Prisoner B-3087

by Alan Gratz

  But the planes went away and the bombs stopped falling, and the train started to move again. I couldn’t have told you if I was more disappointed or relieved.

  When the door to the train car finally opened at Gross-Rosen, our new concentration camp, bodies fell out. We left even more bodies in the cars. Those of us who had survived the trip, who had survived camp after camp after camp, shuffled into Gross-Rosen without fear or expectation. Nothing the Nazis could do could surprise any of us now.

  They gave us our barrack assignments and put us right to bed. I sank into a deep stupor. First thing the next morning we were put to work right away, with no more time to recover from our torturous train ride like at Bergen-Belsen.

  On the train, I had wanted a bomb to fall on us to put me out of my misery. But now that I was back in camp and it was the awful business as usual, my old instinct to survive kicked in again. If it was a game, then I had my own part to play; the Nazis would try to kill me, slowly, randomly, teasingly, and I would resist. I would work. I would survive. If the Nazis were going to play their game, so was I.

  The Nazis had needed more workers at Gross-Rosen for the war effort. They still believed they could beat the Allies, even though we’d heard that the Russians had taken Warsaw and that Dresden was in flames.

  “Any day now,” prisoners whispered among one another, “the Allies will be in Berlin, and we will be set free.”

  But not today.

  Today we built more barracks. As I worked, I told myself there would be another world after this one. A bright, shining, beautiful future, where I didn’t wear blue and gray stripes, where I ate three full meals a day, where I wouldn’t work until I passed out. Where I could have friends again. Where I could have family again. Where I could laugh again. That world existed, I knew. I couldn’t reach it now, not yet, but soon. If I survived.

  So I worked. Not so hard I would die, and not so little I would be punished, as Moshe had told me so long ago. I put my head down and worked, day and night, day and night. Worked to live.

  “You there,” a kapo said to me one day. He stopped me with the end of his club, poked into my chest. I raised my eyes to him, the first time I’d looked up in days, maybe weeks.

  “Where is your button?” he asked me.

  I blinked. I had no idea what he was talking about. Dully, I looked down at the ragged, dirty shirt I wore. The top button was missing. I hadn’t even noticed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. My voice surprised me. It was nothing more than a croak. I hadn’t spoken a word to anyone for days. I licked my lips and tried again. “I must have lost it.”

  “You know what the penalty is for losing a button, don’t you?” the kapo said. “Twenty lashes.”

  Twenty lashes. I was going to be flogged for the “crime” of losing a button. I closed my eyes. I was too tired to cry, too exhausted to even feel angry.

  At roll call, I was pulled out of the lines and marched to a wooden “horse” — a polished, barkless log with four wooden feet — and laid over it with my bare back facing up.

  “Keep count,” the Nazi with the whip told me.

  Crack! My back erupted in pain as the first lash hit me. I jerked on the log, almost falling off, but I grabbed on tighter. If I fell off, it would only be worse for me.

  “One,” I said in Polish.

  “In German!” the soldier said. “We’ll start again.”

  Crack! I closed my eyes to the pain. How would I ever survive twenty lashes when two hurt worse than anything I had ever felt before?

  “Eins,” I said.

  Crack!

  “Zwei.”

  Crack!

  “Drei.”

  Crack!

  “Vier.”

  Crack!

  “Fuenf.”

  Crack!

  “… Sechs.”

  Crack!

  “… Sieben.”

  Crack!

  “… Acht.”

  Crack!

  “… … Neun.”

  Crack!

  “… … Zehn.”

  Crack!

  “… … Einzehn?”

  The Nazi soldier tutted. “No, no, no. It is elf. Did they teach you nothing in your Jewish schools before the war? I will teach you. We’ll begin again.”

  I remember very little after my lashes were finished. I couldn’t even tell you how many I eventually had — many more than twenty, that was certain. When they were finished with me, I was dragged back to the barracks and dumped onto one of the shelves, where I passed out.

  That night I had a dream. I was in a beautiful green meadow. Yellow wildflowers grew here and there, so tall they swayed in the light summer’s breeze. In the distance a brook burbled happily along, and a great tree beyond it spread its branches wide. I sat in the grass and listened to a cricket chirp nearby, totally at peace.

  But then a dark cloud appeared on the horizon. Lightning flashed, and thunder rolled over the hills. “No,” I said, not wanting my perfect afternoon disturbed. But the storm kept coming.

  Lightning split the air near me, and — krakoom! — the thunder knocked me down. The earth shook beneath me. The ground cracked and opened. I tried to grab something to stop my fall, but my hands clutched only air. I fell into a deep, black abyss lined with tree roots and rocks, and they struck me as I fell.

  Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! I counted them in German as I fell — eins, zwei, drei, vier, fuenf —

  Thoom!

  Something exploded near the barracks, shaking me out of my dream. I raised myself up on my elbows — I had to sleep on my stomach, because my back was too raw with pain. There were prisoners packed in all around me — roll call had long since ended, and it was the middle of the night.

  Thoom!

  The barrack rumbled again as another bomb fell close to the camp. Everyone was awake now, every prisoner, and we watched the roof and waited without a word, waited to see if one of the bombs would fall on us and kill us all. But no. The bombs fell all through the night, and soon we all went back to sleep. Raining death was no reason not to sleep. Not when there was work to be done tomorrow.

  As I laid back down on my stomach, my bloody back still screaming in agony, I remembered my dream. I told myself I would not fall down the hole. I would climb out again. The Allies were getting closer, and I was going to be there to welcome them when they got here.

  From Gross-Rosen we were to be moved again, this time to a camp called Dachau. And once more, we would walk.

  It was late in the winter, almost spring, but the ground was still frozen, and the snow hadn’t melted. The wooden clogs I wore were terrible for crossing icy patches and clomping through snowdrifts, but I was still better off than those who had lost their shoes, or never had any to begin with. If you could keep good care of your feet in the camps, especially on the marches, you could survive.

  The sides of the road were littered with the dead bodies of Jews who had marched this way before us. They were blue and frozen, lumped into the ditches along the side of the road so cars could still pass. The bodies were a constant reminder to us to keep up the pace.

  As we walked past the frozen corpses, I wondered who else used this road. Somebody else had to, surely — someone besides the German army. Who were these people who passed the bodies of dead Jews in the ditches every day on their way into town to work? How could they not see what was happening? How could they be all right with this?

  Along the way, we passed through villages and suburbs. Little houses lined the roads, houses with painted shutters and wreaths on the doors. Electric lights lit the windows, and inside we could sometimes see a family sitting down to listen to the radio together, or washing dishes in the kitchen. Every now and then from a doorway hung a Nazi flag, bright red with a black swastika in a white circle. It was warning enough that we should keep our heads down and stay quiet as we passed through.

  The route from Gross-Rosen to Dachau, north of Munich, took us through Czechoslovakia and back in
to Germany again. Czechoslovakia was still held by Germany — it had been one of the first countries to fall at the start of the war — but the homes we passed now were Czech, not German. Germany had conquered them, but that didn’t make them love the Germans any more. If anything, the Czechs hated their Nazi overlords. There was a change in the SS officers guarding us when we crossed into Czechoslovakia. They still walked like they owned the place, but they were more wary, watching the doorways and crossroads for any sign of trouble. There were no Nazi flags to welcome them here.

  No Czech revolutionaries jumped out from behind the bushes to free us, but the Czech people fought back in less violent ways. In one little village, there was bread left out on a windowsill. Bread! One of the prisoners saw it and ran for it. Others joined him, and the bread was gone before the Nazis could yell at them to stop. I saw a loaf of bread on the doorstep of another house, but it was gone before I could get it — snatched up by starving prisoners and devoured on the spot. Every Czech village we passed had some little food set out. Not nearly enough for us all, and not nearly enough for those lucky enough to get a bite to eat, but it was something.

  Farther inside Czechoslovakia, some of the villagers hung out of their windows to throw whatever they had to us — crusts of bread, half-eaten apples, raw potatoes. The Czechs couldn’t share much — there was a war on, after all, and food was hard to come by. But their kindness in the face of the Nazi soldiers and their guns warmed my heart. It was easy to think the worst of humanity when all I saw was brutality and selfishness, and these people showed me there was still good in the world, even if I rarely saw it.

  The kapos took as much of the food as they could for themselves, but a little still made it into the hands and mouths of the prisoners. The SS officers were mad about that, but they yelled at the Czechs, not us Jews.

  “Can’t you see you’re helping traitors to the Fatherland?” they cried. The Czechs didn’t care. Germany wasn’t their fatherland, and how were we Jews traitors anyway? What had we done other than to exist?

  We marched on for three days, and I still hadn’t been lucky enough to get any food from the kindhearted Czechs. I was starving, and I knew I would die of hunger before the cold got me. I was already struggling to keep ahead of the prisoners at the back of the column. Any farther back, and I would end up one of the frozen Jews on the roadside with a bullet in my head.

  There was a kapo in front of me with four big loaves of Czech bread slung over his back in a cloth sack. I stared at the bread as I walked, imagining having such a feast. Four loaves! That bread would go bad before that kapo ever ate all four loaves. The kapos were healthier and better fed than the rest of us, but they were still not fed as well as the Nazis. He couldn’t possibly eat that much and not get sick. What if I could talk him into giving me some? Not every kapo was a monster.

  I summoned what little strength I had left and moved up closer to the kapo. I couldn’t speak to him now, here, on the road. There were too many other kapos around. But maybe if I stayed close to him, made him see me as a real person, the way the Czechs saw us, maybe when I asked him tonight for bread he would take pity on me and give me some of his hoard.

  I sidled up alongside the kapo, but when I saw his face I gasped.

  It was Moonface.

  Moonface, the kapo who had beaten me whenever he could at Bergen-Belsen. Somehow he’d been transferred to Gross-Rosen, and now he was marching south with us to Dachau.

  Moonface turned and would have seen me, but I quickly backed away. What terrible luck! I wanted to cry again. So much bread, so much more bread than one person needed, and it was Moonface who held it all! Moonface would never give it to me, or to anyone else. He was too cruel.

  But as I trudged along, I couldn’t help staring at that sack of bread. If I didn’t get food by the end of the day, I would die. I knew it. My arms shook on their own, and the green spiky leaves and toxic red berries of hollies growing alongside the road started to look appetizing. I’d be eating poisonous fruit and bark by nightfall if I didn’t get some of that bread.

  I marched up beside Moonface again, my hunger making me brave. What could Moonface do to me that hunger and the cold weren’t already doing? I walked right alongside him until he looked down and saw me. I smiled at him, trying to make him remember me not as the boy he used to punch in the face, but as one of his best workers at Bergen-Belsen. Moonface frowned at me like he was trying to remember who I was, then ignored me.

  I did everything I could to get his attention, short of talking to him. I crossed back and forth in front of him. I walked right beside him on the left and right, matching him step for step. When he walked faster, I walked faster, even though my feet were sore and frozen and my legs were so weak they wanted to quit. I wouldn’t let them. Not yet.

  That night we stopped in a field. I watched where Moonface went, away from the other kapos. Maybe he didn’t want to share with them either. Moonface opened his sack and pulled out one of his loaves of bread, and I inched closer. I glanced around to make sure none of the other kapos were watching. If they saw me, if they heard what I was about to ask, Moonface would beat me to death. He would have to, to save face. But Moonface had sat far enough away from the other kapos that they didn’t notice me. The only people around were the mute living skeletons — my fellow prisoners.

  I moved close enough to stand over Moonface, and he looked up at me with his scarred, pitted, round face. I faltered. This was the face I had avoided so often at Bergen-Belsen. This was the face I had fled to Gross-Rosen to avoid. Moonface would beat me senseless for what I wanted to ask him. But what choice did I have? I cleared my throat and spoke for the first time in days.

  “Do you remember me?” I croaked.

  Moonface grunted and tore a bit of bread off with his teeth.

  “If you remember me,” I said, my voice cracking, “then you know I’m a good worker.”

  The other prisoners on the ground around us looked up at me with wide eyes. They must have been thinking the same thing I had, that Moonface would kill me just for talking to him. I pushed on before my courage left me.

  “I — I want to work, but I won’t make it on the march another day if I don’t get some bread. I haven’t eaten in three days, and I was — I was hoping you could give me some.”

  Moonface stared at me, his mouth slowly chewing on the bread like a cow working its cud.

  “I — I would like to be able to work,” I told him. “But I can’t work without food.”

  Moonface laid his bread aside and pulled out a knife. He stood and put it against my throat. I tried not to flinch, but I could feel where the knife nicked my skin. Blood from the cut ran down my neck. The prisoners around me seemed to hold their breath, waiting for me to die. Or maybe it was me holding my breath. I couldn’t tell. All I could do was stand there, as tall and strong as possible, and wait for Moonface to decide my fate.

  Moonface held the knife against my neck, staring into my eyes. I stared right back, showing him how strong I was, showing him I wasn’t afraid to die. Neither of us blinked. Another long minute went by. If he was going to kill me, I wished he would just get it over with. I was ready to scream!

  At last, Moonface pulled the knife away from my neck and I breathed again. To my amazement and to the amazement of the other prisoners watching us, Moonface cut a hunk off the loaf with his knife and tossed the bread to me. A murmur of surprise went through the prisoners around us, but Moonface silenced them with a glare. I nodded my thanks to the big ugly kapo and hurried away before he changed his mind and killed me.

  My heart was racing as I found a place to lie down and eat. With shaking fingers I tore off a small piece and lifted it to my cracked lips. No bread had ever tasted so good in my life. I wanted to eat it all right then and there, but there was no telling how much farther we would have to walk. I had to save as much as I could.

  Moonface had found it in his heart to be generous once, for whatever reason. But just this once.
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br />   We marched another three days before we crossed back into Germany. The Czech people continued to help us as much as they could along the way, but once we were back in Germany the doors in the villages were closed to us again, and the window shades pulled down tight. If the Germans didn’t see us, they didn’t have to think about us. But we left enough dead bodies in the ditches that they would know we’d been through.

  I made my bread last as long as I could, but there was no way I could march for another three days. Neither could any of the other prisoners, from the looks of our ragged ranks. How close was Dachau? How much longer would it take us to get there? Would any of us be alive to see it?

  The Nazis must have been thinking the same thing. On the afternoon of the sixth day, we came to a tiny depot, where a train waited for us. The kapos split us up — Jews in one train car, Poles in another — and we were loaded on. In a third car, the Nazis loaded in wooden crates.

  “Our documents,” one of the other prisoners told me. “They send them along with us wherever we go, the monsters. They like to keep track of who they kill and how they do it.”

  It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go through for “traitors to the Fatherland.”

  The cattle car was crowded and unsanitary like all the rest, and there was no food or water but what we brought with us. At least we weren’t walking anymore, which was a small mercy.

  A day and a night passed in the train. I drifted in and out of sleep, swaying on my aching feet, but was awakened by the sound of an explosion. Ka-boom. It was close enough to rattle the car. Planes droned overhead. Russian? American? British? I had no idea. But they were dropping bombs all around us. Boom. Boom. Ka-boom! The last of them hit so close we were all thrown forward. The train’s brakes screeched as it slammed to a halt, and we all struggled to look out through the slats and see what had happened. Soon word came to us from the Polish car behind us: The last car on the train had been hit with a bomb. No one had been hurt, but the car that held all our documents was destroyed.