The Children’s Block

by Otto B Kraus

  He was eager and Marta Felix enjoyed his young mind. He could have been her son, she thought, and was sorry that she’d not had any children. But then she looked around and wasn’t sorry any more, because it must be a terrible thing to have a child and know that it would perish in the gas chambers.

  The lice bred typhus. Three people fell ill at the beginning of the month and then there was a pause. Towards the second half of May, with the arrival of seven thousand five hundred new inmates, there was a renewed outbreak of the disease and the Hospital Senior had to add three more rooms to the infection ward. The typhus spread fast on the crowded bunks where the vermin proliferated in enormous numbers. There was no protection against the lice, which lived in the soiled clothes, in the mattresses and even in the cracked wood of the barrack walls. They sucked blood from the sick and deposited their poisonous faeces everywhere – on the people’s skin, in the straw stuffing, the blankets and even in the air they breathed. It took two weeks until the person knew that he was ill, and in the meantime, as he slept with six or seven other prisoners on a pallet, he infected his bunk-mates.

  The prisoners were starved and exhausted and those who fell ill died. The process of dying was fast – first there was fever and nausea and in two or three days the patient lost consciousness and passed away in a coma. Three of Alex Ehren’s children fell ill in spite of the washing and daily inspections, but Neugeboren, the smallest and thinnest among the boys, recovered and with additional soup and the crumbled cakes from the orphaned parcels, returned to the Block.

  One evening Beran suffered from headache but the next morning he got up and worked with his group, taught chemistry to the older children and in the evening met with Sonia on the camp road.

  She still scraped the dregs from the barrel bottom but she had grown haggard and tired. She worked with a new teammate because the Capo had found Agnes an easier job at the weaving workshop.

  Beran pushed the bowl away.

  ‘The mush makes me sick,’ he said. ‘There is something wrong with my stomach. Couldn’t you barter the soup for a slice of white bread?’

  He was impatient and his mouth was dry.

  ‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ she said, unaccustomed to his short temper.

  The next day he was nauseous and couldn’t eat the bread, which Sonia had bartered for her soup, and when she touched his hand it was clammy and very hot.

  He stayed on his bunk for another day but he ran a high fever. Alex Ehren noticed the dark patches on his face and asked the Block Warden to send his friend to the hospital. There was no room in the Hospital Block and he had to stay on his bunk until some patient died and vacated a bed.

  That night he was delirious and Alex Ehren wrapped a wet rag around his head.

  ‘Take the book of verses.’ Beran pressed on him the sheaf of paper. ‘The orderlies steal everything. Even poems.’

  He turned from one side to another in a restless sleep. In the middle of the night he awoke and sat up.

  ‘It’s not me who is sick.’ He laughed at something he had dreamt. ‘In the Carpathian Ukraine the Jews have a way with the Angel of Death.’ His eyes were feverish and wide open. ‘If a man is beyond hope they change his name. From Moshe to Abraham or from Mendel to Shlomo. The Angel of Death comes down with a list of names of those that will die that night. He takes one and then another and then starts looking for Menachem Mendel. But there is no Menachem Mendel in the village. He knocks on the door and looks into the window but there is no such man, only Slomo, Aharon and Moshe. And so he goes back with one name missing. How very clever to fool Death with a name.’

  He rested for a while but then went on.

  ‘The trouble is that it sometimes doesn’t work, and when the Angel of Death doesn’t find Menachem Mendel he may take somebody else, somebody whose name wasn’t up yet, to complete the list.’ He clung to Alex Ehren’s arm and mumbled. ‘It’s not me who should die. I am the wrong man. It’s a secret,’ he whispered, ‘but I am not who I am. Beran?’ he asked, ‘Beran is not sick because he is still in the ghetto.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Another man was in the transport. A fellow member of my Zionist movement.’ Beran held Alex Ehren’s hand so tightly that it hurt. ‘If you take his place he might stay. Volunteer for the transport because he is essential for our hachshara groups. He has a mission here and you’ll look after the movement in the labour camp.’

  He spoke fast and feverishly and Alex Ehren didn’t know whether his words were true or the result of his illness.

  ‘I volunteered,’ said Beran. ‘I volunteered and so did Sonia. Imagine, we volunteered for Auschwitz.’ He laughed hoarsely. ‘No, we didn’t exchange names, only transport numbers. I won’t tell you his name. It’s between him and me. One day he will know how I died and he will have to live with it.’

  Beran lay with his eyes open in the dark.

  ‘He fooled the Angel of Death, but he won’t be able to fool himself. Why should I tell you his name?’

  He still clung to Alex Ehren’s hand.

  ‘The Zionist movement is important. Tell me I did the right thing to volunteer for Auschwitz. With Sonia, my wife. After the war we’ll go to Palestine and live on a kibbutz. The more worthy will survive in the ghetto and start a new nation. The less worthy will die in Birkenau. Tell me it was right.’

  ‘It was right,’ Alex Ehren swallowed and said, though he didn’t know whether any man or any movement had the right to judge.

  The following day Sonia knocked on the planks of the hospital wall, but Beran didn’t answer. They asked the orderly but he chased them away.

  ‘He will die. So few recover from typhus,’ she said, and her plain face was contorted with sadness. ‘He could have refused. Isn’t it stupid to die for an idea? Or for another person’s rescue? How could they decide who is worthy to live and who isn’t? What is an idea and what is a movement against Beran’s life? Or mine?’

  Next day, which was a Sunday, Beran died. His ashes, like those of all the other dead, were strewn into the River Sola. Alex Ehren left the book of poems with Dasha, who kept her library on the smokestack.

  The Germans were scared of typhus. They had guns and ammunition and they kept the convicts behind electrically charged fences, and yet they were unable to contain the lice in one place. Twice a day, in the morning and at dusk, the SS guards counted the prisoners, but they entered the camp buttoned up and with their hands covered by gloves. They kept a distance from the inmates and when they came to see the children’s performance they dared not enter and stood at the open door.

  In the camp Dr Mengele continued to weed out the sick and the weak. The Special Commando sped up the executions and the bodies they couldn’t process in the three incineration plants were doused with kerosene and burned in an open field.

  At the end of May two events followed one another. After the evening roll call the prisoners were handed out postcards. They held the flimsy paper in their hands and stood in a queue for the pencil stubs, which Julius Abeles leased for a spoonful of soup or a bite of bread. They jostled and pushed and while they waited for the stub, they deliberated about the thirty words they were permitted to write in block letters on the card. It was tremendously important what they wrote because the postcards were their only link with the outside world. They couldn’t write about their hunger, their diseases or the gas chambers. The inmates invented ploys to circumvent the regulation and to ask for food parcels without spelling out their misery.

  Hynek Rind mentioned a relative who died of stomach cancer, another met Dalibor, a legendary Czech hero who starved in a dungeon, and Marta Felix wrote that she was reading Knut Hamsun, hinting at his book called Hunger. They were like drowning persons who cast about for a piece of flotsam, though the plank was often only an illusion or a handful of straw. Some of the postcards were never mailed, others got lost or were not delivered, yet after some time a number of prisoners did receive a parcel, which allowed them to survive another week. Oth
ers, mainly the members of the Zionist movements, banded into communes and shared their additional bread and margarine. Alex Ehren would have starved had the SS doctor not given Lisa Pomnenka bread and had Pavel Hoch not shared with him Aninka’s parcels.

  The cards were also a reason for panic. Alex Ehren turned the piece of paper in his fingers and remembered the cards they had written at the beginning of March. They’d had to date them 15th of April, to allow – so the SS sentries said – the censor in Berlin to read them. By mid-April the September transport had been dead six weeks. When their food parcels, robbed of the better items, began arriving in the Family Camp, they were sent to the Children’s Block. They were of no use to their dead addressees, but the bread and crumbled cakes did help the children to keep above water.

  When they were handed the new cards they were apprehensive. Would the Germans repeat the same ruse? Why should Alex Ehren write that he was well and working in Birkenau bei Neu-Berun, Deutschland, Schlesien? Why make his friends believe that he was still alive if he had been reduced to a wisp of smoke and a flake of ashes? Did they want to fool the people in the ghetto or the half-Jews who were still at large? Were they planning another transport to Heidebreck and wanted to assure the victims that there was nothing to fear?

  ‘Take my card,’ said Fabian to Alex Ehren. ‘I have nobody who would send me a loaf of bread.’

  ‘There must be somebody. A classmate. A girl you dated? A neighbour?’

  ‘Small towns don’t like poor Jews. My neighbours would read the card and say good riddance. Write the card and we’ll share the bread. If there is any and if we are still about.’ He also remembered the September transport.

  In the evening they wrote their cards under the weak electric bulb in their section. They kneeled at the chimney or leaned the paper against the bunk, but above all they planned the words and the sentences. Each word was of supreme importance and they turned the version over in their minds several times before they wrote. To whom should they address it? To a distant cousin, a neighbour, a business partner or a former lover? In the afternoon Adam Landau came with his postcard in his hand.

  ‘Will you write for me?’ He hadn’t been at school for many days and his eyes were hard like two small stones. He had an aunt married to a gentile to whom he wanted to write.

  ‘Don’t you play marbles any more?’ asked Alex Ehren, remembering the golden bead.

  ‘Marbles are for children,’ said the brat. ‘Write to my aunt that I’ve grown a lot. She might send me chocolates.’

  He looked well and had good clothes, though he hadn’t grown and his face was still that of a small child.

  Two days later all the inmates of the Children’s Block were sent to the showers.

  Jagger, the Camp Capo, stood on the chimney, hunchbacked and leaning on Adam’s shoulder.

  ‘The Camp Commander,’ he said, in his booming voice, ‘has granted you a favour. You will have a shower and get a fresh shirt.’ It can’t be the time, thought Alex Ehren, with his heart pounding against his ribs. There were only two SS guards accompanying them, the one they called the Priest and another who spoke Romanian. Neither had they been forewarned by the underground movement. He looked at Fabian, at Hynek Rind and even at Felsen, who should have known, but they were as bewildered as he was.

  Was it time for the uprising? He felt betrayed. He had prepared himself for the mutiny, he had dreamt and exercised with the rock, but when the time came he was locked up in the Children’s Block and unable to defend himself.

  They were marched down the camp road and when they passed the gate the musicians played ‘Marinarella’ and ‘The Blue Danube’. He saw the men sitting on their platform, blowing their trumpets and fiddling away on their violins as if the procession of children was leaving for work and not passing the gate for the last time. What a pitiful crowd they were, the instructors, the matrons and the children, the youth assistants and Himmelblau with his glasses and Fredy’s whistle around his neck. What fools they were, he thought. They had the kerosene bottles Lisa Pomnenka had smuggled into the camp, they had formed triads, with each member knowing his task, they had a pickaxe, a hatchet, five crowbars and an iron octopus hidden in the Hospital Block. And yet here they were, marching meekly through the gate. Why hadn’t they seen the obvious – the May transports that came to take their place, the postcards, the overcrowded bunks and the outbreak of typhus? He was furious with himself, with Felsen and with the underground movement that had promised support, but when their time came, had abandoned them and let them die alone.

  The two guards marched them between two rows of barbed wire, a way Alex Ehren had never walked before, and when he turned his head, he saw the older boys and the youth assistant Foltyn, Bass, the stoker and the new boy who was Shashek’s apprentice. There were twenty adolescents on the Block, girls with small budding breasts who used to sit together and giggle, and the boys, some tall and lanky, with a shadow of moustache over their lips but others still round-faced.

  He craned his head and looked for the girl and he saw Lisa Pomnenka at the far end with Aunt Miriam and the girl librarian who belonged to no group. Alex Ehren marched with his class, the Maccabees, the twins Hanka and Eva, and Majda with the blonde braid and the boys, who even now pushed one another out of the row and laughed at their own pranks. There was Bubenik and Lazik and Neugeboren, but Adam Landau was not among them and he thought how right the brat was when he wouldn’t learn to read and write. Yet even now, in his time of fear, he was glad that the boy might be saved. He had the soul of a poet and the temper of a weasel. He pimped for the Capo, he probably stole and lied, but it was the camp that had taught him to be like that. He remembered Beran, who had died to let a better man survive and he wondered who was the better and who the worse, Adam or the other children, and had it not been for his desperation, he would have laughed at the absurdity of life and death.

  The two SS guards made a detour. They led the column on a round trip, first to the Gypsy Camp, then to the Men’s Infirmary, then turned a corner and stopped at the squat building with the brick chimney.

  Alex Ehren had never seen the gas chambers before. He had looked at the tall chimney that spewed smoke and coloured the night sky, but the building was hidden in a copse and invisible from the camp. It looked innocent enough, like a small house, silent and shaded by a group of trees, and had he not known its secret, he could have mistaken it for a home, a laundry or even a well.

  One of the SS guards, the Priest, took out a cigarette and smoked, watching the children with his pale eyes. There were three mounds, dishevelled like unkempt hair. One was a pile of shoes, which lay haphazardly, each unconnected to its mate, brogues and laced shoes, slippers and boots, all of them in poor repair, some wrinkled by age and others torn like gaping mouths. The other pile was of spectacles, entwined and tangled with one bent loop sticking out. There were thousands of them, thick and thin, gold-rimmed and tortoiseshell, worn and new, and their lenses blinked in the sun that broke through a cloud. The third stack was low, yet the most pathetic of all because it was built of baby carriages and toys that had belonged to children.

  There were no additional guards and no Capos at the door and the house was silent and peaceful.

  ‘Not our turn,’ said Hynek Rind, encouraged by the quiet. ‘They wouldn’t dare touch the Czechs.’

  The SS guard threw away the cigarette and marched them on to the shower rooms. There was an entrance for men and another for women.

  Alex Ehren left his clothes at the concrete wall. They took off their shirts and the room was stuffy with the smell of unwashed bodies. He had worked on the road, carried boulders and slept in the same trousers for many months. When he undressed the rags were so stiff with filth they held the shape of his body and he could hardly fold them.

  He heard the sound of running water but the shower might be a ploy to make them enter without resistance. For many weeks he had thought that he would fight for his life, but when their time came he was naked
and unprepared. He looked around and clawed his fingers like a bird of prey.

  ‘There are only three SS soldiers,’ he said, ‘and we could take away their guns.’

  ‘There is no need,’ said Felsen, who had spoken to a Polish prisoner. ‘We’ll shower and go back to the Family Camp.’ He sounded as if he didn’t believe his own words. ‘When the time comes we will know.’

  Alex Ehren kept the boys in a tight group. They were frightened and clung to one another, but only now, when he saw them without their clothes, did he notice how skinny they had grown. They were like a nest of baby birds and they entered the shower room in a skein of arms and legs and concave bellies.

  The three Greeks were the last survivors of a Corfu transport. The Germans had taken their island in September and by the end of June there were no Jews left there, save a handful of fishermen that hid in the mountains.

  The three were relatives – two cousins and an uncle – and they had been spared because they were barbers. One of them shaved the convicts’ heads and the other their body hair, but their razors were blunt and their clients left the bench bleeding. The third man doused them with a disinfectant and the carbolic acid burned in their wounds and eyes.

  There were many customers for the shave and they waited in a long queue. Alex Ehren didn’t mind the time, the blunt razor or the carbolic acid because each shaven prisoner was a promise that they would live. The Germans wouldn’t have shaved and showered people that were to be killed. He was exhilarated by the air he inhaled and by the beating of his heart and even the acid that burnt his cut flesh was a blessing. He felt as if he had been handed a gift, a prize, and he ran his hand over the stubble on the boys’ heads.