by Pierre Berg
I was surprised and somewhat confused when the truck veered off the paved road and ground to a halt below a bridge spanning a small river. The driver and Kapo jumped out. I took a deep breath, inhaling the musty smell of the water. It was intoxicating. Gone was the overwhelming, acrid stench of the plant. I almost felt free.
Almost…
“Unload that girl!” the Kapo barked.
I did as I was told. With her slung over my shoulder, I followed the Kapo and the driver, who had a gunnysack and length of rope squeezed under his arm, down to the river. Where the hell are we going with this girl, I wondered but didn’t dare ask. The driver stopped at the river’s edge and looked around. He pointed at a rope in the water that was tied to a tree. When the Kapo reeled in the rope, pulling out a bulging, muddy gunnysack that had been sub-merged in the reeds, I knew exactly what was going on. I had done something similar as a child to catch crayfish in the Brague River, but I had used a dead cat in a flour sack.
The driver hefted the heavy sack upright, and the Kapo lifted out the bluish white legs of a corpse. The bottom of the gunnysack was squirming with eels. The Kapo shook the man’s body, then dropped it onto the bank. His belly was sliced open and a couple of lucky eels sprang out of the guts and slithered back into the river.
The SS driver swore in Czech, and I realized that he was a Sudetendeutscher, the ethnic German minority in Czechoslovakia. They had complained about discrimination in 1938, which gave “the god with a moustache” his excuse to invade the country.
The Kapo yanked the girl off my shoulder. After they stuffed her into the fresh gunnysack, the driver reached in with his bayonet and gave her a cesarean. “You didn’t have to cut her open. Her hole is stretched out enough,” the Kapo chuckled.
“And let the eels catch the clap?”
The two men howled as they heaved the gunnysack into the water. I turned away, fighting back the urge to throw up. With dinner a long way off, I couldn’t afford to lose my breakfast. As the Kapo and I threw the man’s corpse onto the truck, a question occurred to me. Would I have to drag her body up the trail tomorrow?
The driver was now in such a rush to get to the crematoriums that he didn’t bother to avoid the numerous potholes, and I was certain I was going to find myself face-down in one of them. Was the asshole trying to make up for lost time? Or did he want to ensure that his precious eels were delivered alive and squirming?
Each jolt momentarily animated the corpses, sending arms and legs flailing, sometimes tapping me on the back. A few more bumps, I daydreamed, and the driver will raise the dead and be marched in front of a firing squad for letting his load escape the ovens.
The truck came to jarring halt right outside one of the gates of Birkenau. SS guards screamed at me to move away from the vehicle and not to talk to any of the Häftlinge. What Häftlinge, I thought?
There wasn’t a soul about except the guards. I put a wide berth between me and the truck as the Kapo and the driver stayed in the cab, chatting and smoking.
A significant distance past the barbed wire stood two large red brick structures with black plumes streaming from their chimneys.
I had never laid eyes on them before, but I knew exactly what those buildings were. They were why the air reeked of grease burning in a skillet.
As if on cue, members of the Sonderkommando (Special Detail) came out of one the buildings, pushing flatbed handcars. The Sonderkommando was responsible for the disposal of all the dead—those that were delivered to them like our load and those murdered in the “showers.” I had never seen such a strange and disturbing group of men. Even though they were walking and breathing, and seemingly well fed, there was no life in them. Their eyes, their faces, had less expression than the corpses that they hauled off the truck. They all moved—no, glided—with shoulders hunched and arms hanging limply at their sides. They worked fast, silently, and without a wasted gesture. It was as if I were watching a ballet of Dante’s Inferno. On how many corpses had they rehearsed this gruesome choreography? Birkenau is German for “birch groves,”
and when I first heard the name I imagined a peaceful sanitarium where the truckloads of Muselmänner were nursed back to human beings. What wishful thinking!
On the way back to camp we stopped in the Auschwitz main camp and picked up a load of men’s clothing. There was a shortage of the striped uniforms in our camp, and the SS were supplementing with civilian clothes that had a square piece of striped material stitched on the back. We then made a detour to the Buna plant’s civilian kitchen, where the driver delivered his eels and a bag of unaltered clothes. He came back with a smile and a few packs of Navy Cut, a British brand of cigarettes that an English POW had traded with the cook.
“Gee, they smell delicious,” I told the Kapo.
“You’re too young to smoke,” he said.
“But not too young to burn.”
He laughed and handed me one.
Loading the truck the next morning, all I could think about was the Jehovah’s Witness. My sleep had been wracked with images of her naked body shivering as hundreds of eels burrowed through her. Feigning sick had crossed my mind, but I feared the Kapo’s fury more than watching her be poured out of that sack. I could definitely survive seeing another dead body; another beating was a different story.
My stomach was twisted in knots by the time the truck pulled under the bridge. I carried the smallest corpse I could find down to their fishing spot. The SS driver was in a jolly mood, certain that “the whore” had brought him a prize catch. I closed my eyes as he and the Kapo extracted her. When I heard her body drop on the bank I couldn’t keep my eyes shut any longer. Her mud-streaked corpse glistened in the sun. The ugly welts on her body had receded in the cold water. She sure had put a spell on me, because by the time I heard him, the Kapo was screaming in my face.
“Hey shithead, get moving!”
I struggled to carry her up the embankment. I didn’t care that my “pajamas” got dirty and wet. She deserved better than being dragged by her bluish white ankles, but how I wished that the cold water had closed her milky eyes. Not wanting to stare at her ripped-open belly, I laid her on her stomach. I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help admiring her still firm buttocks. Doubtless she had been a virgin until they dragged her kicking and screaming into that whorehouse. As a final act of desecration, an eel slowly slithered out from under her. I stomped on its head with my heel and ground it to gelatin. The SS driver came up the embankment yodeling. A fat catfish had erred into his sack.
“This one I will keep for myself,” he announced.
I looked at the dead eel at my feet and thought, I’ll do the same.
On the way to Birkenau, I hid the eel in the tube that reinforced the side panel of the truck, then sat down next to the girl’s corpse.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
I didn’t even know the name of this decent, fervently religious human being whose God had forsaken her. It was no wonder that I was an atheist. In this place, God validated my choice every day.
Again, the SS ordered me to stand away from the truck as the Sonderkommando shuffled through their dance. When two of them turned the girl over, exposing her eviscerated belly, they froze for a second, shook their heads, then resumed their roles. After all the corpses had been removed, the Sonderkommando loaded the truck with over forty old cement bags filled with human ashes. They stacked the bags in neat, tight rows to prevent them from spilling.
Once the tailgate was closed I climbed into the bed. When I was eight, an elementary school pal showed me the urn that held the ashes of his grandmother. I had a hard time believing that a canister no bigger than a small coffee can could hold a whole adult.
There had to be at least twenty to twenty-five men, women, and children in each of the cement bags, which meant I was staring at all that was left of one train load of human beings.
As we drove away I peered inside one of them. I had never seen human ashes before. The ashes were grayish brown and co
arse like sand, and peppered with blackened pieces of bone. I looked back.
The smoke from the red brick chimneys was beginning to eclipse the sun. Goodbye, you innocent, devout creature. I am sure I’ll see you again in my nightmares.
The truck turned onto a dirt road leading to vast fields of cabbages. We stopped at a patch being tilled by a Kommando. The driver blew his horn and yelled at them to unload the truck. As they approached, I realized that the Häftlinge were women—black triangles from the Ukraine. I handed the bags down to them, and a few immediately started spreading the ashes along the rows of cabbages. The Nazis made sure nothing went to waste, and from the looks of those bulging, green heads, we made excellent fertilizer.
I wanted to see if one of the women would circulate a message for Stella through the women’s camps, but none of them spoke any of the languages I spoke. At least seeing that the SS had a use for them bolstered my optimism that I would see Stella again. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that there was a father, perhaps even a boyfriend, who was confident he would see that Jehovah Witness again.
After the women loaded our truck with cabbages meant for our camp’s kitchen, the driver once again stopped at the plant’s civilian kitchen to trade his morning catch, along with a large number of the cabbages. When we arrived at our kitchen I helped unload.
While no one was looking I retrieved my catch. I swapped the eel for a ladle of soup with no questions asked, but I could tell by the way that he eyed me that the cook knew how I got it.
CHAPTER 12
The next day, it was a new Block, a new Kommando, and new companions. I now was part of a work detail that was digging trenches for the plant’s sewer, water, and heating pipelines. Most of these trenches had to accommodate several pipelines. The digging would go like this: Four to five Häftlinge abreast would swing pickaxes to break up the topsoil as another crew shoveled the dirt out. After having dug about one hundred yards in length and a half-yard in depth, we would take our pickaxes and go back where we started and take off another layer. This procedure would be repeated until we reached the Nazis’ specified depth of two to three yards, depending on the diameter of the pipes. At that depth, platforms were erected to facilitate the extraction of the loose earth.
It was a backbreaking Kommando. Every evening there were corpses to carry back to the camp. There was one advantage, however. Since we were digging along the road that led to the civilian factory workers’ kitchen, all the wagons delivering provisions passed right in front of our noses—right above our heads, to be exact. They were loaded with potatoes, a long-forgotten delicacy, or beets or cabbages. Hearing the rattle of the wagons’ ironbound wheels and the clatter of the horses’ hooves, we would first make sure we weren’t under the watchful eyes of a Kapo or SS guard, then ready ourselves for attack. We would let the wagon pass a short distance, then a chosen Häftling would jump onto the rear and toss to us whatever he could grab.
We did our work on those trenches as slowly as possible. There wouldn’t be any rolling food markets to “organize” from at our next job site. Before heading back to camp in the evening, a few of us would chop at the sides of the trench, and with the help of the night frost and morning thaw, it would be caved in when we returned. Our Vorarbeiter, Emile, closed his eyes to all this and naturally got the lion’s share of our bounties, but soon the drivers got wise and passed by us at a gallop. We then started attacking en masse, with our mess tins over our heads to protect ourselves from their whips.
Twice a week, a local peasant came to pick up the “pig pot,” an enormous receptacle kept behind the plant’s kitchen in which the spoiled remnants of the day’s soup were poured. The pig pot was always infested with drowned flies, but it took more than that to turn the stomach of a starving man. The peasant drove his wagon slowly in order not to spill any of the foul liquid. That made it easy for us to fill our mess tins as he passed, but left us unprotected from his whip.
The lash marked us all, and one Häftling even lost an eye from a well-aimed blow. Inevitably one of the drivers complained and Emile was demoted, and we were assigned to a different work detail. Probably for the best, I thought. A few more rancid bowls from the pig pot and we would all have dropped dead from diarrhea or hepatitis.
♦ ♦ ♦
Many times while I dug those ditches, standing ankle-deep in cold mud, I would think about my brief stint in the Resistance. I would chide myself for never seeing action in a raid and for having landed in Auschwitz because of lousy luck and not for my efforts in the Maquis.
My involvement in the underground started in 1941, when I was fifteen years old. At that time, Southern France was under the rule of the Vichy government, a puppet regime of the Germans.
Nazi troops occupied only the northern half of France. Menard, my neighborhood’s black marketeer, was the one who steered me to the Maquis. He had made a king’s ransom after the Nazi’s blitzkrieg by collecting the abandoned cars of those who fled and selling them for parts. I would always give him an earful of my anti-fascist rants when he came over to have a coffee with my father. After seeing the split lip and black eye a school bully gave me for cheering the sinking of the Nazi battleship Bismarck, Menard pulled me aside. He told me to meet an elderly gentleman who was interested in talking to me at a bench on the Promenade des Anglais, which ran along the Mediterranean coast.
Adrenaline pumped through my heart when I spotted an old man in a well-tailored suit and fedora feeding the gulls. It wasn’t the suit, the hat, or the bird feeding that identified my contact, but his gueule casseé, a facial disfigurement that was a souvenir from the WW I Battle of Verdun.
“Bonjour, mon capitaine.”
“Drop the title, it attracts attention. Call me Mr. Meffre,” he said as we shook hands.
I sat down next to him as he resumed feeding the gulls. “We need a messenger with strong legs and a bicycle.”
“I have both.” I was working after school at a bicycle shop a few blocks from my house.
“When I need you, we will meet here. You’ll meet nobody else. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you where to hide or deliver the messages. Don’t bother trying to decipher these messages. You won’t be able to, and the less you know the better off you will be. Do not tell a soul, not even your family, what you’re doing. The Germans and Italians are easy to fool, son; it’s our traitors and collaborators you have to worry about.” Mr. Meffre got up and shook my hand. “If we win this war you might get a medal, but if we lose they will hunt you down as a saboteur and a traitor.”
On my first few trips I tied my fishing tackle to the bike and hid the messages in a double-bottomed can of worms. Then I realized the merits of my tire pump. When I had a girlfriend with strong legs, I would borrow a tandem bike from the shop. We would pedal off on an outing, a movie, or a picnic that included wine and fooling around, and I would deliver a message. I had a good idea that most of these messages pertained to the organizing of different cells around southern France.
In 1943, when Nazi troops occupied all of France, Meffre called a meeting. “Are you circumcised?” he asked me, as he tossed stale bread to impatient gulls. He was happy to hear I wasn’t. In the Germans’ hunt for Jews, they were forcing males to drop their pants at checkpoints and roadblocks outside Nice.
Now when I pedaled I wondered if the message I was carrying was the arrival time of a military convoy to be sabotaged or the orders to assassinate some Nazi official or collaborator. Every time I met with Mr. Meffre I hoped it would be the moment he would tell me where to pick up a weapon. If I had had the right gun I could have cut down a hell of a lot of boches. My bedroom balcony overlooked a road along a cliff, and every day platoons of German soldiers marched along there fully exposed, a perfect target for a sniper or someone armed with a machine gun. I reported this to Meffre.
“I’m glad to see that you’re this observant, but don’t underesti-mate them. They’re baiting us. At another location outsi
de town they’ve hidden a machine gun nest aimed at a spot where we could easily ambush a patrol. Shooting a couple soldiers would only give them an excuse to burn down the whole city, like they did in Czechoslovakia.”
“Are we cowards? What good are we doing?” I asked.
“Our orders are to lay low until an Allied landing on our coast.”
I continued to dutifully deliver my messages and patiently waited for the Allies so Mr. Meffre could give me a more vital mission. Shithouse luck saw to it that I never got the chance.
♦ ♦ ♦
I was at the bottom of a nearly completed trench on the plant’s perimeter, shoveling dirt onto a wooden platform, when I noticed a big German Shepherd sniffing the leather toecaps of my canvas boots. Since the boches didn’t waste anything, I wondered if the dog was smelling the skin of his parents. He squatted in front of me and blessed the trench with a long, steaming turd. With strong kicks of his hind legs, the shepherd began to cover it, but quit when he heard the shrill whistle of his master. I picked the shit up with my shovel and deposited it next to a French Häftling on the platform.
“Merci pour le cadeau” (Thank you for the present), he muttered.
My laughter was cut short when I spotted a group of SS officers passing by, pointing at buildings and jotting down notes. Standing at the rim of the trench, our jittery Kapo and Vorarbeiter pushed us harder. As we chopped away at the earth, we nervously watched the strutting, high-ranking Nazis. Their presence was highly unusual, and from a Häftling’s perspective, any deviance from the daily routine was a bad omen. These boches though seemed preoccupied with something more pressing than the labor of a filthy bunch of Untermenschen (subhumans).