Scheisshaus Luck

by Pierre Berg

  The following morning I found myself behind Joseph, the oldest member of our Kommando, as we goose-stepped through the camp’s gate. He was a frail, middle-aged Dutch Jew who wasn’t very bright. Many Häftlinge addressed one another by their first three numbers, which indicated one’s transport. Joseph’s first three numbers were 175, and that made him the butt of many jokes in our Kommando.

  “Bist du ein Hundertfünfundsiebzieger?” (Are you a 175?) they would teasingly ask him.

  “Ja, ich bin ein Hundertfünfundsiebzieger,” he would answer with a grin that always caused fits of laughter. Joseph never caught on to the joke. One hundred seventy-five was the number of the paragraph in the Nazi penal code that outlawed homosexuality, and as far as I could tell, Joseph was a simpleton but he wasn’t a “pinkie.”

  This particular morning Joseph had diarrhea, and the brownish yellow liquid was streaming down his pant legs as we marched. I was splashed and sprayed with every step, as were the men goose-stepping in front of him. As a matter of fact, they were getting it worse. Humiliated, poor Joseph weeped, wiping his tears and nose with his sleeve. When we arrived at our work site, the Kapo ordered Joseph to wash his pants at a faucet at one of the factory buildings across the road. Sniveling and bent over from cramps, “175” did as he was told.

  The Vorarbeiter had us digging double-time on a new section of trench as the Kapo paced anxiously, continually looking down the road as if he were expecting an arrival. I noticed that there were German soldiers with binoculars positioned on the roofs of the factory buildings. This had to have something to do with the officers who were surveying the area the day before.

  Joseph returned bare ass, his wet pants in his hands. Incensed, the Kapo ordered him to put his pants back on and dig in an area of the trench away from the rest of us. When the Kapo saw a shivering Joseph leaning on his shovel, he pointed at him and barked at the Vorarbeiter. “Helmut, let’s make a good impression!”

  The Vorarbeiter jumped into the trench and snatched the shovel from Joseph’s hands. Crying, Joseph sank to his knees. He didn’t see the Vorarbeiter raise the shovel, and he didn’t even moan as he slumped to the ground with his head caved in. None of us stopped digging. None of us even hesitated. We all knew it was coming.

  The Kapo screamed at us to hide the Drecksack (dirt bag), and a quick thinking Häftling covered Joseph’s body with an overturned wheelbarrow.

  A few minutes later the Kapo and the Vorarbeiter took off their caps and stood at attention as a black Mercedes convertible led by two motorcycles slowly passed by. I recognized Reichsführer Himmler,[6] the boss of the SS, sitting in the backseat. Flanked by two of the plant’s engineers, he had come to inspect the fruits of his slaves’ labor. That was what all the fuss had been about. That was why 175’s body was under a wheelbarrow.

  CHAPTER 13

  Every morning, once the Kommandos were counted and through the gate, the goose-stepping stopped and we became our true selves—a haggard, shuffling horde of slaves. A half-mile later, the Kapos would halt us at the Buna gate, where we would wait for the arrival of the British POWs. For some unknown reason, they and their Wehrmacht (German Army) guards had to enter the plant first.

  Always whistling some popular tune, these well-dressed and well-fed POWs marched by us like strutting roosters. I would watch them go by with a twinge of envy and resentment, thinking that they wouldn’t be whistling such a happy tune if they were in my ill-fitting wooden shoes.

  These strong fellows didn’t seem to mind working, mainly delivering supplies to the multitude of buildings that made up the plant. Pushing flatbed pushcarts, they would buzz back and forth, laughing and joking among themselves. It was probably a welcome relief from the idle monotony of their Stalag. They definitely enjoyed the opportunity for some contact with the civilians—the female civilians, to be precise. The POWs received chocolate in their Red Cross packages, and some of them bartered the sweets for “romance” with the local Polish girls working in the plant. With thousands of niches and dark corners, and not enough guards to cover the twenty square miles of plant grounds, it was easy for a hungry couple to duck away for a quickie. Hell, I would be whistling in the morning if I could soak my biscuit once in a while, but I would bust a lung singing if I could get my hands on one of those chocolate bars.

  Häftlinge weren’t allowed to mingle with the POWs, but there were always opportunities to have a quick, furtive conversation. In the winter that usually happened around a barrel with a fire blazing inside, where we warmed ourselves during lunch breaks. From time to time POWs would stop to thaw out, and they would always dis-creetly pass out a few cigarettes to us “stripees.” With the coming of spring, the pace of everyone’s toiling outdoors slowed, and that brought more opportunities to chat with our allies.

  In halting English I asked a blond, well-tanned sergeant pushing a cart of steel pipes, “What new, mate?” Having overheard fragments of their conversations, I thought “mate” was a common first name for Aussies and “bloke” was a first name for most of the British POWs.

  The sergeant gave me a smile and said, “We’ve landed in Normandy, and Jerry is running back to the ‘fatherland.’ We’ll all be going home soon.” No wonder they marched as if they were in front of Buckingham Palace.

  “Take it easy,” the Aussie said, winking as he left. With his drawl, “easy” sounded like “dizzy,” so I thought he expected me to be dizzy with delight about the landing.

  A few days later we were digging a deep trench between two warehouses. The sergeant sauntered by with a few of his “mates.”

  “Is this a mass grave?” the sergeant joked.

  I didn’t find it funny because it could easily have become one.

  “Is war over?” I shot back.

  He told me a few battles had stalled the whole campaign, em-phasizing “battles” with a swear word that with his accent I took to mean as “foggy,” which explained to me why they were held up. It sure would be difficult to shoot those Nazis in that thick Normandy fog.

  The news of the Allies’ landing quickly filtered through the camp, reviving our hopes and strength. The talk in the Blocks was that the end of the war was only a few weeks away. But D-Day also brought the war closer to us. Hardly a day passed without an air raid alert. When the sirens sounded, the civilian workers and guards scrambled into their concrete bunkers, where Häftlinge weren’t welcomed. We had to crawl into one of the pipeline trenches or roam blindly in the artificial fog that the Nazis pumped out to obscure the plant. In June and July they were all false alarms, the Allied bombers thankfully going after other targets in Poland.

  The summer of 1944 was a brutal one, and it seemed that the SS had a “no shade” policy for Häftlinge. We were all baked crimson digging those trenches under the sun’s unblinking eye. I barely perspired because my body didn’t have enough water and oil. After toiling for twelve hours, my skin would be scorched and blistered.

  Sunstroke and heat exhaustion now took the place of frostbite and influenza. Thirst now superseded hunger, but the heat made the water undrinkable. Cases of typhoid fever ravaged our ranks. I had never seen new arrivals—who were now mainly Hungarian Jews—

  convert so quickly to Muselmänner.

  “Follow me. Today is your lucky day,” my Kapo informed me one morning as we entered Buna.

  Apprehensive, I trotted after him toward a gray building. When a green triangle was being nice, there was reason to be suspicious.

  We entered a well-lit, cavernous machine shop where the hissing of lathes, the clattering of mills, the whistling of grinders, and the pounding of shapers were skull-rattling. A Häftling was operating every noisy tool. A sergeant of the Wehrmacht in his late twenties greeted us. The cuff of his empty right shirtsleeve was pinned to his shoulder.

  “Herr Kies, here is your man. I hope that he’ll work out for you. I’ll pick him up at the end of our shift.”

  Herr Kies directed me to a workbench. “This will be your station. Take go
od care of the tools and don’t lose any. We have an inventory.”

  All I could think was, Why me? How did I land this job? I wasn’t a machinist and I would never think of masquerading as one.

  “Look around for a while and get familiar with the shop. Can you read a blueprint?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  Herr Kies nodded, then climbed the steps to a glass-walled loft.

  What I had told him was more truth than bluff. I had become pretty comfortable with the basic language of blueprints. One of our neighbors in Nice was an architect who had designed my parents’ house and four others on the cul-de-sac. While we both waited for plates of his wife’s homemade ravioli, I would look over his shoulder as he worked and ask questions when he put his pencil down. I also studied the blueprints of the Tour de France bikes built in the bicycle shop where I worked. By no means was I an expert, but I was confident that they wouldn’t boot me back outdoors, as they had at the electrical shop.

  Herr Kies returned and spread a large blueprint on my bench.

  “What is this?”

  I looked at the blueprint’s measurements. I had seen something similar in a Nice plumbing store. “Yikes, this is colossal.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Oh, it’s a hydraulic gate valve. I was just surprised by the huge specifications.”

  “Nothing is small in this plant.”

  Herr Kies introduced me to the machinists and tool and die makers. Like every Kommando, they were a multinational group of yellow, red, black, and green triangles, every one of them an experienced craftsman.

  “Why me?” I finally asked.

  “Because I was told you speak four languages, and I need someone to translate to this bunch. I’ve had enough misunderstandings and mistakes.”

  My Kapo was right, it was my lucky day. My duty of translating Herr Kies’s German directives into French, English, Spanish, and Italian was a wonderful reprieve from what I had endured the last six months. I felt like a human being again. Herr Kies was a good boss, treating us all with an even hand. Once in a while he would even sneak part of his lunch into my tool drawer. He had lost his arm in the battle of Stalingrad, but he wasn’t bitter about it. He considered himself fortunate because his wound had brought him home before his battalion was decimated.

  The shop was responsible for assembling valves and fittings for pipes, and for repairing equipment for other shops, but its main duty was to line and glue plastic sleeves into five-meter-long pipes.

  With Germany cut off from the supply of many raw materials, the pipes used in the Buna plant were made of rolled steel or cast iron.

  Because they lacked any stainless alloys, it was our job to line the insides of the pipes with plastic to protect them from the corrosive fluids that would flow through. We would coat the insides with an adhesive, using a sponge attached to the end of a long wooden rod, then insert a long sleeve of soft plastic, pressing it against the pipes with a spreader. We would stretch the plastic over the face of the pipes’ flanges, which another shop had welded on. If the flanges were warped from the welding, we would resurface them on a lathe.

  Pipes would then be placed in the shop’s kiln to fuse the plastic. It took a half-hour to bake a dozen pipes. Once cooled, we would use drills to clear the plastic out of the flanges’ four assembly holes.

  With the plastic covering the flanges there was no need for a gasket when the pipes were bolted together. Many times, once the trenches were dug, we would be the ones to assemble and bury the pipes.

  Near my workbench I found a page from a magazine that must have been used as packing material. I figured I could use it as cigarette paper until I saw that it was from a French magazine. There was an ad, a picture of two people, and the last half of an article. I put it under my shirt, and back in my Block that night I hid it under my pillow. I must have read that page more than a dozen times that week before it disappeared. It was the first thing I had read in six months. In Drancy, I was able to at least read the newspapers the gendarmes had left. Hell, there I had a semblance of a social life. At night we played cards, cracked jokes, listened to someone blowing Glenn Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” on the harmon-ica, or a few voices singing the Yiddish tune “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” that the Andrews Sisters made popular. It all helped to keep my mind off the fact that I was a prisoner. The only things that kept me from dwelling on my plight in Monowitz were physical exhaustion and unbearable hunger.

  One evening, a group of us watched through a window in our Block as the orange halo of an immense fire bloomed in the direction of the main camp. Its unusual intensity puzzled us. This was no ordinary blaze. We speculated that a methanol pipeline or tank had ignited. Whatever it was, it burned through the night. At the plant the next morning, I spotted an English POW who had been friendly with me in the past. I asked him if one of their Blocks had burned down.

  “Oh, no. It was on the other side of our camp. One of our guards told me that the SS had wiped out forty-four thousand Gypsies in one night. The Jerry said they were bragging how efficiently they had done it.”

  “Forty-four thousand? Are you sure it wasn’t forty-four hundred?” I asked in my shaky English.

  “No, you got it right, chap.”

  We parted without another word.

  Forty-four thousand? I knew of the existence of the brown triangle Gypsies, but I had never crossed paths with a single one.

  That day I was acutely aware of every SS guard I passed at the plant. They had been so secretive about their slaughters for so long, and now they were brazenly bragging. Was mass murder that easy? I guess if you can kill one in cold blood, what’s another four or a thousand or forty thousand?

  I had become numb to their savagery, and I hated them for doing that to me. I knew I would remember the girl from the Puff, maybe Mario and Pressburger, but my other fellow Muselmänner were just faceless cattle in the slaughterhouse.

  Rumors circulated for a week about what had happened that night. One was that the Gypsies had been exterminated to make room for skilled Häftlinge from the camps near the Eastern Front.

  True or not, it was sobering reminder that there was nothing preventing the SS from processing all of us the same way once they had no use for us. Another was that the crematoriums had broken down that night, and after the Gypsies had been gassed their bodies were torched in open pits along with many arriving Jews.[7]

  The “prominent” Häftlinge arriving from the abandoned Eastern Front camps found themselves stripped of their status and privileges. For some this was as good as being sent to the gas chambers.

  One morning before roll call I noticed fifteen “pajamas” standing in a circle, yelling obscenities. In the center was a bloodied Häftling screaming for help. He was being pushed and punched from all sides. Grinning and laughing, the guards watched from the fence. I was sure they were taking bets. The man finally collapsed to the ground, and the infuriated “pajamas” kicked him until he was just a bloody mess of broken bones. He was dead or in a coma. Either way, the Transportation Kommando would make sure he was on the back of their truck. Out of curiosity, I asked a yellow triangle standing at the circle’s perimeter why they had done him in. He told me the man had been a Jewish policeman in one of the ghettos.

  “He was the worst of the bunch. A son of a bitch.”

  Well, if that many guys have decided that he had it coming, he must have deserved it, I thought as I lined up in my Kommando.

  CHAPTER 14

  After so many false alarms, our first Allied bombardment finally came on an idle August Sunday when we stayed in the camp. I thought that the distant explosions in the plant were butane tanks erupting. Forty English POWs were killed in that raid and a woman’s camp was laid in ruins. An untold number of female Häftlinge had perished, and I couldn’t stop wondering if Stella was among them.

  I was cleaning out a new methanol tank that we had just buried and connected to our pipes when the air raid sirens started shrie
king once again. As I climbed out of the tank, an Aussie came running over, dragging a pretty young woman dressed in factory coveralls.

  “Speak English?”

  “Enough.”

  He handed me a half pack of cigarettes. “Mate, have some fags and keep an eye open. I need some privacy.”

  The girl nervously fidgeted with her blond locks as she scanned the clouds for any indication of American bombers. Grayish puffs of exploding anti-aircraft shells were dotting the sky.

  “My name is Pierre,” I told the Aussie.

  “A hell of a time for introductions, mate,” he said as he herded the girl into the tank.

  I sat down to enjoy one of the “fags” when I realized I needed matches. From the sounds inside the tank, it would have been rude to ask the POW for a light. Bombs began to explode in the distance as I calculated how many cigarettes I could smoke and still have enough for an extra ladle of soup. It wasn’t that I was blaseábout the bombing raid, it just wasn’t the first time I was on the receiving end of an aerial attack.

  My baptism under fire was on a sunny day in June 1940. When the German army occupied Paris and the senile Marshal Philippe Pétain was ready to sign an armistice, Mussolini, the bold vulture of Rome, wanted to share in the spoils. Proclaiming “Niza nostra” (Nice is ours), he declared war. The French and Italian armies watched one another from their mountaintop fortresses, pondering who would fire the first shot while I went fishing for eels to supplement my family’s meager rations.

  I pedaled my bike to the Brague River, which is on the way to Cannes, armed with a darning needle, a nine-foot-long bamboo pole, nightcrawlers, and an umbrella. With the darning needle I strung the bait on three-feet of fishing line, then wrapped it into a ball with another three-feet of thread. When the eels went for the juicy worms they would snag their crooked teeth on the thread.