Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  I should have grovelled, of course. I should have bowed my head, pulled off my cap and mumbled my apologies. I should have dragged the man who’d put the scaffold bar there in front of the Steiger and reported him to the Kapo. But I’d been Vorarbeiter for a couple of months by now and it had gone to my head. Without thinking, I told the Steiger to piss off. ‘You should have been looking where you were going!’ I said, proving that a Yid could shout too.

  You could have cut the silence with a knife. Nobody, least of all a Jewish prisoner, spoke to a Steiger like that and he went straight to the SS, to report to Rottenführer Berger. A lot of the punishments meted out in the ghettoes and the camps was instant – a slap round the face, a cane across the back, a bullet in the head. Mine wasn’t. All day I was expecting it and that night, after roll-call, it came. I was marched out on the Appellplatz in full view of everybody. My wrists were tied to a wooden post and my trousers were dropped. Maximum humiliation, maximum effect. They were treating me like a naughty schoolboy, not Vorarbeiter of a construction squad. Kapo Wilhelm came up behind me. I could see the walking stick in his hand and after the first stroke I couldn’t bear to look. I have never experienced pain like it, before or since. I’d taken the odd switch with a ruler from a teacher, felt the sting of my father’s belt, but nothing like this. I gritted my teeth as the tears of pain and shock ran down my cheeks. I was given twenty strokes of that stick, but I lost count after the first five or six. I am not ashamed to admit that I lost control of my bowels at some point and shit ran down my legs. There was nothing I could do about it and all the time I was thinking of the man with dysentery in the Quarantine Block in my first day at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He had been beaten to death. It felt as though I was detached from my body, looking down at that stupid Yid Szlamek who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. It was a lesson learned.

  I don’t really remember a group of the lads from my squad dragging me away. I could barely walk and spent the night lying on my front on my bunk while my arse must have looked like a patchwork quilt and my back was in agony. Getting up in the morning was almost impossible and I needed serious help. I got to the wash block which wasn’t far away but it felt like kilometres and actual washing was hell. Even half turning to wipe off the dried blood was agony and I should have stayed in bed. That of course would have been suicide. It would have meant selection. Men who couldn’t work routinely found themselves on trucks going back to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  I stood as straight as I could for the roll-call to be told that I’d lost my position as Vorarbeiter. My replacement was Hersh Goldberg, a man in his mid-twenties I’d got to know quite well. He was solidly built, with a ruddy complexion you didn’t come across often in the camps. He had a brother, Yonnie, and a cousin, Shlomo. It was nearly two kilometres to our building site at the mine’s entrance and I was going to need all my strength just to get there.

  ‘Szlamek,’ Goldberg whispered to me as we moved off, ‘March on the inside of the squad.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, green as grass for all my months in the camps.

  ‘Because Rottenführer Berger is looking for an excuse to shoot you, that’s why.’

  I didn’t risk looking across at the man, in case that look was interpreted as excuse enough. Berger was an SS NCO from Silesia and he hated my guts. I suspect that the scaffolding incident was the last straw. Fürstengrube was different from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Harsh and often bewildering as they were, there were rules here that smacked of the outside world. In Auschwitz, Berger would just have put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger and some other poor bastard among the special units would have had the job of scraping me up. Here, Berger needed a reason – dragging behind the squad or sloppy marching might have been enough – but if I was half-hidden by the others, he’d find it more difficult to winkle me out. After all, we all kept telling ourselves, we were skilled workers for the Reich. Killing one or more of us would affect productivity and Hauptscharführer Moll and Herr I.G. Farben wouldn’t have approved of that. The strategy worked and I always listened to Hersh Goldberg after that.

  Losing my job had its compensations. As a skilled worker I still got the Premiumschein so food and cigarettes still came my way with their huge black-market potential. Now, without having to worry about the squad – that was Goldberg’s headache now – I could get on with my work. I specialised in doorways, corners and windows and kept my head down. And I had an assistant. He was years older than me, an intellectual who had been a professor at the University of Kraków. He was a political prisoner or perhaps some kind of hostage – you didn’t talk about such things or pry too deeply at Fürstengrube. His unusual status meant that he got mail from outside, including the odd food parcel that he’d sometimes share with me. I think this was the SS idea of a joke: an uneducated working-class teenager giving orders to an academic. He mixed mortar and fetched and carried without complaining once and I never knew his name. It’s funny how the little civilities survive even the worst barbarism. In the outside world, in the Poland we all knew before 1939, he would have been addressed as ‘Panier’. And that’s what I always called him in Fürstengrube, even when he was staggering under the weight of bricks, covered in dust and cement. He was a nice man. And he was always ‘Panier’ to me.

  However much I might be able to make capital out of my skilled-worker status, it was never possible to forget where we were and what was happening. This was still part of the Auschwitz complex and the unskilled workers around us were dropping like flies that spring. I watched them day after day, turning into Muselmänner in front of us, their bones sticking through their jackets and trousers, their faces pinched and drawn. They didn’t get enough food, enough rest or enough medical treatment and yet they were expected to carry the heavy bags of cement and loads of bricks. They still dug ditches and laid pipes, the backbreaking work that would take its toll on fit, well-nourished men before the war. One by one, the worst of them fell to the selections.

  After all this time, I can barely remember most of the men in the Maurerschule and in my Block, with the obvious exception of Herzko Bawnik. Yankl was the camp barber and Sol was in the next bunk. During the working shift I met Josek Zoller, whose Vorarbeiter was the fair-haired Peter Abramovitch. And there was a man called Velvell and an electrician Srulek Lipshitz, whose brother was there too. Srulek was in his mid twenties, a powerfully built man with darker hair than his kid brother, who wasn’t much older than me. Kapo Shlomo Barran was a jack of all trades. Most Kapos had a specific role, but Shlomo seemed to be all over the place. He was huge. Mendeler Davidovitch was a shoemaker, with a square face and constant grin. Somehow, he had been able to hang on to his glasses. Most of these men had come direct to Fürstengrube from the Lodz ghetto; they had no experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Rampe or the crematoria. As far as they knew, or at least hoped, their families were still coping, somehow, in their home town. I knew that mine weren’t, so I kept off the subject. What did we talk about, buried deep in our tunnels or crammed in our bunks? God knows. What I understand as a joke now, was not a joke then.

  And no one talked about religion either. The Jewish faith was of course taboo to the SS and the idea of holding even limited services was laughable. Some survivors whose accounts I have read since talk about feeling God with them in spite of everything. I couldn’t feel that. Auschwitz-Birkenau and Fürstengrube didn’t make me an atheist. They just made me realise that God wasn’t allowed inside the perimeter wire.

  If you got ill – as I had done on the Rampe – you had two weeks (if you were lucky) to get better. In the end, I had to go to the Infirmary at the far eastern corner of the camp. This was presided over by Dr König, who was a genuinely nice man, like doctors are supposed to be. I had painful, inflamed swellings in my neck and I knew the risk I was taking. Somehow, though, I knew I’d survive this and I was back at my bricks the next day. If you didn’t get better, you were on the truck for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of these were swept up from the infirmary, but so
me were shunted out of line at roll-call or on the deadly march to or from the mine. Their response was always the same. They became quiet, sunk in on themselves. A few would cry. Some, the ancient traditions of my people bred in them, prayed to a God I knew wasn’t listening. I never saw anyone try to escape or fight back. They were too far gone for that, physically exhausted and mentally dead already. The fight had gone out of them with the debilitating drill of each murderous shift. The guards marched them back to their barracks for the rest of the day. No one spoke to them. No one had the words, not even Panier with all his sophistication. Late in the afternoon or early in the evening a truck would arrive, engine growling at the main gate. It had a red ambulance cross painted on the side; that was supposed to allay fears and maintain the lie that these men were being taken away for convalescence. The sad little column would shuffle out, nobody speaking, nobody making eye contact. Then it was out on the free road, out past the silver birches making for the distant gates that led to the crematoria.

  Work was never going to set these men free. For the Muselmänner, freedom was the gas chamber if a new consignment had arrived from somewhere else. If not, to save on Zyklon B, it was a bullet to the back of the head. Either way, it was the end.

  In the March of 1944, Hauptscharführer Moll handed over command to his Number Two and went back, we heard on the camp grapevine, to Auschwitz-Birkenau to supervise huge consignments of Hungarian Jews who were on their way. The Rampe, I knew, would be busier than ever.

  Moll’s Number Two was Max Schmidt, not that much older than me in his early twenties. He had the smooth face of a country boy and wore his blond hair combed back. He had been with Moll the day his boss shot the man in the water tank and liked to stride around Fürstengrube with his Alsatian and his riding crop, ready to use either on us if the occasion arose. He came from a farming family in northern Germany, not far from the Baltic coast, and Nazism was in his blood. His father had been a party member for years and had served in the brownshirted Sturmabteilung long before they became subservient to the SS. Schmidt himself had been a combat soldier in the Waffen-SS, along with his two brothers, one of whom was missing. In common with several of the SS men in both the camps I knew, he had been wounded, invalided out and posted to the Auschwitz Guard Regiment. Shortly after I arrived at Fürstengrube, Schmidt had married Gerda Bergman, the pretty blonde daughter of one of the civilian engineers working on the mine. The Schmidts lived in nearby Wesola.

  Even though I was no longer Vorarbeiter, I was savvy enough to know by now how the camp politics worked. Moll was violent, drunk and dangerous when he was in his cups. Schmidt was steadier and came increasingly under the thumb of Oberkapo Hermann Josef, who, now camp senior, exercised an almost paternal influence over the Oberscharführer. Josef, like all Kapos, walked a deadly tightrope and he could usually play Schmidt like an old fiddle. If things weren’t worse than they were in the spring of 1944, I thank Oberkapo Hermann for that. Hermann Josef would tell investigators long after the war that Schmidt was not a natural sadist like Moll, but, completely imbued with the culture of Nazism and very ambitious, he did all he could to impress his superiors.

  But sometimes things went wrong. It may have been April when there was a sudden burst of activity. Prisoners were hurried from the mine, cleared out of the workshops. Tools were downed and abandoned. The civilian workers, who had already been ordered to remove their headgear so that we shaven-headed ones couldn’t sneak out of the gates with them, were sent home. We were all marched back to our huts at double speed, the Muselmänner keeping the pace as best they could. This was a lock-down, searchlights probing the far woods, dogs barking in the darkness. We crowded to our slatted windows trying to see what was going on, but the windows faced the Appellplatz and we couldn’t see the wall or the wire at all.

  Rumours of course ran like wildfire. Somebody had heard something and they’d passed it on to somebody else. Was it true? Who knew? But lock-downs didn’t happen for no reason. The story went that there had been an attempted breakout. One of the Block Seniors had led a group in digging a tunnel, pointing north under the camp perimeter between Blocks A and B. One of them had been caught inside it. Was this just luck on the part of the SS guards, to catch them red-handed? Or had someone blown the whistle? The bottom line was, don’t teach men to be miners and not expect them to put their skills to good use.

  The prisoners were taken away and no one expected to see them again. But of course we had reckoned without the theatricals of the SS and their need to make a point. None of us had any notion of the romantic escapes of British and French prisoners of war from the Stalags further west. In theory those men were covered by the Geneva convention, even if it was sometimes ignored. There was no convention for Fürstengrube and no convention for Jews. And it must have been Friday when we saw the truck full of fresh timber arriving and a gang hammering and sawing on the Appellplatz. They were building a gallows.

  Sunday. The Christian Sabbath. A blessed day of rest at the mine. But there was no football match today, no chance to ease exhausted, aching limbs. We were ordered out onto the Appellplatz early in the afternoon as though for a roll-call. The gallows stood stark against the grey of the sky, the timber pale and almost gleaming in its awful newness. I could see a row of chairs set out in line facing the posts. This was a circus for the entertainment of the SS and we were to consider ourselves privileged to watch the show too.

  After a while the snarl of car engines reached us from the main gate and a convoy of SS vehicles arrived, swastika flags snapping on car bonnets. The men who got out wore the silver braid of senior SS officers from Auschwitz and there was much saluting and heel-clicking, the Prussian military obsession long overlaid with Nazi formality and the inevitable ‘Heil Hitler!’ Schmidt was there, the perfect host, smiling and nodding as though he were presiding over a garden party. And in a way, of course, he was.

  I knew all the men who had tried to escape and been caught. Three of them had come from Auschwitz-Birkenau with me. And I saw them now, brought out from a guard hut with their wrists shackled and their eyes vacant. There was the Frenchman, Leon. Maurice, the happy-go-lucky Blockältester who came from Belgium. My fellow Pole Nathan, who had been a gangster before the war in Lodz to the north of Bedzin. And the fourth man whose name, I’m afraid, I have now forgotten. He looked after Max Schmidt’s chickens. I can see him now, throwing some of the grain to the half wild pigeons that flew into the camp, reminding me of home. All four looked like Muselmänner now, scrawny and ill, with sunken faces and shambling walks. And they’d all taken one hell of a beating over the last few days.

  Four nooses swung from the cross beam, rough hemp creaking. Below each one was a plain wooden chair and leaning against one of the uprights a small wooden stepladder; the furniture of death. Schmidt and his visitors took their positions on their own chairs that gave them ringside seats. Then, as if we hadn’t had enough of them, another selection. Unterscharführer Anton Lukoschek was running the show and no doubt he wanted to impress his superiors with his efficiency. He stood in front of us, one arm behind his back, the other outstretched with the pointing finger. He told us he needed five of us and he raked our ranks with his lethal gaze. ‘You,’ he barked, ‘You. You. You. And … you.’

  The finger had pointed at me. We all looked at each other. We were all teenagers. We all knew each other. Felt each other’s pain in all the terrors of Fürstengrube. And now we were an execution squad – an Einsatzgruppe with no zeal, no motivation, and no alternative.

  ‘You,’ Lukoschek said to one of the others, ‘are going to put the nooses around their necks. The rest of you,’ he looked at each of us in turn, ‘will kick the chairs away when I give the word.’

  We forced ourselves to look up. The SS guards had lifted the dead-men-walking onto their chairs. Lukoschek handed the stepladder to the lad he had chosen. ‘Get up there and put the rope around their necks. The rest of you, stand in front of the chairs.’

  I did as I wa
s told and I was standing in front of Maurice, the Belgian. I couldn’t look at him. Instead, I focused on Leon to his left and watched the rope pulled tight around his neck. In the terrible silence of those seconds, I heard his erratic gasps, fighting for breath already even before his chair had gone. When it was Maurice’s turn I heard a slight sob but now I was looking at the ground, at the chair, anywhere but into the face of the man I was about to murder. One of the condemned men roared a Polish battle cry, defiant to the last.

  I was aware of Lukoschek looking over towards Max Schmidt for the signal. There were no speeches, no reaction from the watching crowd. ‘Right,’ Lukoschek barked to the boy in front of Leon, ‘you first.’ I saw the boy’s foot lash out and hit the chair, but it barely moved.

  ‘You’ll have to do it harder than that,’ the Unterscharführer tutted. The lad kicked again, but still not hard enough and Leon’s feet were still on the seat. I heard him snort in terror and the lad doubled over, yanking the chair legs with all his strength. The rope creaked and stretched as the chair clattered away. Leon’s feet flailed in mid-air, desperately trying to find the ground, to take the appalling pain away from his throat and windpipe. His jaw was rigid and his bulging eyes stared wildly ahead. All this took seconds, but it felt like years.

  ‘Now you,’ Lukoschek was snarling in my ear. ‘Pull it.’ I heard a sigh and I looked up. God knows I never meant to, but I did and found myself staring into Maurice’s face. Tears were trickling down his cheeks and he had this profound look of sadness. I heard him say, ‘Long life.’ The others there heard it as a rallying cry, one last, proud, fierce gesture from a brave man. But I heard it as a whisper, to me only, to the stupid, naïve kid who was ordered to make sure that his life wouldn’t be long at all. I turned away, grabbed the chair legs and pulled. Maurice’s feet danced in the air as he writhed in his death agony, kicking my arm in his convulsions as he died.