The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  ‘What matters is not what will happen,’ said Lisa Pomnenka, ‘but what is now.’

  They used different weapons and fought on many fronts, against fear, dirt, hunger and vermin. They didn’t fight because they were brave or well-trained or led by a military man. They fought because it was the only thing they could do. The Block and the painted wall were their El Alamein and Stalingrad and the plains of Crimea.

  * * *

  Alex Ehren made it a rule to save a slice of bread every day. He added the slice to the one he had already saved until he had a whole ration. He ate the old bread and kept the fresh for the next evening until he saved up two rations and at the end he had a whole loaf of bread. It was a treasure, a trove of food, which would sustain him for several days, even a week, if necessary.

  The girl teased him about his miserliness and hoarding of bread.

  ‘Why not have one royal meal,’ she said, ‘and go to bed with a full stomach? Tomorrow will take care of itself. I may get some food from the doctor.’

  Alex Ehren could never free himself from the thought of tomorrow. He thought about the uprising, the breakthrough and walking in the darkness and about the deep woods of the Slovakian mountains. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to buy food or to steal from a farmstead. He imagined how they would hide in a gully or in a cave, live on berries and mushrooms like hermits, until they made contact with other escaped prisoners or partisans. He also kept a finely sharpened knife hidden within his loaf.

  ‘One day,’ he said, ‘the bread might keep us alive.’

  * * *

  There were two pairs of twins on the Block – two older boys and a pair of kindergarten girls. From time to time the twins were summoned to the Hospital Block where they stayed for half a day, a day sometimes, and then returned with a piece of bread or a slice of sausage. Dr Mengele sent an orderly to fetch them and soon the camp reverberated with the shouted summons.

  ‘Twins on Block Thirty-two; twins on Thirty-two,’ and all the inmates repeated the words. The labourers that worked in the ditches, those who knelt and broke rocks on the road, the men who stood guard in front of each barracks and even Sonia, who staggered under the burden of the soup barrel, all took up the call and shouted it in a frenzy of obedience. There was a punishment for those who wouldn’t fall in with the shouting and the Capo beat the recalcitrant ones with a cane until they lifted their arms in defence and shouted with the others.

  The SS doctor made Lisa Pomnenka the warden of the twins. She accompanied them to the Hospital Block, waited until he had completed his measurements and then took them back. The doctor’s projects ran concurrently to one another. Sometimes he was more involved in his sterilisation scheme, another time in his research of inferior races and then again in his work with twins. They offered a rare opportunity because the identical twin would be an ideal control subject when he decided to infect his brother or cut out one of his glands. Birkenau, with its influx of death-bound prisoners, was a superb ground for research, as never before had a scientist had such an inexhaustible pool and supply of human specimens.

  The Jews were abundant and dispensable, and when an experiment needed to be repeated, there were always thousands of others to replace the dead. Their lives were cheap, because, as they were to die anyway, it didn’t matter whether they were suffocated by gas or died on the operating table. The people arrived in sealed boxcars – ten, sometimes twelve thousand each day… men and women and children – and he had but to move his hand to have as many of them as he wanted. Sometimes, on his luckier days, he found three generations of the same family, which helped him trace a genetic flaw or malformation so frequent among the inferior races.

  He had plans for Lisa Pomnenka, who, with her long skull and blue eyes might have some Germanic blood. He had taught her to draw family trees and diagrams in different colours and it would be a waste of time to train a new assistant. She spoke decent German and was good with the twins and there was no reason why she shouldn’t serve him even when the rest were gone.

  Once he showed her pictures to a friend, an SS officer who then commissioned the girl to paint a storybook for him. He brought her fairy tale texts and made her produce illustrations for Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. He was about to go on leave the next afternoon and he ordered her to stay in the Gypsy Camp overnight to finish the gift for his children.

  ‘I thought you were never coming back.’ Alex Ehren was bitter as if her absence had been her fault. He had waited for the girl on the road and was relieved when he saw her coming through the gate.

  ‘One day I might not come back.’ She laid her hand on his sleeve. ‘The SS doctor wants to transfer me to another camp.’

  Lisa Pomnenka felt sorry for the man in the tattered jacket. He tried to look neat, possibly for her sake, and his face was shaven.

  He washed his shirt and wore the cap she had knitted for him at a rakish angle. He tried hard to keep his spirits up in spite of his fear and hunger, and he waited with his evening meal until she returned from the Gypsy Camp. He spun plans for an uprising, an escape and refuge in the woods. She looked at the one pitiful loaf of bread he kept wrapped in a piece of cloth and she knew how foolish, how impossible, his hopes were, but as she knew no other solution, she kept silent. She loved him, but what use was there in dying together when she might leave him and remain alive.

  ‘I have a surprise for you,’ she said, and kissed him on the mouth in front of the old men wrapped in their blankets and the old women that shuffled back and forth on their swollen feet. She stood very close and her black hair smelled young in the evening wind. ‘Stay on the Block after the curfew.’

  ‘How can I? The Block Senior counts us on our bunks.’

  ‘He needn’t know.’ She held her hand over her mouth to hide a smile.

  Alex Ehren had often dreamt about being with the girl, but it was always only a thought, far-fetched and imaginary. Sometimes, when they sat next to each other and he touched her hand or her shoulder, he was full of desire and pictured her naked skin and the shape of her body. But it had always been a dream, an idea, something that would never come true. Now, when she asked him to stay overnight in the Matron’s cubicle, he was shy and self-conscious of his body.

  He went to the washroom alone, long before the morning roll call, and he stripped and washed from head to toe in the sparse trickle of water. It was still dark and he saw the fading stars and a sliver of predawn moon. The stars were clear among the running clouds, though to the east they had grown pale with the promise of a new day. There was beauty in the June morning and yet he felt sad and abandoned. There was ambivalence in his existence, he thought, a double link of death and life, a taste of the end in each beginning. The breeze smelled of river but it was marred by the smoke that trailed, dark and bittersweet, over the landscape. There was an intimation of death in his daily routine of waking and falling asleep, his work with the children and even in the promise of lovemaking that night.

  And yet the awareness of his imminent death sweetened the bread he ate and every breath of air became an experience because it was numbered and finite. He treasured even his squalor, the cold of his nights and the hunger of his days, because they were the only life he had. He shrunk away from the nothingness of non-being, but at the same time the finality of his time sharpened his sense of living. The insignificant trifles of his present – his towel, his mess-bowl, the broken comb – carried a luminescence, a beauty and meaning they would never have acquired in a different setting.

  The Block was quiet without the children’s voices and the bustle of the day. Alex Ehren had never seen the eighteen stands, the wooden stage and the chimney stack empty and silent. After the arrival of the May transports there were more than five hundred children on the Block and they took turns playing outside to let others squat on the floor and listen to the teacher.

  The two bare bulbs over the chimney gave hardly any light and the corners were full of ghosts. Under
Himmelblau’s door was a bright chink and Alex Ehren stepped back.

  Lisa Pomnenka motioned with her hand. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

  He was embarrassed that Himmelblau knew but so did Fabian, who stuffed a blanket on his bunk and covered up for him.

  The girl laid the table with a blue cloth. She put two enamel plates from the Gypsy Camp on it and stoked the cast-iron stove. They ate hot soup and a potato spread with cheese and then Lisa Pomnenka put a brown cake on the table. It was, like so many other things on the Block, a make-believe cake made of the bread the SS officer had paid for her storybook. She had cut the loaf into slices, spread them with jam and laid one on top of the other. She dressed the top with margarine sweetened with sugar. They drank tea she had saved from the morning and when they had eaten they sat at the wooden table, silent and at a loss at their sudden intimacy.

  She had been formal and polite during their meal as if trying to keep up the illusion that they were in a different time and in a different place, and that the Block, the camp and even the next day didn’t exist. It had been a long time, two years perhaps, since Alex Ehren was alone in a room and he stood up and paced the three steps from one wall of the tiny cubicle to the other and then stopped and held his palms above the stove. It was an exquisite experience to have a private place, a room all for himself. Yet he was still too shy to touch the girl.

  Lisa Pomnenka took off her woollen jacket, which had been a gift from the seamstress. She stepped out of her skirt and unbuttoned her shirt and Alex Ehren watched in wonderment as she rolled back her dark stockings until the room grew fragrant with her nudity. She was, he thought, like a butterfly that had broken through its chrysalis. There were two separate worlds, he thought again, one dressed and the other naked, which were like two circles that did not touch during the day but intertwined at night.

  She watched him with her open blue eyes as he undressed, clumsily and with his hand over his private parts, and then he turned towards her.

  They touched and he felt the silk of her skin and his hand moved to the valley of her waist and he stroked her belly and navel. For a short while he drowned in the security of homecoming and was lost in time. They made love and Alex Ehren was surprised at the passion that flowed through the girl. It was as if they had exchanged roles and she was the stronger, the older and the more vital in the game of lovemaking. She gave herself generously, with total abandonment, though Alex Ehren was unable to shut off his awareness, to expose himself, to lower his defences and to speak about the pleasure they gave each other. It was as if the terrors of the last months had built a wall, which stood cold and forbidding, between his heart and the outside world. He knew that he wasn’t her first lover but, afterwards, he was reluctant to ask about the men she had known before him.

  She was lovely in her nakedness, delicate and with boyish hips and movements. The thought that he would lose her was like a wound and an affliction.

  ‘I’ll always remember,’ he said, ‘wherever we might be.’

  ‘You won’t—’ she shook her head ‘—because we live what is and not what was or will be.’

  She fell asleep with her dark head on his arm and he wondered whether their intimacy had brought them closer or had opened a wound and driven a wedge between them.

  Next evening Lisa Pomnenka didn’t return to the Camp. At first he thought she was working overnight for the SS doctor, but when another day passed and then another, he understood that she was gone, transferred to another compound or dead. He asked Mietek, Julius Abeles, who came and went with the Cart Commando, and even the Gypsy prisoner who brought the children soup, but they knew nothing of the girl.

  The first days were the worst and he longed for her blue eyes, her smile, her hands and the touch of her body. One of the Clothes Storeroom prisoners might have informed the SS on her kerosene bottles, but when nobody came to search the Block, he dismissed the suspicion. The German physician conducted terrible experiments and he might have used her for one of his operations. She might also be saved, he thought, because the doctor wouldn’t want her to perish with the condemned transport. It occurred to him that she had disappeared because their time was up and they were soon to die.

  They had made love and her fragrance still lingered on his hands and he wouldn’t forget her for as long as he was allowed to live. He loved her but he was unable to mourn for her deeply. He wondered how did she know? Were they all robbed of their ability to love, to mourn, to hate? Was it the utter exposure to death, the days and nights and weeks when he knew the date of his execution that made him lose his humanity? He didn’t know. His time was like a spiral that spun around its axis, faster and faster in an ever-diminishing circle, and when the spiral and the pivot became one, he too would cease to exist.

  He remembered the naked maidens in the adjoining camp, his friend Beran, who had died instead of another man, the September transport, the Hungarians and the frozen corpses that lined his road to Birkenau. They were all gone, like water in a sluice, in a sequence of arrivals and departures, and because there were so many dead in such a short time, he could feel little sadness or pity even for the girl he had loved.

  11.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE, their last month, Aunt Miriam fell ill. She ran a temperature, had a sore throat and in the morning couldn’t swallow. She went to see the doctor, who diagnosed diphtheria and sent her to the infection ward. There were always outbreaks of contagious diseases in the Camp. Once it was encephalitis, an infection of the brain, another time typhus, which was transmitted by lice, or scarlet fever or an epidemic of festering sores. The vermin and bad food caused diarrhoea, which the paramedic treated with a white powder called bolus that stuck to the tongue and choked the throat. It was strange that the infections didn’t spread faster, but possibly because the sick died so soon, they had no time to pass their illness on to others.

  Aryeh bribed the hospital orderly to take his mother a bowl of pudding, the sweet mush they cooked from crumbled cakes. He spoke to Miriam through the wooden wall and she said that she felt better and would return to work in a week or two. She was a quiet, reliable woman, who didn’t have an enemy in the world, and Himmelblau was relieved that she would be back on the Block in the critical time ahead.

  The matron had a privileged position in the Camp because of Edelstein, her husband, who had been the Ghetto Eldest. The Germans had arrested him for reasons she didn’t know. Some said it was because a number of ghetto inmates had escaped; others believed he shouldn’t have visited the Bialystok children, who passed through the ghetto on their way to Auschwitz and still others thought that he had learned about the gas chambers, which the SS wanted to keep secret.

  At the beginning Miriam didn’t know where he was. She thought that he was still in Theresienstadt, in another concentration camp or in a prison in Berlin. He had worked with Eichmann, and when the officer visited the Family Camp, he promised to take a letter to her husband.

  ‘One day we may permit a visit,’ said Eichmann and looked at her through his cold spectacles.

  It was only later that she learned how close he was – half an hour’s walk away – and she and the boy lived in the hope that they might see him again. They heard of Edelstein here and there, from a prisoner who had met him at the infirmary where he had come for treatment, on his walk around the prison yard and once when he carried out his bucket.

  * * *

  One day three SS officers visited the camp. They walked quickly up the camp road, inspected the workshops and even peered into the Children’s Block. The next day the Block Seniors and the Registrars compiled lists of the prisoners, separate lists for women and men. They wrote down their tattooed numbers, age and profession and there was a rumour that the Family Camp would be dismantled and the inmates sent to labour camps in Germany.

  There were other omens of an approaching change. The mica workshop and the weaving plant didn’t get a new supply of material and when the women exhausted the stock, the shops were closed and the l
abourers sent to another commando. The same happened at the Clothes Storeroom, where all the workers were dismissed and the Clothes Capo was left only with the prisoners’ rags, with the seamstress and Pavel Hoch as his only helpers. There were no new bales, no deliveries and no boxes packed for Germany. The seamstress had a hard time concealing the contraband on the half-empty shelves and Felsen warned the underground triads to be cautious and not to meet until the danger blew over.

  On Monday two men from the Cart Commando were taken to the Main Camp for interrogation and in the evening the Priest discovered a cache of pickaxes and crowbars on one of the blocks. There was nothing unusual about prisoners being taken to the Camp Gestapo, the German secret service, and many Block Seniors had in their cubicles a stolen hammer, a pickaxe or a spade, which were needed to dig a ditch around the block. Nobody was publicly flogged or executed, and a day later the Cart Commando people were returned to the camp. Yet with the lists, the closed workshops and the visit of the three high-ranking officers, there sprouted a rumour about an informer in their midst.

  At first it was just a whisper. Alex Ehren overheard it from the adjoining bunk but paid no attention. The bunks were full of tales; they bred and propagated like lice and most often proved to be fiction or a false alarm. There was no reason, he thought, why Julius Abeles should be an informer. Usually a rumour lived for a day and then died, supplanted by another story or other news, about the war, the Camp Capo or the distribution of the bread rations. Yet the word spread and grew wings and soon was all over the block until it burst open like a poisonous fruit. People spoke about ‘Julius the Informer’ and pointed him out to one another on the camp road. A man saw him stand with a guard and another watched him leave the block at night, another added some gossip and the next one took it for granted. The only person who seemed unaware of the suspicion was Julius Abeles, who left to work in the morning, hitched himself horse-like to the cart, and dragged a load of potatoes to the kitchen and then a burden of bodies to the incinerator. Like all the Cart Commando, he knew about the planned mutiny. In fact, the Commando people were an essential link with other compounds and with the underground leadership. They bartered bread for tobacco and stole from the prisoners’ rations, but also smuggled news and contraband material into the camp.