Auschwitz, 24th July 1943
AFTER being photographed and catalogued, Meyer followed Kapo Langer to his hut and stood outside, along with the other men. The Kapo turned and stood with his arms folded, barring the way in through the door.
“This is hut number seventy-two,” he said as he pointed to a faded number '7' and an almost imperceptible '2', both painted in what would once have been blood red but was now a rusty brown, flaked and nearly impossible to read.
“This is my hut. It was built for a hundred men. It holds four times that number and is now your home.” He turned and pushed open the door, beckoning the men to follow him inside. The air was stifling in the summer heat. The smell of sweat and urine was oppressive and spilled from the wooden building to cover the waiting disinfected men with its putrid stench, making Meyer turn his head to try to get a lungful of cooler air.
He took a deep breath and forced himself inside with the others. Sweat began to form on his forehead immediately, and he let out the spent air from his lungs and tentatively took a short breath. He could taste the filth.
The wooden walls inside the hut had faded to grey, and mould and dirt covered the glass panes that remained in the windows, most of which were boarded up or cracked. The floorboards were filthy with dried mud and dust, and dirt lay in piles against the skirting. The ceiling was the direct underside of the roof and was stained from rainwater; white clouds from salts which had leached from the wood, and with fingers of black mould. Filling the room were stacked sets of wooden bunks. Most were three bunks high but some had four.
Langer held out his arms, and with them outstretched and his index fingers pointing, he slowly turned, as if proud of the dirty, decrepit building.
“This is my hut. Where you sleep and where you will probably die. I will outlive all of you. But, I will try to keep those who help me and, how can I put this, ‘work with me’, alive as long as possible.”
He dropped his arms and looked at the men before him.
“You get up at four am. You go outside no matter the weather and line up. This is for my roll call. Once I have a list of all those present I check the hut for those not there. I mark the sick and the dead.
“You stay standing in line until the SS do their roll call. They have the dead and the sick removed from the hut. We don’t see them again. Ever.
“You then get water to drink and are split into working parties by me. You go and do your work and return at a time determined by the guards. You go to the mess hut. Eat, drink. Come back to the hut and sleep.
“Then the same the next day. And the next day. There is no day off. There is no Sabbath.”
Langer looked from one face to another. This was a little speech that he liked giving. There was something powerful in telling men that they would live in misery and that this is where they would die. It was the most power he had ever enjoyed.
“You go now to the mess hut and pick up a bowl and a cup. Wait in the queue with these. No cup, no water. No bowl, no food.”
One of the other men spoke up.
“Which of these are our bunks?”
Langer’s brow deepened and his eyes darkened.
“You call me ‘sir’ when you speak to me.”
The man who had spoken stepped forward, and for a moment Meyer thought that he was going to challenge Langer’s authority. But instead he apologised for his disrespect and asked his question once more, this time adding ‘sir’ to the end of the sentence. This placated the Kapo and he laughed as he answered.
“Where are your bunks?” repeated Langer, and pointed around him, laughing.
“You can sleep where you want but you might need to do a bit of negotiation with the man who feels that you are sleeping in his bunk.”
Still laughing, he walked out of the hut in to the relatively cool air outside. “Come with me,” he commanded, “I will take you to the mess hut.”
His band of new inmates followed him.
“The first of the work parties will be back now. Let them eat first. Then you get your cups, bowls and meal. If I see any of you jumping the queue...” and Langer drew his finger across his throat.
“That is the latrines,” said Langer, as they passed a brick building from the days when this had been a Polish barracks. “Working there is a punishment. Being in this camp is a death sentence, but the only thing that will kill you faster than working in the latrines is an SS bullet.”
Langer took them across the dusty compound to the location of the mess hut. A line of grey-striped men stood waiting for their food. There was an eagerness behind the sunken eyes and dirty faces as they all stared at the queue in front of them as it slowly moved forward. Those at the front scurried off like rats to corners of the yard to eat their only meal of the day.
The new men were ignored with only a cursory glance as they were led to the back of the queue by Langer, who then walked off to the brick buildings near the entrance gate.
None of the men talked. There was no chatting. No jokes. No laughing. Only the occasional cough or sneeze broke the silence of the men. And forward they slowly but surely moved, one eager step after another as they got one place closer to the front of the queue and food.
Meyer moved forward one step, sometimes two or three steps at a time, until he reached the table with the piles of tin bowls and cups. Each man picked up one each and resumed their slow march to their edible reward for a hard day’s work.
Slowly, they shuffled forward and the dust from the camp settled on Meyer’s prison uniform. With every speck of grey he lost some colour. He could see it happening before his eyes. He wondered how long before he looked like the rest of the prisoners.
Meyer finally made it to the front of the queue and held out his tin bowl. The prisoner behind the counter poured a ladle full of thin soup into it, and a piece of black bread was unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the bowl, splashing some of the soup onto Mayer’s wrist. He then copied the man in front and filled his cup from the top of an open water barrel.
Meyer then found a corner to sit in before quenching his thirst with the cool water. He then devoured the thin soup and black bread. It was insubstantial, but he hadn’t eaten for so long that to Meyer it tasted like food at the best restaurant in Berlin. It did not take long before it was finished. He looked into his empty bowl and ran his finger around the edge to pick up any of the watery soup which had stuck to the metal. He sucked his finger, enjoying the faint taste of salt and perhaps chicken. He surprised himself, feeling his heart fill with joy as he spotted a reasonable size crumb of black bread which had stuck to the underside of the lip of his bowl.
Once he was certain that every single morsel of food had been consumed, he then made his way to the back of the mess hut and dropped his empty plate and cup into a pile of dirty crockery as he had seen the other prisoners do and started to make his way back to the only place he could imagine going in this hot dismal place, hut seventy-two.
A Murder in Auschwitz (Sampler) Page 6