lazik, didn’t clamour to go back to their game of marbles.
For several days the old man waited for the children.
‘It is still there,’ he said. He shushed them to silence as if the tree were a deer that might be startled by a sound. ‘It is still there and blooming.’
After a week the flowers fell off and the tree sprouted pale leaves. The children painted the tree on scraps of paper and wrote a short story for the daily bulletin Felsen pinned on the wall.
One day the old man fell ill and died. Old men, those with wrinkled hands and white stubble on their faces, didn’t last long once they fell ill. The children didn’t know his name or the block on which he lived, whether he was alone or had a family, and they didn’t visit him in his illness. Death was anonymous in the camp and when he passed away there were no mourners and no funeral. And yet, at least for a short time, whenever they came to the washroom, they remembered the old man, who had made them see the blossoming tree.
In the twisted world of the camps, strange, improbable friendships sprung up. Some prisoners banded together into communes to share the little they had, and children took to an old man who burned rags behind the washroom, and Mietek, the Polish roof repairman, fell in love with Magdalena, the gym teacher.
People who had nothing of their own clung to friends, to bunk-mates, who became a substitute for family or clan.
Foltyn, the gangling guard boy, became friends with Marta Felix who spoke to him about philosophy. He was fascinated by her wisdom and spent as much of his free time with the teacher as she would allow. He became her orderly, stood in line for her soup and roasted her bread in the oven. She was amused by his attachment and knitted him a sweater, which he wore under the heavy coat Himmelblau had brought him from the Clothes Storeroom.
* * *
For some reason Julius Abeles became Alex Ehren’s friend. With the arrival of the Hungarian transports there was an abundance of wares, and he grew rich. There were rumours that he had sold an SS guard a watch and another a salami, which the soldier sent home to his wife. Sometimes he bribed the Labour Capo to leave him on the block. However, most of the days he still worked on the Transport Commando, where, hitched to the cart like a horse, he left the camp and met his contacts. He had an additional bunk where he kept his goods, loaves of white bread, sugar cubes, spools of thread, needles, razor blades, pencil stubs and a pouch of tobacco. He struck a deal with the Kanada convicts who provided him with goods to be sold in the camp.
‘Difficult,’ he would say. ‘Come back tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do for you.’
He opened his shop when the prisoners returned from work and he sat on his bunk, haggard and cross-legged, and traded in spoons and mittens and sometimes even pills against pneumonia, stolen from the SS infirmary. He drove a hard bargain and only inmates with parcels from the outside world, the Block Seniors or cooks, were rich enough to buy his wares.
‘People need things and if you can supply them you reap a harvest,’ he said to Alex Ehren. ‘Here and everywhere. No difference.’
He was stingy and dressed in rags and ate little, but sometimes made Alex Ehren a gift of white bread.
‘Don’t worry. One day I’ll take advantage of you. Your kind pays debts. But don’t try to start a business because you’ll lose your shirt.’ And he grinned. ‘You are worth as much as you have.’ He fingered the knotted bundles under his straw mattress.
‘I have nothing.’
‘Wrong, my friend, wrong. You have the books you have read. Ah, here you are. You sell your knowledge in comfort while Julius Abeles drags the cart to make a profit. Don’t pretend. There is no difference between you and me.’
He leaned closer and lisped over his broken tooth. ‘What is life? It’s buying and selling.’
He had some money and a handful of precious stones, which he believed would save his life.
‘Everybody can be bought,’ he said, ‘the Capo, the Poles and even the Germans. Only the price is different. Have money, and you will live.’
He worried about tobacco in which he had invested most of his riches.
‘The worst ones,’ he said in a confiding tone, ‘are those that die without paying. They buy on credit and then lie on their bunk cold and stiff. And I take the loss.’
He sounded angry as if the dead cheated him on purpose. Sometimes a prisoner was taken away by the Gestapo, the German secret police, and beaten to reveal what was going on in the barracks, who was a communist and who conspired to escape. There were whispers that Julius Abeles sold the SS not only watches but also information about the camp.
* * *
In mid-May there were several days of frost. The cold was caused by the melting icebergs in the North Sea. The Czech villagers used to count the days off on their fingers and called them after the three saints: Pankrác, Servác and Bonifác. Towards noon, however, the sun broke through the mist and the children could play behind the Block.
In the morning the washroom was empty. At dawn the prisoners came to rinse their bowls or sprinkle water on their faces, but after the roll call even the thin trickle of water dried up and there was no reason to linger around the smelly troughs. Alex Ehren promised Julius Abeles he would watch out for intruders, for Jagger or a German sentry.
‘Half an hour,’ said Julius Abeles. ‘What is half an hour for a friend? Let the children run around for a while. Give the little ones a break. Himmelblau won’t notice that you are missing.’
His wife came up the camp road and slipped into the washroom through the rear entrance, quietly and unobtrusively. The man and wife didn’t walk near the trough together, but each of them took a different aisle, Julius Abeles to the left and the woman to the right. She looked like an ungainly bird, a crow or a raven, with her prominent nose and her blac
k coat tightly buttoned up to her neck. Once, a long time ago, the coat had been trimmed with fur, but it had fallen out and the bare patches were like islands of disease. She knew that Julius had hired Alex Ehren and when she passed him she hid her chin in her collar and turned her head. She was ashamed but walked on stolidly, perseveringly, until she met her husband at the oven.
The washroom, like all barracks, was equipped with an oven and a horizontal smokestack that ran through the block and up to the roof. The cast-iron door was open and Alex Ehren saw the sooty bricks, the grate and the cinders that were spilled on the floor. She reached the end of the chimney and took off her coat. She folded the garment inside out as if it were made of exquisite cloth and the bald collar were the fur of a beaver. She hung it on a dead tap and bent to enter the hole. The door was narrow and she had to crawl into the cave on all fours like an animal.
First she stuck in her head, then her shoulders and finally her thin legs with the mismatched stockings, one black and one grey. Alex Ehren stood at the far end and watched the road. The husband and wife were middle-aged and plain and they had been married for many years. There was terrible danger in their meeting; they possibly risked their lives, and yet they went through the ritual of lovemaking, despite the place and the time and the darkness around them.
Alex Ehren was suddenly startled by a noise and turned his head. He was relieved to see a bunch of his children, Majda and Eva and two other girls. How long had they been there, he wondered, and what had they seen?
He didn’t speak about the event as if the girls had not seen Julius Abeles and his wife and him standing guard in front of the empty washroom. There were no secrets in the camp and the children must have known what people did in the oven. Majda couldn’t be ignorant about Agnes, her mother, and about Magdalena, who met her Polish lover at the Clothes Storeroom, or the other women who sold their love for bread. What could he tell the children about Julius and his wife behind the cast-iron oven door? That they loved each other or that their lovemaking helped against fear? Were they hungry for the touch of their bodies as he was for Lisa Pomnenka, or was it an attempt to put a semblance of normality into their lopsided lives?