Scheisshaus Luck

by Pierre Berg

  Finally the train started moving. I rolled off Hubert and looked at the railway worker’s prostrate body. I turned him over. A stream of blood was running from where his right eye had been. Why had they killed him? Were they afraid of partisans? Had they taken the package he tossed for a bomb? Or had this civilian become an embarrassing witness, unwittingly spying the Nazi underbelly? I opened the package he had dropped—a piece of bread and a sausage. Inside his shoulder bag I found the rest of his lunch. Hubert and I devoured the food so quickly that we almost choked. Suddenly I was no longer afraid of dying from starvation before arriving at the next “Pitchi Poi.”

  The railway man’s wedding band made me think of his wife. I pictured her anxiously standing on the stoop, waiting for him. She would never know how or why he had suddenly disappeared, or that the lunch she made her husband gave two emaciated teens another chance at survival. The man looked about the same age as my father. He probably had sons and daughters. Had it been his paternal instincts that compelled him to be a Good Samaritan? There would be tears, curses, and questions by family members for months, and I was the only one who could tell them that the “god with a moustache” and his goons had propped me and Hubert up with their loved one’s bones.

  Hubert fell fast asleep and awoke in the late afternoon a different person. Those few calories had done wonders.

  “Do you think that some day you will run your family’s business?” I asked in an attempt to gauge his mental state.

  “Well, if you should ever find and marry that girl Stella, you’ll have a roomful of our finest carnations,” he smiled.

  It amazed me that he remembered her name because I hadn’t mentioned Stella for some time. I became sad. I hadn’t given Stella much thought. Truthfully, close to none. If she was even alive when we left Auschwitz, I couldn’t imagine her surviving the march. And if she was alive on some other train, I hoped that she had more confidence in my tenacity than I did in hers.

  I awoke to find the train stopped on a sidetrack. I looked over to Hubert, who was peacefully gazing at the sky.

  “How long have we been here?” I whispered.

  “An hour or more.”

  “Why? Have they unloaded the cars?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve only heard boche voices.”

  I carefully inched over to the edge. From the snatches of conversations I caught, it seemed that no one had been moved yet.

  There was a question if the nearby camp, Mauthausen, could absorb us. I truly hoped they couldn’t. In Auschwitz, I had heard that Mauthausen was one large quarry, and breaking rocks for twelve-hour stretches in the winter was not appetizing, whatsoever. I crawled back to Hubert and told him what I had heard. He complained that if he had to lie still much longer, he would be frostbitten. I reminded him that he would be much colder with a bullet in his brain.

  Three or four hours later, with the sun setting, I heard an SS guard say to another that there wasn’t enough room to take the whole load. I guess breaking rocks wasn’t killing Muselmänner fast enough. Shortly thereafter the train started moving again.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Alles raus! Alles raus!” the SS ordered. I peeked over the rim. We were stopped at the foot of a steep hill, and the guards were beginning to line what Häftlinge were left next to a trail leading up to barbed-wire and pine tree shrouded barracks. This I presumed was our new “Pitchi Poi.” The guards had their backs turned to the morgue cars so it was easy for Hubert and me to slip out and fall in with the others. We all threw ourselves on the ground and greedily ate the snow. Glancing back at the train, I saw that every car had practically become a morgue. It looked as if we had lost about 80 percent of our fellow “pajamas.”

  We stumbled along the train track, which disappeared into a tunnel at the foot of the hill. The tunnel’s entrance was camouflaged with a canopy of netting woven with greenery and guarded by a fortified pillbox. Next to the tunnel was a pile of gigantic cylindrical aluminum sheets that looked like cigars sliced in half. They had been meticulously camouflaged. I couldn’t imagine what they could be used for, but my mind wasn’t altogether clear. I could barely hold up my head.

  The guards ordered us onto a trail that veered away from the tunnel’s entrance, then zigzagged up to the camp. It took everything I had to keep Hubert on his feet as we went up those switchbacks.

  This camp seemed newer, smaller, and better constructed than Monowitz. At least from the outside, it appeared that the Blocks were built for human beings, not animals. I wondered if the Germans had planned this to be a vacation resort after their victory.

  We were immediately ushered to the showers. Once again, all our clothing was taken from us. Bye, bye, wool sweaters. Again, a shower that went from freezing to scalding. From the bitching of the Häftlinge from Majdanek and Gleiwitz, I realized that every single camp had the same design: to kill Untermenschen by inches.

  When we came out of the showers they lined us up for a “selection.” I held my breath as Hubert threw out his chest and summoned his last reserves of strength, but they shoved him among the Muselmänner, or rather, the super-Muselmänner. There were tears in my eyes as I watched him totter away. My puny chest was filled with whimpers of protest, and somewhere in my numb brain I felt the urge to go after him. But I knew that opening my mouth or running after Hubert would just get me killed, too. So, I stood silent like a good Untermensch.

  I had helped Hubert to the limit of my endurance, when I could barely stand myself, and it hadn’t been enough. The boches had pressed the last drop of blood and sweat from my friend, and now they were going to fertilize some cabbage field with his ashes. For the first time I grasped the hell of watching family, loved ones, trudge toward Birkenau’s belching chimneys. As we were being led into this new camp, I had seen a brick chimney. I knew the SS had shut down the Auschwitz crematoriums in November. Were they still burning here? I couldn’t assume they weren’t. That was hope, and the longer I treaded in striped “pajamas,” the more I believed hope was a cancer.

  Dressed now in light summer “pajamas” and felt slippers, we were herded through the snow to a large frame building. The sign at the door read Kino, the German word for “cinema.” We sat down on rows of wooden benches. To keep myself from dwelling on Hubert, I studied the faces of the men around me. Oh, we were a sorry lot. Even the green triangles who had left Auschwitz in much better shape than the rest of us were now faint shadows. We had survived, but it was a hollow victory. We were still breathing as slaves behind the barbed wire that encircled a camp called Dora, and me without my vieille noix (“Old Nut”) to share my suffering with.

  Barrels of soup were brought in. It was the first warm food we had received in two weeks. As we slurped up the soup, rumors circulated that there was an underground factory in the tunnel and that only those who were craftsmen in metalworking would be kept in the camp. The hell if I was going to go on another Nazi joy ride, so when the SS asked, I told them I was an electrician.

  PART IV

  DORA

  CHAPTER 18

  “ Links, zwei, drei, vier; Vordermann und Seitenrichtung!” (Left, two, three, four; straighten up front and side!) the Kapo called off. After a week in quarantine, I tottered more than marched down the hill that I had climbed with Hubert. Near the camp’s gate, a potpourri of musicians from different camps struggled to play harmoniously.

  The virtuosos in Monowitz had spoiled my ears. Unfortunately, most of them had arrived here as corpses. The kettledrum’s beating still echoed in my ears when I reached the bottom of the hill.

  We followed the Kapo along the train tracks to the main tunnel.

  About a hundred yards away was a sister tunnel that also had tracks coming out of it. A maze of “blast walls”—large blocks of concrete—were positioned in front of both entrances. They were designed to protect the factory inside the tunnel from the shrapnel and conflagration of Allied air raids. These heavy obstacles had to be removed every time a train brought in supplies. />
  A pleasant rush of warm air greeted us as we marched under the canopy of camouflaged netting and into the main tunnel. Boxcars with signs reading Achtung Sprengstoff! (Beware of Explosives!) blocked our path. “Zieht die Baüche ein!” (Pull in your stomachs!) joked the Kapo.

  Hell, he was the only one who needed to suck in his belly. I hugged the tunnel wall and squeezed by the freight. In front of me were flat cars loaded with the aluminum hulls that had so intrigued me when I arrived. These sixty-five foot hulls were fully assembled, making them look like metal dirigibles. I felt as if I had stepped into a Jules Verne novel. Did the Nazis want to send us “undesirables” into space, using our ashes to turn the moon into one big cabbage patch? On racks near the flatcars sat the guts of these vessels, intricately contorted assemblages of pipes, hoses, sphere-shaped tanks, and valves. From my physics studies I knew that these were jet pro-pulsion engines. Whatever their purpose, I thought, these metal dirigibles must be drastically important to the Nazis for them to be built in such an elaborate underground factory.

  A row of hanging lights stretched down the tunnel as far as I could see. The Kapo led us past a series of immense transverse tunnels set up as workshops. The bursting of explosive rivets that came from the workshop assembling the hulls sounded like Bastille Day fireworks. I was thankful the boches hadn’t drafted me as a riveter.

  No amount of cotton could save one’s eardrums from sixteen hours of that racket. From other workshops came the shrieking of lathes, the hissing of paint guns, and the rattling of milling machines. We passed ten tunnels before we came to the relative calm of the electricians’ shop.

  Unlike the Elektriker Kommando in Auschwitz, there was no barrage of questions from the Kapo, no impromptu test of my knowledge and skill. I was just assigned to a workbench and given a color-coded schematic. My job was to assemble and mount switches, gages, and instruments on panels of Winidur, a German PVC. It was all relatively new to me, but to my own astonishment and relief I managed well. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. As a kid I took toys apart to see what made them tick, and spent hours in my room with my Erector set. In high school, physics had been my favorite subject, while at home I happily did all the electrical repairs. In Buna I watched the electricians, asked the right questions, and became familiar with the German names for their tools and their symbols for volts, amps, and ohms. In the pipe shop, I had even helped solder circuit boards subcontracted by some unknown German company. Now, thankfully, it was all paying off.

  As the days went by I realized how enormous and elaborate the underground plant was. The two main tunnels, which were about a mile long, worked as assembly lines fed by a total of forty-six tunnel workshops. If the top of the Kohnstein hill were shaved off, the plant would look like a ladder. The two German Häftlinge who became my mentors at the workshop told me the names of the strange contraptions we were building: the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Both in their late twenties, Bruno and Siegfried had been Luftwaffe technicians working at Peenemünde, which was on an island in the Baltic sea, where the Nazis created and first tested the rockets. When the island became a target for Allied bombers, the Germans moved the construction of the V-1s and V-2s to Dora, which had been a gypsum mine.

  While working in Peenemünde, Bruno and Siegfried carried on affairs with a couple of Danish cuties. When their wives got wise to their infidelities, they went straight to the Gestapo and the two men were stripped of their uniforms and stuffed into “pajamas.”

  “That was a dirty trick those bitches pulled on you,” I said, wanting to sound sympathetic. “Just because they were jealous?”

  Bruno raised his bushy eyebrows. “No, because we were associating with the enemy. Our wives are good Nazis.”

  “Basically, they did us a favor,” Siegfried laughed. “We’re much safer in this tunnel.”

  From them I learned how lethal and intricate those futuristic-looking weapons were. The V-1s carried 551 pounds of explosives, but they weren’t effective because their accuracy depended solely on the direction and speed of the wind, which made the V-1 an easy target for a fast fighter plane.

  The V-2s were a different matter. These long-range missiles flew at twice the speed of sound, carried over two thousand pounds of explosives, and had guidance systems. With a sarcastic smirk, Bruno informed me that “the god with the moustache” had promised that the rockets would turn the tide of the war. Even if Bruno had his doubts, I was determined to do all I could to ensure that “the god with a moustache” couldn’t keep his promise.

  The slightest shock would render the precision instruments I installed in the electric circuits useless, and I saw to it that they got it good. Who could accuse me of sabotage? There was no way to prove I was responsible because it couldn’t be detected until the rocket was fired. They would have to write it off as a manufacturing defect. I daydreamed that some of the V-2s might errantly explode over Berlin. Finally I was able to do real damage to the Nazi war machine—at least that was what I told myself.

  One day the SS discovered sabotage in one of the shops. They didn’t bother with an investigation. They simply hung the whole Kommando, Kapo and all. Fifty men were tethered to a rail that was then hoisted into the air by a crane used to lift the V-2s. They were left hanging near the tunnel entrance as a reminder to us to be good little slaves. Passing before those dangling bodies—that row of purple faces with protruding eyes and tongues—didn’t deter me from my sabotage. It just gave me more fuel to be relentless in my mission.

  After a sixteen-hour shift, climbing the hill back up to the camp strained the limits of my endurance. I would stumble along that frozen trail with heavy legs, and many times my heart would palpi-tate, then seemingly stop beating. I’d put my hand to my chest and wouldn’t feel a thing. I would become dizzy. Everything in front of me would begin to fade. And just when I would think I was dying, my heart sparked and I would have enough energy to drag myself to my bunk, where I wondered in astonishment how I had held out for another day. Luckily there were times we stayed in the tunnel for a couple days straight, taking catnaps at our benches or wherever it was comfortable. That was okay with me. I was safe from the Allied bombs, and I didn’t have to drag my ass up and down that damn trail.

  Our Blockälteste, Ludwig, a green triangle from Hanover, was a vile dog. He had been dismissed from his teaching job for clobbering his pupils and had been locked up for printing phony money.

  Having been wounded on the Western front during the First World War, Ludwig was a fanatic Francophobe and picked only those who spoke French for his daily trouncings. In his sadistic rages he even beat a few Muselmänner to death. After I found myself under his lash, I joined a group determined to kill him.

  “This must look like a natural death or the SS are going to hang the whole Block,” I told them. “I’m not going to die because of that prick. The end of this war is too close.”

  From the tunnel I smuggled a small container of glass cleaning fluid, a mixture of ether and detergent. The following night, two Belgians, a Fleming and a Walloon, whose ethnic feuding was centuries old, started a noisy, diversionary fight at the piss pails. Once the night watchman and the Stubendienst were distracted, five of our most able-bodied cohorts charged into Ludwig’s private quarters while I stood lookout. They pinned him down and covered his face with a rag soaked with my lethal contraband. After his body went limp, they opened the window, and I rushed over to separate the Belgians. In the morning, Ludwig looked very peaceful.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  For lunch the Nazis delivered an infusion of roasted acorns that they had the gall to call coffee. In my workshop I was assigned the lucky task of returning the empty container. There was nothing in the bottom except a few drops and the grounds, which had no nutritional value but appeased my stomach for a while. One day after delivering the container I went to the toilet and found a Häftling struggling on the plumbing of one of the bowls. He was lying on his stomach, swearing in French and banging his tools. I coughed and th
e fellow rolled onto his back. I stared at him astounded. It was Marius, the Corsican plumber who befriended me in Drancy. He looked me over in disbelief, then jumped up and hugged me, blowing his trademark garlic breath in my face.

  “Boy, you look like shit!”

  He didn’t have to rub it in. I knew that without the assistance of a mirror. “Well, you’re the expert on shit. You look pretty good in ‘pajamas.’” He had hardly changed. “How long have you been here?”

  “About a year. Before that I was in Compiègne.”

  Compiègne was a camp in northern France, by the Marne River. “I heard that camp was only housing the so-called ‘enemy aliens.’”

  “Well, there are two camps,” Marius said. “Remember that couple from Honduras with the twins? They put them in that camp and dumped me in the political one. I repaired the plumbing in both. The bastards liked my work so much they sent me here.”

  “In what tunnel is your shop?” I asked.

  “I’m all over this place, wherever I’m needed. I even have those bastards and some of the civilian workers from Nordhausen bringing me their faucets and the like to repair. They slip me extra food.”

  That’s how he got the garlic.

  “Ciao, I have to get back. Look me up when you have a chance.

  I’m in the electric shop.”

  “You’re an electrician? Good for you, boy. My trade has saved my ass.”

  It was encouraging to see someone from the train to Drancy alive and weathering the ordeal well. It made me think that someone else might have been lucky, too.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “See if you can repair this,” snapped my Kapo, Kristian Berg, a sea captain who was rumored to have killed four prostitutes in a Hamburg brothel.