Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora
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Across from me at the window sat Marius, a middle-aged man with a handlebar mustache stained yellow from nicotine. He wore a leather jacket, corduroy pants, work boots, and a cap as dirty as his fingernails. A corncob pipe was stuffed in one jacket pocket while cloves of garlic, which he munched on like bonbons, were stuffed in the other pocket. Marius was a Corsican plumber and a low-level official of the French Communist Party. Next to him sat a beautiful young Honduran with shoulder-length jet-black hair and flawless olive skin. She was a stunning mix of Central American Indian and Conquistador. Her Austrian-Jewish husband, sitting on her other side, was at least twice her age. He was some kind of professor and had a coiffure like Albert Einstein. Every time I looked at him I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a correlation between high IQ and crazy hair growth. She constantly fussed over their two-year-old twin daughters sitting between them. They were headed to an enemy civilian internment camp because of their Honduras citizenship.
Sitting at the window on my side was a refined lady who was constantly wiping her nose and dabbing at tears with a lace handkerchief. Her husband I recognized from photos in the newspapers.
He had been an official in the French Socialist Front Populaire government, which had been in power from 1936 to 1938. From their conversations I gathered that the girl next to me was their daughter, Stella.
For some reason the monotonous clicking of the car’s wheels on the rails reminded me of the metronome my mother used when she rehearsed for a recital. She was a contralto who had performed all over Europe before I was born. After I arrived, my father decreed that there would be no more tours, but she still performed locally.
There were times her rehearsals drove me out of the house. I closed my eyes and thought, if only now my homework was being disturbed by her practicing scales.
Stella leaned toward me. Her breath tickled my ear.
‘‘Would you like to step out with me?’’
I nodded, welcoming the chance to stretch my legs.
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‘‘I can’t bear watching my mother cry,’’ she said once we were outside the compartment.
‘‘Why were you and your parents arrested?’’
‘‘Because of my father’s politics and editorials and my mother being Jewish. My father’s internment has been a priority since the Nazis crossed the demarcation line. How about you?’’
‘‘Because of pure, irresponsible stupidity.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘It’s not important. Never mind.’’
Oh, Stella was pretty, but she was a pretty stranger. I wasn’t about to open up to her. At least not yet.
‘‘How about your parents?’’ Stella asked.
‘‘They’re safe, but I’m worried about them. I’m sure they’re going to be frantic when they realize I’m gone.’’
By giving the Nazis false identification papers I had made it impossible for my parents to trace me. Neither my parents nor any of my friends knew that I was involved in the Resistance, and the only person in the Resistance who I knew was the man who had given me the I.D. papers, Lucien Meffre. He was the man who recruited me and had been my contact.
A German officer came down the hall.
‘‘Maybe we shouldn’t be out here.’’ I whispered, touching her arm.
Once we sat down I saw the SS officer stop and peer through the glass window in the sliding door of our compartment. I stiffened. Now we’re going to get it, I thought. The boche opened the door. With his chest full of medals, he made a perfect poster for the
‘‘master race.’’ He smiled and addressed the mother of the twins.
‘‘I have milk for your girls,’’ he told her in perfect Spanish.
She seemed more resigned than happy about the news. Her husband stroked the heads of their daughters as she followed the officer. He looked sad. I believe there were tears in his eyes.
The mother returned a while later with her dress in disarray, her face flushed, and two cans of evaporated milk cradled in her arm. Her husband snatched them from her as she sat back down.
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Not a word was uttered between them the rest of the way. Their uneasiness shrouded our compartment. From that moment, all conversation seemed trite. The couple’s unsavory predicament brought home to all of us that we were at the Nazis’ mercy. But the guards sure made an effort to seem friendly. For our journey they acted as if they had gone to charm school. During our eleven-hour ride, they even managed to get us some food—a piece of bread, some cheese, and some sausage. The professor wondered out loud if the sausage contained pork. I almost laughed. That should have been the least of his worries.
I went out to take a leak. As I walked to the end of the car, I glanced into the other compartments. There wasn’t an empty seat in any of them. All my fellow prisoners had been held at the Hotel Excelsior in Nice. Some had been locked up for two weeks, others only a day. While I was pedaling to Bernard’s, they had been herded into the street and marched to the train station.
We were all asleep when we reached Paris. The jolt of our car’s being detached from the train brought us back to our sad reality.
Stella’s head had been resting on my shoulder.
‘‘Oh, I am so sorry,’’ she said blushing.
‘‘I didn’t mind.’’
She flashed that shy smile again.
To ensure that none of us had the chance to melt into the crowd of travelers at the Paris station, the Nazis had an engine pull our car to a desolate area of the train yard. There, two green-and-white buses waited to take us to Drancy.
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Drancy, November 1943–January 1944: I sat next to Stella’s father. Stella sat in front of us with an arm wrapped around her mother. Two SS guards stood on the ticket-taker’s platform at the rear of the bus. I decided to memorize the street signs so if I escaped I could make my way back to the station. With Nazi goons checking papers, it would be impossible to slip onto a passenger train, but I might be able to hop a freight train.
The buses rumbled down empty boulevards. Because of the gasoline rationing there were hardly any vehicles in sight. The Parisians we passed were either on foot or on bicycle. I had never been to Paris before, but the people sitting around me remarked on how drab and dark the capital now looked. Many store windows were boarded up and the entrances were protected by stacks of sandbags.
Other shops appeared to be abandoned. Some of the streets barely hinted at human life.
‘‘How can you be proud of something that doesn’t belong to you anymore?’’ a man behind me asked.
We traveled alongside a high gray stucco wall. ‘‘ Monsieur, you lived in Paris for some time. What’s behind this wall?’’ I asked.
‘‘ Père Lachaise. My mother is buried there.’’
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We passed the gated entrance to the most famous cemetery in France. Sitting on the steps was a woman breast-feeding her baby.
Stella turned around, with tears wetting her cheeks.
‘‘Daddy, I want to visit grandma’s grave.’’
‘‘I’m sure we will soon.’’
I could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe his own words, and that was unnerving. What does he know that’s making him lie to his own daughter? I asked myself. I searched for words of comfort to say to Stella. Realizing I would be deluding both of us, I sat silent and stared at her red hair.
Our bus reached Boulevard Gambetta. On the corner was an elderly gentleman relieving himself at a pissoir, a green kiosk with a pointed roof, encircled by a three-foot-wide metal band that obscured the user’s midriff. Some of the prisoners giggled and waved.
The man looked up and raised his hat. As we went down rue de Paris, a couple of kids on roller skates raced after our bus, trying to hitch a ride, but they backed off when they saw the German guards.
; The buses turned onto avenue du Parc and we found ourselves at our destination, a horseshoe-shaped housing complex with an expansive cinder-lined courtyard. Barbed wire surrounded the four-story buildings and a large gate sealed the compound’s opening, which was manned by gendarmes instead of Nazis.
I turned to Stella’s father as our bus drove into the courtyard.
‘‘Is this a French military brig?’’
‘‘This is part of a new agreement between the Vichy and the Occupation administration. Frenchmen doing the Nazi’s dirty work,’’ he said. ‘‘They’re the jailers of many brave men who fought side by side with them when the Germans invaded.’’
The captain of the gendarmes stepped onto the rear platform and was handed a ledger by one of the SS.
‘‘Raise your hand when I call your name,’’ he barked.
When he came to Pierre Berceau, I held up my arm.
‘‘Stella, Ruth, and Emile Binda. . . .’’
The captain stared at Mr. Binda, then looked down at his feet.
Mr. Binda shook his head.
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‘‘He used to stand at attention and salute me when I entered the ministry building,’’ he whispered to his family.
‘‘ Raus! ’’ The two SS guards waved us off the bus.
As I helped an elderly couple with their luggage, Frenchmen with red armbands directed us to the center of the courtyard, where they had us line up three deep. These red armbands were the camp police, the Nazis’ lackeys, mainly well-educated professionals but prisoners just like us. They received certain privileges for administrating the camp. It was the efficient Teutonic way of saving their manpower for the battlefield.
The buses pulled out and the gendarmes closed the gates. A red armband, whose mannerisms made me think he had been a school-teacher, briefed us.
‘‘You’ll be housed in the building to your left. The construction of all these buildings hasn’t been completed, but for lodgings they are more than adequate. The connecting building at the end of the yard is off limits. It’s quarantined. We have a scarlet fever epidemic here in Drancy, but there’s no reason to be alarmed by this. All those that have been stricken are quarantined. Now, if you have had scarlet fever, please step out.’’
Without thinking I stepped forward.
‘‘Only one?’’ the man asked. ‘‘Don’t be afraid. We need you because you’re immune. You cannot catch it twice.’’
I started thinking I had been foolish, and then I found Stella standing next to me. Only a handful of us stayed in Drancy. The rest, mostly Jews, gave the Nazis the twelve hundred inmates they needed to fill a train. The Germans would never waste coal on a light load. To Stella’s relief, her parents were able to avoid the deportation because of her assignment in the quarantine ward.
Stella and I spent many hours together in that ward. While she attended to the needs of the stricken, I carried the pails that their bedpans filled down to Le Chaˆteau. Our shithouse got its presti-gious name because of the castle-like crenellations at the top of the walls. Every day I emptied one hundred and ten pails, making fifty-five trips up and down four floors. My legs must have thought I was 22
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living in the Eiffel Tower. And at the end of every shift I scrubbed the stairs to erase the double yellow line created by the sloshing pails.
I would watch Stella with admiration and warmth as she fed patients whose hands were too shaky to hold a spoon, applied ointment to bedsores, and sponged down bodies that were wracked with fever. There wasn’t a single patient who died whom she didn’t shed tears for.
‘‘You cannot cry for everyone,’’ I told her.
‘‘Someone should.’’
‘‘You’re going to make yourself sick.’’
‘‘I can’t help that it acts on me this way,’’ she shot back. ‘‘Anyway, they said we couldn’t catch it again.’’
‘‘But there are a lot of other things you might catch.’’
‘‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’’
I could make her laugh and evaporate some of her tears with my Laurel and Hardy impersonations. I was never sure if she was giggling at the jokes or just found me incredibly silly. Regardless, it seemed to distract her from the sadness that surrounded her.
Stella also enjoyed my recollections of my mother’s singing.
She felt it was a pity that my father had stopped her from touring, but she thought it must have been magical to grow up in a house echoing with arias. She missed her violin and was overly concerned that she would lose her ability to play.
‘‘If you’ve been practicing since you were six, there’s no chance of that,’’ I reassured her.
Emptying the buckets wasn’t my only task. I was in charge of cleaning Le Chaˆteau, too. Marius, the Corsican plumber, gave me the title ‘‘ Roi du Chaˆteau,’’ or ‘‘King of the Shithouse.’’ To keep the long row of concrete squat toilets disinfected, twice a day I would sprinkle lime around the funneled holes in the floor. Easy enough, but some prisoners had got into the habit of painting the ceiling with their feces, especially in the women’s section. This exercise in frustration and animosity toward the Nazis made my life a stinking hell. It was impossible to escape the brown raindrops as I struggled PART I | DRANCY
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to unglue their mess with a garden hose and broom. I had only the clothes that I had been arrested in, and the stench on them became unbearable for everyone. When Stella stopped brushing up against me I knew something had to be done. Thankfully, one red armband took me to a storeroom full of suitcases and clothing.
‘‘Take anything that fits. These belonged to the departed.’’
I didn’t ask if ‘‘departed’’ meant dead or deported. The armful of tailor-made suits I quickly chose got me the nickname ‘‘the Dandy of the Shithouse.’’
I was also responsible for emptying the pails of those prisoners in solitary confinement, who were held in the same building those in quarantine. This was where the SS and Gestapo tortured men and women. Many times I would find a mangled corpse instead of the living person I had spoken to the day before. Standing over these corpses, I would ponder if they had died because they refused to reveal their contacts in the Maquis or because they wouldn’t disclose the hiding places of their art collections, jewelry, or other coveted valuables. To me, it was foolish to die for a painting or diamond ring, and it was sad that those Resistance members probably knew nothing more than the names of their contacts, which were more than likely false names.
Stella and I quickly found ourselves acting like boyfriend and girlfriend. We never discussed it or announced it to anyone, but we were an item. Hell, the fifty men I shared sleeping quarters knew she was ‘‘my Stella.’’ How could we not become involved? It was inevitable. In each other’s arms, we forgot for a few sweet moments the gravity of our predicament and dreamt of fairytales futures.
As the weeks went by Stella and I made more time to sneak off into a staircase or the corner of a comatose patient’s cell to kiss and caress. As long as we performed our duties nobody paid attention to us. I loved the way she felt, smelled, and tasted. She liked that I had some experience. I didn’t tell her that it had been a thirty-six-year-old woman who had initiated me at fourteen. The wine they gave us with our meals was spiked with saltpeter because sex between ‘‘undesirables’’ was verboten, but it hardly had any effect on 24
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the two of us. Stella could be pretty bashful, though. One time I knelt, raised her dress, and began kissing her thighs. Realizing my intentions, she became embarrassed because she hadn’t washed yet, but I didn’t care. Afterwards, she wanted to try on me, but I finished before she could start. Tears welled in her eyes. She thought she had done something wrong. Holding her hand, I reassured her that that wasn’t the case at all. I brushed my thumb over a pyramid-shaped scar above the knuckle of her left index finger.
‘‘A parrot,
a big Macaw, bit me when I was in kindergarten. I thought he was going to bite off my whole hand. Oh, I cried. And I hit that bird so hard that I stunned him. I thought I killed him,’’
she giggled.
One day I came out of my castle and found Mr. Binda standing in the courtyard. I had been avoiding him and his wife so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about my relationship with their daughter. He grabbed me by the arm. ‘‘Let’s go for a stroll.’’
We walked in silence and I began to sweat. Had Stella let something slip about our relationship? ‘‘I want to thank you for being such a good friend of Stella’s. It’s been traumatic for her.’’
‘‘I know. I wish I had met her, all of you, under other circumstances.’’
We came to the gate. A jovial group of gendarmes were standing there.
‘‘Those dirty sons of bitches. Don’t they have any shame? I would rather die than be in their boots,’’ I said.
‘‘Don’t judge them too harshly. They’re professional soldiers trained to take orders from whoever’s in charge. Believe me, some of them are working hand in hand with the resistance.’’
‘‘Yes, I know one in Nice who notified our network and some Jewish families on impending raids.’’
‘‘I may know him, too.’’
‘‘One of the gendarmes told me that he would close his eyes if I slipped through the wire on his shift.’’
Mr. Binda shook his head. ‘‘You can’t chance it. He may be a rotten egg hunting for a promotion.’’
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‘‘That’s why I’m still here. There’s no sure way to candle the good eggs from the bad ones.’’
♦ ♦ ♦
On Christmas Eve, I had emptied my first two pails when a red armband approached me.
‘‘Wash your hands and come with me.’’
‘‘Why? Where to?’’ I asked.
‘‘To the administration building, but don’t ask me why.’’
My stomach instantly knotted up. Being escorted to the Nazis’
offices meant only one thing—trouble. A gendarme escorted us out the gate and to a high-rise building across the street. We went down a hallway on the first floor and stopped at a door where a large cardboard box was sitting. After knocking, my two companions entered the office. As I stepped into the doorway an SS officer sitting at one of three desks barked in French.