Therefore, I was alarmed when he barked for us to make our beds, emphasizing the need to tuck our blankets tightly under our mattresses, making sure they rested smoothly on top of the straw. Accomplishing such a task was incredibly trying given the inadequate space to manipulate our bedding. The lowest level bunk was the easiest to make because the men could stand on the floor while they folded their blankets. Those of us on the upper bunks had to balance like ducks in a squatted position on the wooden frames while we beat the rough, lumpy mattresses until they were somewhat level. We all got in each other’s way as we worked that first morning. All the while we were told, “Quickly, quickly!” Everything we did in the camp, every movement, had to always be performed at a sprint. Beds in order, he then told to use the restroom in the building across the way and meet back in five minutes. We ran over to the building, eager to be as near the front of the line as we could, afraid to wind up in the back of the line and waste all of our time waiting without having a chance to go. Once there, we saw two rows of toilet seats embedded into long wooden benches, surrounded by semi-darkness. Pressured along, twenty of us at a time relieved ourselves. I whimpered as my pubic area screamed with pain; an infection had arisen in one of the gashes stemming from the previous night. Agonizing cries filled the room. With no antibiotics or creams to help, we had to endure the pain, hoping it would vanish on its own, although in reality many of us developed puss-filled sores in these areas that lingered for weeks. Some of them never went away.
Once we had all gathered together, we were led to an open, gravel-filled area where we were to stand at attention as we were counted. Standing there, I could hear musical notes floating to my ears from another area of the camp. I wondered if a speaker system was transmitting the sounds, and if so why. Music in such a desolate area seemed remarkably out of place. I tuned it out that first day, partially thinking I had imagined it. My mind was inserting the pleasing sounds of the world’s universal language into that moment, perhaps to cover up the constant cacophonous commands I was already sick of hearing. My mind was doing its best to energize me. My body had been through many changes in the days leading up to that point so it seemed feasible that my mind was beginning to lose grip on reality. But, it wasn’t. Not yet anyway.
This counting process was repeated at least twice a day for the remainder of my stay, no matter what the weather was like. The procedure sometimes took hours as the guards counted and recounted, verifying that their numbers were correct. If there was a discrepancy, we were all forced to remain standing for the duration of the counting as the numbers were sorted out. If someone had attempted to escape the previous night, we had to stand for an entire day as the escapee was hunted down and returned. If the prisoner was not found, the block from which he had escaped was reprimanded. One person was not punished for the wrongdoings of one prisoner—instead, ten or more prisoners were punished. The punishment was not trivial; it was oftentimes death by hanging or shooting. During our first roll call, we stood unaware of the process, learning about it as time went by. Fortunately for us, we only had to stand and be counted for less than an hour—a short period of time that was thereafter always exceeded. Afterward, we were led away to obtain our breakfast.
I fell into line and wandered over to a table decorated with an enormous metal pot. Two men were scooping into the pot, dolling out spoonfuls of a hot, thick liquid to each prisoner. From my place in line I couldn’t tell what we were being served. Was it food? Was it drink? I didn’t know. It wasn’t until it was my turn to hold out my bowl that I was able to look at the liquid up close. I peered into my bowl and saw some type of dark colored fluid inside. It smelled like a mix between tea and coffee but it didn’t look like any beverage I was accustomed to. Exposing it to my mouth, I swallowed it. It filled my mouth with bitterness, a taste altogether revolting, but I was so thirsty that I gulped it down without further thought. Having emptied my bowl, I was unsure of what I should do with it. I contemplated returning to my block to put it on my bunk for use later; but Jakob showed me how to tie it with the string holding up my pants so that it rested next to my leg. “You must not part with it,” he warned me, glancing down at his own bowl, which was tied around his pants. Following his lead, the rest of the group also hung their bowls next to their thighs.
Pausing for a moment to converse with Mendel, I watched as the other prisoners were making their way to another table where pieces of bread were being distributed. Food at last, I thought to myself as I made my way over to the table. When I picked up my ration, I pressed it to my lips almost in a kissing fashion. I began devouring it until it disappeared. After it was gone, I realized I had just eaten what must have been a combination of sawdust and coarse flour. It was like no other bread I had ever eaten. It lacked the yeasty richness of the breads my mother had baked in our home in Warsaw, of course, but it was even worse than the bread we had eaten in the ghetto. It left my mouth dry, but I had nothing left to drink. Lesson learned. I told myself that I would eat before I drank at our next meal.
In the short span of time we were given to eat our breakfast, I looked around at my surroundings. Though it was not yet light, I could see that thousands of prisoners were milling around—in uniforms just like mine, though much more frayed—all throughout the complex. Rows and rows of blocks filled the landscape. Barbed wire was an abundant commodity—a fundamental object—throughout the camp, dividing the area into separate sections. Wherever we were, we knew that we were expected to stay.
It was during breakfast that my fellow block prisoners, sitting or sprawled this way and that in the dirt, began to ask questions about their loved ones. Everyone wanted to know where their wives, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children were. A common question was: “Where are all of the women?” Not one of us had an answer for the other, so we asked Jakob and other seasoned prisoners. The responses they gave were chilling: “If you saw them go to the left, then they went through the chimney,” they all said, making vanishing motions with their hands. What did such an odd statement mean, we wondered? The answers we received seemed unbelievable at the time. We questioned how people could “go through the chimney.” Nothing we heard made sense to us. People did not stand in chimneys; they did not disappear into smoke and they definitely did not spontaneously turn into ash, we told them. We pushed the other prisoners and laughed at their jokes, applauding their cleverness. We told them they were witty to come up with such farfetched nonsense about our loved ones. They were not amused. We thought they were trying to scare us since we were new to the camp. We wished they were, but they weren’t. A few days later, we learned the truth. Well, really, a few days later we accepted the truth. Those hardened prisoners had been honest with us during our first breakfast. All of our loved ones who were sent to the left during the selection process were gassed and cremated upon arrival. Little Blima was dead. So many infants were dead. Most of our family members were dead. We were living in a camp surrounded by the ashes of our relatives. There’s no way we could have digested such a crude reality during our first breakfast, which is why we didn’t believe it. It was easier for us to swallow such a jagged pill of information when we learned that the women who were sent to the right side during the selection process—like we had been—were alive in the women’s section of the camp. Hearing this, the married men were filled with hope. They plotted out scenarios in which they would see their wives and looked forward to happy reunions with them. I anticipated seeing my mother again.
But, let me take you back to that first morning in the camp. Back to when we were oblivious to the truth about our loved ones. The topic shifted away from our relatives and onto slightly more trivial topics once we became agitated with arguing with the other prisoners. Some of my companions began to worry about their luggage. I hadn’t even thought about mine since we arrived, not until they mentioned it. Then it was at the forefront of my mind. I tried to imagine the items I had packed: clothes, toiletries, and a comb. Yes, it would be nice to have my things.
Surely our suitcases would arrive to our blocks later that day—the guards would have had plenty of time to match our names on our bags to our registration numbers by then. But no, Jakob shook his head at us. He quieted our excited voices, telling us that our luggage had already been discarded, dumped into a storage facility at the other end of the camp in a place he referred to as “Canada.” My fellow prisoners and I refused to believe Jakob. We held out hope that our most precious possessions—the last of the belongings that we owned in this world—would be returned to us. Then again, we knew Jakob had no reason to lie to us.
CHAPTER 25
In the span of time it took to eat breakfast—a mere thirty minutes—we had learned (but not yet believed) the fate of our relatives and of our luggage. We came to use our mealtimes as information gathering sessions. Listening was better than talking. Food was safer in our stomachs than in our hands. Information was priceless and we took every opportunity to collect it.
After breakfast, we were ordered to gather together as a group once more along with the other two male quarantine blocks. Jakob and an SS guard who was in charge of our block, whose name I can’t recall, informed us that we were at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in the town of Oswiecim, Poland, near the German-Polish border in the eastern region of Upper Silesia. Auschwitz-Birkenau was a sub-camp of a large camp called Auschwitz, they told us, and our camp surrounded an area of land containing nearly three hundred buildings, comprising an area that spanned more than four hundred and twenty-five acres and was about three kilometers from the main camp. Auschwitz: an unnerving name everyone today knows, but back then it was just another word. We were to spend six weeks in our current block, set aside from the rest of the men’s camp until we had been cleared to enter and intermingle. During this time we were to become acquainted with the daily rituals of the camp. We shrugged upon hearing the news, thinking that the camp didn’t seem as awful as we had initially thought it would be—that is until the sun rose and our day began.
Upon daybreak, a group of SS guards emerged and told us we were going to “get some exercise.” I hoped for a stroll around the buildings to stretch my legs and see more of the camp, but the “exercise” referred to didn’t involve sauntering. For the next four hours we underwent a series of pointless activities designed to humiliate and break the weakest of us. We were told to take off our caps and then replace them on our heads hundreds and hundreds of times until the guards became bored of watching us. Next, they instructed us to repeat after them as they sang German songs. We had no idea—and to this day I still don’t know—what they were making us say. Whatever it was, they found it amusing. We went through other exercises, such as childlike games of leap frog, until the majority of the group fell over from exhaustion. At times, we were told to climb trees like monkeys, one after the other, until five or six of us were dangling from one branch many meters above the ground that bowed under our weight. There was no point to such an exercise that resulted in broken trees branches and broken prisoner limbs. The only positive part of our initiation period was that they taught us to understand the German pronunciation of our numbers so that we would recognize them during roll call. At noon, we were given an hour break for lunch.
The process of receiving our lunch was similar to breakfast. As we stood in line behind a table containing a large steel pot, we untied our bowls from our pants. I prayed for a belly-filling delicacy, but was disappointed when a watery, warm liquid was poured into my bowl. Walking past the table to an open area in the dirt, I looked down at my bowl, seeing a few pieces of potatoes floating inside. Having no spoon to ladle the soup into my mouth, I gulped it down like a drink. The taste resembled what I thought dirty dishwater must taste like, but I was happy to have been given something to inflate my shrinking stomach. After drinking my soup, I went back into line to obtain more of the coffee we had been given at breakfast. I had to fight back my gag reflex as I drank it down, knowing that it was better than not drinking anything at all.
When lunch was over, we grouped back together to continue with our initiation drills for five more hours. We performed our “tricks” for the guards automatically, realizing it was better to play along with them than to fight with them. Most of us cooperated, although a few prisoners attempted to sit out; these prisoners were beaten until they could no longer speak. During these incidents we were made to continue on without paying attention to the beatings. Tough to ignore at first, it soon became easier. Jakob never beat any of us although he did verbally berate us, hurling nasty comments whenever he felt like it. The SS guards, however, did not hesitate to lay their hands on any one of us just for the sake of expressing their dominance. We lived in constant fear of being whipped, beaten, shot, and killed every second of every day.
Dinner came only after we were forced to undergo roll call again. Roll call in the quarantine area was far easier than roll call in the main area of the camp. Despite this, it was still a burden to stand at attention while we were counted like animals until the guards were satisfied. When we were released for the day, we stood in line for dinner, most likely remnants from lunch with perhaps a few pieces of vegetables, or if we were lucky a few bits of meat, added to it. Once again, we were given the dreadful coffee to drink. We all wanted water, just plain refreshing water, but it was nowhere to be found.
For the first time since arriving at camp, I introduced myself to a few of my fellow Jewish prisoners. We spoke at length about our families, where we grew up, and what we used to do for a living. One of the men I spoke to was newly married, another had twin sons, and the other was single like me. The man who was recently married smiled as he pulled out a tiny, creased photograph of his wife, a homely girl with long, wavy hair. I did not dare to ask him how he had smuggled the photograph into the camp. Together with Mendel, we spoke for hours about life until we were ordered to return to our blocks for the night. Speech was the only thing we had to entertain us since we had been robbed of everything else.
Making our way back to our barracks, I caught a glimpse of flames shooting from the sky directly ahead of us. The flames did not dance as they generally do during a bonfire; instead they seemed to be moving in a stream directly out of the building like they were bolting out of it. I kept the observation to myself, thinking nothing of it. As time went on, I learned what I had seen was the fire blazing from a chimney of a crematorium. That night I found it troublesome to sleep on the lumpy mattress in the unventilated block. I stayed awake for most of the night listening to the sounds of the men living with me. The second story bunk was not an ideal living space. Those men sleeping on the third story stepped on Mendel and me when they climbed down to use the buckets, and we did the same thing to the poor people sleeping on the first level. Those in the top bunk had slightly more space to sit up. During my insomnia I made up my mind to obtain a top bunk for Mendel and me when we moved blocks. I would fight for it if I had to. In our current bunk, we could barely lean our bodies up onto our elbows. I also decided that we would have to find a way to keep our bodies clean. The plaque that was beginning to build up on our teeth had no hope of ever seeing a toothbrush; some of us used small twigs to pick away at the slimy buildup, but we probably scraped off our enamel more so than the bacteria. The dirt on our skin was crusting over; some of us picked it off but most of us just left it where it was. We were all filthy.
CHAPTER 26
For the remainder of the six-week period, we underwent the same grueling exercises even on days when the rain saturated our flimsy uniforms, making them heavy and cumbersome. Splatters of rain droplets pegged my face, fogging my glasses, glazing my vision, making it impossible to see. Our clogs would sink down into the mud, creating a pocket in which our feet would slip into, suctioning away our shoes into the ground, pulling us forward so that we became covered in the mud. When we attempted to yank our feet out, they would emerge from the throes of the pocket covered in mud and gravel. We would then have to bend down on our knees to forcefully remove our shoes from the earth. All the
while, the SS guards would be watching us, either laughing at our misfortune or yelling at us to stop “resting.” During this time—spanning through September and October—the weather hadn’t made up its mind whether to be hot or chilly or rainy, and so we lived through all conditions. We slowly learned to adapt to the clothing we had be handed and to develop a way to keep our wooden shoes from falling off our feet. To do so, we could no longer walk by picking one foot up and then the other, instead we began scooting so that our shoes never left the ground; in this way we walked slower but used less energy and made sure we never lost the only precious articles standing between our bodies and the ground.
Day after day, it was the same routine until our quarantine period was over and we were assigned to new blocks. Our group of five hundred was divided up and those with specific talents were led away. Mendel and I were assigned to the same block again, probably because our numbers were consecutive. Since we were new to the group, we were given a bunk on the first level, not the location I had hoped for. Our sleeping quarters were no larger than they had been while in quarantine, although we now shared our bunk with three other men instead of two. In place of red brick walls and dirt floors, our new block was made of wood and had a thin concrete base. Our mattresses were also stuffed with paper instead of straw. We were required to make our beds in the same fashion as we had when we were in quarantine.
We were now amongst Jews from all over Europe, including Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, etc. Each man had his own story to tell about where he had come from and what he had experienced since Hitler began trolling through the continent, expelling innocent inhabitants from their homes, plucking them and discarding them like unwanted hairs. This multitude of nationalities made it vexing to communicate so we turned to Yiddish and gesturing. When we were lucky, a linguistic prisoner was able to translate for us. From our new block mates we learned more information about the camp. They explained how the camp used to be for containing Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs) but had been converted into an extermination camp. They told us about the importance of “organizing”—the camp term for “trading”—to obtain items we needed. They warned us not to approach the barbed wire fences because they were electrified and if we approached within a meter of them, we would be shot. They spoke to us about not walking around at night, because if we did so we would be gunned down. We learned of gas chambers and a crematorium inside the main camp as well as gassing bunkers in our camp, with talk of more of both types of destructive facilities about to be constructed. The men went on about how each person was forced to work in pre-assigned labor groups, the most favorable of which involved working within the confines of the camp working as barbers, cooks, and clothes sorters. Unfavorable assignments, they said, involved walking kilometers to and from job sites each day to work on farmland or in coal mines and rock quarries, clearing rubble or pits of sand and gravel, and building tunnels and roads. The less strenuous the job, the longer you would survive, they said. One man chimed in, speaking about the worst job he had completed so far, consisting of standing up to his waist in freezing water while he helped to build a drainage ditch in the marshy area on the western end of camp where a bog had been. Swarms of mosquitoes, he said, inhabited the region, and spread mosquito-borne diseases; dozens of his fellow workers had died after being bitten by these bloodsucking creatures. I hoped that Mendel and I would be assigned to a work group located within the barbed wire fences away from the marshy reaches of the camp.
My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel Page 11