by Otto B Kraus
‘Birds,’ she said. They stopped in the middle of the road and lifted their heads to the seams of the clouds. There was a flock of birds, geese probably, flying in an arrow-shaped formation toward the north. And as they watched there was yet another arrow, larger and sharper and lower, so that the children could see their flapping wings and long necks.
They had never before seen migrating birds and later when the geese were gone and they sat in their stall, Alex Ehren played a spring game with them.
‘In spring there are flowers,’ said Eva. ‘Little cats are born.’
‘The ice on the rivers melts.’
‘In spring it is warm,’ said Lazik.
The boys took off their shirts and ran in the sunshine half-naked. After the long winter their bodies were thin and white, but otherwise, in that moment, they looked like ordinary children.
8.
PAVEL HOCH LENT ALEX EHREN A BROKEN MIRROR AND HE looked at his face. He had grown accustomed to the looks of others, but he was taken aback to see himself in the piece of glass. Was it indeed he, the haggard stranger that gazed at him from the mirror? His nose and ears protruded from his face and his eyebrows had risen almost to the top of his forehead. Lisa Pomnenka had knitted a cap for him but it was dirty and the tassel shabby from prolonged wear. He washed each morning but he had slept in his shirt since he had arrived in the camp and it stuck out from his jacket like a piece of refuse. The Block Warden shaved the inmates once a week, on Sundays, but his blade was blunt and Alex Ehren left the chair with his face bruised and bleeding. His stubble grew and by the end of the week he looked like a vagabond and a blackguard.
Sometimes he wondered how the girl felt about his face, his clothes, his grimy shirt. How could she love him with the countenance of a murderer, neglected and dressed like a scarecrow?
‘Yes, your clothes are funny and if I was in a different place I would laugh. Your trousers are too short for your legs and your jacket smells. The canvas of your clogs is torn and you drag your feet so as not to lose them.’
He didn’t know that she had noticed so much and he was ashamed of his appearance.
‘And yet—’ her eyes were blue and bright like fresh water ‘—I still love you.’
Next day Alex Ehren sold half of his bread ration for a razor blade and shaved even in the middle of the week. He was pleased when Lisa Pomnenka commented on his better looks.
Each day he was more attracted to the girl. She wasn’t beautiful or soft and her movements were sudden and angular but she had the appeal of a squirrel or a mountain flower. Sometimes she was capricious and stubborn but on another day she agreed with whatever Alex Ehren said. He touched her fingers one by one and held her wrist to feel the beat of her heart. He ran his hand over her black hair and brushed the softness of her eyes. She had knitted herself a grey pullover in which she looked young and fragile like a child.
She was careless and he was concerned for her life. Day after day she left the camp and returned with a box full of inflammables but didn’t seem to mind the risk. Once she forgot to deliver the bottles and he was shocked to find the contraband – ominous, dark and gathering dust – next to her toolbox and the rickety ladder. He touched the bottles with enmity and fear.
‘How long will you carry them? Will it never stop?’
‘Not until Felsen tells me. I can’t refuse, can I?’
‘No,’ he said, and swallowed. ‘I don’t suppose you can.’
He didn’t know how many prisoners were involved in the underground movement, yet once they set fire to the straw the whole camp would be caught in the uprising, those who knew and those who hadn’t known. It was wrong, he thought, to take advantage of the girl who was credulous and didn’t see the danger.
There was little time left and they would soon lose each other. Whatever happened in June – their death, a miracle or the uprising – it would possibly tear them apart forever. He put his arm around her shoulder. It was good to belong and to own and to meet in the touch of their bodies. He wanted to protect her and to save her from suffering and danger. He felt that he was the wiser and should be the stronger of the two and he was about to ask her to stop carrying the bottles. He was unhappy whenever she left to work for the SS physician, yet he didn’t know what was better and what was worse, because the diagrams she drew for the German doctor might save her from death. Hadn’t he reclaimed the Jewish physicians, the pharmacist and the nurses from the September transport? The awareness of loss and parting made him love the girl desperately, until his love turned into almost physical pain.
By the first days of May Lisa Pomnenka had completed about half of the wall. She had no overall concept, no grand scheme, and she worked from her whim and intuition.
‘What will it be today?’ He was curious in the morning but she laughed and shook her head.
‘How should I know? I haven’t yet climbed on the ladder.’
She went up the rickety ladder, which Shashek had hammered together from bits and pieces and which always needed another nail or rung, and she dipped her brush in the paint. She paused and let the idea float through her mind until it took root and she was ready to start. She drew the shape and then filled it with colour, light and shade. She painted a bunch of bluebells, a copse and the sky with a flock of birds. Another day she painted the wooden railing and the prominent red geraniums that spilled almost to the ground. She didn’t know beforehand what she would produce, and in the evening she was often surprised at what she had created during the day. She moved with small, birdlike gestures, was happy one moment and sad in the next, and lived by the hour rather than by her head.
In the following weeks she had more time for the children because the SS doctor was busy with the Hungarian transports.
The Hungarians arrived, three trains a day, on the platform on the other side of the fence beyond the Children’s Block. Sometimes the SS officers summoned the camp orchestra and the musicians played ‘Marinarella’ and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ while the deportees were marched to their deaths. The children watched the locomotives, the wagons, the frightened people and the Capos that beat them into marching formations. Each day there were ten thousand fresh deportees, sometimes even twelve – men in large and stiff Sunday suits, women with kerchiefs printed with roses and children in oversize coats that were meant to last for another year.
There was an air of urgency on the platform and everything happened very fast – the disembarkation, the transition from darkness into light, the dogs, the Capos and the separation of the families. The dazed people rushed here and there looking for a husband, a child, an old relative or a basket with the last bit of food. There was no time and as soon as the prisoners were gone, their handbags and bundles were torn open and the contents built into mounds of bread, preserves, cheese and smoked meat. The commandos piled up the toys, the feather pillows and the clothes that the new arrivals had left scattered behind. All that was done in haste, at a trot – the descent, the looting of the luggage and even the sweeping of the platform. There was always a new train waiting on the rails and more villagers were processed and marched away. It was a colossal murder, a miracle of organisation, a crime brilliant and demented.
Alex Ehren tried to keep track of the numbers and counted a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand but then he stopped counting the dead because there seemed to be no end to the Hungarian Jews, who continued arriving in a perpetual sequence of trains.
Magdalena kept the children inside the Block. In the past there had been trains with new arrivals once a day, three in a week, and she tried not to take notice. She made the children look the other way and she beat the rhythm on her piece of tin and made the little girls move like birds and flowers and butterflies. She pretended that there were no transports and no marching convicts, but now with the avalanche of people, she was unable to pretend any more and she left the grassy stretch. It was wrong, she felt, a blasphemy, to let the girls lift their arms in gentle movements with so much horror on the other s
ide of the fence. She conducted her gym lessons at the rear end of the Block where Shashek repaired chairs and produced toys for the kindergarten children. Yet her pupils wouldn’t stay cooped up inside the Block, and when they heard the engine and the clang of metal, they ran to watch the trains, the people and the unloading of the luggage. They also came to listen to the music, because in the middle of the bedlam, the cries and the barking of dogs, the orchestra played its tunes until there were no more people and the platform was empty and ready for the new contingent. The children stood at the fence and the many transports made them indifferent to human misery. They asked no questions now.
There was nothing to ask, thought Alex Ehren, because they knew.
The Hungarian Jews were marched away and in the afternoon the chimney started belching smoke, black, dense and heavy and at night the sky was red with the glow of fire. The furnaces couldn’t manage so many bodies and the Special Commando dug trenches, poured kerosene over the dead and burned them in smouldering heaps. The smoke wouldn’t rise and the whole Birkenau complex, the Family Camp, the women’s and men’s compounds, the Gypsy Camp, the Kanada Blocks and even the SS garrison barracks were darkened by the cloud. It rolled over the landscape in wreaths and when the wind changed the smoke came back and the prisoners coughed with its charred sweetness in their mouths.
And with the smoke fell also the fine ash, which settled like snow on their hands and faces. Alex Ehren’s eyes watered and when he ate he felt the gritty grains between his teeth. He knew what the dust was and his stomach turned and revolted, yet he couldn’t stop eating because the soup was the only food he would get during the day and without it he would have starved to death. There was nothing to ask and nothing to answer, because even some of those who refused to believe in the gas chambers couldn’t be blind to the killing of the Hungarians.
Yet even now – in the middle of the hecatomb, five hundred thousand, six hundred thousand dead, the smoke and the nightly fires in the sky – there were prisoners who wouldn’t give up hope.
‘It won’t happen to us.’ Hynek Rind shook his head. ‘The Germans know that we Czechs are different. Assimilated and hardly religious. Why else the Family Camp? Why else keep the children alive?’ He looked around for support. ‘The Hungarians are practising Jews; they pray, study in Jewish schools, know the Talmud and whatnot. They speak the Yiddish lingo. We are modern, eat sausages with sauerkraut like the Germans. What is Jewish about us? Look at me. Even my birth certificate doesn’t say I am a Jew. Without religion, that’s what I am.’
‘Yes,’ said Beran, ‘you don’t speak Yiddish. And you are what you say. Modern, Czech, without religion. But the Germans have decided that you are a Jew. And that’s what matters. There is a woman who was a nun. Had taken the vows and lived in a convent. One day she was called up like any other Jew. A nun, a bride of Jesus Christ. Because her father came from Jewish stock.’
Around this time Beran started to compile his volume of verses. He had always been fond of poetry and he knew many poems by heart – ballads, sonnets and lyrical poetry of love and nature. The instructors invited him to recite to the children and the older groups copied the verses and learned them by heart. He soon ran out of his repertoire and began collecting poems he and other instructors, matrons and even the children knew, and wrote them down in a booklet.
He got hold of used paper, which was still usable on the reverse side. He perambulated among the stalls, clumsy, awkward and slightly bent forward, and noted down each poem or a stanza or only several lines, according to the person’s memory. It was remarkable, he thought, how much they remembered from their school days, because with one verse there came another – Czech, German, French or even Latin, a quotation or a part of a poem – which flowed back into the mind from the past.
‘Why all the trouble?’ asked Marta Felix. ‘Is it not enough to remember?’
‘It helps,’ he said and smiled.
‘With what?’
‘You read a poem and you are transported to another place. You transcend yourself or you escape. I do what I can.’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t stop the Hungarian transports but I can collect poems.’
In the evening Beran took the pages to Sonia and they held hands and read the poems together, leaning on the wall. The book of verses grew thicker and the teachers borrowed it and read it aloud to the children. They didn’t understand French or Greek but listened to the fall, the rhythm and the music of the words.
Not all the Hungarians died. From each transport Dr Mengele selected the strongest, who were then sent to slave labour. Sometimes he pointed at one of the marching people and a scribe added the man’s name to the list of labourers. He also saved identical twins, hunchbacks, cripples and a group of midgets he needed for his research.
One morning the adjoining camp was filled with naked women. There was no shame in the camp and yet the sight of so many female bodies was beautiful and disturbing. The girls stood in intense rows, young, nubile and with their heads and private parts shaven. There were ten thousand of them and they shuddered, pressing their bellies against other women’s backs in an attempt to keep warm and hide their nakedness. They shivered in the morning chill, and though Alex Ehren was embarrassed, he couldn’t stop looking at them because even in their wretchedness they were graceful and feminine. He saw the elegance of their necks, the proud curve of their breasts with the dark nipples stiffened by the cold, their strong thighs and their fertile groins.
They were like a herd of deer, shy and appealing and with their eyes large and dark under the domes of their shaved heads. They were kept in formation by female Capos, sturdy and brutal, and by a bunch of armed SS women warders in green uniforms. There was a bizarre difference between the two groups – the gross, peasant-like guards and the naked maidens, who in their helplessness looked exquisite and sensuous.
Two of the girls broke the row and when a Capo chased them back with a rubber hose, the rest fluttered in fear and called out in high confused voices, ‘Lanok, lanok, lasses, lasses,’ to show them to which row they belonged. It was a spectacle bitter and sweet, cruel and delicate, a mixture of senseless hatred and squandered love.
The children had finished washing and put on their ragged shirts but Alex Ehren lingered, unable to turn away. Some of the naked girls noticed the children and stretched out their arms.
‘Children, children,’ they cried, appalled by the presence of children in the camp. Other groups took up the words and the whole compound, the multitude of naked girls, moved like seaweed in their direction.
‘Kis gyerekek, little children,’ they sang and their Hungarian voices were like the sounds of birds, falling, sad and reedy. Some of the girls cried and their tears fell on their bare breasts, necks and bellies.
Why did they cry? Alex Ehren had learned not to feel sorry for himself and for the children. Their misfortunes descended on them unrelentingly, like the oncoming winter, first one thing and then another until at the end they were robbed of everything and shipped to Birkenau to die. They were like a tree in autumn with one leaf falling and then the next and then many, until the whole tree was bare. Even here, in the hopeless reality of Birkenau, Alex Ehren needed Pavel Hoch’s shard of mirror to see his face and the naked Hungarian girls to show him the misery of his existence.
The girls were cold and hungry. The SS sentries didn’t allow them to enter their blocks and the girls stood in front of the barracks with their hands covering their breasts and groins.
The Family Camp inmates were utterly poor. They didn’t own anything, for even the pockets of their tattered clothes were sewn fast to prevent them from hiding contraband. And yet, in the run of five months, each of them, even the lowest labourer on the ditch commando, had acquired a fistful of possessions – a piece of cloth to wipe his face, a foot rag, a shaving blade, a length of string or a speck of tobacco dust. During the day they kept their assets inside their shirts and at night under their heads to guard them against thieves.
They
were also utterly hungry. They had starved for so long that their hunger couldn’t be stilled by a piece of bread or a bowl of beet soup, because it was fathomless and all-encompassing. It wasn’t only their stomachs and bowels that cried out for food but their hands and feet, their livers and hearts, their private parts and above all their brains. Food had become the hub of their existence and dominated their consciousness and dreams until they were unable to think of anything but their hunger. They gathered in groups to cook imaginary meals and when they fell asleep they dreamt of feasts and loaded tables.
They were starved, bereft of everything and beggarly and yet some of them gave up the pittance they had saved, and threw rags and bits of bread over the wires to the naked women. Neugeboren slid into the ditch and pushed a pot of soup under the fence and the girls knotted a stone to a muffler they had knitted in their handicraft lessons and cast it over the top wire. Some of the rags got caught on the barbs but nobody dared to take them off from the mortal wires. The women rushed forward to collect the gifts, but though they were starved, they were more intent on the clothes than on the bread. They tore the rags into strips, but as if they had forgotten all shame, didn’t cover their breasts or crotches, but tied the kerchiefs around their shaven heads. The rags were white and black and yellow and after a while the host of girls looked like a field.
Next morning the women were issued striped prison uniforms, marched to the railway station and taken away.
There was hope in their departure because what happened to the Hungarian girls might also happen to the Family Camp inmates.
‘Where did they go?’ asked Majda.
‘Probably to a labour camp. To Poland, to Germany. Who knows.’
‘They won’t die?’
‘They won’t die. They were shaved and given uniforms.’
He was surprised at the questions because the smaller children seldom asked about death. The older ones, the thirteen-year-old adolescents in Beran’s group, spoke about being and non-being and even about God, but Alex Ehren’s Maccabees lived in the present and cared more about a game of marbles, the puppet theatre, competitions and birthday celebrations than about God and their future.