by Pierre Berg
“I’m sure those couples didn’t make it past the first day here.
My parents didn’t.”
“I’m sorry. Why didn’t you leave Germany with your cousins?”
“My father was a decorated veteran. He thought that the Nazis wouldn’t touch him, and I was in my fourth year of medical school.”
I asked a question that I had been eager to ask a German Jew for some time.
“Why do you think Hitler hates you people?”
“I don’t know, but he sure needed us—blaming us for losing the war and causing the depression. He would’ve been a nobody without us. He got rich off us, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“The gangsters confiscated everything we owned. Affluent Jews were jailed, and when they managed to secure a visa to another country, the Nazis turned them loose and legally took everything they had.”
“Legally?”
“Oh, yes. Hitler imposed a penalty for fleeing Germany, a Reichsfluchtsteuer, which was only a lawful way for him to steal everything a man owned.”
“There were many wealthy Jews?”
He shrugged. “Wealthy, I don’t know. Understand that many were forced to start their own businesses or be self-employed because the German guilds and unions didn’t accept us.”
I told him that I never knew that. “I always heard that Jews didn’t want to get their hands dirty.”
He laughed at my ignorance and bid me good luck. My heart grew heavy, realizing how horrible it must have been for Stella and Hubert to grow up stigmatized and then witness that intolerance turn into ovens.
On a rainy Tuesday night the assembly bell rang as the Kommandos returned from the plant. I pitied my fellow Häftlinge for having to stand out there, soaked and shivering, after toiling for twelve hours. A gaggle of bitching SS passed by. I went to the window. The wind carried the echoes of the Lagerführer’s pronouncement. They were hanging another man for trying to escape. The execution was over quickly; the boches were in a hurry to get back to their warm quarters.
I slipped back into the bunk. For the first time, Pressburger was sleeping soundly. I mulled over why the SS hadn’t postponed the hanging. Was the man’s demise that urgent? Were the boches that rigid with their protocol? Of course, they were. They probably kept records of every man, woman, and child they slaughtered. Maybe they didn’t want to wait one day because then the condemned man would have enjoyed the double ration of bread and spoonful of jam we received every Wednesday morning. For a doomed Häftling that jam would be a royal delicacy, but as the White Queen told Alice,
“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”
The Nazi jam, like their margarine, was made from coal. I didn’t believe it when I was first told, figuring it was a dirty trick to sucker me into giving my portion to an “old timer.” Then I overheard some Häftlinge mention that they worked in the factory labs that used coal to make synthetic food products and other materials used in the camp. There wasn’t any nutritional value whatsoever in the ersatz jam, but it did help quiet the hunger pangs for a while.
I awoke as a searchlight beam skimmed across the icy windowpane, making it sparkle like crystal. The footsteps outside told me the sentries were being relieved. I had to relieve myself, so I ran for the pail. My bare feet stuck to the cold, oiled floor. I passed the Häftling who was on night watch. He was asleep in a chair, snuggly wrapped in a blanket. Nice to see that one of us was momentarily having it better than the Nazis outside.
When I got back under the covers, Pressburger’s feet were on my side of the bunk. Irritated, I pushed them away. His legs were rigid and cold. He was dead. Pressburger was gone.
Having slept next to a man while he gasped his final breaths gave me the creeps. My instinct was to run, but since there was nowhere to go I just laid there and got goose bumps. It’s a depressing revelation how easy and unceremoniously life can vanish. I couldn’t help thinking that if life had any value at all, then Pressburger’s death wouldn’t seem so completely meaningless. I thought about waking the night watchman, but he would have to wake the Stubendienst, who would have to wake a couple of the orderlies. I felt foolish that Pressburger had that much sway over me. Why rouse the whole Block for one corpse? It could wait till morning.
I took Pressburger’s blanket, and was about to shove his body out so I could have the whole bed to myself, when a better idea popped into my head. In a few hours Janec would arrive with the morning rations, and if he saw that Pressburger was dead he would keep his share. Why should he get it instead of me? The big Pole didn’t need the bread and jam; he got packages from home. I was the one who had taken care of Pressburger, made things easier for him in his last hours. I deserved his ration.
I dragged Pressburger to the other side of the bunk, away from the light of the corridor. The body had stiffened, and it took all my strength to move the limbs into the semblance of a normal sleeping position. I turned his face toward me. The features were contorted into a horrible scowl. I pushed on his jaw, but his mouth wouldn’t close. His eyes were rolled back and his eyelids kept sliding up every time I tried to close them. I pulled the blanket so that only the top of his head showed. I went to the spot where Janec would stand while distributing the food and inspected my stage setting. It seemed perfect.
As I tried to go back to sleep, I considered what Pressburger would have done if he had known that he was going to die so forsaken. Would he have confided in me about his life, his dreams, his failures, his loves? Would he have prayed to God or cursed him for such a foul-smelling fate? Here was another man whose family, if he had one and if they were still alive, would never know where and how he died. This man suffered, laughed, thought of the future….
No, I had to stop. I wasn’t strong enough. There were too many dying for me to grieve for any of them. And was Pressburger the one to be pitied? His suffering was over, but what was still in store for me? What would I have to go through till my forsaken death?
The camp’s reveille brought me to consciousness with a jolt. I kept my back turned to my bunkmate and dozed back off. A little while later the Kommandos marched out as the camp’s band played
“Beer Barrel Polka.” Every morning the band, which was made up of some of Europe’s finest musicians and composers, played moronic German marching songs as we left for the plant. In my first couple of months, goose-stepping past those SS guards I wondered whether the music was for their entertainment or whether they were seriously trying to rouse us to give our all to the Reich. What I figured now is that they decorated this human slaughterhouse with the trappings of normal society so they wouldn’t see the butcher in the mirror. The only music playing in the HKB was the symphonic coughing and spitting of awakening Muselmänner.
I heard baskets scraping along the floor. The orderlies were beginning to distribute the rations. My heart began to beat faster. I slipped my foot under Pressburger’s body and made it move up and down to the rhythm of my own breathing. He sure seemed alive. I looked over to Janec, who was chatting away with one of the Polish patients. What are you doing? Why the morning chat? Don’t keep me waiting, Janec, my leg is cramping! Finally he came over and gave me my food.
“Sleep well?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Why did you change places?”
“He was falling out of bed,” I said, making a gesture toward the corpse.
“Hey, Pressburger,” Janec patted him on the shoulder.
I raised the body up a little, like somebody who was stirring, then let it fall back.
“Oh, let Pressburger alone,” I said. “He didn’t get any sleep last night.”
The coughing fit of a patient on the next tier distracted Janec.
He took a second ration out of the basket and handed it to me.
“Promise me that you’ll give it to him.”
“You know that I look after him,” I said.
Janec nodded and continued on his rounds.
After I had eaten my fill, I feared what the Pole would do when he discovered my trick, but Janec was in good humor. He had a voucher to soak his biscuit at the camp’s bordello that he had obtained with the contents of a package sent by his family. That’s how he had landed the privileged post of orderly—by paying for it.
Many German and Polish Häftlinge were able to buy a hell of a lot of favors with the packages they received. I smiled at the irony of the peasant woman who toiled and denied herself so she could send food to her imprisoned husband, which gave him the opportunity to be unfaithful to her.
After Janec left that afternoon I alerted the orderlies that Pressburger was dead. Unceremoniously, they dragged his body out to a nearby shed. The following morning a Häftling threw his body onto the bed of a truck loaded down with the camp’s dead, and by that evening the only testimony to Pressburger’s existence was smoke and ashes.
CHAPTER 11
I walked out of the HKB two days after Pressburger’s death by no means the picture of health, but feeling damn good for a Häftling. I might even have put on a couple of pounds. Since no one in the HKB remembered that my Block had gone up in flames, and the Kommandos had already marched off to the plant, I wound up wandering aimlessly about the camp’s grounds. Except for the Maintenance Kommando, Monowitz was empty. It felt strange to be alone in the camp, but it felt stranger not to have some menial task to perform. I expected at any moment a Kapo or Vorarbeiter to rush up, eager to beat me into the ground since an idle Häftling was a sin to “the god with a moustache.”
I considered how long it would take me to locate Hubert. He had never gotten word to me of his new Block number or Kommando, and I had stopped pestering Janec after the Pole brought up the possibility that my schoolmate was dead. Yes, it was a definite possibility, but one that I wasn’t about to entertain. As far as I was concerned Hubert was sleeping in one of the Blocks, and it was in my best interest to find out which one as quickly as possible.
I went to where my old Block stood to see if the rubble had been removed. Not only had they cleared the debris, construction on a new barracks was well under way.
The gallows still stood at the edge of the Appelplatz. It was unlike the boches not to cart it away after an execution. Without the rope the wooden structure looked benign and comically unfunc-tional. If only I could wipe away those strangled faces.
Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the green triangle Kapo walk up behind me. “Arbeitest du im Lager?” (Are you working in the camp?)
With some apprehension, I handed him my release paper from the HKB and explained my situation. By the number on his Kapo armband I knew that he was in charge of the Transportation Kommando.
“You’ll work for me,” he said. “Two of my men were hurt in an accident.”
What luck, I thought, but I wasn’t so sure after he told me that one of the injured men had lost his foot when the Kipp Lore (tilt lorry) he was pushing rolled back over him.
“Come, I’ll straighten it out with the Schreibstube.”
Since I preferred never to set eyes on the Arbeitseinsatzführer again, I was relieved that the Kapo had me wait at the steps of the administration barracks. It took only a few minutes for him to straighten things out. “You’re mine for a couple of days, ’til I get some new arrivals from quarantine.”
The Transportation Kommando was responsible for moving supplies from the rail yard to the warehouses, factory buildings, and construction sites. This was all done with two-wheel carts that six to eight men pulled by a long rope while two or three others kept the load balanced. The Kommando also collected the camp’s dead and shepherded them to Birkenau’s crematoriums some five miles away.
As we lined up in our Kommandos the following morning, the Kapo informed me that I would be working on the Leichenwagen (hearse) with him. I was overjoyed to be able to leave Monowitz for the day. I might get lucky and speak with a Häftling from the main camp or Birkenau who would have information on the fate of the women from my transport. But when the bed of the truck was half full of dead Muselmänner, I began to question my eagerness. I had had my fill of dead bodies in the HKB. Was a day outside the barbed wire worth staring at all those distorted faces? The Kapo must have seen it in my face. “Look without seeing, boy,” he laughed, slapping me on the back.
Making my way along a row of Blocks with a pushcart saddled with two corpses, the Blokowa (female barracks supervisor) of the Puff, the camp’s bordello, waved me over. This green triangle, a buxom, butch blonde, had the habit of hurling obscenities at us from the whorehouse doorway as we marched to work in the mornings. The Puff was located in the middle of the camp. It was a regular barracks encircled by a barbed-wired fence with an SS guard on duty around the clock. Once in a while I would see a woman’s face at one of the windows, but none of them ever came outside.
Every evening, Häftlinge, mainly Kapos, were lined up at the entrance. Since their time was limited, the guard would always be seen pushing out half-dressed laggards with the butt of his gun.
I had been in the Puff once before, months earlier, not for pleasure but to deliver towels from the camp’s laundry facility. When I approached the Block that Sunday afternoon, I was scared. If I found Stella inside it would have broken me, dooming me for a ride on the back of a truck. With the Blokowa’s quarters at the far end of the barracks, I had to pass a honeycomb of makeshift cubicles with no doors or curtains, and I couldn’t stop myself from peering into each one. I didn’t see Stella, but I did get a quick lesson on how cold and mechanical sex can be. Most of the couples seemed as detached as stray dogs humping on a street corner, except for one happy fellow, who, without missing a stroke, gave me a wave and a big smile as I went by.
Heading back to my Block that day, I realized that if Stella had been in one of those cubicles, it shouldn’t shatter my hopes. It would be ridiculous to be jealous and forlorn if it meant her survival. But as I walked down the hall this time, to retrieve the body of a young woman who had slashed her wrists, my heart pounded again. When I saw the blonde stubble on the head of the teenage girl on the bed, I let out a silent sigh of relief.
The girl’s naked body was curled up on her side and her arms were drawn against her chest. Her mouth was slightly opened as if she were thinking about something to say. Most of the burlap mattress was black from her blood. Someone had strewn sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood that had pooled around the bed. A slight breeze drew my attention to the window that she had shattered. I didn’t want to imagine the pain she must have endured to slice open her wrists.
Easing her stiffening body prone, I noticed bite marks and hickeys on her neck and rashes from ringworm under her small breasts.
With her fixed green eyes staring at the ceiling, her pale, near transparent face seemed oddly serene. I kicked a bloody shard of glass under the bed as I began to roll her in a blanket. My hands became sticky with her blood. She had welts on her back and buttocks, no doubt the Blokowa’s signature.
Two women in their early twenties dressed in baggy “pajamas”
stood at the entrance of the cubicle, whispering in French.
“How long have you two been in this Block?” I asked.
“We came here from the main camp two weeks ago.”
“Did you see any other French girls over there?”
“No. But the day we arrived they sent a bunch of them to work at a camp with a textile mill.”
I finished wrapping the corpse. With her body covered and the five o’clock shadow on her head, she could have easily been mistaken for a boy.
“She must’ve desperately wanted to die,” I mumbled.
The more talkative of the two answered. “She was praying and preaching constantly to us and our dates. The Blokowa kept beating her bloody, and she still wouldn’t shut up. I guess God finally got pounded out of her. First she tried to hang herself.”
“Get out my way, you stupid bitches!” the Blokowa yelled.
The women scattered.
> “What a bloody mess.” The Blokowa was boiling mad. “I’ll never have another one of those Bibelforscher in here. Lousy fanatic, I should have let her hang.”
German Bibelforscher (Jehovah’s Witnesses) were turned into purple triangle Häftlinge because of their singular devotion to Jesus, which left “the god with a moustache” in the cold. Any of them could easily have regained freedom by pledging allegiance to the Nazi Party. As a non-believer, I had difficulty comprehending their beliefs and their dedication, but I admired their resoluteness. With suicide being an affront to her God, how that girl must have agonized before she broke that window.
“Don’t steal the blanket or it will be your ass. The Krätzeblock can use it,” the Blokowa growled. “Not that those crud-infested pricks would care, but blood won’t show in kerosene.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll return it,” I promised.
I didn’t need the blanket, but why expose the girl’s naked body to the catcalls of the onlookers I knew were assembled outside? I had been raised to respect and look after the “weaker sex.” I cradled her body in my arms and headed for the door. None of the women in the cubicles gave even a passing glance as I walked by. The Blokowa stayed on my heels, spitting out obscenities about Jehovah’s Witnesses and other “Bible nuts.”
The jackals outside scattered once they saw that I had closed the curtain on their main attraction. I laid the girl’s body on my pushcart. Three corpses were more than enough for one Häftling to haul, so I took them to the truck. To blend with the rest of the load, I placed the girl on her belly. I was relieved that the Kapo wasn’t around. He would get a good laugh, seeing how protective I was of a whore’s bag of bones.
The Blokowa was in a more pleasant mood when I returned with the blanket. “You’re a good kid. If you ever feel the urge, I’ll let you tear off a piece without a voucher,” she promised.
After our 100-plus load was counted at the gate, we started on our way to the crematoriums. The Kapo was in the cab with the SS driver, and I bounced around in the back with the corpses. First, we passed by a Stalag[5] housing prisoners of the British Commonwealth. Many of them worked at the plant. Then we drove past a camp for female forced laborers. A group of kids waved to me from behind the barbed wire. I waved back. I had almost forgotten that children still existed on this planet.