The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  ‘The Germans are no fools. Why kill cheap labour if they can put us to work? They have a war to fight and they need hands for their factories. Or in the fields. They wouldn’t feed prisoners for six months and then send them up the chimney. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Beran turned his back and closed his eyes. He thought about his wife, her neck and her belly and the few times they had been together. They married in haste when he was summoned because there was no other way Sonia could join the transport. They weren’t on the same block but they met after work on the camp road. He thought about her with tenderness and when she brought him a bowl of soup, which she carried under her coat, they spoke about the future. What kind of apartment they would rent, what pictures they would hang on the wall and what meals she would prepare. She waited, bending her head in the drizzle, until Beran finished eating. She was a food carrier and was allowed to scrape the barrels before she returned them to the kitchen. It was hard work because the carriers were hitched into a canvas harness and lifted the barrels on wooden poles. They trudged through the mire of the road from one barracks to the next to deliver the tea and the midday soup and in the evening the ersatz tea again. It was cold and Sonia’s clogs were caked with mud. She was often aching and weary but she always looked forward to the evening when Beran ate her bowl of cold mush.

  Sometimes on a good day, she found a piece of potato at the bottom, but some women were like birds of prey and had always grabbed the beetroot before she could secure it for herself. Beran ate his soup sheltered by her body, and, in the intimacy of the barracks’ wall, she laid her hand on his wrist. She knew that she was plain, that her hair was coarse and she had a thick nose, but at that moment she felt almost beautiful, for the touch of their hands was a bond of love. It was only a light touch, a touch of a butterfly, because in the camp men and women were not allowed to be intimate. And yet she felt comforted as if his strength had flowed into her blood. ‘One day,’ he said in his slow voice, ‘the war will be over. There is a rumour that the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad.’

  She never ate the soup, which she scraped from the barrel bottom, but brought it to Beran. Sometimes, when there was not enough to fill the bowl, she added from her own ration. She loved to watch him eat, because then he was only and exquisitely hers.

  The night of the trucks brought windfalls to the December transport people. They didn’t know how many prisoners were marched away but Rudi, the Slovakian Quarantine Camp Registrar, claimed that he had seen the lists.

  ‘There is always a number,’ he said. ‘The Germans are sticklers for detail and everything is written down. There were 3,792 prisoners that left for Heydebreck.’

  He twisted his mouth into a sneer.

  ‘Heydebreck, they say, but who would believe the SS.’

  He was a young man with a strong neck and shoulders and he thought about the girl who tried to attack a soldier before she was killed. Only a handful of prisoners had stood up against the sentries and they were all beaten to death.

  ‘No use fighting them,’ he said. ‘One has to run.’

  ‘How do you run away from here?’ Alex Ehren looked at the fence, the ditch and the soldiers in the watchtowers.

  ‘Watch me,’ said Rudi and grimaced.

  Suddenly there was enough space on the blocks. Alex Ehren moved with Fabian and Beran to an empty bunk with a pile of abandoned blankets. He wrapped one around himself and lay under the soft fabric, warm, comfortable and complacent, not caring that the wool still held the breath of its previous owner. The man might live, he thought, come back the next morning and claim the blanket. He held the cover to his chest, reluctant to part with it. He felt no compunction, no pain, no compassion for the dead man. What am I, he thought, a man, a monster, a stone? How would I speak to the man if he suddenly stood at the bunk?

  ‘He won’t. Once dead always dead,’ said Fabian.

  For about a week there was a climate of abandon in the camp. It took time to get accustomed to the space on the bunks, the warmth of the Dutch blankets, the new Block Senior, and even the half-empty latrine block, where Alex Ehren used to wait in a painful queue for a vacant seat.

  ‘Grab it for as long as you can,’ said Fabian, ‘A piece of bread, a blanket, a better job. How long will I live? A week, a month, a year? Whatever it is, life is too short to be wasted on qualms. Why look for your better self? There is no better or worse you, because there is only one self that deserves to be pampered like a child. As long as it lasts. Why fuss about a dead man’s blanket? What matters is to stay alive because that’s what it’s all about. What’s wrong with being a crook and staying alive? When you are dead nobody gives a hoot whether you were an angel or a rogue. Conscience? Morality? My foot. Look at Mother Nature. Show me an honest rat, a merciful wolf, a good-natured bird of prey. Or a tree. Trees grow and choke the daisies at their feet. Consideration and honesty are an invention of the weak. Have you never walked in a forest? Green tops and a graveyard underneath. Why should I be different from a tree? It’s life or death and whoever is stronger prevails. I’d rather be a tree than a dead lily of the valley. Honest, modest and dead.’

  Fabian thought about his father who had died when he was a child … four or five years old, he himself didn’t remember. He had grown up in an orphanage where he learned the tricks of survival. He leaned forward as if he were revealing a secret.

  ‘Take advantage of what there is. It’s a rotten place but in a way better than the world outside. At least the Germans have made us all equal. The smoke from the rich stinks the same as that of a beggar.’

  It was a long speech and Fabian felt embarrassed by telling too much. He took off his spectacles and rubbed the cracked lens.

  ‘Everybody hates one’s father sometimes,’ said Beran. He was tall and gawky and he walked as if his head were a step ahead of his body. Yet he was gentle and knew how to listen.

  Next day at noon Fabian caught Alex Ehren by the sleeve. ‘Most of the instructors are gone and they need new people at the Children’s Block. I may be a crook but I won’t forget a friend. After all it was you who found the abandoned blankets.’ And he laughed.

  It was the only Children’s Block of its kind in Auschwitz. There was none similar to it in Buna or Monowitz or even in the Central Camp, where the barracks were built of solid red bricks and had real windows. There were other camps, the Gypsy Camp or the Women’s Camp where the children slept in special barracks before they were sent to their deaths. But there was none similar to the Children’s Block in the Czech Family Camp, where the children spent their days with their teachers and matrons.

  Mietek, who had been in prison camps since the Polish war, claimed that there was no such block anywhere within the German conquest, from the vast spaces of the Soviet Union to the deserts of Libya in Africa, to Estonia and Latvia at the Baltic Sea. The Children’s Block was started in October, three months before Alex Ehren arrived at the Family Camp. Dr Mengele, the SS physician, commandeered the furthermost barracks in the row and nominated Fredy Hirsch to run it. Arno Boehm, who wore the green triangle of a convicted murderer, came to the Block, looked at the stalls and clicked his tongue.

  ‘Why give the Jews privileges?’ He ran his hand over his shaven skull and pondered why the Czech transport was treated differently. As a German he had the confidence of the soldiers, but even they didn’t know why the Theresienstadt Jews were allowed to keep their hair, wore civilian rags and underwent no selection.

  Mietek, the Polish roof repairman, became friendly with Magdalena, one of the matrons and came to the Block every second day. He sat on the horizontal chimney with his striped beret at the back of his head and watched the children. They reminded him of his village and his eyes grew soft.

  ‘You don’t see many of them here.’

  He too pondered the mystery and shook his head. He was an old hand at camp life and knew that all other children – the Poles, the Russians, the French and the Greeks – were put to death immediately on arri
val. There must be a reason, he concluded, why the Germans allowed the Czech children to live. Yet what the reason was he didn’t know.

  Sometimes he repaired a roof in the Kanada Camp, where the newly arrived transports’ luggage was looted and he brought the children an egg, an apple or a tattered book.

  ‘Sure,’ he said to Fredy, ‘there is a scheme. One day they will barter them for gold or butter or sardines. Who knows? Today here, tomorrow on your way to Switzerland.’

  Sometimes German officers came to see the Children’s Block and once even Dr Mengele spoke to a child.

  He touched the little girl’s head with his pigskin glove.

  ‘Call me Uncle Joseph,’ he said in his thin voice and walked a step in front of Fredy, the Children’s Block Senior. He got on well with the gym teacher who had been born in Aachen, spoke like a native German and clicked his heels.

  A Jew, thought Dr Mengele, but certainly more human than the Polish convicts or the Gypsies in the D Camp. He looked at the man’s shoulders, his sharp nose and strong neck. He may even have some Aryan blood in his veins. A pity I can’t trace his family tree. One day, he thought, I could take his measurements. The long head, the spine, the proportions of the limbs were not Jewish. Yet he dismissed the idea because he didn’t want to digress from his fertility research. It would be embarrassing, he thought, to ask the Children’s Senior to strip and let him inspect his cranium, ears and private parts. For a while he contemplated reclaiming him from the death-bound contingent, but then he decided against it. There were other prisoners to take over the Block. It was enough that he would save the three physicians and the pharmacist for whom he had no replacement.

  After the death of the September transport, Himmelblau, the new Children’s Block Senior, took on Fabian and Beran and Alex Ehren whom he knew from the ghetto as teachers. He lectured them in his atrocious Czech, moving his head like a St Bernard dog.

  ‘There are do’s and there are don’ts,’ he said. ‘We don’t speak about death and the chimney. We pretend that we’ll stay here until the war ends and then return home. The Germans don’t allow Jewish children to attend school—’ he lifted his finger in the air ‘—and so we don’t teach.’

  ‘If I don’t teach,’ said Marta Felix, ‘what shall I do with the children?’

  She was forty and Himmelblau employed her because she had been a lecturer at the university and spoke French and Russian.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I say to you so many things.’ One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile while the other remained low and sad.

  ‘How can you remember all the regulations? And who can tell the difference between play and learning? Sometimes play is the best learning and the best learning is play.’

  Himmelblau got entangled in the Czech feminine and masculine genders and what was neuter he mixed up with both.

  ‘What an awful language,’ he sighed. ‘How can anybody speak it? No wonder you can’t remember about the difference between the learning and the play.’

  When Fredy was still alive, Himmelblau had been his second, Deputy Children’s Senior. He was different from the gym teacher, who was neat and elegant even in his prison clothes and who charmed little boys and clicked his heels when SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann came for a visit. Fredy sparkled and impressed, but it was Himmelblau who bore the burden of the daily routine. It was he who was in charge of the youth assistants, cut the bread rations, kept records and counted the children before the roll call.

  There was a man, Felsen, among the instructors, a communist and conspirator, who seldom spoke to the other teachers.

  ‘Fredy?’ said Felsen and looked over his shoulder. ‘He is like soap that produces foam but doesn’t wash out the dirt.’

  ‘And Himmelblau?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Felsen was careful not to enter into an argument, for he had secrets which he carried like an unborn child.

  He drew his neck into his collar until he resembled a turtle and turned away. He had no group of his own but perambulated among the classes and talked about history and politics. On Mondays he huddled with a cabal of pupils with whom he produced a clandestine newspaper. They hung it on the wall and the children crowded around the sheet and read it as eagerly as if it were printed and published in earnest.

  Alex Ehren had no doubt that Fredy was dead. There was a witness, a male nurse, who was one of the few whom Dr Mengele had reclaimed from the death transport.

  ‘He took too many pills,’ said the male nurse, ‘and they carried him to the truck on a stretcher.’

  ‘There is only one way to stay alive,’ Rudi the Slovakian had urged Fredy, as they’d talked in his white-washed cubicle in the Quarantine Camp. He had friends in the Main Camp in Auschwitz and he’d known that the transport was condemned to die.

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Attack the sentries and take away their guns. Cut through the gate and run for your life. You are the man to give the word.’

  ‘They will shoot at us from the watchtowers.’

  ‘Not if you take them first.’

  ‘How many children will die if we fight?’ Fredy had fingered the whistle on his neck.

  ‘Some may escape into the woods. But without a fight there is no hope for anybody.’

  The Registrar had a girlfriend in one of the barracks and he was eager to save her life. He’d looked at the Children’s Senior and at the whistle, which was the symbol of his authority. He was the only man whom people would follow.

  ‘Other camps may join in,’ Rudi had continued, ‘the Men’s Camp, the Gypsies, perhaps even the Buna prisoners. There might be a general revolt. Who knows where it might end.’

  ‘I need time,’ Fredy had said. ‘Come back later. In an hour, in two. Before it is dark.’

  He had been of two minds. He had little doubt that the transport would die but at the same time he’d hoped that he would be saved. He would be exempt from death because Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann, the SS officer from Berlin, needed him. He’d known that the Family Camp had existed for a reason. Some of the prisoners might be executed, but the camp would prevail. And as long as the camp existed the Germans would need him. Hadn’t he written a report about the children for Eichmann? About their better rations, their sport lessons behind the barracks, their adequate clothing? Eichmann had folded the document, put it in his briefcase and nodded in approval.

  ‘Good work, Youth Senior.’ The SS man had taken the paper, but he had been careful not to step too close or touch Fredy’s clothes. ‘You will be rewarded.’

  What reward was there other than life, Fredy had wondered as he’d lain on his pallet. Outside somebody had called out the numbers of those who were exempt from the transport and would return to the Family Camp. Mengele’s twins, the hospital staff, the Camp Senior’s lover. He had left his room and stood on the camp road craning his neck for a messenger with his name. The message was late but it must, it certainly would arrive. Hadn’t Eichmann, the SS officer with the face of an accountant, promised? ‘You will be rewarded.’ But would he keep his word to a Jew? Fredy had known that the Germans had a twisted sense of humour and they thrived on deceit and cruelty. He had known them well, for he had attended the same schools with them and had been weaned on the same myths and fairy tales full of blood and terror. Eichmann was in Berlin and might have forgotten, he’d thought. Or was it a practical joke? Would he promise and then let him die after he had used him? His hope had become the father of his despair and he had lain on his bunk motionless and wrapped in his frustration like in a cloak.

  Should he listen to the Slovak Registrar and start a mutiny? He’d mulled it over: the children loved him, and if he blew the whistle the older boys would attack the Germans and so would some of the grown-ups. But what was the use of fighting against an army that had guns and armoured vehicles? He had heard a rumour about an uprising in Warsaw. But weren’t they all killed or burned like vermin in their cellars? Fredy felt sorry for the children who would die, but he felt even mor
e pity for himself, for his youth, for his perfect body, for the days he would not live. He had got up from his bunk and walked to the gate. He’d asked a registrar about a message but there had not been one. He had returned to his cubicle confused by his fear and frustration.

  After an hour he had got up from his bed to find one of the physicians.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ he had said, ‘as soon as it grows dark I’ll give the word. I need a pill to steady my nerves.’

  During the day everything had seemed normal in the Quarantine Camp; people met outside the blocks and the instructors played a game with the children. They had been served their midday soup and some of the prisoners had waved to their friends in the Family Camp. The three Jewish doctors and the pharmacist had kept themselves apart. Dr Mengele had promised that they would be reclaimed from the transport. Their numbers were already at the Registrar’s office and they would return to the Hospital Block before nightfall. The physician had looked at Fredy’s eyes, at his trembling hands and his twitching mouth.

  The Children’s Senior had been in distress and could blow his whistle any moment, the physician had realised. A mutiny against the Germans was lunacy; it was the death of all – of the doomed transport, of the prisoners in the Family Camp and even the reclaimed hospital staff. If Fredy started an uprising, there was no chance for anybody. The man was crazed, obviously out of his mind, and if he wasn’t stopped, the Jewish doctors would perish with the rest.

  ‘I’ll give you something, a sedative,’ the physician had said and turned to the pharmacist.

  They had been sorely short of medicines, but they did have a small stock of painkillers. The druggist had handed him a bottle of sleeping pills. The doctor had poured out its contents and had closed his hand in a fast movement. He had some cold tea in his mess bowl and he swilled the tablets round its bottom until they dissolved in the murky liquid.