The distant, potentially fruitful lead was in Melbourne, Australia. It presented not merely a financial challenge but an emotional one too. Melbourne, his late mother’s home town, was the city he’d grown up in after his parents had separated when he was three. It was where his grandparents had helped his mother bring him up, where he had gone to school before college and where he still felt he should have been when his mother had died. But then surely this lead, more than any he’d found since stumbling upon Border and the wire recordings, was too tantalising to ignore. Adam had tracked down to Melbourne a Holocaust survivor, one he definitely knew to be still alive, who claimed to remember being interviewed by Border in Zeilsheim DP camp. He had come across the woman’s name in Border’s papers but he hadn’t yet come across the transcript of her interview. It might have been one of the transcripts that Sahera Shukri and her staff hadn’t yet reached or the Melbourne woman could have been on one of the wire recordings that nobody had heard since Border had recorded it.
‘Sweetheart, you can’t wait for this woman’s transcript to turn up. It might not turn up until you get all the recordings digitised and transcribed and translated,’ he heard Diana’s voice tell him. ‘In the meantime, the woman might die.’
‘I’m already shelling out money on this thing left, right and centre.’
‘Adam, you’re not shelling out money, you’re investing in a project that might be very important both for your career and for what we know about those times.’
‘ “Might be”, are the operative words.’
‘Adam, are you seeing a pattern here … in your life? You’ve got to show a little faith.’
‘Of course you’re right. Now if you could just meet me at the corner of 109th and Broadway, we can sell the faith I’m meant to have to my Chase personal banker and then I can go to Melbourne to interview this woman.’
‘So you’re still with Chase?’
Suddenly the buzzer to the intercom rang.
‘You expecting someone?’
‘You know I’m not. You live in my head.’
‘I might live there but sometimes I go out.’
The buzzer rang again and this time Adam answered it. ‘Hi, I think you’ve pressed the wrong buzzer.’
‘No, I haven’t. It’s me.’
‘Sonia?’
‘Can I come up?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do your parents know you’re here?’
‘Comin’ up!’
Adam stood around with his hands in his pockets waiting for Sonia to knock at the door. When she knocked he opened it. She came in, a little out of breath, and they hugged as they always had since she was a child, but this time he noticed she was slower to let go.
‘Do your parents know you’re here?’
‘Yep.’
‘Really?’
‘You don’t think I’m gonna lie, do you?’
‘No, of course not. You’re not capable of lying. Other people are but you’re not.’
‘Hey, what do you mean by that?’
‘So your parents really do know you’re here?’
‘I’ve answered that.’
‘That’s true. It’s just that … Weren’t you meant to call before coming over?’
‘Are you … entertaining?’
‘Ooh that hurts! You really know how to hurt a guy. I could’ve been working.’
‘Are you?’ ‘I was actually.’
‘Sorry, Adam. You want me to go?’ She looked at him plaintively.
‘No, I’m nearly done. Why don’t you grab a soda and I’ll be with you in a few minutes? I’ve got to finish reading something.’
She walked over to his refrigerator and opened it. Adam was about to go back to his desk when he noticed that she was just standing there, seemingly transfixed by something inside the refrigerator. She had her back to him and wasn’t moving.
‘Sonia, you don’t have to defrost the fridge.’ She didn’t move. It was as though she hadn’t heard him.
‘Sonia?’ She stayed still and silent, just staring into the refrigerator. He walked over to see what it was she was staring at.
‘Sonia? What are you looking at?’ She turned around and he could see tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘Hey, little one, what’s wrong?’ He took her in his arms and hugged her again. ‘Was I meant to save the last Dr Pepper? What’s wrong, sweetie?’
‘Everything’s all different now. Nobody says anything, like it’s all still the same. But it’s not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you and Diana ever going to get back together again?’
‘Is that why you’re crying? You’re not s’posed to cry about that. That’s my job.’
‘Do you cry about that?’
‘All the time.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure, what else have I got to do? But why are you crying?’
At this question she began to cry harder, her shoulders rising and falling involuntarily in time to the internal rhythm of her sadness.
‘Adam, they’re always fighting. I hate it. I really hate it. Grandpa didn’t come for dinner tonight like he was meant to. Nobody said why. It didn’t used to be like this, did it?’ And then from a space between his arms and inside his chest she asked, ‘When did it get like this?’
*
It was night and Henryk Mandelbrot, again on the day shift, was in one of the barracks used to house the Sonderkommando. Zalman Gradowski, one of the stokers, wanted to talk to him but Mandelbrot was going to have to wait. Gradowski had still not finished his evening ritual. Each night at the end of his shift, after the Appell, the roll call, and after he had eaten, Zalman Gradowski would put on a tallis, a Jewish prayer shawl, that had been found among a victim’s possessions and he would recite Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, for all of the people he had just incinerated. He did this every day. Every day he also recorded in secret a running account of the work of the Sonderkommando and of all that he’d witnessed. Henryk Mandelbrot knew what he was doing and why. He’d had to know. Mandelbrot was one of two other men with whom Gradowski shared a wooden bunk and it would not have been possible to hide his writing from them. The other man, also named Zalman, was Zalman Lewental, a Polish Jew from the town of Ciechanow. Zalman Lewental was also keeping a record of the work of the Sonderkommando.
Gradowski and Lewental, who had been in the Sonderkommando longer than Mandelbrot, had explained to him their purpose. These writings, they had said, were acts of resistance. Since it looked to them as though no Jews would survive the war and it was close to certain that none of the Sonderkommando would, they had decided to produce a written account of the destruction of European Jewry down to the last detail and to bury it in the hope that it would survive. This was the whole point of surviving as long as they could. News, or, more accurately, rumours, had spread that the Russians were getting ever nearer and that the camp would soon be liberated but rumours of all sorts had always spread throughout the camp every bit as fast as lice, typhus and dysentery. The Nazis might sooner or later lose the war against the Allies but they would win their war against the Jews. The two Zalmans, Gradowski and Lewental, would record as much of what they saw as they could despite the certainty of immediate death if they were discovered. When they thought the time was right, they would bury their testimony as securely as was possible somewhere near the crematoria where they worked … This was what kept them going – the need to tell what would otherwise have been unimaginable.
It wasn’t his writing that Gradowski wanted to talk about to Mandelbrot. While Lewental looked out, Gradowski took Mandelbrot outside the barrack and when he was certain no one was paying them any attention, he spoke to him very quietly. ‘You know Lewental has a brother here?’
‘Yeah, I know, an electrician, right?
‘Right … an electrician,’ said Gradowski. The flames from the pits lit up the night sky. The work of the night shift was well under way. Not every one of Birkenau’s slave l
abour details were divided into day and night shifts. The Sonderkommando was. Its work never stopped.
‘So … Lewental’s brother is an electrician, that’s what you wanted to tell me?’
Whatever it was Gradowski had wanted to tell him, he now seemed extremely reticent about it, almost as though he were having second thoughts about taking him aside. The smell of charred flesh hung in the air even as a new transport was being unloaded. ‘Lewental … thinks we ought to tell you …’
‘That his brother is an electrician?’ Gradowski looked around them again. It was still safe to talk. It was almost a whisper.
‘Henryk, have you heard anything about a resistance movement?’
‘In the Sonderkommando?’
‘Throughout the camp.’
‘No, is there one?’
Gradowski nodded that there was.
‘Yeah?’ questioned Mandelbrot. ‘Zalman, what exactly have they achieved? Look over there. It’s business as usual.’ Henryk Mandelbrot pointed up at the night sky lit up by the flames from the pits where the night shift was trying to hurry things along. ‘This resistance, whoever they are, they’re doing a great job.’
‘Yeah, well, so far, yes, they’ve spent too much time arguing with each other to be of much use to anyone but themselves,’ Gradowski had to admit, ‘but there’s been a change recently. We’re hoping for better.’
The dogs were barking in the distance. The work of the night shift was progressing without diurnal variation. The sun was irrelevant to this work. The blinding lights were on. The screams had started right from the unloading ramp. The more screams the more the beatings. It was a rough equation, all the more true the earlier the screams began. If the people were already panicking there was no point trying to keep them calm. It was already too late. So the SS would just want to hurry them up. Spare the deception and hope to save time with more than usual beatings. This was going to be an especially difficult shift. Not only were too many people panicking too early, but the victims were going to have to wait. There were still corpses to be unpacked in the gas chamber of Crematorium III. They were falling further behind and it made the SS especially irritable.
‘Who are these people, these resisters? Where are they?’
‘Shhh! Listen to me carefully. I’ll tell you what I know. There’s an Auschwitz-Birkenau branch of the Polish underground, the Polish Home Army. They act in coordination with the Polish underground outside the camp.’
‘The AK?’
‘Yeah, the AK has a branch inside the camp. There’s another resistance group in the camp, the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz, made up of leftists of all different nationalities, including some of the Jews in the different work details. Then there are various small groups of Jews who’ve formed resistance cells on the basis of … I don’t know … ideological grounds or just based on their hometown ties.’
‘So much resistance all over the camp!’ interrupted Mandelbrot. ‘It’s a wonder anyone has time to be gassed.’
‘Well, it’s only the Jews who get gassed, isn’t it? Okay, some Gypsies and homosexuals too, but the rest of them, the Poles, the Russians, the French, all the leftists and everyone else, they have time to make all sorts of plans, argue with each other about every detail, ditch the plans and start over again.’
‘And they hate each other more than they hate the Germans.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Perhaps that’s why you’ve never seen any of their plans bear fruit.’
The filing had started in the dressing room of Crematorium III. The first five came down the stairs; all women – a hairdresser, a widow, a photographer’s assistant, a teacher, and the cousin of a violin teacher well known in his town who played very well herself. The first of the next five pushed into the back of the violinist. She turned around and already another five were coming down.
‘There seems to have been a change recently,’ Gradowski whispered. ‘The Auschwitz branch of the AK and the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz have put aside their differences.’
‘I’m happy for them.’
‘Well you might be. They’ve established what they’re calling the joint Auschwitz Military Council …’ Gradowski leaned in closer, ‘with the intention of planning and executing an uprising.’
‘An uprising?’
‘Yes and the Sonderkommando are to be included in this uprising. Not only is the plan for there to be a mass escape from the ranks of the entire camp, it’s planned that the gas chambers and crematoria be blown up and destroyed.’
‘So that’s where the Sonderkommando comes in?’
‘Well, we have the privilege of living and working here. And we’re going to die here anyway. Plans have been made and in fact efforts are already being made to enable prisoners to acquire weapons.’
‘Weapons?’
‘What do you know about the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory?’
‘Nothing, what is it?’
‘One of the labour details is dedicated to the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory. It’s a munitions factory near the main camp. You passed it when they brought you in. We’ve wanted to acquire gun powder from there for the purpose of making our own incendiary devices, bombs or grenades of some kind. There’s a Russian –’
‘Who are we?’
‘Henryk, so many questions! I need to get this over with. Some time ago we made contact with two Jews who work in the Weichsel Union Metallwerke munitions factory, Israel Gutman and Joshua Leifer, Polish Jews.’
‘They’re part of the resistance?’
‘Yes, they were trying to make contact with the women who worked in what the Germans call the Pulverraum, the gunpowder room. Only women work there, no men. But the women in the Pulverraum are under the strictest supervision imaginable so they haven’t been able to even contact them and sound them out about getting hold of gunpowder.’
‘And they work in the same factory?’
‘It’s a big factory. They’re under tight supervision.’
‘So no gunpowder.’
‘We don’t even know if they’d agree to do it.’
‘Well, if no one can even contact these women it’s off, this part of it, right?’
‘Not necessarily. No man can get to them but what if there is a woman from within the resistance who could contact the women in the Pulverraum or even if there is another woman who works at the munitions factory who could?’
Inside the undressing room at Crematorium III the men had already started coming down. They were well advanced and most of the women were already at least partially undressed but for a mother and her two daughters, aged about twelve and fourteen. These three, all well dressed and clearly from a very comfortable background, did not move at all. Terrified, they looked around them in disbelief. Then the twelve-year-old said something to her mother in French and it happened that the Sonderkommando man nearest them, Chaim Neuhof, spoke a smattering of French.
Hurriedly in the middle of the chaos, trying to make sure the SS didn’t notice him talking to her, he asked, ‘Vous êtes française, madame? Madame? Are you French, madame?’
‘De la Belgique, monsieur,’ the fourteen-year-old replied shyly, her mother apparently totally unable to speak out of fear. The undressing room was filling up.
‘Madame, you must all of you undress immediately! If the SS see you dressed they will beat you. They will kill you and the girls with their clubs! All of you … undress now!’ he said in rapid whispered broken French while pretending to help an old man undress.
But a combination of shyness, shame, pride and terror rendered the mother and both of her daughters seemingly physically unable to comply. They just looked at the scene they were in with horrified disbelief but as though they were not a part of it.
‘Hurry, madame! Please!’ Chaim Neuhof insisted, still in a whisper with his head bowed as he helped the old man struggling to remove his trousers. An SS guard had now noticed the scene from the corner of his eye.
‘I will stand in front of you, madame. Please! For th
e young girls, you have to hurry! They will beat you!’
The Sonderkommando man, Chaim Neuhof, stood up and placed himself in front of the mother and her two daughters with his back turned to them but, because they were standing near the centre of a crowded room full of frantic movement, he could only partially cover them on one side and could guarantee nothing other than that he himself wouldn’t watch them undress. But somehow this act was itself enough to get them started. Neuhof provided seconds of cover from the SS man watching the mother and her daughters from the corner of his eye and by the time the guard’s view was no longer obscured, they were largely naked and the guard turned his attention elsewhere around the undressing room. Chaim Neuhof turned around and saw that finally they had complied. Fortuitously he’d been able to save them from a brutal beating in the last minutes of their lives. He usually worked the day shift, and had only swapped that shift with a man who was ill, a man who, like almost every other Sonderkommando member, spoke no French.
‘Thank you, madame,’ he said when he eventually turned around. The three of them moved a little towards him as though he was in a position to protect them, not realising that what little help he could ever offer had just in those few seconds been spent. The mother was about to touch him, an involuntary consequence of this mix of his kindness, her fear and her gratitude. For a moment, quite dangerously, he stopped in the middle of everything. This was when he saw them anew, each of them by now naked, each of the three of them to Neuhof so beautiful, their round eyes pleading with him, their unblemished pale skin, their thick shoulder-length auburn hair. Would he ever get this image out of his head? Different-sized versions of female perfection had appeared before him in the middle of hell, the very middle. Tears welled up in his eyes. He bent down and picked up their clothes. ‘Look at them!’ screamed a voice from inside his head. This was death talking. He had to turn away.
The Street Sweeper Page 46