Scheisshaus Luck
Page 9
Like a basset hound chasing a greyhound, I tried to keep up with the Lagerkapo’s long strides as he led me across the Appelplatz.
Gentle warmth greeted us as we entered the administration barracks. I took off my cap. The Häftlinge typing at desks didn’t dare look up at us. There was a contingent of SS mulling about, which made me extremely apprehensive. As a Häftling, one did everything possible to stay far away from the men in green uniforms. The Lagerkapo knocked at a door, then opened it a crack.
“Herr Arbeitseinsatzführer, der Häftling 172649 ist da.” (Labor Deployment Officer, prisoner 172649 is here.)
“Rein mit ihm.” (Get him in.)
As the Lagerkapo led me into the office, a Häftling brushed against me on his way out. Even with his face covered with blood, I recognized him—Olaf’s Kapo. Olaf had repeatedly told me he was a mean Schweinehund (pig dog). In escaping, the Norwegian had managed to kill two birds with one stone. The prick’s red Kapo armband was gone. He was now just another nobody.
The Lagerkapo closed the door behind me, and it sank in that the Kapo’s battered face was not a good omen.
The Arbeitseinsatzführer’s office was small and his enormous mahogany desk made it seem even smaller. The officer was sitting behind it with his shirt unbuttoned and his forehead glistening with sweat. His baby-pink bald head was at odds with his deeply tanned face. I had seen him duck into my Block for perfunctory inspections and speed by in a motorcycle sidecar, but I had seen the officer this close only once before, and that was on my first day in the quarantine Block.
He leaned forward, his hairy chest touching the desk, and fixed his blue eyes on me. Like a mouse hypnotized by a snake, I stood motionless by the door. I was afraid to look into those transparent eyes, but I didn’t want to look down either, for fear of its being misconstrued as an admission of guilt. He grimaced, which was evidently intended as a smile, and waved me to a chair. I had never heard of a Häftling sitting down in the presence of an SS officer—or any SS, for that matter. He spoke to me in excellent French, but with a harsh German accent.
“I have been to France, in Bordeaux, to be precise. I love French wine and have the highest respect for French culture,” he cordially told me.
Why the niceties from this member of the “Master Race,” I mused? I played meek, not uttering a word. One false move could cost me my life.
“How’s the food in the camp? I hope the work isn’t too rough.”
No reason to respond to that, since he knew as well as I did that the lice in the bunks were better off than we were.
“What would you think of becoming a Kapo?”
The Arbeitseinsatzführer was underestimating me.
“Well, there are prisoners who’ve been here longer. Wouldn’t they be more entitled?”
“It isn’t seniority, but aptitude that counts. Besides, I’m the one who appoints these positions. Think what it would be like to have better food and a warm Block to sleep in. But to become a Kapo you’ll have to tell me where Olaf went.”
This was why Olaf never shared his plans with me. It wasn’t that he distrusted me; he had no idea how well I would hold up under interrogation and possible torture. Hell, the Norwegian did me a favor. Having knowledge of a planned escape and not reporting it would have been as damning as making the escape. I continued to play the fool that the boche believed I was.
“Which Olaf?”
“You know very well, the Norwegian who shared your bunk.
Where was he planning to go?”
“I don’t speak Norwegian.”
The Nazi’s face hardened, but he restrained his anger.
“Olaf speaks perfect German and so do you. The job of Kapo doesn’t interest you?”
“Yes, it does, but I honestly do not know anything.”
“You cannot sleep in the same bed with someone for a month without knowing something,” he shot back.
The Arbeitseinsatzführer got up and began to twirl a braided leather whip that had been lying on his desk. I jumped to my feet, but he pushed me back into the chair with the handle of his whip.
He paced silently. My eyes followed him like a cornered rabbit.
What now? He sat down in front of me on the edge of the desk and glared.
“And what would you think of a trip to the Stehbunker?”
The Stehbunker was a solitary confinement cell no bigger than a coffin.
“That wouldn’t bring Olaf back because I don’t know anything.”
The veins in his forehead swelled. “I don’t know! I don’t know!
All the bastard can say is ‘I don’t know!’”
He swung the whip down on the edge of my chair. I felt as if I had received an electric shock. My right hand began to burn terribly. The blow had crushed my middle finger. Drops of blood oozed from under the nail. Instinctively, I closed my other hand over the injured finger to ease the pain.
The boche went around his massive desk and picked up a lavishly framed photograph that had overturned. He handled it like a sacred heirloom. I figured it must be a photograph of his family, but it was a portrait of “the god with the mustache.” The officer looked at me with fixed, dull eyes. He seemed to be deep in thought. Was he thinking up some refined torture or a better trick to make me squeal? I’ll never know, because the telephone rang. He snatched the receiver. I felt like a boxer momentarily saved by the bell.
“Hello? Yes, it’s me. Where? Krakow? What? Dressed in civilian clothes. But the description and identification number correspond? Good. Tried to escape. Dead? Shot on the railway platform.
Excellent. Do I want to see the body? Certainly. Get it here as quickly as possible before it can stink up the place.”
With a little smile on his lips, the Arbeitseinsatzführer dialed three numbers. “August, you can stop the search.”
He hung up the phone, lit a cigar, and puffed on it with smug satisfaction.
I couldn’t hold back my tears for Olaf. I hoped that he hadn’t suffered, that he wasn’t lying on that platform realizing that his carcass would be dragged back for the SS to spit on. His family, like countless others, would never know that he died a proud man. I would never have the pleasure of making him escargot, and I felt foolish believing that I ever could. It was painfully obvious how dependent I had become on his friendship, a commodity as scarce as food and almost as vital. I was again alone with thirteen thousand men in a place where a bowl of soup could turn a pacifist into a cold-blooded murderer. And in this place where men spoke only curtly and swore at one another, it could be months before I would share a laugh with another human being again.
The Arbeitseinsatzführer looked at me with surprise. In his jubilation he must have forgotten me.
“Raus!”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
CHAPTER 9
It was Sunday, Easter Sunday, 1944, to be exact. We were supposed to stay in camp. Sundays were usually free days, but at the last minute a train arrived with a shipment of steel rails and concrete reinforcements. To help expedite the unloading, Häftlinge and Kapos from all the Blocks were randomly drafted into Kommando 15. In spite of my bandaged, smashed finger, I was among those given the glorious opportunity to work on a holiday for the Third Reich.
Hell, it wasn’t that I cared that it was a holiday. We worked on every holiday—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan. It was just too miserable a day to be breaking my back outdoors.
We marched to the Buna plant in rain swept horizontal by an icy gale coming down from the Carpathian Mountains. There were times I wondered if Mother Nature herself wasn’t a Nazi stooge.
Past an array of buildings under construction was a rail spur with two boxcars and a flatcar parked on it. In gangs of ten, lined up by height, we carried the rails on our shoulders and stacked them about a hundred yards from the track. Because the ground wasn’t level, the full weight of the rails would crush my shoulder one moment, then hover over my head only to come crashing back down.
After two hours of this punishment, and despite the cement bag I was using as a shoulder pad, I was battered and exhausted, and scheming for a way to get a little rest.
“Austreten” (I have to piss), I told the Vorarbeiter, a German red triangle with the crooked nose of a boxer.
“Nur fünf Minuten” (Only five minutes), he grumbled.
The downpour had turned the ground into a quagmire, making my trek to the Scheisshaus a ridiculously daunting task. Mud threatened to steal my shoes at every step as I circled past a red brick warehouse. The rain came down harder and rusty brown water rolled down my jacket, obscuring my triangle and number.
Finally reaching the latrine, which looked more like a hunting blind than an outhouse, I sat down on one of the three holes, twice as tired as when I had set off. My drenched clothes were steaming from the heat of my spent body. The old boards making up the shelter were pitiful protection from the wind and rain, and the stench of shit, mold, and disinfectant were overwhelming. I would have been better off staying in line and lugging those rails. At least there I could keep my circulation stimulated.
I looked down at my throbbing finger. Puss was oozing through the bandages. I had gone to the HKB the day after my visit with the Arbeitseinsatzführer and had my finger dressed, but the fingernail still turned black. On my return visit to the HKB, they yanked it off. The pain had yet to subside and it had definitely become infected. Sometimes the rotten finger would be under my nose when I ate my morning piece of bread, and I would swear I was enjoying a Limburger cheese sandwich.
I decided to play things smart and use the loading platform encircling the red brick warehouse on my return trip to the train yard. Then, at least, I would have firm ground for half my jaunt back. I climbed up the steps and made my way slowly along the platform. The wind pushed me from behind. I heard a door banging. Turning around, I asked myself what could be inside the warehouse. Something I could eat? I shuffled toward the flapping door.
At least on the other side was a true reprieve from the wind and rain.
I peeked in. The vast warehouse was filled with sheets of glass.
I looked over my shoulder. There were no eyes, so I stepped inside and closed the door.
The warehouse was a labyrinth of crated and uncrated ship-ments of glass. The floor was littered with straw and packing material, and sheets of glass leaned against the walls. Not far from the entrance was a stack of tall, unpolished glass with a gap large enough for me to crawl behind. It won’t piss off the Vorarbeiter if I dry out here for a few minutes, I thought as I made myself comfortable.
A slamming door startled me awake. What time is it, I thought?
My clothes are nearly dry. Shit, I must have slept for hours! By now the Vorarbeiter had surely noticed that I was missing. I heard footsteps. Someone had come in. Had the Vorarbeiter reported me to the SS already? Were they searching for me?
I glanced out from behind the glass. Under the only light stood a man in a brown leather jacket, thumbing through an inventory.
He wasn’t SS, but that was hardly comforting. I had no way out.
The I.G. Farben employee was between me and the door. He looked around, apparently searching for some particular item.
Frowning, he looked in my direction. I froze. Did he see me? He moved slowly toward my hiding place. I heard him unroll a tape measure. No, he hadn’t seen me.
He grabbed the first sheet of glass and leaned it against another pile. He measured the next sheet, counted, then swore in German.
He moved that sheet, scraping it along the concrete floor. My only salvation would be if he found his desired specs before I became visible through the unpolished glass. He kept searching, swearing, and stripping the stack.
Suddenly I could see his legs through the glass. He would have spotted me if he had glanced down, but he was busy measuring the tops of the sheets. The man measured the second to last sheet, then took it away. I pressed my body against the wall in a desperate attempt to make myself as small as possible. He unrolled his tape measure along the final sheet.
“Na, endlich doch” (Well, finally anyhow), he sighed.
I watched terrified as his two big hands lifted the glass. It was then that he discovered me. Startled, he let go of the glass and took a quick step backwards. The sheet balanced for a second, then fell against the wall. With the sound of a plucked harp string, the glass shivered into a thousand pieces. The civilian stood as if rooted to the floor as the shards rained down on me.
As fast as my wooden-soled shoes would allow, I shot for the door. I opened it as his hand fell on my shoulder. He swung me around. The boche was in his fifties and wore thick-lens glasses that he pushed back up his nose with one hand as the other kept me anchored to the floor.
“What are you doing here?” he screamed.
“Just drying out a little,” I said.
He pushed me outside. The rain was still unrelenting.
“Where’s your Kommando?”
I pointed, and without a word he dragged me toward the railroad tracks. The swastika button on his jacket told me that begging for mercy was pointless. I tried to break away, but he was strong, lifting me off the ground with one hand. We rounded the corner of the warehouse.
The columns of Häftlinge were still working, but the train cars were almost empty. I must have slept for a damn long time. A Kapo spotted us and rushed over with my group’s Vorarbeiter. I was going to get it good.
“I found him in the glass warehouse,” my captor informed them.
There was nothing I could say to this Kapo that would save my hide. Since I wasn’t in his regular Kommando, I was worthless to him. No excuse would appease him. In fact, it would only make matters worse. A well-placed uppercut blasted me off my feet, and I went sliding into the mud. To impress the civilian, the Kapo and Vorarbeiter punished me with soccer kicks. I slipped in and out of consciousness. When their fury died down, the Kapo profusely thanked the Meister for bringing me back.
The civilian left and the Kapo said to the Vorarbeiter, “Since they’ve been notified, we’ll have to make a report.”
I played possum as the Vorarbeiter bent over me with a notepad in his hand. “It’s so dirty I can’t read it.”
“Get it from his arm,” the Kapo said impatiently.
The Vorarbeiter yanked on my left arm, pulling up the sleeve.
He wrote down my number, then gave the notepad to the Kapo, who talked out loud as he began to write.
“The Kapo of Kommando 15 reports to the Lagerführer that the prisoner…”
I watched through my eyelashes as he made a few flourishes over the paper as if he was unsure what to write next.
“Bruno, wake up the scumbag. I’m going to write up the report when we’re back in camp.”
By the seat of my pants, the Vorarbeiter dragged me through a sea of cold, muddy water, then shoved me toward the railroad cars.
“Where the hell have you been?” someone hissed as I groggily found my place back in line.
Cloudbursts came in welcoming waves, reviving me and washing away the muck my clothes had collected during my beating. I struggled to stay focused on the task at hand, but all I could think about was the thin line I was now walking between the Stehbunker and the rope. Would my Easter nap be considered an escape attempt, even though I hadn’t left the plant grounds? That would all depend on how the Kapo wrote his report and who in the Schreibstube read it. Every one of us had a foot in the grave, and now it felt like my other foot was on the way down. I fought back tears and reminded myself I had to be a fatalist. When your time is up, it’s up. A rail banged against the side of my head as if in agreement.
Apprehension and the pain of a battered jaw and infected finger tormented my sleep. The next morning I awoke with a fever and swollen glands under my arms. After a torturous day of digging a ditch, I arrived back at camp with my face on fire and my whole body trembling with chills. I dragged myself to the end of a long line of sick men waiting outside the HKB. An
epidemic of ringworm had spread through the camp, and it was being treated with a tarry ointment that left the infected Häftling looking like a spotted leopard. When I stepped inside someone took hold of me, and before I could utter a word, my whole face was smeared with the black goo.
“Next!” called the orderly.
“But I have a fever,” I said.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Well, I saw the line…”
“Go through that door,” he interrupted, pointing over his shoulder.
The sign above the door he pointed to read Schuhe Verboten.
So with my shoes in my hands, I entered a big white room. From the distinct smell I could tell the floor had been cleaned with kerosene. A green triangle orderly wrote my number and the date on a card, handed it to me, then pointed to a bench that ran the length of the room. There were at least fifty other “pajamas” waiting. The doctor was conducting examinations in an adjoining room. Those who came in after me had to stand or sit on the floor. The line scooted slowly along the bench, and I found some comfort in having a warm spot for my bony ass.
A Polish orderly came around taking temperatures. I pressed my tongue as hard as I could against the thermometer in hopes of getting a higher reading. There was no need—it was high enough: 102ЊF. Now, I began to worry. Walking over I relished a stay in the HKB, a chance for some needed rest and relief from the awful weather. Realizing that I was truly sick, I started to view my situation with dread. There was no medicine for flu, blood poisoning, or whatever it was that I was infected with. The HKB stocked only aspirin and charcoal for diarrhea. I was now running a real risk of becoming a Muselmann and getting thrown onto the back of a truck.
The doctor waved me in. He was a yellow triangle in his sixties who wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. His medical expertise was the only thing keeping him alive. He glanced at my card. Seeing that I had a fever, he gave me two aspirin tablets, told me to come back the next morning, and handed me a card to give to my Blockälteste.
I was now an Arztvormelder, which meant I wasn’t officially sick, but was exempt from work detail for one day.