Scheisshaus Luck

Home > Other > Scheisshaus Luck > Page 14
Scheisshaus Luck Page 14

by Pierre Berg


  They were hungry that day, and my upturned umbrella was almost filled with the slithering, slimy fish when I noticed an Italian Ca-proni bomber leisurely circling above me. A French Morane fighter burst out of the clouds with machine guns blazing. I watched with awe and fascination until the fighter’s stray bullets whizzed by me, churning up the water. I dropped my pole and hugged a tree, which was raked by rounds. When the planes disappeared behind a hill, I went to retrieve my pole, only to find it shattered. Just as well, I figured, since I was shaking too badly to hold it anyhow.

  So, when I saw a squadron of B-17s in a V-formation closing in on the plant from the northwest, I knew hugging a tree wouldn’t do me any good. With the explosion of bombs closing in on me, I slid down the tank’s ladder. The Aussie was in full action and took no notice of me, but the woman, with her coveralls at her knees, was horrified and tried to hide her face. The tank began to quake from the bombs’ shock waves.

  “Baby, don’t worry, it’s only friendly fire. I’ve got you covered.

  I’m on top,” he joked.

  The girl’s unease seemed evenly divided between my intrusion and the nearness of the bombs. How could he keep his erection through all this? I asked myself. I like tearing off a piece more than most, at least that was what my eighteen-year-old mind thought, but there was no way I could stand at attention during such a deadly hail. The Aussie had to have been a veteran of the siege of Torbruk.

  While in school, I had read about the vicious, month-long beating Rommel gave the British in Libya. Hell, he didn’t even stop when a near miss shoveled mud through the tank’s hatch. No bomb was going to prevent him from getting his candy bar’s worth.

  As soon as the raid was over, I gave them back their privacy and went looking for something on fire so I could enjoy one of my cigarettes. Unfortunately, the sight of the rubble of Herr Kies’s workshop ruined the taste of that tobacco. It was back to digging trenches under the sun.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  They assigned me to a Kommando working close to the cement kiln where Hubert had worked before his stint in the HKB. The kiln had a towering smokestack the likes of which I had never seen before, easily over 300 feet high. All winter most of the smokestack had been hidden by fog. Now it glistened and shone red. It was constructed of concrete castings and the seams of the individual blocks made it look like a patchwork quilt.

  “Do you see the second segment from the top?” a Polish yellow triangle asked as we were shoveling dirt out of a trench.

  I nodded yes. The reek of kerosene told me that the Pole was spending his nights in the Krätzeblock.

  “There’s a man’s body inside it. While we were pouring the cement, he slipped and fell into the mold. He pleaded for us to lower a nearby ladder, but the SS wouldn’t let us. Fresh cement was beginning to pile up. I’ll never forget his screams and terrified face as that mold filled.”

  A ribbon of blue carbide fumes weaved from the top of the monstrous smokestack and was swept away by the morning breeze.

  The red and orange basket that hung from the smokestack was at its lowest position. When the basket was raised to the top of the smokestack, it signaled that Allied bombers had crossed into German territory. Because we were working in such close proximity, the squeaking of the basket’s pulleys was our initial warning. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a flock of birds gathering on the smokestack. The blast of the air raid sirens was our last warning, and by that time the bombers would be almost overhead.

  A few Häftlinge had left to fetch our barrels of soup when I heard the birdcalls. The artificial fog began to blanket the trench, stinging our eyes and burning our lungs. We heard shrill sirens in the distance, then those in the factory began to wail. We watched civilian workers race to their air raid shelters or cling to fleeing trucks. None of us was in a rush. For a Häftling, an air raid was a game of roulette. Pick an open space away from the plant buildings or lie down in the hole you were digging and wait and see if the bombs fall on top of you. So I gathered a few dandelions as the fog thickened.

  “What are you doing, picking flowers for your funeral?” someone laughed.

  “No one else will.”

  The truth was that I was munching my bouquet in hopes the vitamins in the weeds would strengthen my bleeding gums. I plopped down with the others in the dirt between the kiln and some nearby warehouses. Häftlinge working in the factory buildings joined us. If it weren’t for those lying on their stomachs with their arms over their heads, and those who had placed discarded planks on top of themselves, it would have looked like we were waiting for an afternoon concert in the park. Someone near me mumbled a drawn-out prayer in Yiddish. We lay there in the Nazi fog for a half-hour. Some of the men even dosed off. There weren’t many chances for a slave to enjoy a siesta.

  A squadron of fighter planes buzzed by—Messerschmitts, from the sound of their motors—then the sudden cacophony of an in-tense air battle. A violent opera of screaming planes, barking machine guns, and thundering anti-aircraft batteries played behind the curtain of fog. All at once everything became quiet. The silence was oddly oppressive. The planes were gone. Why hadn’t they bombed the plant? They had been directly overhead. Did they have some other objective?

  My ears began to buzz strangely. I sat up and saw a man looking toward the sky as he placed an empty cement bag over his head.

  Shit, how could I have forgotten about the splinters of anti-aircraft shells and the planes’ errant machine gun bullets? Someone cried out and crumpled to the ground, holding his head in his hands. The lethal shower fell thick and fast. Not far away was a section of cement sewer pipe. With my mess tin as a helmet, I sprinted and dove inside. Fragments peppered the pipe. Outside, Häftlinge were running, screaming, and dropping. The fog machines were depleted and the wind had swept away any remnants of the plant’s cover. I peeked out. The sky was sprinkled with little silvery stars, a second wave of Allied bombers out of reach of the anti-aircraft cannons.

  All at once the earth trembled and heaved, and the air filled with a terrible roar. My shelter began to roll and skip. I felt myself lifted into the air and savagely dashed to the ground. In a panic, I pressed my arms against the pipe to prevent myself from slipping out. I caught glimpses of buildings erupting in flames. The air was choked with dust and smoke. A bomb exploded next to me and gravel cut into my face as the pipe spun like a top, then rolled into the bomb’s crater. My body twitched from the concussion of the blast. My hands, arms, and face were covered with blood, but I felt no pain. Because everything sounded muted, I thought the crater was incredibly deep. When the tinkle of anti-aircraft shrapnel stopped, I dragged myself out of the pipe and discovered that the crater wasn’t that deep at all—thirteen feet at the most. Everything sounded muted because the blast had ruptured my eardrums.

  Crawling out of the crater, I found myself in a new world. A firestorm was sweeping through a complex of warehouses. Thick clouds of black smoke rose from the butane reservoirs. Steam from the boilers hissed from broken pipes. Train tracks were flayed from their ties, and the remains of boxcars were scattered along them.

  The sight of all this destruction filled me with joy. I knew that soon much of Germany would look like this.

  You would have thought that everyone lounging in grass around me perished during such devastation, but only two Häftlinge didn’t get back up. It was the hardships in the days that followed that dropped us like flies. The camp’s kitchen ran on steam produced by the factory, and with the pipes broken we received neither soup nor coffee for three days. No bread, either, since the trains couldn’t run. Seventy-two hours without anything to eat. We were starving, but nevertheless they made us work, clearing away the rubble.

  Every night we carried back scores of dead Muselmänner, and each morning the pyramids for Birkenau grew higher. The camp’s band should have been playing Chopin’s “Funeral March” as we went out the gate. I was sure that the Allied raids were helping to bring a quicker end to the war, b
ut with all the added misery, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of us would be left to see it.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I stabbed the earth with my spade, being careful of the heels of the Häftling in front of me. Tossed the dirt, took a step, and stabbed where he had just dug. The man behind me did the same just as the man behind him did and the man behind him and the man behind him. I felt like an oarsman on a Roman galley. Ten of us in single file moving in unison; one full shovel, one step forward. We moved very smoothly, digging a narrow, shallow ditch for a single pipe.

  We were digging not far from our entrance into the plant. I wasn’t sure but it seemed like our ditch was going to be part of a pipeline running to either our camp or the British P.O.W. camp.

  The rest of the Kommando, ninety men and our Kapo, were exca-vating for a larger project. A red triangle Vorarbeiter followed us with half-hearted demands to put our backs into it. If his voice rose, it wasn’t because we weren’t working hard enough, but because there was an SS guard in earshot. When one of us had the urge for number one or number two the Vorarbeiter grabbed the shovel and joined our chorus line. We had no Scheisshaus, just a Scheiss trench, a six foot pit with a wooden plank laid across it that you could hang your ass over.

  The Vorarbeiter stepped in for the man in front of me. Lunch would be coming soon, I thought. A smart Häftlin g made sure to empty his bowels before the Buna soup arrived, never after. You wanted to give you body enough time to absorb everything it could from the gruel before saying adieu. That’s if your bowels were stout enough to have a say in the matter.

  A shriek and a loud splash jammed a cog in our motion. The Vorarbeiter stopped and looked over his shoulder. So did I. So did everyone in the work party. The Häftling who should have been sitting over the shit trench wasn’t there and neither was the plank.

  The Vorarbeiter went over and we all followed. The flimsy board had broken at a knothole. Our comrade was treading in the ooze. I didn’t remember the stench being so offensive when my ass hung over the plank. His thrashing had churned the brown pond too well.

  “Idiots! Don’t stand there! Get him out of there!” the Voribieter ordered.

  A couple of recent Häftlinge lowered their shovels but the shit covered figure couldn’t get a good grip. No matter how much the Voribieter screamed and threatened, none of us were going to reach our arm down to help pull him up. He tried to claw his way up the side of the pit, but it was just too slimy. Shovels were lowered again.

  “Back to work, you dirtbags. The creep is not worth cleaning.”

  We were so engrossed and repulsed by our comrade’s predicament that none of us had noticed the SS guard who had walked up.

  He stared at us with pistol in hand. We stepped back as one.

  “You heard him!” the Vorarbeiter yelled. “Back to work.”

  POP! One shot. We moved, fast. Some of the newcomers were flabbergasted. Old timers like myself weren’t fazed. He could have just as well shot into the air instead of the trench. Maybe the Boche thought he was doing us a favor. Maybe he hadn’t fired his pistol in a few days. Whatever his reason, he had just made our day shittier.

  Alive or dead, dripping in human waste or not, that man had to come back to camp with us to be counted.

  When the Vorarbeiter was confident the SS brute wouldn’t be strolling back, he ordered two of the new arrivals to get pickaxes and retrieve the body. It was not an easy task. We must have dug for thirty minutes before the two men reported that they had snagged him. The Vorarbeiter promised Nachschlag, an extra ladle of Buna soup, to whoever cleaned up the mess. My workmates were ready to throw up their meager breakfasts. I raised my arm. After my coronation as Roi du Chateau in Drancy no sight or smell fazed me.

  There was no water faucet with a hose, but luckily for me there was an abundance of steam valves all over the plant. With some doing, I got the body into a wheelbarrow and pushed it over to a valve, which was to a steam pipe that provided heat to our camp. I draped the body over the wheelbarrow’s handles, which were resting on the pipe. I turned the body as if roasting a side of beef. As I cleaned him, the steam warmed up the shit and the stench almost overwhelmed a Scheissmeister like me.

  Trying to clean him with his pajamas on wasn’t working, so I stripped them off. He was a yellow triangle. I was sure he was one of the recently arrived Hungarians. He was still in good shape for a Häftling.

  The Vorarbeiter, a red triangle Prussian, looked over my shoulder.

  “Throw his pajamas back into the pit,” he said in German, then grinned. “Although, it would be fun to dump it at the doorstep of the SS barracks.”

  I chuckled in agreement. “What a waste. He was worth three Muselmänner.”

  “And now I’ve got to write an accident report.” the Voribeiter said as he left.

  By the time I shoved the body into two cement bags it was bleached and well done.

  When the Kommando arrived at the camp’s gate that evening, the Kapo announced to the guards, “Ninety-nine and one dead.”

  The man’s body was on a warped plank shouldered by four Häftlinge. I wasn’t one of them. I had gotten my extra ladle of soup.

  As luck would have it, on a late summer Sunday I was again assigned to Kommando 15. Because of my screw-up that rainy Easter, I tried to wiggle my way out of it, but my Blockästester wasn’t passing out favors that day. It was four months ago, a near lifetime in Auschwitz, I consoled myself. Kommando 15’s Kapo and Vorarbeiter could easily have been demoted or died. Lining up in the Appelplatz, I saw that was not the case. I hoped that they wouldn’t remember me. My ribs couldn’t withstand another round of their soccer kicks.

  Again, a pathetic parade marched to waiting freight cars in the plant. We passed the glass warehouse, which was now nothing more than a heap of splinters and shattered glass. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Bonjour, Pierre,” whispered a familiar voice.

  Hubert was grinning from ear to ear and looking fit without the jaundice. I could have hugged him.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “And I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Never at the same spot at the same time, I guess,” Hubert laughed.

  Mon ami told me his Block and Kommando number and how his survival had been going. “I’ve got a janitor job in one of the buildings that’s still standing.”

  “You’re lucky. Mine went poof.”

  We lined up for a count next to the train cars. After giving his instructions to the Vorarbeiter, the Kapo retreated to the crudely assembled shack that was his office. The Vorarbeiter moved along the line, writing down our identification numbers. He stepped up to me. Gazing at my feet, I rattled off my numbers. He began to write them down, then suddenly stopped. I looked up to find him staring at me, nonplussed. His reaction puzzled me, but I kept a blank face. He quickly regained his composure and continued down the line. What the hell was going on? He looked scared, as if he saw me as a threat. Did he believe I had been punished for my Easter nap and was looking for vengeance? I sure wasn’t a physical threat to him. He was well fed. When he divided the Kommando into work gangs and left me out, I became concerned. Had he been punished for allowing me to wander into the warehouse and was now planning to even the score?

  As Hubert and the others started working, the Vorarbeiter grabbed me by my jacket. “The number on this jacket isn’t yours!”

  His face was flushed red as he shook me, and his breath was pungent with garlic.

  “And who do you suppose it belongs to?”

  His behavior frightened me, but strangely I felt I had the upper hand.

  “Roll up your sleeve.”

  “Why?”

  “Do what I say, Drecksack!”

  I pulled my sleeve up. I remembered that he had copied my number from my arm. What was the big deal?

  “You have a nine on your coat and a three on your arm.”

  “I beg your pardon, but I have a nine on m
y arm.”

  He grabbed my forearm and examined it closely.

  “Goddamn! What cretin tattooed you?”

  “He didn’t bother to sign his masterpiece,” I chuckled nervously.

  “You dare laugh?” He shook me. “Don’t you know that someone was hung in your place?”

  I was staggered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because a three was written in the report. A three instead of a nine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I had assumed that either he or the Kapo had failed to turn in a report or that it had been lost. “Go to the latrine and be quick about it!” he ordered.

  “Why?”

  “Move before I bash in your skull!” He hissed, raining blows on my back. “If the Kapo sees you, we’ll both dangle from a rope.”

  The latrine was deserted, but I took down my pants in case of an inspection. With my cap, I kept a swarm of big blue flies at bay.

  The stink was nauseating, but I barely noticed. The Vorarbeiter’s words kept ringing in my ears: “Someone died in your place.” It was my neck that was supposed to be stretched. I was the one who should have been fertilizing the cabbages, but I was alive, and all because of one wrong number. A three instead of a nine. What shithouse luck.

  I could imagine how he must have screamed his innocence and the sinister smirks and savage beatings he received in return. Had he been a young man, middle-aged, a father, a good man, a fair man? I squeezed my eyes shut. My temples pounded. No, I couldn’t allow myself to ponder who he was! This wasn’t the place to burden one’s self with such questions. Suddenly I saw Jonny. I hadn’t thought about him for a long, long time. I fought back tears. Was I cursed? Did my life depend on the blood of others?

  I looked up to find the Vorarbeiter walking slowly toward me.

  What now? Was he going to drown me in this stinkhole? He sat next to me without dropping his pants.

  “Weren’t you there for the execution? A man hung for trying to escape on Easter Sunday? They rushed it because of the lousy weather.”

 

‹ Prev