by Alan Gratz
“W-what?” the boy stammered. He wasn’t much older than me. “No! No, I didn’t even know him!”
Guards grabbed the boy and dragged him to the front of our lines, where the Nazis had built a gallows for hanging prisoners.
“And this man,” the commandant said, pointing into the crowd. “And this one. And him. And him. And him.”
He was picking people at random now in his fury, punishing innocent people for the dead man’s effrontery. I shrank back. I recognized the boy and two of the other men from my barrack. Like me, they couldn’t even have known who the dead man was.
“I’m innocent!” the boy my age sobbed as they dragged him up onto the gallows and put the hangman’s noose around his neck. “I never tried to escape! I promise! I’ve done everything you asked!”
I shook with helplessness and rage, but also with fear. This is what fighting back earned you. More abuse. More death. Half a dozen Jews would be murdered today because one man refused to die without a fight. To fight back was to die quickly and to take others with you.
This was why prisoners went meekly to their deaths. I had been so resolved to fight back, but I knew then that I wouldn’t. To suffer quietly hurt only you. To suffer loudly, violently, angrily — to fight back — was to bring hurt and pain and death to others.
“Please!” the boy cried. “I never tried to escape. I’m innocent!” He looked out on all of us, those of us with the courage to look up from the ground. “Remember,” he begged us. “I did nothing.”
The hangman kicked the chair out from under him, and the boy’s body jerked as his neck was broken.
I kept my head held high and watched, vowing never to forget.
My work detail was on its way to the quarry to break more rocks one morning when another kapo came to speak to ours. The two kapos talked for a moment, and our kapo ordered us to stop. I kept my head down, but tried to look around with my eyes to see what was going on. Something different was happening, and different was never good. Our kapo kept us standing there without saying anything else for a long time. What was happening? Why had we stopped? Were we in trouble? Were we going to be killed? The other prisoners had to be asking themselves the same questions, but of course none of us spoke. To speak was to invite a beating. We would be told our fates when our captors decided we needed to know.
“Turn around,” our kapo said at last. “March.”
We headed away from the quarry, which would have been a relief if I thought we were going someplace better. We passed a place where prisoners were shot over the pits they had dug for themselves, and I said a silent prayer of thanks. But then we passed the barracks, and the main gate. We were being marched to the depot. A train waited at the side rail, but it didn’t have passenger cars. It was fitted out with cattle cars. We were to be transported like livestock.
We were herded up a ramp into one of the train cars under the whips and clubs of the kapos and SS officers. I was one of the first ones inside. The car was empty and looked recently washed, but it smelled of urine and vomit and excrement. I reeled back, but there was nowhere to go.
“In! In!” the guards yelled at us, and I was pushed up against the far wall. More and more prisoners were forced into the car. They packed so many of us in I was crushed between three other men and the wall, but it was like that for everyone. I couldn’t even raise my arm. I felt trapped again, like I had felt under the floorboards and down in the salt mine. I couldn’t be here. I had to have space. Air.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!” a man at the other end of the car started to scream, giving voice to my panic. “Let me out! I need to get out of here!” He kicked at the wall of the cattle car. “Please! I can’t take it!”
Crack! An SS officer shot the man through the wall of the cattle car, and he no longer had to worry about not being able to breathe. If I panicked, if I broke, I would suffer the same fate. Instead I worked my way toward a ventilation grate on the wall of the train car and pressed my face up against it, breathing in the fresh air from outside. My heart still raced, but at least I could breathe.
We stood squeezed into the train car for half a day while the Nazis loaded more prisoners into other cars. We had no food, no water, and no way to go to the bathroom. Soon I understood why the train car had smelled so bad, and would only smell worse before this ordeal was through.
Late in the afternoon the train lurched and we were away. None of us knew where we were going. I hoped it would be better than Trzebinia, but by now I knew not to dream. False hope only made things worse.
It was cold along the wall of the cattle car. Wind whipped through the spaces in between the car’s wooden slats, making me shiver. But at least I had air. The prisoners in the middle complained of it being too hot and too close, and of not being able to breathe. So I shivered while I sucked the freezing air into my lungs, and I didn’t complain.
As the train made its way to wherever we were going, I watched the landscape slide by. Plaszów, Wieliczka, Trzebinia — they had all been right around Kraków, my home. Now I was truly leaving home and seeing the outside world for the first time. I had never imagined it would be under these circumstances.
I saw snow-covered fields. Farmhouses with electric lights burning in the windows. Forests. A river. A busy road with cars and trucks. After all my time in the work camps, it was strange to see people in the real world, eating dinner and going to school and watching movies. But that was the world for non-Jews. My world was concentration camps and salt mines, starvation and cattle cars.
The train slowed, and the other prisoners began to stir. Were we at our final destination? Did anyone recognize where we were? I watched through the grate as a little train station slid into view, but I couldn’t make out the name on the station sign. I could see people though, regular people.
Polish men carrying briefcases. Polish women pushing strollers. A child in a blue coat pointed at our train, and her mother turned her away. Two boys waited with their parents beside a stack of luggage. They were going on a trip. Maybe on vacation. “They’re going to turn you into soap, Jews!” one of the boys yelled. He couldn’t have been much older than five or six.
“No,” his older brother said. “They’re taking you to the gas chambers!” The boys scooped up snow from the platform and threw snowballs at the train. One of them exploded on the grate near me, and I was showered with slush and ice. I was angry until I realized the snow was water, and that I was dying of thirst. I licked what I could off my face and my shirt.
The train lurched and we were off again, the boys taunting us and throwing more snowballs at us as we left.
“And you wanted to escape,” a man near me whispered to another man. “You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them think about us? These people would sell you back to the Nazis for a sack of potatoes and then toast you at the dinner table.”
We did not arrive at our destination that night. Nor the entire next day. And still we had no food or water. I drifted in and out of sleep, that blessed escape from hunger. I would have collapsed from exhaustion if I hadn’t been held up by the prisoners squeezed in around me.
One morning or night — I couldn’t tell which it was — I woke up to find the man next to me leaning heavily on my shoulder. I shook him to wake him up, but he wouldn’t open his eyes. Something about the way he stood there, something about the way he moved, stiff and awkward, made my skin prickle. His flesh was gray, like a Muselmann’s, his lips cracked and frozen at the corners. Then I realized: He wasn’t breathing.
The man leaning on me was dead.
I squirmed and twisted, trying to push him away, but there was nowhere for either of us to go. The men near me roused from their sleep to grumble at me to be still, and I gave up. The dead man would be my companion until we got to wherever it was we were going. I worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep again, knowing there was a corpse leaning on me, but soon the cold took me and I reentered the half-aw
ake world of the barely alive.
I woke again to an orange horizon. A sunrise? A sunset? My throat was cold and dry, my tongue like burlap. It had snowed while I was asleep, and the ventilation grate near me was covered with the stuff — grayish white from the engine’s smoke. I tried to reach it with my tongue, to lick some of that precious frozen water off the grate, but it was just out of reach. My arms were pinned at my sides by the crush of people in the car, but I wanted that snow. I needed that snow to survive. Slowly, painfully, I pulled my arm up between the dead man and the sleeping one beside us. The sleeper muttered in his sleep as I jostled him, and he pushed my hand back down without even waking. But I had to have that snow. I pushed again, and again the man pushed back. I elbowed him in his sunken stomach. He whimpered in his sleep and stopped fighting. My arm was free!
I scooped snow from the grate. My thin fingers were so cold they were blue, but I didn’t care. I shoved the snow in my mouth like a toddler eating cake. My throat was so dry I gagged on it, but I forced the melting snow down, ignoring the shocking pain in my teeth from the cold. It was water, wonderful water! Not even a pastry at the corner bakery on Lwowska Street had ever tasted so good. With a pang I remembered going there on Thursdays with my father, eating a treat and watching the pigeons in the park while my father read his newspaper. I pushed the memory away and reached for more gray snow.
The orange horizon turned out to be a sunrise, which turned into a bright blue winter morning. Our train slowed again, this time not for a station. We were shunted to a side track while another train of cattle cars passed us, going in the opposite direction. The other train slowed, then stopped alongside.
“You there,” someone called from across the way. “You there, in the other train.”
I squinted through the slats in the wall. There were people in the other train, packed in like us. We were all Jews being shipped around occupied Poland like coal or meat.
“What?” a man a meter or two away from me answered.
“What does our train say? Where are we going?” the man in the other train asked.
I hadn’t thought the trains would have our destination on them, but most trains did, I remembered. There were plates at the top that could be switched out for different destinations. I peered through the slats at the other car, trying to see.
“Treblinka,” I called, seeing the placard at last. “It says you’re going to Treblinka.” I didn’t know the place. “Where are we going?”
“Birkenau,” the man in the other train called. I had never heard of Birkenau either, but the word spread through the train in scared whispers. Birkenau. Birkenau. Birkenau.
The other train rocked and started moving again, and soon we too were on our way.
The man next to me, the live one, mumbled and shook his head.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s Birkenau? Another work camp?”
“You don’t go to Birkenau to work,” the man said, his voice hoarse and dry. “You go there to die. Birkenau isn’t a concentration camp. It’s a death camp.”
A chill ran through me. The boys at the depot had been right, I realized. They had known. The Nazis were going to kill us. They were going to turn us into soap. The train rocked back and forth, back and forth. Outside, it began to snow again.
“You want my advice?” the man next to me rasped. “When they take us to the gas chambers, try to stand right under the exhaust vents.”
“Is that how you survive?”
The man laughed, or tried to. “No. You won’t survive. None of us will. But if you stand under the exhaust vents, you won’t suffer as long before you die.”
The train arrived at Birkenau at night. The cars clanked and groaned as the train came to a stop half a kilometer outside the gates. It was a cloudy night, and should have been dark, but the sky was lit up red like a bonfire. Black chimneys stood up in silhouette against the glowing sky, shooting flames from their tops, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air. I gagged.
I waited for the train to move again, to take us into that awful factory, but we didn’t move. We sat for what must have been hours, all of us who could see out watching the flames, knowing that was where we were going. Why were they holding us here? Was this one last torture, one last joke? Did they want to drive us to panic? To madness? If they did, it was working. The longer we waited, the more anxious I got. What was going on? Why weren’t we moving?
“What are they waiting for?” I said at last, my voice hoarse from thirst and fear.
“Don’t you see the fires in the chimneys?” a man next to me said. “They have to finish off the last trainload before they have room for us.”
I took in his words, too weak to react. We were just another raw material, waiting to be processed. Shovel us in, shovel us out.
I dozed again. Every time I woke, I was still in the cold train car, a dead man leaning against me. At last, the train jolted and began to move, and I woke for good to a pale yellow sun rising above the trees in the distance. They were taking us inside to the furnaces. They were taking us inside to die.
The train-car door opened. For a few steps the dead body next to me came with us, held up between the living as we pushed for the door. But soon there was more space, and he fell, slumping to the floor with the others who had died on the trip. There were dozens of them, rag-and-bone skeletons who had perished of hunger, or thirst, or the cold, or suffocation, or overwork. We climbed over them, gulping in the fresh air outside before the kapos and soldiers whipped us and shouted at us to line up.
We assembled in a field just beyond the train cars, those of us who survived, looking more dead than alive. After another roll call to see which of us were still alive, the Nazis marched us toward one of the big brick buildings with chimneys.
So this was it. The reality began to sink in, and I slumped under its weight. They really were going to kill us. I had come so far, endured so much agony and suffering.
I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs, had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to live, and now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away with their furnace!
I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe had died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn’t have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing.
In a large empty room we were ordered to undress and pile our striped uniforms in a corner. In a different corner was another stack of clothes — silks of bright red and blue and purple and green. Gypsy clothes. Now we knew who had fed the fires of Birkenau while we waited our turn outside. I was still crying as I pulled my shirt off and added it to the pile. The tears came unbidden, but I didn’t try to stop them. Some of the other men were crying. Most weren’t. I didn’t care. I was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of being brave. Tired of surviving.
They whipped us and beat us again to herd us into the next room, where showerheads lined the ceiling. I remembered what the man on the train had said, that you died fastest if you stood underneath one of the showerheads, where the gas came out. Instead I moved away from them, near one of the stone columns set throughout the room.
They packed us in again, just like on the train, but there was still a little room to move. When the door clanked shut, some of the men cried out. By now we all knew why we were here, and what they were going to do to us. Some people panicked and beat on the door, yelling for the Nazis to let us out, to have mercy, to spare us. Some people cursed them. Some people closed their eyes and muttered prayers. Some just stared off into space, waiting to die.
Tears streamed down my face, tears I didn’t know I had left, and I slid down the column
to the ground, burying my head in my hands. Mother, Father, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my friends in Kraków, I missed them all so much.
We waited, but no gas came. The cries of the men grew louder and more desperate. I stayed frozen to where I sat, not knowing what to think. Why were they waiting now? Maybe someone was standing on the hose, I thought crazily, and I started to giggle. Yes. That was it. Or maybe they couldn’t get the fire for the furnace going. Maybe the match kept blowing out. Or the kindling wouldn’t catch fire. I laughed out loud at that, and a prisoner standing over me looked down at me like I was insane. Maybe I was. The Nazis had finally broken me. It was all a big joke. I could see that now. There was no rhyme or reason to whether we lived or died. One day it might be the man next to you at roll call who is torn apart by dogs. The next day it might be you who is shot through the head. You could play the game perfectly and still lose, so why bother playing at all?
Still the gas didn’t come. I pulled myself to my feet and pushed my way through the men until I was standing right underneath one of the showerheads.
“Go on!” I yelled at the showerhead. “Go on, do it! I dare you!” I laughed again. “What are you waiting for?” I cried. “Kill me! I give up! You win!”
The pipes rattled and moaned. Something was finally coming out. The men in the room got quiet, like we were all holding our breaths, and I reached my arms up toward the ceiling.
Kill me, I prayed. Please kill me and put an end to this. I’m ready.
Water rained down on me. Freezing water so cold it made me scream. Water! Not gas! I was going to live! I laughed and cried, and so did the other men. We celebrated as we shivered, hugging one another and shaking hands, all of us granted a last-minute reprieve by the Nazis.
I was alive.
After the shower, nothing seemed to matter as much to me. I knew it was a game to the Nazis — kill us, don’t kill us, to them it didn’t really matter — but even so, I was glad I had made it through.