Scheisshaus Luck

by Pierre Berg

  Unfortunately, cigarettes were nearly impossible to get in Monowitz, so I joined up with four other Häftlinge from my Block who also had a strong need for tobacco smoke in their lungs. Every morning one of us would make a trade with a Russian black triangle: the margarine that we received with our bread and coffee for a pinch of coarse Russian makhorka (tobacco stems). Since the stems pierced newspaper, we rolled it in squares cut from the middle layer of the triple-lined cement bags that we “organized” from the plant’s construction sites.

  Once rolled, the five of us hurried behind the Blocks before morning assembly. The one who traded his margarine got the first puff. He would then exhale the smoke into the mouth of the next man, who would exhale into the mouth next to him. Once the fifth man got his, the cigarette would be passed to the second man and he would inhale and the smoke was passed around again. The cigarette lasted long enough for everyone to get one drag from it.

  Exhaling into one another’s mouth was about the unhealthiest thing we could be doing in the middle of winter. When the yellow triangle Czech and red triangle Serb showed up with nasty coughs, we just took our one drag from the cigarette. Still the third, fourth, and fifth men were taking in a lot of germs. Twenty-one days and twenty-one cigarettes later, we wisely dissolved our smoking circle after we all started hacking up phlegm.

  In March, I befriended a new arrival, a nineteen-year-old yellow triangle from Holland who was in my Block and Kommando. Peter was tall and unusually skinny for a new arrival. He was lucky that I.G. Farben was demanding more manpower for the Buna plant.

  He would have been directed to the left if he had arrived with me.

  Peter had been shipped in with his father, whom he missed terribly.

  During our lunch break one frosty day I asked him where he had learned to speak fluent German, and without a Dutch accent.

  “I’m a German Catholic from Cologne.”

  “Then how come you wear a yellow triangle?”

  “My father is Jewish. Eight years ago we fled to Holland by hiding on a barge.”

  “How about your mother?”

  “She’s Catholic. She stayed in Cologne because everything we own is now in her name.”

  “Do you miss her?” I pried.

  “Before the war she visited us a few times, but I haven’t heard from her since the Germans came into Holland. I worry about her because Cologne has been bombed many times.”

  I mumbled matter-of-factly, “I guess you were starving in Holland, too. You don’t look good.”

  “No, we were doing okay in Groningen, but when we were discovered by the Gestapo I got a bad infection. My father told them that I’m not Jewish, but the agent screamed that a leopard doesn’t change his spots.”

  Peter bragged to me constantly about his father. It seemed that he was the owner of a prosperous factory that produced women’s corsets, and Peter believed that he had landed a good job in Auschwitz.

  “I’m sure they’re taking advantage of his excellent bookkeeping skills,” he would say time and time again.

  I didn’t have the heart to inform Peter that he was living in a dream world. I assumed he used this feeble thread of hope the way I did with my thoughts of Stella, to keep the will to live strong. But amid the stories of camping trips and his father’s keen business mind, I could sense that Peter was becoming more and more distraught. Against my advice, he went to the Schreibstube and asked to be reunited with his father in the main camp.

  A few days later I openly cried when he waved to me from the back of a truckful of Muselmänner. You fool, I wanted to scream.

  Was he that delusional that he couldn’t see that no one his father’s age ever escaped the gas chambers? Or was he crazy like a fox, committing suicide without offending his faith? I would never know. The answer disappeared in smoke.

  My memory was failing. It was as if someone had wiped my eighteen-year-old mind with a blackboard eraser, leaving me with only the faint outlines of my family, friends, and classmates. Stella was slowly becoming a phantom. I had difficulty seeing her spirited eyes, hearing her voice, smelling her scent, and feeling her touch.

  There was only one image that had become more vivid, and it savagely haunted me: food. In my mind, I could conjure up the most complicated recipes. Delicious and appetizing smells would fill my nostrils, and my mouth would water until my salivary glands were close to cramping, but it did nothing for my belly. I couldn’t survive for much longer on the meager pittance of food they gave us.

  Every week I was becoming noticeably thinner. I had to find some means of supplementing my rations, but it wasn’t time to trade my one and only possession on the black market. Not when there was a pyramid of cabbages behind the camp’s kitchen guarded by only one green triangle armed with a stick, and not when there were two French yellow triangles in my Block willing to help me “organize” a few heads.

  On a moonless night, when the chain of searchlights was providing the only illumination, Antoine, Jules, and I eased out of our bunks. We met next to the red triangle Pole working a shift as night watchman. With the promise of a fistful of cabbage, he didn’t see us walk out. Antoine was our goat; he had drawn the short straw.

  Jules and I laid in wait behind one of the Blocks as he crept toward the kitchen. Suddenly, he jumped out from the shadows. The guard went after him, and Jules and I threw ourselves onto the pile of cabbages. Antoine took a few knocks, but we were victorious. Behind our Block, we munched away like rabbits. Though the insides of the cabbages were frozen and we had no salt for seasoning, it was an amazingly delicious salad.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Links, zwei, drei, vier, links!” (Left, two, three, four, left!) Hans commanded. As we did every night, we goose-stepped in rows of five through the camp’s gate. My feet felt like bricks as I kicked them into the air. As always the Lagerälteste (camp administrator) and Lagerkapo (head of camp) were standing side by side inside the gate. The Lagerälteste was the Prussian with the riding-crop “interpreter.” He ensured that the affairs of the camp were to the boches’ liking and dealt out the punishment when they weren’t. The Lagerkapo, who I figured for some Berlin garbageman, had a red triangle with the number 1 and was in charge of the Kommandos working inside the camp, which included the kitchen and HKB.

  These two senior Hftlinge were like night and day. Where the Lagerälteste was a sharply dressed, sadistic matinee idol, the Lagerkapo looked like a wallowing pig with his big, upturned nose and sloppy uniform. Where the Lagerälteste’s eyes seemed focused on every detail in front of him, the Lagerkapo’s eyes were listless. I believed he held no pride for his position, doing only the minimum necessary to keep his privileges. That made him sympathetic in my eyes.

  “Kommando one hundred and thirty-six. Forty-four Häftlinge, one dead!” Hans announced as we passed the guard station.

  Roster in hand, the SS guard counted our lines. The last row was made up of the dead man who had collapsed while mixing cement and his four pallbearers. The dead had to be returned to the camp or we would have hell to pay. Being so consumed with preventing us from breaking out, I questioned why the Nazis didn’t hang the dead for escaping.

  Like birds on a wire, fifty of us sat on the Block’s heating pipe with our bowls of soup and began to thaw out. The bell for assembly rang.

  “Alles raus!” (Everybody out!) the Blockälteste shouted.

  Armed with a stick, the Stubendienste hustled men toward the door. I hadn’t finished my soup. I took a quick swallow, then hid my bowl on a rafter above my bunk.

  Thick clouds blanketed the moon on this damp night and searchlights lit up the Appelplatz where Blocks were already lined up in rows of five. The beam of a single searchlight enveloped three gibbets. Rumors of who was to hang circulated, but no one had any real idea. A group of SS guards with bayoneted rifles formed a semi-circle in front of the gibbets. Three Häftlinge were marched across the Appelplatz. This was my third hanging, but the first time witnessing a multiple execution.
<
br />   It was about three weeks after my arrival that I witnessed my first hanging. I looked down at my torn shoes when the condemned Dutchman stepped up to the scaffold. As an SS officer rattled off some Nazi legal crap that frequently mentioned the Führer and the greater glory of Germany, I closed my eyes and considered what the Dutchman’s last thoughts were. The trapdoor’s dropping made my body jerk to attention, but I kept my eyes shut. As they marched us past the scaffold, I stared at the blue stripes of the fellow in front of me. It was only a few weeks later that I witnessed my second hanging. By then I was hardened enough by our daily misery that I didn’t bother to close my eyes.

  The execution orders for these three men were ridiculously longwinded. Two of the condemned men were Poles who had been caught trying to escape. The third was a young Greek, not much older than I, who had stolen some bread during an air raid alert.

  “Im Namen des Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler!” (In the name of Reich führer Heinrich Himmler!) The Lagerführer finished and shoved the orders into his SS coat pocket.

  A group of green triangle Kapos laughed. For these career criminals the hangings were a Grand Guignol attraction, an entertaining diversion from their monotony. As if betting on racehorses, they put money and cigarettes on which of the three would live the longest.

  Resigned to their fate, the two Poles stepped up to their nooses without uttering a word. The Greek fell to the ground with tears rolling down his face.

  “Nichts klepsi, klepsi!” (No stealing, no stealing!) I looked over at my cabbage-stealing cohorts. Their blank stares told me that we all had the same thought—it could easily have been our necks. Two green triangles had to carry the Greek up to his gibbet. The Lagerkapo put the noose around his neck. The boy’s legs buckled, tightening the noose. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to drop the trapdoor now, I thought.

  The trapdoors were sprung, the bodies fell, and the ropes went taut. The three men swung in slow circles. The Poles’ bound hands convulsively opened and closed as their shoulders jerked and their legs kicked furiously in the air. One of them lost his trousers. His white, sweaty legs and buttocks glistened in the searchlight’s beam.

  The Greek hung lifeless like an empty sack. The Kapos who had bet on him spat curses.

  “The dirty dog cheated us.”

  “Tickle him to make him move.”

  Other Kapos chimed in.

  “Give the Poles some gum so they can chew on something more than their tongues.”

  “Look how that one runs along.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t escape altogether.”

  When the only things moving were the ropes, the Lagerkapo yanked on each man’s legs, and we heard the last cracking of their tendons. It was then that I realized that there was more than one way to die from hanging. The two Poles were pale and their tongues weren’t protruding from their half-open mouths. The drop had broken their necks and their thrashing about had been only reflex spasms. The young Greek had turned purple and his tongue jutted from his swollen face. This was my first death by strangulation.

  “It’s perfectly justifiable to hang a thief,” said a Kapo.

  The others chortled in agreement. Assholes, I cursed to myself.

  How can these bona fide criminals sit in judgment of one whose only offense was being hungry? If the Greek lost his life because of a few crumbs of bread, how many times had they deserved to die?

  “Links, zwei, drei, vier!” We filed past the gibbets.

  At my second hanging, the Kapo in charge of the gallows pulled me out of line as we marched past. “Komm mit mir” (Come with me), he ordered.

  I was in a panic. What did he want with me? Was he going to practice with my neck? I relaxed when I saw that he had already cut the rope. The stocky green triangle opened a small door at the base of the gibbet.

  “Get him out.”

  Inside lay the crumpled body of a young red triangle Pole whose failed escape had earned him the rope. He had stood erect on that platform and died without a whimper. I pulled him through the small opening by his legs. His coat slid over his head, straightening his arms in a gesture of surrender. I took the noose off his broken neck, curled the rope on his chest, and waited for the Kapo to return with a flat dolly. Staring at the Pole’s face, I decided that a broken neck was far easier than facing a trip to Birkenau.

  When the Kapo arrived with the dolly, he pointed at the corpse.

  “Switch shoes. They’re better than yours.”

  I had noticed them, too, but didn’t dare take them on my own.

  They were still warm.

  “Abtreten! (Fall out!)” the Blockälteste commanded, and we all rushed toward the Block’s door as the bodies of our three comrades gently swung in the cold wind. I elbowed my way to the front of the herd. I had to get to my soup before someone else did. Minutes later, ribs bruised and out of breath, I sat on my bed and greedily wiped out the last cold drops with my fingers. In Nice, seeing a dog run over would have taken away my appetite for a whole day, but here the sight of those three men had hardly moved me. I was still relatively new to the camp, but many of my civilized attitudes and emotional endowments were muted or gone.

  I couldn’t condone the Kapos, but I was beginning to understand why they were so cold-blooded and cruel. Auschwitz was a world where brutality and inhumanity were rewarded with privilege and preferential treatment, and compassion and empathy only hastened death. The SS sure knew what they were doing when they assigned convicts—hardened criminals—to run things. The cold truth was that the Kapos, like the rest of us in the camp, were just doing whatever they had to do to survive. The only difference was that some of those bastards truly enjoyed doing it.

  CHAPTER 8

  New arrivals assigned to our Block forced us to double up in the bunks. My sleeping companion was Olaf, a twenty-one-year-old college student and soldier from Oslo, Norway. We quickly became friends. I was ecstatic to be able to converse in German with someone well educated. When the lights were turned off we carried on long conversations in low voices. He had been taken prisoner in the first days of the blitzkrieg on Norway. Whole battalions had been surprised and encircled, and the German paratroopers left few survivors. I asked him why he had been sent to Monowitz since he was a POW.

  “After my second escape attempt from the Stalag (POW camp) they shipped me here,” he answered with a smile.

  Our principal topic of conversation, of course, was the war.

  “We wouldn’t be sitting here if the French army had gone after the Nazis when they marched into the Rhineland,” I proclaimed.

  “They had a chance to stop Hitler cold, but they fell for his bullshit.”

  “Every prime minister, president, and monarch in Europe was a gullible idiot. ‘Peace in our time,’” Olaf spit sarcastically.

  “And how can you fight when you have traitors stabbing you in the back at every step? It makes me sick to think how many good Frenchmen are rotting in here because of those Vichy bastards.”

  “Yes, you have Laval[3] in bed with the Nazis and we have that bastard Quisling.[4] The best day of my life will be when I see him hanging from a flag pole.”

  Ultimately, our empty stomachs steered our discussions to food.

  “How can you French eat frogs and those slimy snails?” Olaf asked with a disgusted face.

  “Snails are delicious. You just need to know how to prepare them. Someday soon I’ll be serving you escargot fattened on grape leaves.”

  “You eat them raw?”

  “Oh, no. You have to fry them first with some garlic and parsley butter. Oysters we slurp raw.”

  “Well, we finally have something in common.” Olaf’s eyes lit up. “You know, when a girl likes oysters, it’s a good indicator that it’ll be a successful date.”

  I muffled a laugh.

  “That’s been my experience, too.”

  Returning from his work detail one night, Olaf seemed changed. He was cheerful like a lottery winner. There was a gleam
in his eyes as if the future no longer worried him, which was abnormal for any Häftling. Despite my curiosity, I didn’t ask the reason for the sudden shift in his demeanor and Olaf didn’t volunteer an explanation. In the nights that followed I realized that his bony frame was poking me less and less as we tried to sleep, and many times he would say his belly was full and give me his leftover soup.

  One evening, as Olaf poured his soup into my bowl, I asked whether he wasn’t depriving himself with his generosity. I leaned in close, figuring that at last he would reveal his culinary benefactor.

  Olaf raised his eyebrows in overstated surprise. “Are we not allies?”

  I left it at that, realizing that the reasons Olaf gave me his soup were unimportant. What was important was that my benefactor held onto his benefactor as long as possible.

  Weeks passed, and Olaf became more confident and stout. I was beginning to gain back a few pounds, too. As we were sleeping head to foot one night, Olaf anxiously tossed and turned, waking me up every few minutes. He even picked my nose with his little toe. The next morning when the Blocks separated into Kommandos, Olaf stared at me, then shook my hand instead of waving as he normally did. He didn’t utter a word, but I knew in my gut that I was seeing him in the camp for the last time. A good friend was leaving me.

  That evening, before all the Kommandos had returned to camp, the bell for assembly was rung. When the rumor reached me that a Häftling had escaped, I knew it was Olaf and I silently wished him luck. After a half an hour of standing at attention, the Lagerkapo hurried along the ranks.

  “172649!” he called out.

  My heart began to dance a polka. What did he want with me?

  “Hier,” I replied.

  “Los schnell, zur Schreibstube.” (Come along quickly to the administration office.)

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said pulling me by my sleeve.