The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  ‘Probably the name of the factory,’ said Himmelblau.

  ‘Not so.’ Fabian grimaced and held the soap away from his face. ‘The Germans burn the dead and use their ashes as fertiliser. One day a Jew and next day a cabbage. Though I would prefer a cherry tree or a rosebush. Anything but a concentration camp. But what do they do with the little fat that remains?’

  ‘Enough,’ said Marta Felix, frowning. ‘The joke has gone far enough.’

  ‘What joke? R J F. Real Jewish Fat … that’s what the letters mean. This is what I have been told by a man from Monowitz.’

  It was Fabian’s fear that made him speak of their death. He flouted his death, hoisted it like a banner and came back to it like a thief to the scene of his crime. He cracked jokes about his own death to assuage his terror. At the beginning, every time Alex Ehren thought of his death, his heart missed a beat. It happened once or twice, but then his rage welled up from his stomach and rose to his head and his anger became stronger than his terror.

  ‘I will not,’ he said, ‘I will not go meekly to the slaughter. I will not be burned to fertilise German fields and I will not be made into a cake of soap. I may die, but I will take some of them with me.’

  He sat on the tepid chimney with his eyes to the ground, but with his fists clenched so tight that his palms hurt.

  The instructors were silent but after a while they took up another theme. At the beginning they were timid but then their voices grew louder, as if they were trying to drown out the words that would have been better left unsaid.

  In the evening, when most of the prisoners were asleep on their pallets, Felsen tapped Alex Ehren’s arm and led him to a corner.

  ‘You brag,’ said Felsen, ‘and you don’t know who is listening.’

  ‘Who is listening?’

  ‘The walls. The floor and the rafters. Those who speak are dangerous.’

  He contemplated Alex Ehren in the light of the dim bulb and ran his hand over his face. ‘There are talkers and there are doers. But they don’t brag about what they do.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘They are ready to fight for their lives.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. They don’t advertise, but there is an underground organisation.’

  Where?’

  ‘Here and in other camps. All over Auschwitz.’

  Alex Ehren was overwhelmed. He had found a group of people who, like him, wouldn’t accept their ordeal.

  ‘How do I join? I’ll do anything they ask.’

  ‘First of all, shut up. Don’t trumpet into the world what a hero you are. Someday they will give you a task.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not before the time is ripe.’

  Alex Ehren lay on his bunk afraid and excited. He imagined the chaos, the fight, the dying people among the barracks. But for the first time in his Birkenau existence there was a flicker of hope. He knew that most of them would perish, but why shouldn’t he make it to the woods and join the partisans? In his mind he saw the mountains and the rugged men who ambushed German convoys and blew up bridges. He knew nothing of the place where he was being held, which Polish town was nearest, or how far it was to the Slovakian border. He had no idea of the German security installations outside the fence, the number of garrisons or how to cross the river Sola. And yet at night he dreamt about the mutiny, the struggle and his escape. For within the slavery of the camp the convicts had one freedom of which nobody could rob them – the freedom to dream.

  There was no paper on the Block because the children were not supposed to learn how to read and write. Alex Ehren took them to the Registrar’s Block where the children stole used sheets from garbage bins. The scribes compiled daily lists of how many men and women were on each block and who had died during the night. There was the weaving workshop and the spinning shop and the mica plant for women where the workers produced military equipment. The foremen kept records of the workers, of the used materials and the finished products. The children went through the bins until they collected enough scraps for the day. They had no pencils except the one stub Alex Ehren saved for the postcards on which they could ask for food parcels.

  There was a man on the Children’s Block who was good with his hands. He had only a broken knife, a file and a rusty screwdriver, but he knew how to repair a door, fix the smoking oven or build a small stage on the horizontal chimney. Sometimes he even produced toy soldiers from a piece of wood and some bent wire. They called him Shashek, which means clown, because his mouth was frozen into an eternal smile. He was a whim of nature and his laughing countenance was often his misfortune. In the first months he worked together with Alex Ehren on the road, where they carried boulders from a pile, split them with a hammer and built a pavement. It was a frustrating task because as soon as they finished a stretch the silt swallowed the stones and they had to start from the beginning. The SS sentry beat Shashek more often than the others because the sentry thought that Shashek was laughing at him.

  ‘Stop grinning,’ said the German soldier and lashed out at Shashek.

  ‘I can’t. It’s my face that grins.’

  He was scared of the sentry and of his rubber hose. Yet his mouth was turned into a smile and the more frantic he grew the worse the sneer on his face became.

  The sentry caned him until he cried but even the tears that rolled down his cheeks didn’t change the laughing grimace of his face.

  Himmelblau never regretted that he took Shashek onto the Block, because his ingenuity brightened the children’s lives. He had a shelf at the rear end of the barracks where he hoarded twisted wires, pieces of wood, a broken spade and half a dozen beer bottles, which he found behind the German guardhouse.

  ‘Why all that junk?’

  ‘One day it will come in handy. To throw away is easy but to find is difficult.’

  He rummaged in a trash box and shook his head. ‘No pencils. Why don’t you try charred splinters?’

  They had no knives to peel off splinters but Bubenik had a sharpened spoon.

  ‘I rubbed it on a brick,’ he said and ran his finger over the edge. ‘Cuts even bread. No problem to peel off a splinter from my bunk.’

  They spent the afternoon grinding their spoons on a stone and when Bass started the fire in the oven, he charred both ends of the children’s splinters. With each end they wrote three words and sometimes even four. Alex Ehren’s wards were still poor writers but the older boys ran back and forth to the oven and watched their wooden pencils flicker in the flames.

  Adam Landau had the sharpest spoon of all. He worked on his knife for several days until it looked like a dagger, thin and sharp on both sides, honed into a dangerous point.

  One day, thought Alex Ehren, he will stab to kill. He felt that he ought to take away the weapon from the child but he never did.

  The children unravelled yarn from their straw mattresses. They ripped open the jute and wound the thread into skeins until the straw spilled on the ground. Lisa Pomnenka had taught them to produce macramé patterns and they wove strings and belts even during writing lesson. The macramé work turned into an obsession and for some time everybody, even the boys, sat and twisted the strands into an ornament or a rough mitten. The instructor was young and when she got up from sleep she looked as if she were a girl in Beran’s group of older children. Sometimes, especially after an unruly lesson, Alex Ehren watched her work with his children and envied the ease with which she handled her pupils. He left her with a bunch of urchins, excited and fighting among themselves but when Lisa Pomnenka entered the circle they turned into lambs. The girl had dark hair and blue eyes, which were like two pools of water. She was inconspicuous, moved with birdlike movements, and at first Alex Ehren hardly noticed her presence.

  During the first months in Birkenau, Alex Ehren felt no desire. He worked on the road, and in the evening sank heavily into sleep. He had no dreams because his life was in his hands and feet, and his stomach wa
s aching for bread. There was also the fear of blows, of the cold and of sudden death, all of which rendered his existence entirely physical. He was so burdened with his body that he didn’t look up towards the sky, until he was like an animal, a dog or a lizard.

  Neither was there love. He slept on a bunk with seven prisoners and in the evening he met an uncle of his, but he was numb inside and felt nothing, neither affection for his friends nor hatred for his torturers. He listened to words but they had little meaning beyond their sound. He was like a house gutted by fire or like a stone cast into the universe. He was deprived of familiar road signs and his life crumbled and fell apart. His state of shock grew and deepened and had he not moved to the Children’s Block, he would have turned skeletal and apathetic and, like many others, would have died on the road or in his sleep.

  After two weeks on the Children’s Block he recovered. He watched the blue-eyed girl and something within him stirred. In the evening he sat next to Lisa Pomnenka and when she turned her head he smelled her young and feminine hair. He grew stronger because he ate the thick children’s soup and occasionally received a share of Pavel Hoch’s parcels. At the beginning of March the prisoners had written postcards and now some of them received bread parcels. The mail was searched for contraband, for matches, candles, torches, money or a letter. The parcels were looted of the better foodstuffs and often arrived with the bread mouldy and spoiled. The inmates roasted it on the stove and this burned away the mildew and made it edible.

  ‘How lucky you are,’ said Alex Ehren to Pavel Hoch, looking at the neat lettering on the wrapping paper.

  ‘Aninka and I were born in the same small town,’ said Pavel Hoch. ‘We have known each other since we were kids. Went to the same class. We were friends at first and later became lovers. When I get back we’ll marry.’

  His words sounded as simple as spring water and Alex Ehren envied his friend his faith. Pavel Hoch’s parcels often arrived half empty, but at times they slipped through undamaged. This shoebox had been packed with love, each article in a napkin, a loaf of bread, an onion, a seed cake and dried apples in a paper bag. The food smelled of a kitchen, a tablecloth and clover.

  ‘Why do you share with me?’ Alex Ehren asked.

  ‘There will be another parcel. In the country it is easy to get food.’

  ‘How long would a woman wait? A year, two? What if you die?’

  He ate the bread, which was half spoiled by its long journey. It was hard and stale, but it still held the taste of the field in which it had grown. Why does he share his bread, wondered Alex Ehren; I have nothing to give him in return.

  They slept on the same bunk and sometimes spoke about the books they had read and their friendship helped them carry their fear.

  One evening Alex Ehren sat next to Lisa Pomnenka and his arm touched her elbow. He felt her warm skin and there was pleasure in the accidental encounter. The girl looked up from her bowl and smiled. Yet Alex Ehren was too shy to say a word or look in her face.

  Lisa Pomnenka, whose name meant ‘forget-me-not’ was even better with a pencil than with the patterns of macramé, which she taught Majda and Eva and Neugeboren. Sometimes she drew a house, a garden and a tree for the children. She also produced animals they had never seen – a cat, a cow, a hen with a brood of small chicks and even a monkey. Alex Ehren wrote out the names of the animals and the children learned to spell the words.

  Sometimes he touched her wrist and, although Fabian made fun of him, they soon sat holding hands like children. In the following days Alex Ehren woke with a thrill and an expectation that he would meet the girl and watch her draw her little pictures on scraps of paper. She was neither beautiful nor clever, but there was sweetness in her movements and he loved the fall of her voice.

  She spoke to him about her father, who suffered from a strange illness. He hovered between waking and sleeping and wouldn’t get up to receive his bread ration. There were many diseases in the camp – erysipelas, jaundice and inflammation of the brain – and when her father grew worse, the Block Warden sent him to the hospital opposite the Children’s Block. Lisa Pomnenka saved her soup and the orderly agreed to take it to her father. They tried to talk to him through the wooden wall, but he was indifferent and wouldn’t answer.

  She tapped on the wood with a piece of stone, not noticing Dr Mengele, the SS physician.

  ‘You’ll spread the infection. Go away.’

  ‘He’s my father,’ she said and her voice was shaky with fear because there were rumours of horrible operations the SS doctor conducted on young women. She looked at his face and thought about the twins on the Children’s Block, the two thirteen-year-old boys and the two girls, Eva and Hanka, whom he occasionally summoned to the Hospital Block for examinations. Mietek the Pole, who came to visit Magdalena, spoke about the experiments conducted in the Hospital Camp. The victims were wheeled in and after some time carried out dead, covered in blood. The twins, however, returned safely and with a piece of bread in their hands. And yet the evil rumours persisted, and Lisa Pomnenka was frightened and drew her coat tight over her chest.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ said the SS physician and looked at the girl with interest. ‘You work with the children. What do you do there?’

  ‘I am a painter,’ she said in a surge of courage.

  ‘A house painter or a portrait painter?’ He laughed.

  ‘Portrait painter,’ she said.

  ‘Could you paint my face?’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘Maybe some day.’ He was amused by the blue eyes and the trembling mouth. ‘What would you like to paint?’

  ‘The Block wall. Make it a green meadow with flowers.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘I have no brushes,’ she said. ‘No brushes and no paint.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ He turned abruptly and stepped into his office.

  That night Lisa Pomnenka’s father died. In the morning the male nurse handed her a bundle with his belongings, a chipped bowl, a spoon and a ration of bread. Usually the orderly took the bread for himself, but as he had seen Mengele talk to the girl, he didn’t steal it.

  She didn’t get her father’s clothes because as he died on the infection ward, his rags were burned on a smouldering fire behind the washroom.

  The girl didn’t cry. She knew that she should be sad and feel pain but she felt nothing and had no tears.

  ‘Why can’t I be like others?’ she asked. ‘I loved my father and I visited him every day and even washed his shirt. But now, when he is dead, I feel no pain. Am I a monster? Don’t I have a heart?’ She punished herself and wouldn’t sit with Alex Ehren and hold hands and touch. She worked with the children on their macramé patterns but after the lesson she kept herself apart. ‘There is so much death around,’ Alex Ehren said, ‘that it has drowned our sadness.’

  A day later Dr Mengele sent Lisa Pomnenka a box of paints and an assortment of brushes.

  Death had been with them from the very beginning. Three months before, Alex Ehren arrived at Birkenau in the small hours of Christmas Eve. It had been an agonising passage for the fifty people in the boxcar – men, women and even children – who had little space and only one bucket for their needs. In the first hours of the journey they joked about the lack of privacy and took turns holding up a blanket, but soon the bucket was full and spilled on the floor. They were so crowded that only half of them could sit, while the rest slept leaning against one another. They still had some luggage, a rolled up blanket, a pillow, an extra pair of shoes and an overcoat. They piled their bundles in one corner and let the children rest on top of the heap. They were thirsty and licked the sooty icicles that Alex Ehren broke off the roof. The third day was the worst because they were too ashamed to relieve themselves on the floor and suffered from pain in their guts and bladders. There was only a narrow window at the back of the car and the prisoners had no air to breathe, no water and no space to stretch their legs.

  When the doors were thrown
open, the men were separated from their women and herded into a snowy rut along the fence. Some of the prisoners managed to relieve themselves behind the cars, but most of them were driven on with their guts full and painful. Alex Ehren saw Beran and his wife Sonia squat on the rails and hold hands in a moment of blissful relief. They moved their bowels until a Capo drove them apart into separate columns. ‘The happiest hour of my married life,’ said Beran and turned his head to look at the marching women.

  The deportees were confused by the night, the shouting, the lights, the transition from one world to another. They were bewildered by the men in striped uniforms, the sudden separation from their families and, above all, by their utter helplessness. Alex Ehren had seen the names of towns they were passing and he knew that they were being shipped east, but where they were he didn’t know. They waited in the cold snowdrift until they felt like trapped animals. Finally the column moved and Alex Ehren struggled against the wind, which hissed over the ground. He closed his eyes because the frozen flakes of snow stung like needles into his face.

  At first he didn’t notice the corpses that lined the track, but when he opened his eyes he was appalled by the gallery of dead bodies. They were men and women, some of them his friends, some of them strangers and others he had known by sight from the ghetto. The bodies were frozen to stone in an indecent gesture with their blood glistening in ruby crystals on the snow. They sprawled, grotesque, uncouth, their eyes open and their mouths grinning horribly in an arrested shriek. The men lay with their genitals exposed, some clutching their crotch, the women with skirts lifted like dancers, exhibiting their naked bellies and thighs and the hair of their shame. It was a spectacle – lewd and obscene – and at the same time unspeakably horrible, because the dead were so similar to the living – their shoes, their clothes, their faces.

  How easily, Alex Ehren thought, they could have been Sonia or Beran or himself. Like them they had been plagued by their bladder and their gut and when they left the column to relieve themselves the soldiers shot them. Alex Ehren walked along the obscene exhibition and when he was unable to restrain himself any longer he let his water flow. He felt no shame as it spread warmly from his crotch to his leg and into his shoe.