To speak the truth, we did fare much better in the Kanada than other inmates. When the Kapos looked the other way (or stuffed their own pockets with goods), we pulled whatever edible items we could find and ate them right there or concealed them in our mess tins that dangled from our belts to eat them later or exchange them for cigarettes or medicine or even alcohol. I’d found a half-eaten bar of Swiss chocolate earlier that morning. With a faint smile on my face and my mouth pooling with saliva at the mere thought of it sitting snuggly in my pocket, I dreamed of the evening when I’d eat it after dinner – a piece of sawdust bread and a smear of margarine on the palm. What a dessert it would make! I could almost taste its bitter-sweetness on my tongue.
“Achtung!”
Instinctively, I dropped the trousers that I was searching, at the hoarse voice of our Kapo and froze at attention. Someone with an inspection. Someone from the SS and it wasn’t Weber, the accountant. He was in his office; I could hear the keys of his typewriter from here.
“Back to work.”
I recognized the voice that had given the command behind my back. My savior. Rottenführer Dahler.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him stroll among the rows and rows of tables on which the mountains of clothes were rising – the Alps of Auschwitz. I saw a man pull his head inside his shoulders as Rottenführer Dahler passed him by; Herr Kommandoführer must have administered him a veritable thrashing, at some stage, for whatever he’d done and here, we had a dogs’ memory for such things. With his gloved hand, Dahler pulled an overcoat out of the pile, inspected it without much interest and threw it back. Moved closer to my station; fingered at the box with piles of books and documents in it before throwing a sidelong glance in my direction.
Pretending to be unbothered by his attention, I shoved my hand inside yet another pocket and fished out a handkerchief with the initial’s SM in its corner. Another pocket produced a pack of American Camels. Dahler looked at it with apparent interest. I considered throwing it into the respective box for a moment but then caught his eyes on me again and tentatively outstretched my arm, with the pack in it, in his direction.
From Dahler, an uncertain, wavering grin. He was quiet for a few seconds.
“Not allowed,” he said at last. “But thank you nevertheless.”
I barely suppressed an indifferent shrug and threw the pack where it belonged.
He loitered nearby even though now I ignored him entirely. Cleared his throat once, twice; sighed, somewhat irritably.
“Anything… special, today?” he finally asked.
I regarded him for some time, working things out in my mind. Special? I found a porcelain doll with a part of its head broken among someone’s belongings and it reminded me of my first day in the Kanada. We had just had our armpit and pubic hair shaved; were still sore and humiliated after the SS doctors’ personal search for valuables – in the most intimate places, of course, where else – doused with a solution of calcium chloride that made our eyes burn so viciously it was impossible to open them for a few minutes. Along the narrow, barbed-wire-encased passage, we were being marched to our new work detail in our newly issued uniforms. Towards us, a column of women, the ones to which we had belonged just a day ago, was trudging in a different direction, in their wrinkled, dirty clothes, with haggard, pale faces lined with tear stains and resignation – a truly pitiful sight that made one’s heart bleed. The longing glances they threw our way made us turn away in shame.
Suddenly, a baby began wailing, most certainly unfed and unchanged ever since their arrival; ever since the baby’s mother had boarded that cursed transport, most likely. The baby wailed and wailed and one of the guards, escorting the column, must have been nursing a hangover or was just in a bad mood, not for any particular reason but just on general grounds; who knew what the issue was, with him. We only caught a brief glimpse of him tearing the screaming infant from his mother, swinging him wildly by the legs and bashing his head, with savage force, on the cabin of a truck that was parked nearby. The entire camp must have heard the sickening crunch.
The doll that I found today looked just like the child after the guard had dropped him on the ground; only the doll’s head was empty inside.
However, I didn’t think that this story would qualify as the something special that Rottenführer Dahler had in mind.
I pulled the cigarette case that had caused me such confusion from under the pile of coats and demonstrated it to him. “This thing, I suppose. I wasn’t sure if it’s gold or not, Herr Rottenführer. It’s heavy enough but—”
I came to an abrupt halt as soon as his gloved fingers touched mine as he took the case from me. They lingered on top of mine longer than necessary and I barely restrained myself from yanking my hand away.
Dahler inspected it thoroughly, opened it to examine its dark-brown suede lining, grinned at the sight of a few cigarettes still left inside and quickly emptied the case’s contents into his own pack.
“Loose ones are allowed,” he explained, as if I’d go and report him to the camp Kommandant for taking a few smokes from the Reich. “Silver, most likely, with golden coating,” he announced his verdict. “You can put it into the box. Weber will sort it out later.”
“Thank you, Herr Kommandoführer. I would hate to cause any confusion for Rottenführer Weber.”
He nodded but didn’t take his leave. In his presence, under his curious gaze, I suddenly felt even worse than before, like an animal that had been put in an enclosure in a zoo and was now gawked at by the visitors; a humiliated slave who would end its days in captivity after getting its personal freedom violated on a daily basis. I took such great pleasure in visiting the zoo when I was a child but now, the mere thought of it was loathsome.
“Have you found any food items today?”
For an instant, cold terror seized me. There it was, the reason for all this idle talking. I should have known, should have sensed the carefully and cruelly constructed ruse. The SS guards never exchanged pleasantries with the inmates. He must have seen me pocket that half-eaten chocolate bar earlier that morning and was toying with me this entire time; made me drop my guard and now he would administer his punishment. Feeling the blood draining from my face, I wondered if he was planning on merely beating me or sending me to the gas along with the next group. The chimney of the crematorium had long been fixed and worked on an industrial basis, day to day, non-stop operation. Surely, he’d find a spot to squeeze me in for the next scheduled Aktion. I was almost relieved at the thought – at least, this would end. I’d be alone, forever left in peace and quiet.
“Half of a bar of Swiss chocolate, Herr Rottenführer,” I replied without much emotion.
I was resigned to my fate. I was ready for him to free me. Smiling, I extracted the bar from my pocket and demonstrated it to him. Somewhere, behind my shoulder, someone gasped barely audibly. They all thought he’d slaughter me properly now and they were not wrong.
“You kept it?” Before I had a chance to answer, he suddenly broke into another smile. “Good. You can keep whatever half-eaten items you find. The Reich has no need for those.”
With that, he calmly set off, whistling a tune. Around me, stunned silence lay.
After a pause, Rochelle found her voice. “Did he mean us all?”
The Kapo administered her a hard blow on her shoulder, “for asking stupid questions.”
It was still early morning, about six, I think. Across the camp, caught between the barracks, a wet April wind was howling, in search of an escape. The electrical current hummed softly in the wires. We stood still for our morning Appell – the roll call. It was ordinarily a long affair on its own but today our sufferings were prolonged even further for our Blockälteste and Blockschreiberin couldn’t get their numbers right.
Wet snow melted on my cheeks. It didn’t melt on the cheeks of the woman who my bunkmate Esther and I held by her arms. She had died during the night – between us – and now we had to hold her until the Appell w
as over and only then would we be allowed to throw her into the “dead” pile, for the corpse carriers to take later to the crematorium. I silently thanked God that the sparrow-like thing wasn’t heavy. Just cold. Like snow. Like snow, she’d disappear soon, only into the sky.
Rottenführer Wolff was growing annoyed with Blockälteste Irma, who kept nervously checking her lists. She was appointed as our block elder solely because her father was a Volksdeutsche and that, in turn, appeared to qualify her to wear a red armband with a white label and a block number on it – a sign of superiority over the rest of us, full Jews. I saw her pull that armband upward in anguish, as she, for the first time, must have cursed her fate as the bearer of such a responsibility.
That morning, Irma couldn’t seem to place three of the women. They were not among the dead the others were holding; neither did they shout their usual “Present” as she read their numbers from the list. Wolff threw his third cigarette down and stomped on it in irritation. To be sure, it was some sort of a bureaucratic mistake; they couldn’t have possibly escaped. There was no place to run from here. We were surrounded by miles of electrified barbed-wire and hundreds of dogs and men with their rifles and steel-capped boots that hurt so much when they connected with one’s ribs. The only escape from here was death or madness and I wondered, with cool indifference, which one would claim me first.
Esther, the sad-looking woman with empty, invariably downcast eyes, had already succumbed to this collective Auschwitz madness. Not too long after our arrival, she began whispering to herself long into the night as she stared with her unseeing eyes into the bunk above us, talking to people whom only she could see. I hadn’t muttered anything to anyone yet but sometimes, I lapsed into some inexplicable outwardly abstraction while at work or in line for the turnip soup and only a fellow inmate’s nudge or a Kapos baton would bring me back to this hateful reality.
Many of us, new arrivals, walked around in a dream-like state, although, a nightmare would be a better word to describe this place. It was our common belief that we had arrived at a place, which one could only leave through the chimney; where every man was for himself and where one couldn’t count on such a thing as human sympathy. On the contrary, the weakness of the spirit, just like the weakness of the body was mocked and jeered at by both the ones bearing power and the old-timers, who had only survived because they had turned off everything human in themselves.
Auschwitz was the world where the question, “what happened to my brother and father?” was met with sadistic, in its cruelty, laughter and a Kapos crude response, “they both are coughing; you see, they swallowed a bit too much gas.” Auschwitz was a world where death was such a common occurrence that it had transcended, as grotesquely wrong as that may sound, into something ordinary and plain, something expected and unavoidable. Human suffering lost all meaning in this place. Each had their own survival to worry about to be able to consider being charitable to others and that was the reason why Irma was already twisting her baton in her hand, the half-Jew ready to pounce on us, full Jews. If she didn’t come up with the missing women, she’d be getting twenty-five lashes on her buttocks and thighs in front of us all as a punishment and Rottenführer Wolff’s hand was infamously heavy.
Rottenführer Weber was brought from his warm accountant’s quarters to resolve the issue. It appeared the three missing women had been reassigned to one of the SS doctors’ infirmary duty and Irma simply forgot to strike them down from her list. Shamefaced in front of the SS, whose favor she was hell-bent on earning, Irma dismissed us quickly and rehabilitated herself by administering a magisterial thrashing to our Blockschreiberin Vera, “whose sole responsibility was to remind Irma of the inmates’ transfer.” Naturally, the block clerk knew nothing of the transfer order but took both the verbal abuse and the following beating with calm resignation. Wolff muttered “stupid bitches” under his breath and stalked off. Because of their mistake, his entire overcoat was wet with snow, he was cold and hungry, and therefore mightily displeased on account of all this.
We dropped our load into the pile of already stiffened bodies and headed to our work detail. Esther was whispering something again. I touched my mouth to ensure that I still was not muttering anything. It wasn’t like she noticed it until I told her that she was doing it again. But no, my lips were pursed shut. I was not mad yet, or so I thought…
Dahler was here again. I hid behind the pile of coats as he made his rounds, on his long legs, as though searching for something. Or someone. I suppressed the desire to duck and hurl all of these sheepskins and furs and raincoats on top of myself, to bury myself forever, as I did with my sister when we played hide and seek. My favorite hiding place was the laundry bin and not once had she found me there. Would he find me if I did so here? Of course he would. They always found us and dragged us out of our hiding places – wasn’t that how we all ended up here?
At last, he discovered me in my corner. With a bright grin on his young, clean-shaven face, he made his way to me, this time with purpose, without pretense.
“You changed your regular station,” he stated the obvious.
“I was assigned to this one by the Kapo,” I lied.
He nodded and surveyed the pile in front of me. The Auschwitz Alps were even higher today – the new transport had just arrived this morning. For some time, he just stood there watching me work.
“Have you…” he began, without looking at me and examining a sleeve on a camel-wool coat, sticking out of the pile, instead. “How do you like it here, in the Kanada?”
I shot him a sharp glare before quickly remembering myself and lowering my eyes. One had to be quite barmy to antagonize the man who was the very reason we hadn’t gone up in the chimney. “You have the best work detail in the camp, Herr Rottenführer,” I replied carefully before throwing a leather jacket, with a silk lining, into its respective pile. In just a few days, it would be disinfected and shipped to Germany and some Herr Schmitt would be proudly strutting around in it, with his wife on his arm, also clad in a coat stolen from some other murdered Jew. “I don’t think I had the chance to thank you for assigning us all to it. We are all very grateful.”
My words appeared to have pleased him immensely. He was practically glowing now.
“It was my pleasure. I asked the doctors specifically not to shave your heads during the disinfection, too.” He was looking at my head, covered by the blue kerchief. “You have such beautiful hair. It would have been a shame to cut it off. I’m glad they listened to my reasoning. It cost me, of course,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper and gave a burst of somewhat nervous laughter before assuming a serious air again. “The workers under my charge don’t really interact with the rest of the camp’s inmates and the living conditions are much better here, so they don’t suffer from lice. I did, however, promise it to the doctors that I’d keep it that way. Just like the men, you’ll have some time after lunch every day to check your clothes and hair for lice. I want to keep the work detail clean. We don’t want any typhus epidemics here, do we?”
“Of course not, Herr Rottenführer. Thank you for looking out for us.”
He inched closer. We stood a while, much too near to each other. Whenever I moved, the hem of his woolen overcoat brushed the bare skin on my leg. In the uncertain light of the overhead lamps, his face appeared solemn and pensive.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
He said it very softly, so only I could hear it. Before I knew it, he pressed something into my hand, squeezed my fingers one last time and quickly left without saying another word. Only after he was out of the work detail did I unclench my fist. In it, a small note sat. My entire body began to tremble when I read what it said.
I fell in love with you.
I re-read it once, twice, still not believing the audacity of it. It all surged up in me again – the anger, the resentment, the powerless, maddening ire. How dare he? In this cemetery where we dug our own graves daily, to give it to a Jew he’d watc
h go up in smoke one day? He was in charge of the work detail that sorted dead people’s belongings daily. How dare he even utter the word love in this place? How dare he imply that he could feel anything?
I asked the Kapo for permission to be excused to the latrine. She measured me icily but waved me off nevertheless. Briskly, with my nerves strained to the utmost, I made my way to the facility.
It was a joint affair, with rows of holes on two sides, an overpowering stench and a guard who monitored the time we spent inside, men and women together. Two male inmates were sitting with their backs to me. I quickly tore the note apart and dropped it where it belonged, into the hole. If only I could tear apart and throw the memory of it in the same manner.
Love.
4
Helena
The morning chill of the unheated barracks woke us up before the block elder Irma’s usual shouts. In the second half of April, the camp administration thought it to be wasteful to use the stoves at night but compensated us by shoving more people into our barracks. Body heat, Rottenführer Wolff later explained, with owl-like wisdom about him and left us to freeze in the mornings, when the temperatures plummeted below zero and we shivered next to each other on top of our bunks despite the stolen Kanada sweaters, for which we had already gotten a truncheon across the ribs. However, the bruised sides hardly concerned anyone as long as they allowed us to keep the goods. In this cold, it was all that mattered.
Today was Sunday, a day off of sorts. It only meant that we weren’t sent to work details but could spend the day cleaning our barracks and around them instead. The breakfast was served late and cold. Stolen newspapers wrapped around our soles to provide at least some insulation from the icy floor, we were patiently shifting from one foot to another while waiting for Blockälteste Irma to distribute the brooms. A new woman – a still unfamiliar face – bumped into me without noticing it. She was too consumed by trying to reach, with her finger, the residue that was left in her mess tin of our “breakfast” – a splash of lukewarm ersatz coffee. I looked at her distressed face.
The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 4