The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  It was a good bargain for both sides and thus on the 7th of April, the very day Alex Ehren and his friends celebrated their Seder feast, Unterscharfuehrer Pestek and the Czech Block Senior, dressed in SS officers’ uniforms and provided with stolen papers, walked out through the camp gate while the sentry stood at attention. They rode their bicycles to the nearest railway station, boarded an express train and by evening had arrived in Prague.

  The story was leaked into the Family Camp by the man who swept the SS guardroom, the woman who worked at the post office in the Main Camp, and the artisans who came to the Block to have a look at the children. It was like a puzzle or a mosaic, which had to be collected piece by piece until they had a full picture. Alex Ehren waited a day and then another, but Lederer was never caught and never brought back to be hanged. After a week the Germans gave up their search, but the sentries remained cold and suspicious for a long time afterwards. They even stopped attending the children’s charades and shows.

  When, in the evening, the Block Wardens shaved the men’s heads, their razorblades were blunt and the prisoners left the barber’s chair with their scalps torn and bleeding. Some of the prisoners ducked and hid on the bunks because it wasn’t only their hair of which they were being robbed, but a part of themselves, a part of their body and their personality. For a long time they possessed nothing. On their arrival they had lost their clothes, their luggage and the little store of food with which they came on the train. However, they differed from the other prisoners because they had been allowed to keep their hair.

  ‘We are privileged,’ Hynek Rind had said, ‘and one day we will be rescued. There must be a reason why they haven’t shaved off our hair.’

  They didn’t know the context of their lives and they divined and guessed their future from small, almost invisible signs and insignificant omens – their hair, a word from an SS sentry, a scrap of a newspaper and a rumour about the Russian Front.

  Alex Ehren was among the last to sit down and let his head be shaved. None of the prisoners was given his midday soup unless he submitted to the procedure. Alex Ehren stood aside for a long time watching his bald-headed mates eat their grey mush. Finally he gave in to his hunger and to the inevitable and closed his eyes as the barber cut and tore at his scalp.

  Pavel Hoch lent Alex Ehren a shard of a mirror, and he moved closer to the light to see his new self. At first he couldn’t recognise his naked face, the unprotected mug, a face amazed and bare like the moon, with eyebrows raised, a visage gaping, stupid and round as if he had reverted to infancy. He was ridiculously different from his former self. Was he this ugly prisoner whose nose jutted out like a mast and ears protruded like the oars of a boat? He raised his hand to cover his scalp, but he knew there was no use hiding it because from now on his baldness would be a part of him as were his eyes, his chin or his hand. He felt humiliated as if he had been deprived of the last shred of his humanity, the only difference between him and other Birkenau inmates. It was a shock and a setback because, in spite of the departed September transport, they still fooled themselves that they were privileged, that they were pawns in a game and that, despite all odds, one day they might escape or be set free. All that was suddenly gone and without his hair he felt exposed and vulnerable.

  He looked around and saw how ridiculous everybody looked. Fabian’s head was flat and Beran was robbed of his brow and Felsen looked even more like a turtle than before. Shashek, however, remained unchanged as if his frozen smile were a mask and a protection against disfigurement. They were grotesque and tried to hide their embarrassment with laughter, but even Fabian’s ridicule was awkward and jarring.

  Alex Ehren ran his hand over his bald head and thought about his escape.

  ‘The shaven head will betray us when we meet a Pole or a Slovak.’

  ‘Time enough to worry when you meet one on the other side of the fence,’ said Beran in his unhurried voice.

  Yet even more did he fret that Lisa Pomnenka would find him repulsive, a monster, and refuse to sit with him in the dark corner of the Block. He was too shy to mention his concern to anybody, not even to Beran his bunk-mate, who might have had similar misgivings about Sonia, his wife.

  After the Block Senior’s escape the SS sentries patrolled the camp road and the children couldn’t wander too far away from their Block. They were unable to collect paper from behind the Registry Block and Alex Ehren soon ran out of the supply he kept on the shelf. The only one who was allowed to leave was Adam, who ran errands for the Capo, cleaned his cubicle and warmed his food on a little stove. The children asked about the Capo, his food, the gold he kept under his bed and the women he invited. But Adam kept his mouth shut and if they prodded him too long, he drew his scimitar and hunched his back in imitation of Jagger.

  ‘Get off my back, bastards,’ he’d exclaim, standing against the wall until they stopped pestering him and left him alone. Yet sometimes he’d slip behind the Registry and steal paper from the garbage bin. He’d bring it to Alex Ehren, stuffed under his seven shirts.

  ‘Today you write a poem with me. Yes?’ he would say, grinning. Yet, although they sat together many times, their writing fell flat and didn’t sparkle any more, as if the child had lost his touch of innocence.

  At first they couldn’t get accustomed to their shaven heads. Fabian looked around and his mouth twitched but when he remembered his own bald pate he suppressed his laughter. On the camp road and during the roll call they wore their hats with the torn rims but it was inside the Block where Alex Ehren felt naked and ashamed of his appearance.

  ‘What is hair?’ said Lisa Pomnenka when she saw him. ‘It grows and in a month or two you will have it back.’

  He thought about the two months and his heart contracted and his mouth grew dry. Two months, he thought, will bring us to the verge of our lives.

  On Monday two of his boys arrived with knitted caps that covered their shaven heads. The fashion caught on and the women, the matrons and even the youth girl assistants unravelled old sweaters and rolled the yarn into skeins. They knitted round caps on ‘needles’, which they peeled from their bunks and rubbed on a brick until they were smooth and pointed. Most of the children had mothers who produced their caps, but there were also orphans and for them the girls knitted caps during Lisa Pomnenka’s handicraft lessons. The caps became a fashion and soon everyone had one – the teachers, the youth assistants and even the small boys in the kindergarten – so that the girls quickly ran out of knitting material. In the end they turned to Julius Abeles, who squinted at the crate with Himmelblau’s parcels and clicked his tongue.

  ‘Not easy,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get some from the main storeroom. It’s still cold and they won’t let them go cheap.’

  Two days later he brought a bale of knitwear, multicoloured underwear and pullovers and single socks, which the girls unravelled and turned into caps. After a while the Children’s Block was alight with colour because the knitters invented patterns and stripes, white and blue and red until the shaven heads disappeared under the make-believe gaiety of the caps.

  One of the adolescents, Foltyn the guard, was among the last boys without a cap. He was awkward with girls and even in the history lessons, which he attended with the older children, he blushed and stammered whenever Marta Felix made him answer.

  ‘I don’t need one,’ he said in a huff when she offered to knit for him. ‘They are a children’s game.’

  ‘It would be a privilege,’ she said.

  She was alone in the camp and was often glad that she was free from worry about a husband, a lover, an old parent or a child. Yet at other times she felt abandoned and bitter that there was nobody for whom she could knit a cap. In the end he reluctantly accepted and Marta Felix produced for him a cap with a tassel which dangled at the back of his head.

  Lisa Pomnenka gave Alex Ehren a brown cap and then knitted another for Shashek, her secret admirer. The handyman often stood and watched her work with the children or held the ladder, wh
ich she climbed up to paint the sky. He made her a toolbox with a shoulder strap and carved the heads for the puppet theatre.

  A week later the German doctor came to inspect the two pairs of twins – the kindergarten girls and the two boys Zdenek and Jirka – on whom he proved the inferiority of the Jewish race. He looked around and noticed the coloured caps.

  ‘You Jews are a dangerous lot,’ said Dr Mengele with a frown. ‘You turn even a punishment into an advantage.’

  Alex Ehren’s love for Lisa Pomnenka was a remedy against his anguish. He looked forward to their evening meetings, which were like a harbour to his days. After her father’s death the girl was alone and he tried to be her guide and support. They kept sitting in a corner and holding hands and sometimes, when they thought that nobody was watching, they even kissed. They played lovers’ games of hide and seek, and shared each other’s dreams. They walked the camp road, and though the barracks, the fence and the railway ramp were a wretched, desolate landscape, they were happy to breathe the same air, to tread the same ground and touch each other’s arm and elbow.

  After a month on the Children’s Block, Alex Ehren felt strong and healthy. Sometimes the instructors got a helping of the children’s white soup, cooked from food left behind by the transports and he shared Pavel Hoch’s love parcels. He also ate some of the bread Lisa Pomnenka earned by painting naked Gypsy girls for the German doctor. He was still hungry but the occasional extra soup and slice of bread liberated him from his frenzy of starvation. In his first months in the camp he was unable to think of anything else but his midday soup and the evening ration of bread. His whole life and even his dreams were permeated by one wish, a terrible craving for food and filling his aching stomach. Now with the little extra bread everything changed. He was a young man and the touch of the girl’s skin turned his affection into desire. There was no place where they could be alone and their relation was full of tension.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and laid her palm on his, ‘I want to make love to you. One day we might find a way.’

  Alex Ehren’s awareness of time made him impatient and he was not satisfied with a promise. How many days do we have, he thought, a month, two? Each day may be the last and we could die or be parted at any hour. He had no doubt about her affection; she was gentle and ready to listen to his stories, but she still remained herself, a different entity, as if encased in a shell he couldn’t penetrate.

  He wanted to know all about her, about her childhood, her family, school and friends, and, though she talked, he felt that she kept the kernel, the core of the story, for herself. He wanted to have her entirely, her body, her soul, her mind. He begrudged her the time she spent with Shashek, the jack-of-all-trades, with whom she worked on the puppet theatre or prepared decorations for a charade. He suffered when the German doctor summoned her to work in the Gypsy Camp and he imagined the disasters that might befall her in the wilderness of the camps. He would have liked the girl to stay on the Children’s Block where the instructors had created an island of security and where he could protect her. He thought that she was vulnerable and fragile and could come to some terrible harm without his help. Yet that was only a small shadow on the happiness her proximity gave him. He was glad to see her in the morning, eat his soup in her company and in the evening share his bread with her.

  After work the instructors, the matrons and the youth assistants played a guessing game and even then they sat close to each other. They weren’t ashamed in front of Himmelblau, Fabian, Hynek Rind and the children. The Block people had accepted them as lovers and they didn’t feel embarrassed any more.

  Fabian invented a new version of an old game based on brains and honesty. They called the game ‘The Ring’ because the players stood in a circle and held hands, but when the question fell on the girl she shook her head and stood back.

  ‘I am not clever enough for the game.’

  She walked over to Shashek’s workbench and helped him dress the puppets he had carved from a piece of cherry wood.

  ‘Some people have brains and others have hands.’

  ‘Why don’t you try?’ Alex Ehren asked, annoyed that she had left the circle.

  ‘Why should I? Would you love me more if I were clever?’

  ‘You can learn,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe one day I will,’ she answered, working with her needle. She rarely opposed him but instead escaped to an unidentified vague answer, which he hated. She had lost her mother when she was still a child. There was no school and she looked after her father, cooked, did the laundry and shopped for meat and vegetables. With the German occupation her father lost his job and she decorated tiles to pay their rent.

  ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll catch up with my learning.’

  She had no doubt that the war would end and that she would resume her life where she had left it before the camps. It was as if she were blind to the transports, the chimney and the rumours about the date of their death. Sometimes Alex Ehren spoke about his apprehensions but she wouldn’t listen.

  ‘I don’t want to know about bad things.’ She laid her hands over her ears. ‘Fear makes bad things even worse.’

  She was like a bird that lives its summer and doesn’t care about the snow. She took life and death as they came, without thought or regret or deliberation. Sometimes he was tempted to tell her about the mutiny and his plans for their escape. He always planned for both of them to cross the river, to live in the woods or to work as farmhands in a village. Yet on second thoughts, he kept silent because like so many times before, he felt that she was like a child, simple and unworried and therefore happier than he was.

  The German doctor liked her work and she often spent whole days in the Hospital Compound drawing diagrams and painting pictures of Gypsy girls. She still worked on the wall with its meadow, flowers and birds, but because of Mengele’s commissions, half of the wall was still bare and empty.

  6.

  BENEATH THE GAMES AND THE CLANDESTINE SCHOOL THERE was rot. The Block was like a ship on a sea of corruption, which seeped in through the cracks with each flurry of wind.

  The inmates of the camp fought for their lives. The convicts in the red-brick barracks of the Men’s Camp and the Women’s Camp, and even those in the remote labour camps of the immense Auschwitz complex, lived on borrowed time. There were too many of them and as the trains brought new transports, the redundant had to die to make room for the new arrivals. There was a daily quota of ten thousand who passed through the chimney, and Dr Mengele spent his mornings choosing the travellers.

  Sometimes he inspected new transports and at other times he weeded out the veteran inmates. They paraded in front of him, naked or draped in their thin prison drills, and he ushered them with a cane left to their deaths and right to more labour and death afterwards. Even the sick and the weakest were desperate to live, and in pathetic attempts to look strong they inflated their chests, held their heads high and opened their mouths in a twisted grin. Yet they were unable to hide their bloated faces and the doctor made them shuffle into the rows of the condemned.

  And if some of them, one or two, succeeded in slipping through in the morning, they certainly died in the afternoon or by the next day, because the selections went relentlessly on and on, in an ever tightening circle of dying. Never before was there a man who, like the physician, had sent so many fellow human beings to their deaths and remained sane.

  ‘How does he spend his nights?’ asked Alex Ehren.

  And Mietek the Pole, who had been in the camp for so long that he knew its inroads and secrets, pursed his lips and grinned. ‘Listening to classical music,’ he said, ‘Vivaldi, Bach and Brahms.’

  There were, however, the fat cats, the obstinate survivors who worked in the kitchen or in the food storage, or those with the armband of a Capo, a Block Senior or a Registrar, who were not subject to Mengele’s selections. There was a fierce scramble for life, a war without bounds or mercy, because it was either your skin or mine. It was a one-time gamble and
therefore absolute and cruel and final.

  Himmelblau sat with Aunt Miriam, the head matron, and ruminated about morality.

  ‘What is moral,’ he said, ‘to cry out and die like poor Antigone or to steal and tread on others and save one’s neck?’

  He spoke German with the matron and his words flowed easily. ‘It’s the children,’ he went on, ‘we have to teach. The truth or the lie? Don’t cheat and don’t steal and love thy neighbour? Shouldn’t we instead show them how to survive in the jungle? But how can I teach something I’ve never learned?

  ‘“Helpful be a man, noble and good”,’ he said, quoting a German poet and laughing angrily. ‘Schiller doesn’t make sense in a concentration camp. How long can we play the game of make-believe? We tell them not to lie and we lie to them every day, because the Block with its little songs and with helping the small and the weak is only an illusion and a lie. One day when the Germans close the Block the children will be like fish without water.’

  Sometimes the teachers argued about the value of honesty. ‘The Germans have robbed us of everything. Our homes, our work and even our lives,’ said Marta Felix. ‘Why shouldn’t we take back at least a piece of bread or a potato?’

  ‘From whom?’ asked Beran. ‘From the Germans or from our fellow prisoners? Where is the limit? How can I explain to the children that one piece of bread is different from another?’

  ‘Don’t explain,’ said Fabian, ‘because there is no difference. How long do we have? Two months, three? Each day you can fill your belly is a blessing. Why confuse them? The Ten Commandments were not meant for concentration camp convicts.’