by Otto Kraus
The day after, Julius Abeles gave Alex Ehren half a bread ration and a slice of hard cheese.
In the evening he shared his windfall with the girl. She cut the bread into thin slices to make it last longer and they cupped their hands so as not to waste the tiniest morsel of their bread. In the last two weeks the German doctor hadn’t asked the girl to draw diagrams and they were often hungry. When they finished their meal they sat in silent contentment, and, as their arms touched, Alex Ehren felt the warmth of her flesh. He thought about the washroom, the sooty bricks and the lovemaking in the darkness. He loved Lisa Pomnenka and was consumed with desire, but he knew that he would never ask the girl to follow him to the washroom, to bend over on all fours like an animal and crawl through the iron door into the oven.
* * *
On the fifteenth of May a transport with 2,503 new deportees from Theresienstadt arrived in the Family Camp. Next day at noon there was another train with 2,500 more prisoners and two days later, on the eighteenth, there was yet another trainload of 2,500 people. There were all in all 7,503 new arrivals, but they were a mixed lot of 3,125 German Jews, 2,543 Czechs, 1,276 Austrians and 559 Dutch. Many of the newcomers were old or ill with tuberculosis and there was a disproportionately large number of orphans and small children.
The camp became choked with too many people. There was little space in the cavernous barracks and again Alex Ehren had to share his bunk with seven other sleepers. When one of them tried to ease his hip, they all had to turn as if they were an Indian deity, a centipede or a many-limbed animal.
He could bear the discomfort of his bunk, the painful latrine queues and his hunger, but he was unable to make peace with time. The camp was a terrible place, dark, squalid, enveloped in smoke and grey with the fine falling ash. He had learned to live on the crowded block, grown attached to the unruly children and formed friendships with Beran, Pavel Hoch and even Hynek Rind. He didn’t want to part with his work, the white woollen blanket and the girl’s proximity. He knew that the new prisoners arrived in order to replace them, just as they had come to take the place of the September transport.
9.
THE ARRIVAL OF SO MANY children upset the schedule of the Block. The three transports added more than three hundred new pupils, and Himmelblau had to set up German and Dutch groups with new instructors, more youth assistants and matrons. There were not enough food bowls, the children needed shoes, shirts, a foot rag and because there were not enough stools, again many children had to squat on the pressed earth of the floor.
Alex Ehren’s group swelled to thirty and without Thomasina’s help he couldn’t have conducted his reading and writing lessons, let alone the bit of arithmetic he dared to teach. The Dutch girl had a small group of her own but she sometimes took half of Alex Ehren’s pupils for a walk, sang a Dutch song with them or made them paint tulips and windmills. At first Neugeboren and Bubenik were confused by the Dutch and the German, but once they began to play marbles and sing ‘Alouette’ with the new boys, they managed to communicate and some even became friends.
At the beginning it was exciting to have new people in the camp. The December transport had been cut off from the world for five months and they were full of questions about their friends and relatives in the ghetto, about the war and politics. The ghetto was only sixty kilometres northwest of Prague and sometimes the Czech gendarmes volunteered a bit of information and, for a bribe or out of compassion, smuggled a newspaper or a letter into the ghetto. Birkenau was cut off from the world by fences, watchtowers, a minefield and a chain of SS sentries with dogs. The news that filtered through was but rumours that spread by word of mouth. It was incredible that the ghetto people knew nothing of the gas chambers, the chimney and the death of the Hungarians. How was it possible that in the ghetto they saw transport after transport herded into trains and shipped east – their friends, children and relatives – and didn’t ask themselves what was happening in the Polish camps? Was there no suspicion, no message and no warning? Some of the Birkenau inmates had written coded postcards to the ghetto with hints and hidden meanings. Hadn’t they ever arrived? Were the Czech Jews indeed so simple-minded to believe that the tens of thousands of deportees – men and women, but also old people, invalids and children – were in labour camps and alive? It wasn’t easy to escape from the walled ghetto or to start a revolt, but it was seven times more difficult to save one’s life in Auschwitz.
‘There were rumours,’ said Martin, who was Beran’s cousin, ‘but people refused to believe.’
‘More than rumours.’ Olga was one of the new instructors. ‘I saw a coded postcard. And there was Lederer.’
‘The escaped Block Senior?’
‘A Czech gendarme smuggled him into the ghetto,’ Olga went on, ‘and he told us. Urged us to run away or to fight, to refuse to go on the transport, but people said that he was mad.’
‘Life in the ghetto is not easy,’ they said, ‘but we manage somehow. Gas chambers? Half a million dead Hungarians? Ridiculous. Technically impossible. Where would they bury so many bodies? Hitler wouldn’t dare. Couldn’t hide it from the world. Isn’t Lederer himself living proof that his stories are madness?’
Olga was a communist and a friend of the seamstress. She was still amazed by the electrified fence, the smoke and the falling ashes.
‘How could we have believed—’ she moved her hand in a circular motion ‘—in insanity? There is no reason in the killings.’
‘There is a reason.’ Marta Felix had been married to a German, who had divorced her to keep his position at the university. They’d been students together and married for love. She was bitter about his betrayal and her love had turned into hatred.
‘The Nazis must believe in something,’ said Himmelblau.
‘They do,’ said Marta Felix. ‘It’s an insane reason but even insanity may have its logic.’
They were not alone by then because the Block people flocked together whenever there was a discussion. They were unshaven and ragged, hungry and frightened, but they argued about abstractions as if a thought or a theory could fill their stomachs, sweeten the stench of decay or cancel their death sentence.
‘They have read Nietzsche and they believe in their birth-right to rule.’ She spoke German now to make the Dutch and the Austrian instructors understand. Some of the older children and the youth assistants, Dasha and Bass and even Foltyn, who should have been at the barracks door, stood at the outer edge of the circle and listened.
The Nazis don’t act on a whim but rather on a theory. Logic may lead to insanity if the reasoning is based on a false premise. Haven’t people in the past proved that the earth is flat and that three hundred angels can stand on the head of a pin? Insane asylums are full of patients whose delusions are based on faulty logic. The only difference between them and the Nazis is—’ and she lifted her arms in desperation ‘—that the Germans have guns and have conquered the world.’
She paused for breath and went on.
‘Somewhere in the universe, they say, exists a spring, a source of energy that flows through all things – the sun, the stars, rocks and even people. It is the natural drive, the impulse, the gut feeling, the unfettered self. It is the soul which is in harmony with nature and therefore good. A spirit that permeates the world.’
‘Even the concentration camps?’ asked Fabian and smirked. ‘Even the concentration camps, because they serve the purpose.’
Marta Felix looked at the faces of the adolescent assistants, the matrons and the teachers. She loved lecturing and went on with sharp eloquence.
‘The enemy of the soul is the spirit. The do’s and don’ts. The brain and the logic, which stems the flow of the soul. The Germans believe—’ she smiled bitterly ‘—that by conquering the world they serve the course of nature. They impose the cosmic order of the higher and the lower, of lords and servants, man and beast, the human and the subhuman. They are born to rule as others are born to be slaves.’
‘Where do we fit in?�
�� asked Alex Ehren, though he knew the answer even before he asked. Yet he wanted Marta Felix to spell it out.
‘Ah, the Jews,’ she said in her accented German, ‘where do they come in? The Jews are the Geist als Widersacher der Seele, the incarnation of the spirit that corrupts the soul. The cancer that spreads to kill the organism. The Jews are not a human species. And as such they have to be destroyed. Exterminated to the last specimen. Their blood and their seed wiped from the face of the earth.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Hynek Rind. ‘The German carpenter, butcher and cobbler don’t smash Jewish shop windows because they believe in soul and spirit. The SS man doesn’t beat me up because of an abstract idea. And Eichmann didn’t build gas chambers because the Jews corrupt the harmony of nature. With due respect for philosophy, I don’t buy that.’ ‘Not the simple people,’ she answered. ‘They beat up the Jews because it makes them patriots and heroes. They burn a prayer house and save their country. Their cruelty is called a virtue and their aggression courage.’
She looked around at her friends and shook her head.
‘No, I don’t speak about the mob that follows and goose-steps. Their sin is simple because they merely obey. I speak about the educated people, the elite. Those who think and are able to discern between the truth and the lie. The university professors. Those who read Goethe and Kant and listen to Beethoven in the evening. I speak about those who give the Nazi movement its legitimacy. The scientists, the lawmakers and the preachers. Those who teach that torture and lies and killing are justified if they serve an idea. The worst crime,’ she said, and her voice was shrill and angry, ‘is not committed by the butcher and the beer drinker, but by the intellectual and the educated. The Germans are an orderly folk who listen to their teachers and obey their officers. Look around yourselves. Where are those that oppose the Nazis? How many German political prisoners have you met in the camps? Three, four, a dozen of the Protestants, the communists and the honest Social Democrats? The rest of the German convicts are murderers, thieves and homosexuals. I don’t see many of the German philosophers, writers and physicians behind bars. Where are the German humanists and thinkers? They have put on the German uniform and joined the pack of wolves. They were reluctant to give up their piece of cake and chose to belong to the master race and be the conquerors of the world.’
It was getting dark on the Block and Marta Felix spoke faster and faster as if trying to conclude her lecture before the evening curfew.
‘You want examples? I’ll give you examples of how to poison human minds. Take the Ten Commandments, they say. Go over them one by one and you will find that they curb natural drives. For what is more natural than aggression, greed or lust? Why should a man not kill if he craves more territory, more money or power? Or if he lusts for another man’s wife? Why should he give his slave a day of rest? The idea of equality between the strong and the weak is against nature and, to use the Nazi language, a Jewish ploy to corrupt the world. Don’t stars swallow stars and galaxies cannibalise galaxies and suns rule the movement of their planets? The lion feeds on the gazelle and man takes advantage of his fellow men. If nature intended to make everybody equal, the tiger, the deer and the wolf would have the same hide and graze in the same field.’
She folded her palms in a roof against her chest and went on. ‘They say it is the Jew who twists nature. Didn’t the Jew Jesus preach to love thy enemy and isn’t the Talmud the cradle of democracy? Wasn’t it Marx who invented communism and the Jew Freud who took apart the human soul to analyse its hidden abysses? Jews have infected art and music by abstraction and Einstein corrupted science by his theory of relativity. The Jews have upset nature in order to suck the world dry.’ With malicious joy Marta watched the eyes that were locked on her.
‘There is one hope for the world,’ she said, and her voice was bitter with irony. ‘Get rid of the Jews. Burn them along with their books. And when they are dead and their ashes scattered by the wind or washed away in the Vistula, the world will live happily under the rule of its natural master race, the Germans.’
It was a terrible sermon and they were silent for a long while. Marta’s words were like stones, which hung ominously, arrested in their fall above their heads. There was no way out and no hope against the insane logic of the Nazi creed. There was only one way out, thought Alex Ehren, and that was with the iron anchor and the attempt to escape into the mountains.
* * *
Felsen wouldn’t take part in the discussion and stood leaning on the smokestack, with his head low in his collar.
He had a cabal of communists who kept to themselves and knew better.
‘Of course there is hope,’ he said. ‘In communist society there is no Jewish question. The Red Army has beaten the Germans at Stalingrad and the war will soon end with Soviet victory.’ With the arrival of the Dutch and German instructors the Block split into even more opinions. There were the Zionists, the Czechs, the communists and those who believed that when the war was over they would take up their lives where they had been broken off.
There was Dezo Kovac, who hadn’t lost God in spite of the smoke; there was Lisa Pomnenka, who painted her make- believe meadow; and Fabian with his cynical remarks, who dreamt of becoming an actor one day. They were as different as a group of people could be – they spoke Czech and German, Dutch and Hungarian; they were religious or atheists; young and middle-aged; simple and educated – and yet they had one essential thing in common without which they could not have worked with the children. Most of the Block people had a star, of whatever colour or shape, which gave their life meaning and direction.
* * *
The overcrowded bunks bred lice. The prisoners slept in their clothes and when they died their bunkmates inherited their vermin. Some of them fought against the infestation, but it was a vain effort because, for each insect killed, there were a hundred that crawled over from the next bunk.
The matrons checked the children for lice every morning. With so many new pupils they could not manage so the older children had to check one another. Before the lessons they squatted on the ground like monkeys and went over the folds of their clothes. Some of the girls, like Eva, were fastidious and came to Miriam twice a day.
‘I have an itch here and here and here,’ Eva said, and laid her head on the woman’s lap. It was faster to check the boys, whose heads were shaven, but Bubenik and Lazik had four shirts, which they wore like an onion one on top of another, and which prolonged the procedure. At dawn, an hour before the morning roll call, Sonia brought a barrel with tepid tea in which the matrons washed the children’s underwear. They believed that the bitter brew kept the vermin away and they made the children sprinkle the liquid on their collars. There was no place to dry the washed clothes and the children stood on the camp road waving their wet rags in the air. The boys had no patience and put on their damp shirts, letting them dry on their backs.
Fabian’s actors produced a comedy about the vermin. There was a sick man with a puzzling disease. One physician claimed that he had eaten too much soup, another doctor said that it was a hernia and the third decided that the man was in love and suffered from a broken heart. They argued in Czech, in German and in Latin, quoted Hippocrates, the philosopher Maimonides and Doctor Mengele, came to blows and finally operated. They opened the patient’s belly and found that he suffered from lice on the appendix.
The play was fun, though it was like everything Fabian touched, seasoned with cynicism and bitterness. He stopped teaching and took over the weekly entertainment, the games, the charades, the competitions and the theatre. He constantly invented new ideas and kept Shashek and Lisa Pomnenka busy with demands for more costumes and new decorations. He added two more characters to the puppet show – an animal, which was sometimes a dog and at other times a dragon, and Silly Billy, who in his innocence got the better of the Devil. He bought more tinsel and a pot of glue from Julius Abeles and coaxed Pavel Hoch into supplying him with outlandish rags for his theatre.
�
�You will be rewarded,’ Fabian promised. ‘When you come to hell I’ll let you have the coolest place.’
He often spoke in his satanic voice and always cracked jokes about death and the chimney.
‘Today it’s warm and sunny,’ Lisa Pomnenka said. ‘Why worry about tomorrow?’
She was simple-minded and straightforward, and she refused to be drawn into the whirlpool of fear in which Fabian lived. She was one the few who met with long-term convicts, prisoners who knew the camps and the tricks of survival. She carried bottles of gasoline into the camp, but she had no faith in the uprising. She looked like a child with her box of paints, her long hair and her blue eyes, but she had spoken to Camp Seniors from the Main Camp and even to those from Buna and Monowitz, where the SS kept labourers for the rubber factory and the mines. She knew that only the very desperate, those who were on the verge of execution, would join a revolt. The camps were a cruel place where dog ate dog and nobody would risk his life for the doomed Czech Jews. She was a simple girl but she wasn’t a fool and she knew that an uprising against the Germans had little hope of success.
‘It’s the only chance we have.’ Alex Ehren was stubborn in his belief. ‘Once we start, other camps will join in. We’ll be thousands of prisoners against a handful of SS soldiers.’
She knew better but there was no point in an argument.
* * *
The strange friendship between Foltyn and Marta Felix grew. The boy took the night shift and during the day listened to Marta Felix’s lessons. He didn’t join the children but stood half hidden behind a wooden post and drank in the woman’s words. He was fascinated by the kings and battles and fallen empires, and in the afternoon he came up to the teacher and asked questions. After some time they spoke about other things, about communism and democracy and the Platonic ideas of the state, of justice and friendship.