Prisoner B-3087

by Alan Gratz

  I had been ready to die. But when water came out of those showers, not gas, it was like I was born again. I had survived, and I would keep surviving.

  I was alive.

  The Nazis lined us up, still naked and shivering. First they shaved our heads. With our hair gone, we all looked alike — young and old. Next they marched us to a different room, where soldiers waited at tables with what looked like big oversized pencils with wires attached to them. As we worked our way toward them, person after person, I could hear screams of pain ahead of us. I had no idea what they were doing to us, but they weren’t killing us. That was all that mattered, I told myself. I could handle pain.

  By the time I got to the head of the line, I understood what was happening. We were being tattooed. I watched as the man ahead of me had letters and numbers carved into his skin in black ink with an electric needle. When it was my turn, the Nazi with the tattoo pencil grabbed my arm and started to write. The pain was awful as he dragged the vibrating needle over my skin, but I knew better than to cry out or beg him to stop. Besides, nothing could be worse than what had already happened to me. I had been in a gas chamber. I had looked up into a showerhead and waited for death to come, and it had passed me by. I was alive. A tattoo was nothing to me. Not in that moment.

  B-3087.

  That’s what the Nazis carved into my skin. B for Birkenau, 3087 for my prisoner number. That was the mark they put on me, a mark I would have for as long as I lived. B-3087. That was who I was to them. Not Yanek Gruener, son of Oskar and Mina. Not Yanek Gruener of 20 Krakusa Street, Podgórze, Kraków. Not Yanek Gruener who loved books and science and American movies.

  I was Prisoner B-3087.

  But I was alive.

  After the room where we were tattooed, we were taken to another room with a huge pile of old, used prisoner uniforms, and told to find something that fit. The soldiers made us run, beating us with clubs if we took too long to find new pants and a shirt, so we took whatever we could as fast as we could. I ended up with pants that were too short and a shirt that was too big, but I was lucky to get a pair of wooden shoes that fit. That was important. Shoes were everything in the camps. I moved fast and wasn’t beaten. I could play the game as well as anybody. I had made it this far, hadn’t I? I was alive.

  When we were showered and tattooed and dressed again, we were taken to our new barracks. They were worse than any barracks I’d seen yet. The ground at Birkenau was like a swamp, wet and thick with mud, and there were no floors in the barracks. There was no heat or electric light either. The bunks weren’t beds but shelves, stacked three tall on top of one another, and they stuffed us in again as they had on the trains. There were no mattresses, no pillows, no blankets. Just old, wet straw, when there was anything at all. There were so many of us we could only all lie one direction or we couldn’t lie down at all. It didn’t matter. I was alive. I couldn’t help thinking it over and over again.

  I felt something at my feet, deep inside the shelf, and I reached down to get it. It was a scrap of colorful cloth, a bandanna or a handkerchief, probably left there by one of the gypsies who’d slept in these bunks before us. I tucked the scrap up under my head, hoping to use it as a bit of pillow against my ear, but there was something hard inside it. I unknotted the cloth and found an object hidden within: a little wooden horse. It was a simple children’s toy, a rough carving that just hinted at four legs and a head, but it was smooth and dark like it had been played with. Some gypsy boy or girl had loved this horse. Had somehow kept it with them always, right up until the very end. Had they known they were going to die? Had they left their little horse behind so it wouldn’t die with them? So some part of them might survive and be remembered?

  “We have a boy who is thirteen today,” a man on my shelf said. I raised my head, as did one or two others. “Who will stand with him?”

  No one stirred.

  “Are there not ten men here who will make a minyan with us?”

  “Be quiet,” someone told him. “Go to sleep.”

  “How can you care about such things in a place like this?” someone else asked.

  “It is even more important here and now,” the man said.

  Someone scoffed. “Tomorrow he will be dead. We all will. None of it matters anymore.”

  I was tired, and starving, and my arm burned from the tattoo. But suddenly I thought standing in a minyan for somebody’s bar mitzvah was the most important thing in the word. Worth losing sleep over. Worth being punished or killed.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. The men around me were quiet for a minute after I spoke, and then someone else said yes. And another. And another. When there were ten of us, we climbed down onto the muddy floor, and the man who had first spoken began to pray. More men came down then, more than ten, until we filled the whole ground. The boy looked so young, but I knew I could be only one or two years older than he was. With a start, I realized I had probably missed my own birthday. I was fifteen now, maybe even sixteen. It was winter, but I had no idea what month it was, let alone what day. I had been in concentration camps for more than two years. I looked at the boy and remembered my own hasty bar mitzvah in Kraków. I had been so young then, a lifetime ago.

  The ceremony was fast so we wouldn’t be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered “Mazel tov” and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy looked at me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young?

  “We are alive,” I told him. “We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.”

  I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.

  I stood at the water pump, scrubbing my body. It was bitterly cold out, but I didn’t care. I would scrub my body, I decided, each and every morning, no matter how cold it was, no matter how tired I was. I was alive, and I meant to stay that way.

  We had no soap, but at least I was able to wash away the caking dirt of Birkenau. I paid careful attention to where I had been tattooed. Too many others had let their tattoos get infected, and that had taken them to the camp surgeon. You didn’t want to go to the camp surgeon. Ever. I even rubbed my teeth with my wet fingers — we had no toothbrushes or toothpaste, of course, but it felt important to remember what it was like to be human.

  As I scrubbed the taint of Birkenau from my body, I read the signs the Nazis had posted above the water pump: THE BLOCK IS YOUR HOME: MAINTAIN CLEANLINESS! and ONE LOUSE — YOUR DEATH! Big jokers, the Nazis. You could play by the rules, keep yourself clean, do everything right, and still the Nazis would kill you for looking at them wrong. But I played the game.

  Work at Birkenau was as bad as everywhere else. Here, as in Plaszów, we were to build new barracks. The ground for the new section was so big it would double the size of the camp when it was finished. The Nazis called the new camp B III, but we prisoners called it Mexico. I don’t know where the name started, but Mexico always sounded exotic to me. Warm and sunny, with beaches and laughing faces. Maybe that’s why the prisoners nicknamed it Mexico. To make them think of something very different from what B III really was. The camp storehouse, where the Nazis kept all the valuables the Jews from towns and villages brought with them when they first arrived, we called Canada. Food was weak coffee substitute in the morning, watery soup at lunch, and bread at night. The bread was hard and tasteless and had to serve as breakfast as well. The soup was tepid, and you were lucky if there was a limp potato floating in it. I learned a trick with the soup, which was to wait awhile before lining up for it. The heavier parts of the soup sank to the bottom. If you were among the last in line, your soup was thicker. I almost always got some chunk in my soup by holding bac
k until the end. Just that little bit of extra food might keep me from becoming a Muselmann.

  We were forbidden to go out at night, so instead of the camp latrines we had to use a barrel in the barrack if we had to go to the bathroom. There were two barrels for five hundred people, so we learned to go to the latrines during the day as much as we could. There was one latrine per prison block — really just a row of holes cut in boards that sat over the cesspit. Prisoners stood guard at the door with clocks. Their job was to make sure no prisoner spent more than two minutes in the latrine. If you took longer than that, an SS guard would go in and beat you with a club until you left. There was to be no dawdling at Birkenau.

  The joke was on the Germans this time though. By leaving the same prisoners stationed at the latrine, the one place we all had to go throughout the day, they gave us secret postmen. The Nazis never wanted us to talk to one another, but if ever you had a message for someone else, you could whisper it to the prisoner on watch at the latrine door as you went in. He would remember it, and quietly whisper it to the recipient when he came to take care of his business later that day.

  One day as I went into the latrine with another prisoner, I heard the watchman whisper, “Tonight.” I didn’t know what the message meant, but it wasn’t for me anyway.

  That night I was fast asleep on my shelf, slotted in with all the other prisoners in my barrack, when shouts startled me out of my sleep. Kapos and SS guards were in the barracks, yelling at us to get up and smacking at prisoners with their clubs. I blinked, disoriented and scared, but I managed to tumble off of my shelf. This was something new for Birkenau, where usually they let us at least sleep through the night.

  We quickly assembled in the yard, standing in rows, and I could tell immediately that something was wrong. The floodlights in the towers weren’t sliding lazily over the grounds like usual. They were turned outside, where they swept the woods quickly, back and forth. Guard dogs barked beyond the barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp, and cars and tanks rolled by outside.

  “Prison break,” a man next to me whispered.

  A prison break! Who? How? My heart thumped in my chest. I wished I was with them, whoever they were, running for the forest, the hills — anywhere but here.

  Get out, I prayed for them. Get away. Fly.

  A Nazi came around, checking our numbers against a clipboard. There were always prisoners who couldn’t get out of bed again, who had become Muselmanners. That’s what the Nazis wanted, anyway, to kill us with work and starvation. But which of the missing prisoners were dying back in the barracks, and which of them were running free in the woods?

  The Nazi grabbed my hand and read the number on my arm, then moved on to the next prisoner. My wrist still hurt where he’d grabbed me, his grip was so tight. The Nazis were mad. Prisoners weren’t supposed to stand up for themselves. Prisoners weren’t supposed to escape.

  Will they make it out? Where will they go if they do? Could I escape from Birkenau too? I wondered. Could I live in the woods eating berries and nuts, sleeping out in the cold? It couldn’t be worse than the camps, and maybe not every Pole was like the awful boys throwing snowballs at the train station. Maybe some sympathetic Pole would take me in, hide me in their barn.

  We stood for hours, late into the night. They even went through the roll call again, as though some of us might have slipped off in between, which didn’t seem possible. Then, almost at dawn, there were shouts of excitement from the Nazis beyond the fence. The gates were opened, and a ragged bunch of prisoners were marched back inside, all beaten and bloodied. I immediately felt sick to my stomach and swayed on my feet.

  The escaped prisoners hadn’t made it. They’d been caught. How, I didn’t know, and how many had run and how many they’d caught I didn’t know either. But these men hadn’t made it, and the price would be severe.

  The SS officer of the watch sneered at us. “There is no escape from Birkenau!” he cried. “No escape! Perhaps some of you are thinking about running. There is no one waiting to help you on the outside. There is nowhere for you to hide. You will be caught! And here is what we do to those who try to escape!”

  They lined the men up against a wall in the assembly yard. Rat-tat-tat-tat! The watch officer gunned them down himself, riddling their bodies with bullets.

  “Bring forward their work detail!” the guard cried. Other men were pulled out of the ranks — prisoners who had done nothing but work alongside the men who’d run, prisoners who hadn’t tried to escape.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat! The SS man shot them too. Then the solider turned the gun on us in the roll call ranks. Rat-tat-tat-tat! I closed my eyes and prayed the bullets wouldn’t find me, trembling as prisoners were hit and fell dead to the ground all around me. I couldn’t move though. I couldn’t run. If I flinched, I would be singled out and shot.

  “This is the punishment for escape! All of you will share the blame!” the watch officer yelled. He shot until the machine gun ran out of bullets. Click-click-click.

  The SS officer threw his weapon to the ground. “Clean up this mess,” he ordered, and he marched away, leaving us to carry away our own dead.

  That night, in what little sleeping time there was left, I dreamed that Amon Goeth was chasing me with his dogs. I ran, and ran, and ran, but I could never quite get away. Then one of the dogs leaped and bit my left arm. I woke up screaming and holding my burning left arm — my left arm, where the Nazis had carved B-3087 into my skin.

  After a few months at Birkenau, we were told Auschwitz needed workers. Since Auschwitz was nearby, a sister camp to Birkenau, they marched us down the road and across the fields to get there. Our kapo stopped us at the station, where we waited for new prisoners to join us. You could tell they were new because they stepped off the trains in real clothes, not camp uniforms, with their luggage and children in tow.

  “Leave your luggage!” the Nazis told them.

  “Why? We were told to bring it with us,” they argued.

  The Nazis promised them it would all be returned to them in due time, and the new prisoners believed them. The Nazis loved having new prisoners who didn’t know what was coming. It amused them. I could only feel sorry for these new arrivals. They had no idea the waking nightmare that lay in wait for them.

  “Have you heard of Auschwitz?” our kapo asked the new prisoners. “No? Someone’s waiting for you inside. Do you know who? Death, of course. Death waits for you. Look and see.”

  The new prisoners kept their distance from us veteran prisoners as we were herded toward the main gate. They looked at us with wide eyes, and pulled their children away from us. Did we look like monsters to them? I glanced around at the other prisoners who had come with me from Birkenau. We were skin and bones, with shaved heads and shuffling gaits and red skin on our arms where they’d tattooed us. Our eyes were sunk into our heads, our ears stuck out like donkey ears, and we must have smelled wretched, though of course we’d all been long accustomed to our stench. I was fifteen — maybe sixteen? — and I looked like a sixty-year-old man. To these people just off the train, we all must have looked like escaped mental-asylum patients with our shaved heads and our wooden shoes and oversized blue-and-gray-striped uniforms.

  If only they knew that this was what awaited them. If they weren’t taken right to the gas chambers and the furnaces.

  We passed under the front gates of Auschwitz, where the German words ARBEIT MACHT FREI were written above the gate. I knew enough German to translate it: Work makes you free.

  A smiling SS guard told us a very different story as we passed. “You come in through the front gate,” he said, “but the only way out is through the chimney.”

  I looked up with the new prisoners to the tops of the brick chimneys, where a thick black smoke poured out into the blue-white sky. The crematorium. Little flecks of gray fluttered down all around us, collecting on puddles of water in the yard. I watched a little girl in a blue dress catch one on her tongue like snow. I didn’t have the heart to tell he
r it was the ashes of the people who had come before us.

  I recognized the assembly yard before they ever told us what it was. They all looked the same: a big muddy field surrounded by barbed-wire fence, with a bullet-ridden brick wall especially for executions. Auschwitz prisoners in charge of crowd control organized us into a single-file line. One of them shambled up the line, whispering urgent advice. “You’re eighteen, you’re in good health, and you have a trade. You’re eighteen, you’re in good health, and you have a trade.”

  “What?” said the man in front of me. He wore black trousers and a black vest over a clean white shirt, and he stood with his wife and their young son. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten. “What did that man say? Why should I tell them I’m eighteen?”

  “Your boy,” I said. “Tell them your boy is eighteen and has a trade.”

  They recoiled when they saw me, monster that I was. See if you don’t look the same in a year, I thought.

  “What? But that’s preposterous. He’s nine. He’s just a boy,” the woman said.

  I left it. A Nazi soldier was walking by, and I wasn’t going to get caught talking.

  We had been lined up so someone at the table ahead could process us, and slowly I made my way to the front. Three Nazi officers sat at the table. The two officers on the sides wore brown shirts and pants, but the man in the middle wore the black of a senior officer. He looked immaculate, with a shining black cap, polished medals, and neat white gloves like a traffic policeman. No one was so clean in a camp, ever, not even the camp commandants. This was a man of importance, I could tell right away. He held a baton in his right hand, and with a flick of it to the left or right he was separating the line.

  One direction, I knew, would be for the camp work detail. The other would be for the furnaces.