The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, and his voice was high with excitement like that of a woman. ‘We’ll have a shower and go home.’

  They stood naked in the room, crowded and plagued by thirst, but it wasn’t the day of their execution. The children would go back to their bunks, to their starvation rations and the smell of the latrines. Yet they would live and return to the Children’s Block, which, with its lessons and games and Lisa Pomnenka’s make-believe landscape, was their home. The windows at the top of the wall were almost blacked out with grime but he could see the sun and he felt light and happy. And had he not been scared of the SS guards, he would have thrown up his arms in joy and laughed.

  * * *

  Hynek Rind was among the last to be shaved. The Greek barber made him climb a bench and splashed water over his back and belly. He lowered his razor but stopped and gazed at his private parts.

  He looked up.

  ‘Judio?’ he asked in a Jewish dialect with a surprised expression.

  Hynek Rind stood naked on the bench, higher than the other prisoners, and Alex Ehren saw that he wasn’t circumcised.

  ‘Yes, a Jew. Not by choice but because of the Germans. Why else would I be locked up in this stinking place?’

  ‘Judio,’ the Greek asked again. ‘What kind of a Judio?’ He pointed his razor at Hynek Rind’s penis.

  ‘Go on,’ said Hynek Rind, ‘I am the last one and everybody wants to get it over with.’ He felt that everybody was looking at his nudity and he raised his voice. ‘Hurry up!’ he exclaimed. ‘I won’t stand here forever!’

  The SS sentry came closer. He was bored and the incident promised a break in the monotony of his job.

  ‘A Jew and not a Jew,’ said the Greek, and he shook his head. He spoke fast to his cousin and they both laughed at the idea.

  ‘I could make you a Jew,’ he said in broken German and poised his razor like a sword.

  It was only then the SS soldier grasped his intention and nodded his head with a smirk.

  ‘Make him a Jew,’ he said to the barber. ‘Do it quickly, man, and make him a Jew.’

  There were other sentries in the room and they grew interested.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Hynek Rind, holding his hands in front of his genitals.

  The SS soldier stood very near and the Greek was scared. It was a joke at first but now he didn’t dare disobey. And thus, Morpurgo, the Corfu barber, swung his razor and in one swift sweep cut into Hynek Rind’s skin.

  He gave one shrill cry, a shriek of pain and surprise and anguish and ran, with blood staining his thighs, towards the door. The German, still laughing, stepped in his way and with his rifle butt pushed him back into the row of prisoners.

  Alex Ehren and Fabian helped him on his way back and he lay on his bunk, hurting, for three days.

  10.

  THE CLOTHES STOREROOM WAS AT the far end of the camp. It was so close to the Block that the children saw the commandoes unload the bales and then pull the cart, horse-like, down the road to return with a new heap of clothes. It was not only a storeroom for the prisoners’ rags but also a sorting station for the new arrivals’ baggage. With the incoming multitudes the Kanada people couldn’t manage their task and some of the looted articles were sent to the Family Camp to be sorted and tied into bundles. The better coats and jackets were shipped to Germany where, through Hitler’s ‘munificence’, they were distributed to German families, while the worst, the tattered rags, remained in the camp and were marked with red paint and worn by the Jewish inmates.

  At the entrance to the Storeroom were two whitewashed cubicles, one of which belonged to the Clothes Capo, a German convict, a Social Democrat, and in the other sat the seamstress, who patched prisoners’ rags on her ancient sewing machine. Like in other barracks the block was filled with three-tiered bunks, but instead of mattresses, they were full of shirts, underwear, shoes and jackets. On the surface it was a workplace similar to the weaving workshop, the mica block, the camp road and the ditch commando, but like so many other things in the camp, the Clothes Storeroom had two lives, one overt and the other secret, hidden from the Germans.

  It was a privileged workshop because the coming and leaving of clothes enabled the prisoners to deal in tobacco and spirits for which the Block Seniors and the Camp Capo paid with bread and soup. Yet beyond the tobacco and vodka there was yet another secret, deep and dangerous, which the inmates hardly ever mentioned to anyone outside the barracks. The people who were arriving on the daily transports often hid a precious stone, a small jewel or even tightly rolled banknotes in their clothes. Pavel Hoch went over the seams, linings and cuffs and sometimes found a small trove of gold. The valuables, like the pillaged clothes, belonged to the Germans and had to be handed over to an SS supervisor, an officer, who collected them into a cardboard box. Each evening Pavel Hoch and his colleagues had to undress and an overseer checked their trousers, their mouths and even the orifices of their bodies for a possible theft. And yet, in spite of the officer and the search, he managed to conceal a stone, a coin or a small jewel, most of which he later handed over to the seamstress. Some of the prisoners grumbled but at the end they gave up their loot because they were afraid to be branded as traitors.

  ‘We need arms,’ she said. ‘Crowbars and a pickaxe are children’s toys. What we need are guns and hand grenades.’

  The communists tried to come to an arrangement with Julius Abeles, to draw him into the conspiracy and make him buy a weapon for them. He refused point blank and pursed his mouth. ‘It’s a foolish idea and I don’t want to get involved. Dog eat dog, and every man for himself. One day you’ll get caught and the Germans will hang you.’

  After that day the seamstress despised him and spread rumours that he robbed the inmates of their daily rations. She never told them whether there were firearms on the block and where she had hidden the bottles of kerosene and gasoline, which Lisa Pomnenka had smuggled into the camp.

  ‘The less you know, the less you’ll tell.’

  However, the contraband was somewhere, on one of the shelves, in her cubicle or in a dugout under the bunk. Each time an SS guard entered the Clothes Storage Pavel Hoch had palpitations, because had the soldier found a firearm or the bottles, they would have been tortured to tell where they came from and then put to death. There were seven prisoners in the storage and one of them might say a word to a friend or a lover.

  ‘No, I am not afraid,’ she said. ‘There are ways to deal with informers.’

  Sometimes Pavel Hoch mused about the seamstress. What kind of woman was she? Was she really as hard and unfeeling as she pretended to be? Did her faith in a communist revolution make her stronger and more determined? Didn’t she have a lover, a husband, children perhaps? She never opened herself up to others and he felt uneasy in her company. It was difficult to be friends with a woman who had no doubts and who, like a devout Catholic, lived strictly according to the tenets of her faith.

  ‘The world moves forward according to rules,’ she said. ‘Nothing is random. One stage leads to another and we can speed up the process or slow it down. But we can’t reverse the flow of history.’

  ‘Aren’t there things beyond the material? Don’t you believe in nature, in human goodness, in God?’

  He thought about Aninka, his gentile girlfriend, and her loving parcels.

  ‘I believe in a revolution. And the party that will bring it about,’ she said. ‘What happens to me is not important.’

  * * *

  There were communists among the older children. It was easy to be a communist in the camp because communism showed the world in black and white and explained the unexplainable. There were the communists who were good, and the fascists who were the reason of all evil. One day, when the good took over, all problems would be solved. They gathered around Felsen, who taught them Marx and Lenin and the boys felt that they had all the answers.

  ‘For the communists there exist no Jews and Gentiles, only people,’ said Bass, the oven boy.
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  ‘We cope with our Jewishness in three ways,’ said Dezo Kovac. ‘One is to deny your identity; to move to another town, to change your name and to marry a gentile wife. You’ll live in hiding for the rest of your life but your children and your children’s children might escape the curse.’

  He looked around and was glad that Hynek Rind was at the far end of the Block.

  ‘Some, like the Czech instructor, have tried but he was a generation too late. He concealed his Jewishness for thirty years but in the end it caught up with him. A Greek cut off his foreskin and an SS was his godfather.’

  Alex Ehren thought about his name and his grandfather’s house with its strip pasture.

  ‘What is the other way?’

  ‘If you can’t change yourself change the world. Bring about a revolution. The communists don’t have a Jewish problem, they say.’

  He looked at the boy who was at the threshold of manhood and who believed that he could improve the world.

  ‘Maybe they don’t,’ he said, imitating the singsong of a Jewish prayer. ‘But maybe they do have a Jewish problem but don’t speak about it. Can the party not decide one day that the Jews are counter-revolutionaries? That they are capitalists or cosmopolitans, or Trotskyists or enemies of the masses? Once a Jew always a Jew, and anti-Semitism is not a German invention. It is a poisonous plant that has flourished in Spain and France and Russia for a thousand years. Today it is in full bloom in Germany but who knows where it will crop up next?’

  The oven boy wanted to answer but Alex Ehren held up his hand.

  ‘Let him finish. Didn’t you say three ways?’

  ‘The third way is to be what you are. To make peace with it and draw the consequences. To go to Palestine.’

  ‘And live with the curse?’

  ‘Where everybody is Jewish the word Jew isn’t a curse. It doesn’t trail a bad taste, a smell. It is a word like any other. A Frenchman doesn’t mind being called a Frenchman and an Eskimo is not ashamed to live in an igloo. A shoemaker isn’t insulted if you call him a cobbler and even a thief may not object to being called a thief. Once you accept your Jewishness you won’t mind if they call you a Jew.’

  The communists had an organisation that embraced all the camps and they all, even Dezo Kovac and Himmelblau and Hynek Rind, accepted their leadership. Most of the time Pavel Hoch handed over the money and jewels he had found. Yet some of the money and two small jewels he kept hidden behind a beam.

  It was June and the silt had dried into hard cake, which cracked in spidery patterns. The prisoners had to work with a pickaxe to break the surface to lay the pavement. The stones didn’t sink into the mud and the road had almost reached the Children’s Block. Felsen’s paper and the handwritten sheet were filled with hopes and promises. The children waited for the issue and when Bass pinned it on the Block wall, they read it and repeated the names of places and cities they had never heard before. But even the small ones, those who could hardly read, like Alex Ehren’s Maccabees, picked up the names and asked: ‘Where is El Alamein and what is Crimea? What kind of place is Tarnopol and how far is it for the Russians to come to Birkenau?’

  Alex Ehren borrowed the torn atlas from the girl librarian and looked up the towns on crumpled maps with countries and frontiers that had long ago ceased to exist. At the beginning of the month the camp was awash with rumours and even the old and sick, who were swollen from hunger, lifted their heads and listened.

  ‘The end may come sooner than we think,’ said Felsen. ‘Sebastapol has fallen and the Red Army is at the Carpathians.’

  He had memorised a number of Russian sentences to greet the Soviet soldiers at the camp gate. There were other rumours, strange and exciting like exotic landscapes, about the German defeat in Tunis and Libya and about the British landing in Sicily and even about the fall of Rome. They were like ocean tides because they came and went – one day there was a rumour that the Americans had landed in France but the next morning a trainload of French Jews arrived at the platform. They heard that the Russians had conquered Hungary but the Hungarian transports kept rolling in, day after day, and their smoke eclipsed the stars and the sun.

  The deportees had no way of knowing the truth and they lived on hearsay that spread like a grapevine on the barracks walls and on the electric fences.

  On Mondays and Wednesdays, the children still had their afternoon parties and played Aryeh’s charades. That week the actors showed the battle of Jericho and Fabian made Joshua’s soldiers speak Russian. He sat with Marta Felix, who was good at languages, and she helped him write the dialogue.

  Sometimes they were reckless and their little plays and songs were a revolt against the Germans. There had been three successful escapes from the camp: Walter the Slovakian Registrar with his friend Wetzler; and Lederer the Block Senior, who had reported about the gas chambers in Birkenau. Their letters must have arrived in England and America, the Soviet Union and even Palestine, and by now the presidents, kings and governments of the world knew about the organised murder. They knew about the transports, the selections, the naked Hungarian maidens and even about the Children’s Block in the Family Camp. Was it possible that they had heard and did nothing? That they slept at night, ate their meals, made love to their wives and forgot about Majda, Eva and Hanka, the twin girls, Adam Landau and Neugeboren? If only a part of the rumours of the German defeats in Africa, Russia and Sicily was true; if the American planes dropped bombs on German factories and towns, why couldn’t they stop the trains with Jewish prisoners or destroy the Birkenau death factory? Or was the news about the inevitable fall of Germany only wishful thinking, an invention of the underground movement to keep up the spirit of the inmates? How was it possible that in the middle of a crumbling war the SS still had enough trains to carry Jews to their death?

  * * *

  They had only a very short time to live – two weeks, perhaps three, and each of them fought against time in a different way. Fabian defended himself with mockery and ridicule. He had a group of children actors with whom he prepared morbid sketches, one-act scenes, in which they poked fun at transports, lice, Germans and even the chimney.

  He produced a play about a train to heaven. The passengers were met by St Peter, who conducted a selection of those who would go to Paradise, Purgatory or who would be sent to hell.

  ‘Excuse me, is this Birkenau or heaven?’ one of the arrivals asked.

  ‘Of course it is heaven. Protektorat heaven, to be exact. Don’t you know, you blockhead, that it has been taken over by the German Army? Operation Paradise. The SS have made it Judenrein. All Jews, including St Mary and Jesus Christ were sent on a transport to hell.’

  It was a sad and cynical play but it made the children laugh, which was a remedy against their fear.

  They had their sing-alongs with Fabian, who paced the horizontal smokestack and conducted ‘Alouette’ or some other popular song. They sang loudly, with their mouths wide open, swaying left and right in rhythm with the tune, repeating the refrain again and again. The sing-alongs kept the children’s community together because when they sang they forgot their hunger and misery and were like one body with a strong, healthy and even happy voice.

  He was full of plans and ideas as if their time were not running out and he had years to carry them out. He basked in his popularity and enjoyed the children’s applause.

  ‘What is art—’ he grinned and rubbed his cracked glasses ‘—if not a substitute for life? We have no life and so I make art.’

  The Zionist instructors gathered the children in a corner, lit a stubby candle and sang Hebrew songs with words they only half understood. There was a mystique in their togetherness and when they sang they put their hands over their neighbour’s shoulder and created a magic circle. Others sang Czech folk songs and German Wanderlieder with the children, but there was little rivalry and one group learned from another until there were no borders among the singers and their songs.

  Since the Seder night Dezo Kovac had a group of
children with the clearest voices. Sometimes, on Shabbat Eve, they sang the ‘Ode to Joy’, but he also taught them ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ from Verdi’s Requiem and a march from a children’s opera they had sung in the ghetto.

  They had no instruments on the Block save a mouth organ and a cracked flute, but they produced music with their voices and there was hardly a day when the children did not sing.

  ‘How can they sing in such a place?’ asked Mietek.

  ‘The birds are dead,’ Magdalena said. ‘Somebody has to take over.’

  The children and the instructors grew accustomed to the music but the occasional visitors were struck by the tattered youngsters who squatted on the dirt floor and sang, ‘Joy, thou divine spark of Heaven, Daughter of Elysium’. Even the smaller children learned the melody and Bubenik, who was obsessed with drums, beat the rhythm on his soup bowl.

  Alex Ehren knew that their make-believe Block saved not only the children but also themselves. They could have surrendered, like many others did, and sunk into despair, losing their humanity and rummaging in the garbage bins behind the kitchen for rotting rinds and spoiled potatoes. They could have become like wild animals and let the children fend for themselves. They knew that they would die; they even knew the date of their death, half a year after their arrival in Birkenau. They counted the days and were scared of time. They prepared to fight the SS guards with a sharpened spoon handle, an iron anchor, four crowbars and the handful of arms, which the seamstress hid under the bales of clothes. Yet as long as they stuck to Fredy’s rules, washed each morning and sang with the children about joy and peace and the brotherhood of men, they were not lost. They were like the pitiful toy soldiers, which Shashek produced from wood and rusty wire. The boys lined them up in rows and shot at them with their marbles made of hardened bread. The soldiers fell but the boys picked them up and made them stand again. What chance, Alex Ehren asked himself, had the conspirators against the dogs and the electrified wires, the watchtowers, the SS garrison and the German war machine?