Prisoner B-3087

by Alan Gratz

  “Good material this time,” I heard him say as we got closer.

  “Yes, Herr Doctor Mengele,” one of the brownshirts told him.

  “Next,” Mengele told the family in front of me. “How old are you?”

  “I am thirty-nine, my wife is thirty-six, and our son is nine,” the man told Mengele.

  “Are you healthy?” Mengele asked the man.

  “Y-yes. Only my wife had pneumonia recently, and she is still weak from it.”

  I closed my eyes. The man was telling them too much, and not the right things.

  “Your occupation?” Mengele asked.

  “I am a clerk.”

  “Not anymore,” Mengele told him. He waved his baton to the right for the man, and to the left for the woman and the little boy. Kapos came and pulled them apart.

  “Wait! Where are you taking them?” the man asked, looking terrified.

  “Papa!” the boy cried. He reached for his father, but an SS officer pulled him and his mother away while another officer pushed the father to the right.

  “Next,” Mengele said to me. “How old are you?”

  I stood as tall as I could. “Eighteen,” I lied.

  “Are you healthy?”

  “As an ox,” I lied again. It was all I could do not to waver as I stood.

  “What is your occupation?”

  I could hardly tell them “student.” The man before had said “clerk,” and he’d been lucky they’d kept him. “Bricklayer,” I lied again.

  Herr Doctor Mengele pointed his baton to the right, and I joined the ranks of the other men and women who’d been kept to work. At least I hoped that was the group I had been assigned to. Beside the new prisoners, the older prisoners like me looked pathetically weak and incapable of any kind of real labor.

  “Where are they taking my wife and son?” the man who had been ahead of me asked a kapo.

  The kapo cuffed him with his club, making the man’s lip bleed. “They’re going to the gas chambers! Now shut up unless you want to join them.”

  For a moment, it looked like the man might say that he would.

  “Save your own life,” someone whispered behind him. “Just let them go. It’s better for them this way.”

  “How can I let them go?” the man cried. “They’re my family. I love them.”

  But he stayed where he was, holding the back of his hand to his bleeding lip as he wept.

  When the selection was finished, one of the brownshirts addressed our group. Herr Doctor Mengele was done for the day.

  “Prisoners!” the brownshirt said. “You are fortunate. You are strong enough to have been selected for work. Once all the Jews of Europe are collected into our camps, we will organize a new Jewish state for you, where you will be free.”

  The new prisoners looked at one another hopefully. Some of them, like the man who’d been in front of me in line, no doubt thought this meant that his wife and son were still alive, and just taken to a different part of the camp. They didn’t know the games the Nazis played yet. The lies they told us for sport.

  “You will be happy to know too that your stay here in the camp will cost you nothing. All the valuables you brought with you are at this moment being distributed among the camps, where they will be used exclusively for the benefit of the Jews.”

  Another lie. At Birkenau, we had seen the stockpiles of riches in “Canada,” the camp storehouse. We had seen how the Nazis made the warehouse their own personal shopping center before shipping trainloads of gold and silver back to Berlin.

  “Work,” the officer urged us. “Work will set you free. If you work hard, if you perform your duties faithfully, you may be attached to the Wehrmacht as service personnel. From there, you may even earn positions of authority within the new Jewish state.”

  The new prisoners nodded, buying it hook, line, and sinker. I didn’t have the heart to tell any of the new Jews it was all a pack of lies when the roll call was finished and we were sent to our new barracks. No one did. The new prisoners would learn soon enough, and they would accept the truth or they would die.

  That night as I lay in the middle slot of my three-tiered bunk, I heard voices in the distance singing. I couldn’t believe it, and I lifted my head to hear better. It was a lullaby my mother had sung to me when I was a child, but it sounded like it was being sung by a choir. Had I finally lost my mind? Was I going crazy?

  “It’s the women,” the man next to me in the bunk whispered. “They sing when mothers and their children are taken to the gas chambers.”

  I listened to their song, distant and plaintive.

  “How often do they sing?” I asked.

  “All day,” the man said. “All day, and every night.”

  Sometimes in the morning, prisoners didn’t wake up.

  They were dead. Or dying. The guards would come in and beat their bodies to make sure they weren’t faking it, and while we were gone to roll call or on a work detail the bodies would disappear, carted off to the furnaces to burn like the rest.

  One morning the man in the bunk next to me didn’t wake. I knew what death looked like by now. Death and I had become old acquaintances. We knew each other when we passed on the street. This man was dead, I was sure.

  “What is it?” another prisoner asked me. He was a boy, like me, maybe one or two years older.

  “This man is dead,” I told him.

  The boy poked him to be sure, then looked around to see if the kapos were coming yet.

  “Go through his pockets,” he said

  “What?” I was momentarily surprised by his words.

  “See if he still has any bread on him.”

  It sounded awful, but if the man did have food on him he definitely didn’t need it anymore. I put my hands in the pockets of his striped jacket and found a lice-ridden piece of bread from last night’s dinner. I brushed off the lice, tore the bread in half, and gave half to the other boy. We scarfed down the bread before the kapos came.

  The boy introduced himself to me as Fred. I told him my name — Yanek. Not B-3087. I hadn’t spoken my name to anyone for as long as I could remember. Fred and I shook hands. It was the first intentional contact I’d had with anyone at the camps since Uncle Moshe had died. We were all the time touching other people — lined up at roll call, at work, in line to get food, in bed at night. But I hadn’t shaken hands or hugged anyone on purpose in months. It felt good to connect with someone, even though Uncle Moshe’s words came back to me again: You have no name, no personality, no family, no friends. Nothing to identify you, nothing to care about. Not if you want to survive.

  Fred and I stood together at roll call, but of course we didn’t say a word to each other the whole time. When it was time for work detail, we were assigned together to the gravel pit, where we worked side by side breaking rocks.

  “Where are you from?” Fred asked me while we worked.

  I hesitated, remembering Uncle Moshe’s warnings. But Fred was the first person close to my age I’d met since hiding under the floors at Plaszów with Isaac and Thomas. I loved just talking again. Being human.

  “Kraków,” I told him.

  “Me too!” Fred said. We compared streets, and discovered we had grown up not too far from each other. We even went to some of the same parks and stores. “Every day I would walk my sister to school down Krakusa Street,” he said, remembering. Then he got very quiet.

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “She and my parents came here with me. I was sent to the right. They were sent to the left.”

  I knew what that meant. We all did. His family was dead.

  Overhead, we heard the drone of airplanes, and we all looked up.

  “British planes,” someone whispered. I didn’t know how they could tell, but I hoped they were right. British planes meant the Allies were advancing, taking the fight to the Germans. The Allies were the forces aligned against Germany — England, France, America, and the rest.

  The kapos cracked their whip
s and made us all get back to work, but soon we heard explosions in the distance. The Allies were bombing close by!

  “Sometimes I wish the Allies would drop bombs on us,” Fred said quietly. “Blow this place to bits, and all the Nazis and kapos with it. And me too.”

  “We can’t give up,” I told him. “We have to survive.”

  Fred tried to smile, but I could tell he was still thinking about his family. He didn’t say anything more the rest of the morning. It was only at lunch that he felt like talking again. He lifted a spoonful of the tepid, flavorless broth and poured it back into his bowl.

  “You know what I’m going to do first thing, when I get out of the camps? I’m going to buy a big, warm, golden loaf of bread. Then I’m going to slice off a thick piece, and I’m going to spread butter all over it and eat it in three bites.”

  I laughed. “I’ll take five pastries. Oh, and bagels. Three of those.”

  “With cream cheese!”

  “Carrot cake with walnuts.”

  “Chocolate pudding!”

  Just talking about all that delicious food made my stomach rumble, but it was fun to dream. We kept up our running menu all through work in the gravel pit that afternoon, and into the evening in the barracks while we lay next to each other on our shelf.

  “Fresh challah bread!” I said.

  “Sauerkraut.”

  “Mushroom soup.”

  “Stuffed cabbage.”

  “Will you two shut up about food?” a prisoner near us yelled at last. “I can’t stand it any longer!”

  Fred and I laughed, but we stopped. It was best that we got as much sleep as we could anyway. We had a hard day’s work ahead of us, and nothing good to eat.

  Fred and I became inseparable in the camp. We stood together at roll call, we ate together, we tried to get on the same work details, we slept beside each other at night. It was good to have a friend. But one day I noticed Fred was slower at chopping wood than he had been the day before, and at dinner he wouldn’t eat his bread.

  “What’s wrong, Fred?”

  “I don’t feel good,” he told me. He gave me his bread and climbed up into bed. I saved the bread for him in my pocket. He would want it tomorrow, I was sure.

  But he didn’t want it then. He didn’t eat his soup at lunch either. I had to do some of his work at the timber yard to cover for him too. That night as we lay on our shelf, I whispered to him that he had to get better.

  “I can’t, Yanek. It hurts.”

  “What does?”

  “My stomach. My head. My throat.”

  Fred was sick, there was no doubt about it. But you couldn’t get sick in the camps. Not so sick you couldn’t work. There was a camp clinic, but no one wanted to go there. People didn’t come back from the camp clinic.

  “You’ll be better tomorrow,” I told Fred. “I saved you some bread for when you’re better.”

  Fred wasn’t better the next day. He was worse. He couldn’t even get out of bed.

  “Fred, you have to get up!” I told him. “You have to move! The kapo will come for you soon!”

  “No,” Fred moaned. “No, Yanek. Go. You have to. Go.”

  “What’s this? What’s going on?” an angry voice demanded. It was our barrack kapo. He pushed me aside and poked Fred with his club. “Get up. Time for roll call.”

  “He can’t,” I told the kapo. “He’s sick.”

  The kapo struck me with his club, sending me to the floor. I put my hand to my ear and felt blood.

  “Get up!” the kapo told Fred again. He hit him with the club, and Fred moaned.

  I stood up and was about to grab the kapo to try and stop him, but another prisoner took me by the arm. “Come away,” he whispered. “Come away, boy.”

  The kapo hit Fred again, and again.

  “Fred!” I yelled.

  “Get to roll call, or you’ll get a beating!” the kapo threatened me.

  “Yanek,” Fred moaned. “Go. Please.”

  The kapo hit him again as the other prisoner pulled me away.

  “He’s going to kill him!” I pleaded with the man.

  “Yes, and he’ll kill you too if you interfere. Is that what you want?”

  I stood in line at the roll call, watching for Fred. He had to get up. He could make it. He wasn’t a Muselmann yet. He was just sick! He would get better!

  Fred arrived at roll call at the very end, but only because he was dragged there by two kapos. His face was bloody where they’d beaten him, and he hung limp, not even trying to stand. I fought back the tears that came to my eyes.

  The kapos hauled Fred to the front of the assembly yard, where a gallows was built. It was a simple thing: just two standing poles with a bar between them. From the pole hung a rope with a noose tied at the end. The two kapos lifted Fred’s neck into the noose and tightened it, leaving a chair under his feet to keep him from hanging. He was so weak he couldn’t even stand, and the rope cut into his neck, turning his face blue. I choked back a sob.

  “This man says he cannot work,” a Nazi told us.

  No, I thought. No, he can. He’s a good worker. He’s just sick.

  “Work makes you free,” the Nazi told us. “But if you cannot work —”

  The Nazi nodded to the kapos, and one of them kicked the chair out from under Fred. He lifted his head for just a moment, long enough for me to see his horrified face, and then I couldn’t watch anymore.

  That night I said a kaddish for Fred as I ate his bread, and made another vow never to forget.

  One morning after roll call at Auschwitz, we were told we were being moved. All of us. I had never counted, but there had to be five thousand of us at roll call every day, give or take a few hundred. Workers were needed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the officer of the watch told us, and we were being sent to fill their barracks.

  I could feel the other prisoners tensing around me. If we could have whispered and talked, we would have. Every day, Allied planes flew overhead, and the bombs they dropped got closer. Sometimes at night we would even hear the sound of guns. Big guns. Tank guns, anti-aircraft guns. At the beginning of the war, the Germans had taken the fight to France, to Belgium, to Holland, to Russia. Now the fight was happening in Germany. So when the Nazis said they were moving us to Sachsenhausen because the camp needed workers, none of us believed them. The Allies were getting closer. They were pushing back! Any day now we might be liberated. That was the talk in the barracks. The Nazis were probably moving us away from the front lines.

  There were no trains to take us to Sachsenhausen, the watch officer told us, so we would walk. That was another good sign for the end of the war, if the Germans had to use all their trains for the war effort. But it was bad for us. I had no idea where Sachsenhausen was, or how far we would have to go, but just the thought of walking all day made me feel exhausted. There were others, I knew, who would never make it a kilometer. But walk we would, some in bare feet and some in odd-sized wooden clogs, in our thin uniforms, in the middle of winter.

  The Nazis gave us each a half a loaf of bread, and told us it was to last us the whole trip. But how many days would that be? None of us dared ask. I decided right away that I would eat just a bit of my bread at a time, to make it last. If I ended up with extra, I would eat the rest at Sachsenhausen.

  Under the whips and clubs of kapos and SS officers, we marched out through the front of Auschwitz.

  You come in through the front gate, but the only way you leave is through the chimney, the guards had told us when we arrived. Ha! Look at me now, I wanted to shout, walking out through the front gate, the way I came in! I had survived the ghetto. I had survived Plaszów, and Wieliczka, and Trzebinia, and Birkenau, and now Auschwitz. I was going to survive it all. I was going to be alive when the Allies liberated us. This I swore.

  But nothing had prepared me for the death march. That is what we began to call it, as our numbers dwindled. We marched for hours upon hours each day, stumbling and staggering along as
best we could. We walked, and we walked, and we walked, and I began to think there was no Sachsenhausen. That the Nazis merely meant to walk us to death. Those who could not keep up were shot and left by the roadside. The crack of guns behind us was our constant companion, and you knew you had slowed too much if the guns got too loud.

  Snow fell on us most days, and the dirt road we walked on was frozen when we were lucky, freezing slush when we were not. Those without shoes were the first to fall behind and die. Some tore strips from their canvas jackets and wrapped them around their bare feet, but once the canvas got wet it was worse. I at least had wooden clogs to keep my feet off the frozen earth, but without socks my feet were blocks of ice anyway.

  There was no water. We ate snow when we stopped for the night, caught flakes on our tongues as we walked. We slept in the open when there was no barn or shed to be found, which was most nights, sleeping on top of one another like dogs for the warmth. The kapos and Nazis had fires to keep them warm. At least in the camps we had shelter to keep the weather off us at night. Out here, the elements killed more prisoners than our guards did.

  On the fifth day — or was it the sixth? I had lost count — I woke up and I was sure I couldn’t go on any farther. My arms and legs were so cold I couldn’t make them move in the morning, and I was sure a Nazi would shoot me. But there were others like me, many others. One man’s ear had frozen to the ground in the night. The Nazis gave us time to wake and stir before resuming the march, which was a small mercy. Perhaps they just didn’t have bullets for us all.

  As we shambled along later that day, I looked at the men around me. We were skeletons. Ghosts. Filthy toothless creatures in oversized, soiled prisoner uniforms. The hair on our heads was growing in thin and scraggly from not-too-recent shavings. Our fingers were long and bony like vampires from some Hollywood horror movie, the skin on our faces cracked and drawn back like mummies. The older men had the beginnings of beards on their gray skin, and we all walked like zombies, stumbling more than striding, trying always to stay just one step ahead of the Nazis and their guns.