by Pierre Berg
An armed guard took a position near each car. SS guards with German Shepherds moved in and out of the gloom. The dogs’ growls kept me away from the patches of snow on the piles of coal and stacks of wooden ties. I overheard some women lamenting the “poor dears” who hadn’t survived the journey. Probably corpses in every car, I thought, but I was pretty sure no one had been left behind in ours.
Fog floated past the lights in the yard like wads of cotton batting. Over a loudspeaker, a German snapped orders.
“Women and children to the left! All men to the right! Leave all your belongings on the side of the track. They’ll be returned to you after your processing.”
Stella. I had to find Stella. As the guards began to separate us, I spotted a head of flowing red hair.
“Stella!” I called to her, but in the tumult she couldn’t hear me.
I had to catch her before she got into line. Water splashed into my shoes as I pushed through a swarm of clinging families. Slipping in the mud, I called after her again. She ducked past a guard waving his truncheon. I stopped. The girl was too tall. My heart sank. In the chaos and darkness there was no way I was going find her. It was hopeless, for now.
From the loudspeaker, one order followed another.
“All men over fifty years old will remain with the women. All those who cannot walk will go with the women. They will all ride in the trucks.” Why did the speaker’s voice seem to quiver as if he were trying to suppress laughter?
“All the doctors who are over fifty years old will remain with the men.”
Why must the old doctors walk? That didn’t make sense. Moving into line, an elderly man with a matted beard grabbed my forearm.
“What did they say?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied, too overwhelmed with foreboding to tell him the truth.
A weary Father Tonanti marched toward the swelling line of women and children.
“See you later,” he waved.
I waved back, holding tightly to his words. When he was out of earshot I realized I should have begged him to locate Stella and reassure her that I would find her.
“All men march past with hats off!”
A searchlight was turned on. In its luminous pencil appeared a tall, thin man in a dark green uniform. He climbed onto a small platform near the engine and our line slowly began to move. When each man passed in front of the platform, the officer scrutinized him, then waved his riding crop to the left or to the right. As I got closer I realized that he was triaging us into two groups. The men bunched on the left were either middle-aged or frail.
The officer’s profile was like that of a bird of prey. The silver death head on his cap gleamed in the harsh light. Three men in front of me, two, one—it was my turn. I stepped into the light. The officer bent slightly forward to see me better. Instinctively, I stood on my toes and puffed out my chest. With the spotlight shining in my eyes, it was impossible to distinguish his features except for the prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. The buzzard studied his carrion carefully. He signaled for me to go to the right, and I joined a group of young and robust fellows on the other side of the tracks. I placed myself next to familiar faces.
“Fall out by fives,” commanded a soldier. The screening was finished.
The women, one of them Stella, disappeared into the fog along with their wails and pleas. A five-year-old girl came running toward us. “Poppa, Poppa, Poppa!”
Mordechai, a Turkish butcher from my hometown, barreled through our ranks. A guard grabbed his daughter by the arm before she could reach the tracks and dragged her back to her mother and six sisters. With hands preventing him from going any farther, Mordechai let out a disturbing groan. In Drancy I had asked him why he had fathered so many children. “If I had had a boy I would have stopped on the first one.”
With its whistle taunting us, our train began to back out. If I were religious, that would have been a good time to pray. Instead, I lit the cigarette that I had gotten from a new arrival to Drancy and eagerly breathed in the smoke. I hadn’t smoked it on the train because I didn’t have any to share.
The man beside me was shivering and his teeth were clattering.
Another one was beating his arms against his chest to keep warm. I wanted to stomp my feet, but my shoes were stuck in the mud. I moved my toes and thousands of steel needles shot up my stiff legs.
What the hell were we waiting for in this arctic dampness? Even with my layers of clothes the cold was penetrating the marrow of my bones. A guard yawned noisily. He looked bored to death. In the distance, the bell in a church tower struck twelve. If I were in Nice, I would probably be leaving the cinema with my pals and on my way home to my soft, warm bed.
A sentry passed by.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Auschwitz,” the soldier said with a smirk.
What was the twisted smile for? Did I miss the joke? Well, it was a funny-sounding name. He was about to continue on his way when he realized I was smoking. He sprang on me, crushing the cigarette against my mouth with his gloved hand. The blow dropped me into the mud.
“Rauchen verboten!” (No smoking!), he screeched.
When I got to my feet, icy water ran down my neck and dripped from my sleeves. Despite myself, tears filled my eyes. So this is “Pitchi Poi.” I wiped the ashes from my lips. Oh, how I regretted not escaping with the others. What good had it done me to stay in that cattle car? I wasn’t reunited with Stella. I didn’t even get a glimpse of her. Filthy boches. It was obvious now that the Nazis had lied to us. There was never any plan to keep us all together. The whole time in Drancy they had lied, and instead of revolting en masse we had allowed ourselves to be led along like spineless cuckolds. I was standing ankle deep in mud, passively awaiting my fate.
I was pissed, angry with myself for being so foolish and gullible. I would have kicked myself, but the way things were going, it seemed certain I would be getting an SS boot in the ass soon enough.
From the shadows appeared ghastly creatures dressed in blue and gray striped uniforms. They shuffled toward us, bent over like hunchbacks. I had to pinch myself. I couldn’t believe they were human. They went along the tracks gathering up our scattered luggage and throwing it into a heap. They slithered among our rows without uttering a sound. Their vacant eyes ignored our existence.
What horrible secret weighed on those sagging shoulders?
“I bet we’ll all look like them pretty soon,” predicted a voice behind me.
There’s no way that can happen, I thought.
The hunchbacks loaded our belongings onto handcarts and pushed them into the night. Since we had nametags on our bags, some found it reassuring, as if those gaunt fellows were bellhops delivering our bags to our suites. It was amazing how willing we were to delude ourselves with the slightest hint of hope.
A snarling dog on a taut leather leash sniffed at my legs. I curled my hands into a fist, not wanting the beast to mistake my fingers for bratwursts. Another barking German Shepherd, his hot breath steaming, passed by, dragging his handler. For some odd reason it made me think of an anti-Semitic cartoon that I had seen in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer ten years before, when my family vacationed in Berlin just as “the god with a moustache” was coming to power. The caption read, “Jewish Beggar Bites German Shepherd.” The Nazis had sure gone to some length to make sure that would never happen.
A convoy of big dump trucks approached, slipping and sliding in the mud, splashing everything in their path. The tailgates were dropped, and we were ordered to climb onto the coal-dust–covered beds. We were packed so tightly that none of us could move our legs an inch but the warmth produced by our close proximity was welcomed. When the last man was loaded, SS guards took their places on the trucks’ running boards and the convoy started out.
Our truck slipped into the ruts in the road, then lurched sharply out of them. The low railing around the bed cut into my flesh. I tightened my muscles to resist the truck’s jolting. Someone dug
an elbow into my ribs, and then I was thrown against the man next to me. He didn’t utter a sound and kept his gaze downward. I could tell he was petrified. So was I. We were all petrified. There was something depraved here. The place reeked of it and none of us were prepared to confront it. We all feared that if we looked, if we stared deeply, if we acknowledged it, our fate would be worse than Lot’s wife.
The trucks splashed packs of shadows struggling along the left side of the road. I couldn’t believe it. The women and old men—the people who were supposed to be riding—were walking. Now I understood why the man on the loudspeaker had struggled to keep from laughing. I tried to observe each shadow in hopes of spotting Stella, but it was dark and foggy and most of the women were shrouded in their blankets. As the truck hurtled me away from them, I craned my neck to see the lead group being directed off the road and onto a muddy footpath.
The road improved and the convoy gathered speed. We passed through a grove of pine trees. Branches slapped and beat my face.
A rosy shimmer on the horizon silhouetted the final string of skeletal pines. What the hell could that be, I wondered? It was too early for dawn. Coming out of the woods I got my answer. Past a sweeping black field stood a foreboding complex of mammoth factory buildings bathed in a sea of light. With monolithic chimneys spitting fire at the stars, it was the largest industrial complex I had ever seen, at least five miles long.
As we got closer, the acrid smell of smoke became unbearable.
The road began to run parallel to the plant. We sped by immense factory warehouses, and the strident concerto of the machinery inside drowned out our truck’s motor. On the other side of the road sat a cluster of fenced-in barracks. The convoy swooped under a bridge and crossed a web of train tracks, the tires squealing on the wet rails. We went through a metallic gorge of massive tanks reeking of methanol. With the racket of the trucks’ motors echoing violently against their walls, the tanks seemed poised to crush us.
The molten metal from a blast furnace momentarily created daylight.
At a crossroads we turned right and descended a gentle incline.
Ahead was a sea of barracks lit by sweeping searchlights and walled off by a high barbed-wire fence. The trucks passed through the gate, then the brakes squealed and the tires grated on the gravel.
We all pitched forward, then fell back onto one another. The SS guards ordered us off the trucks. Stiffly, I jumped down.
Rubbing my frozen ears, I looked at the rows of barracks, speculating whether the men sleeping inside worked at the factory complex. Since guessing games were pointless, I turned my attention to a broad-shouldered fellow with thick, wavy gray hair staring us down. He was a handsome man who could have been mistaken for a matinee idol, but the folds around his square jaw and his sharp, unblinking eyes left no doubt that he was an unmitigated brute. He wore a black uniform with riding breeches trimmed on the sides with wide red stripes, which were tucked into high black boots. He had a black cap on his head and a riding crop tucked under his arm.
It would have been easy to presume that he was an SS officer, but there were no Nazi insignia on his uniform. Instead, sewn on his jacket was a patch with a green triangle and the number 4. The men who gathered our belongings had colored triangles and numbers on their striped uniforms, so I could only assume that he was a fellow prisoner. But why was he dressed so differently?
“Zu fünf aufstellen!” (Line up by fives!) His accent was clearly Prussian.
A blond Austrian in his twenties tried to gain favor. He stepped out and shouted in French: “Line up by fives!”
The Prussian stiffened. “Was bist du?” (What are you?)
“I’m Max, your interpreter,” he answered self-assuredly. Max was a socialist who had spent a few months in a concentration camp when Germany annexed Austria, then fled to France where he had been rearrested.
The Prussian moved slowly toward Max.
“Here is my best translator.”
The blows from his whip sent Max rolling into the mud. The callousness of the boche startled me. The handful of SS members in Drancy had kept a low profile, and the only time I witnessed a German lash out was to break up an illegal dance we had going in a vacant room. His half-hearted kicks to clear us out sprang from irritation, as when you swat flies. This Prussian’s eyes sparkled with sadistic glee as he beat Max. What filled me with dread wasn’t the violence, but that this was the action of a fellow inmate. I could only hope that he was the exception.
“Los marsch!” commanded the Prussian.
As we started walking, a handful of men dressed in the stripped garb approached from between two barracks. I recognized one of them. He had been shipped out of Drancy in December. It was a relief to see that he hadn’t become one of those hunchbacks.
“Comment que c’est ici?” (How is it here?) the man next to me asked them.
“Awful.”
“Worse than you can imagine.”
The group scattered when the Prussian approached, waving his “translator.”
We were led into a barracks that had the number 36 on the door. The empty, cavernous space smelled of freshly cut wood and varnish.
“Alles ausziehen!” a voice barked.
The few of us who understood German began to disrobe; the rest watched like bewildered monkeys, then slowly followed suit.
That’s when I grasped how difficult Auschwitz would be for those who didn’t understand the Nazis’ language. I took off my entire
“Dandy of the Shithouse” wardrobe—coveralls, plaid flannel shirt, golf knickers, and ski pants. Chills and goose bumps raced over my naked body from the icy wind cutting through the barracks’ walls.
Men began moving to the opposite end of the barracks where prisoners armed with clippers were waiting. I carefully folded my clothes and felt the shoulder of my jacket. The ring that I had hidden in the padding before leaving Drancy was still there. A portly man came to retrieve his belt.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.
“Those are the orders. We’re to keep our belts and our shoes.”
I then realized that I would never be wearing my warm winter clothes again. Incensed, I kicked them across the floor. How could I be that stupid to expect to keep them, I asked myself? My ring!
Shit, I had to get my ring! I scooped up my jacket, tore open the lining, and closed my hand over my one and only true possession as prisoners began to gather up our clothes.
I fell into line for the barbers. We were all naked except for the belts around our middles and the shoes on our feet, which seemed to accentuate how vulnerable and powerless we were. Men stood or sat on stools depending on what part of their body was being sheared.
A big sign hung on the wall behind the barbers. Beneath a skull and crossbones was written Eine Laus Dein Tod (A Louse Means Your Death). It made me think of Nicole. I was sixteen, she was fourteen, and we had been necking on a street bench in full moonlight. I wish it had been a moonless night because while I was kissing her, a louse trekked beneath her bangs. It was the first time I saw one of those miniature gray scorpions. I was so shocked that I forgot to take my tongue out of her mouth.
I stepped up onto a stool and a moon-faced barber grabbed my genitals and started cutting my pubic hairs. He had a grip that could crack walnuts.
“Hey, you don’t have to pull on my balls like that!”
He looked at me with dull eyes and said, “Nix compris” (I don’t understand French).
I yelled it in German. With his clippers, he pointed to his red triangle that had the letter “P” written inside it. “Ich Pole, lieber Mann” (Dear man, I am a Pole), he informed me and kept on clipping.
I winced and gritted my teeth as the clippers pulled out more hair than they cut. I told myself that I would have to learn some Polish swear words fast. After he was through with my armpits, the Pole had me sit so he could assail my head. The hair on my head was less than a half-inch long. What good would it do to cut it any more? I po
inted to my head and indicated the measly length with my thumb and forefinger. Grinning broadly, he shook his head and bent over so I could admire his closely shaved skull. I shrugged and submitted. On my arrival in Drancy, I had put up a fight when they tried to cut my hair and I lost a tooth. It was obvious I would lose a lot more here.
The barber finished by slapping disinfectant powder on my body. I tapped him on the shoulder and signaled that I wanted a drink. He shook his head again. “Nix Wasser” (No water).
I had to find water. My throat felt like ancient parchment, my glands were swollen, and a crushing headache made each pulse beat a hammer blow. There’s plenty of snow, I thought, on the steps outside, and it sure couldn’t be any colder out there than in here. I went to the door, but the damn thing was locked.
A number of my fellow “nudists” were grouped around a tall prisoner with gold-rimmed glasses. He had kind eyes and a vigorous voice with a strong Alsatian accent. On the right sleeve of his striped uniform he had an armband with the printed letters HKB.
Curious, I joined them. HKB, I learned, stood for Häftlingekrankenbau (inmates’ infirmary). He was in charge of it.
“This is Monowitz, a branch of the Auschwitz camp. They will be putting most of you to work in the Buna plant, which I’m sure you noticed on your way here. Helping finish the construction, mostly. Soon you will receive a shower and your striped uniforms.
Tomorrow you will be given a medical examination, quarantined for a few days, then all of you will be housed in the same Block (barracks).” He began to walk away. “Oh, yes. Be sure to keep your shoes. You will need them to work in. If your feet go bad, you cannot work, and if you cannot work, you will be in a lot of trouble.”
“Water?” I interrupted.
“Be patient. You will get some coffee soon. Do not drink any water. It’s not fit for human consumption. Believe me, it’ll make you sick.”
It was heartening to see that there was someone who cared about our well-being. My overwhelming dread returned, though, when the Prussian entered the Block with an SS guard.