I heard bells, and turned to see two Polish peasants, bundled in warm furs and smoking pipes, passing by on a sleigh. They were probably on their way back from picking up the garbage at the civilian kitchen. The short longhaired horses pulling them trotted with heads down, noses steaming, and tails whipping in the wind. It reminded me of the illustrations in my mother’s copy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I looked at the Ha¨ftlinge ahead of me. No holiday picture here. The dragging gray line of misery was more akin to the painting of Napoleon’s retreat across the Berezina River. Our K apo Hans strutted in his high polished boots with his new Piepel (‘‘er-rand boy’’) by his side. It had been no surprise that Hans had dumped his former Piepel, a deformed little beggar, when this fourteen-year-old Dutch kid with big green eyes arrived in the camp.
Hans held the boy by the arm as we took a shortcut along a cluster of butane tanks and twisting pipelines with safety valves that let off jets of steam that smelled like cider. He then put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and let it slip down his back, affectionately squeezing his waist. The Piepel stepped away, glancing at Hans with guileless eyes and a smile. What innocence, I thought. You don’t understand at all, do you, kid? Yes, Hans is fond of you, but not in the way you think. I’m sure you feel lucky that you don’t have to 70
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work like the rest of us, but soon enough you’ll learn the price.
Hans will take you to a secluded spot while we work. The Vorarbeiter will ensure that his Kapo isn’t interrupted.
Like a father, Hans will sit you tenderly on his lap. Panting with excitement, he’ll whisper in your ear all that he can do for you. His hands will press your body. Your few carelessly sewn buttons will pop off. While he holds you with one strong arm, he’ll wet your bottom with his saliva, and before you realize what’s happening, you’ll feel your intestines being pushed through your stomach. I would like to open your eyes, you beardless boy, but truly—what business is it of mine? Don’t I have enough troubles of my own?
Perhaps this will be the only way you will get out of here alive. I stumble, almost crashing to the frozen ground. I mind other people’s business, but I can barely stand on my own two feet, I scolded myself.
Of course, things turned out a little differently from what I had imagined. On the day of our shower, Hans joined us instead of taking a shower on Sunday morning with the other Kapos and Blocka¨lstesters. He stood beside his Piepel, devouring him with his eyes.
The couple was given a wide berth. Hans didn’t even try to cover his excitement. He had brought along a blue-and-white checked towel, a luxury unknown to any ordinary Ha¨ftling, and handed it to the boy while the rest of us returned to the Block, wet and naked.
That night I was awakened by a low voice. I was sleeping on the second tier. Above me was a Russian snoring like a sawmill, and below me was the Piepel. I peeked down. Hans was crouching next to the bunk.
‘‘Shh!’’ he ordered his Piepel.
The bunk creaked when Hans crawled in. I closed my eyes and tried not to care. The boy started sobbing softly. I thought, don’t worry, kid, it will stretch. All three tiers began to sway. Hans was doing him from the side. The SS really needed to switch the color of his triangle.
The Russian’s snoring became irregular as the bunks quaked and Hans panted. I looked at the bunk above me and hoped that PART II | AUSCHWITZ
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the Russian wasn’t prone to seasickness. If he is, he’s going to vomit all over me.
The boy’s eyes were deadened from that morning on, and soon after he contracted pneumonia. Hans went on the hunt for a new Piepel and the fourteen-year-old died alone in the HKB.
Not long after, I found myself with a suitor.
My Kommando was doing odd jobs, laying bricks, hammering spikes into train track tie plates, and tightening track bolts. I was crouched on what would be the base for a railroad track switch, chiseling a gully in the cement for the rod that connected the switch handle to track that hadn’t yet been laid. It was lucky for me that the cement hadn’t completely cured.
A Kapo, whose Kommando was laying electrical cable in freshly dug trenches, had been staring at me for a while. I told myself that he was just suspicious, since I was so far from the other members of my Kommando. But didn’t he have enough ‘‘pajamas’’ of his own to watch over? Suddenly he was standing next to me. With chisel in hand, I got up on tingling legs.
‘‘Boy, look at your shirt. It’s filthy,’’ he said.
How observant. I had worked and slept in it for over a month.
‘‘I’ll give you a new one.’’ Give me? I knew it wasn’t my lucky day. What did he want?
‘‘Let’s get out of the wind.’’
The Kapo grabbed me by the arm and led me to a secluded area between two buildings. ‘‘Take that off.’’
He indicated to the scrap of cement bag I had wrapped around my left hand to prevent my skin from sticking to the steel chisel. I did as I was told. The Kapo held my hands.
‘‘Young man, rub your hands before you get frostbite.’’
Again, I did as I was told. A moment later he held my hands again.
‘‘That’s better,’’ he said, and opened his coat, revealing an erection poking out of his unbuttoned fly.
I had seen this coming, but I was surprised that in this weather he could get his battery charged just by looking at me. He pulled 72
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me close and had me touch his erection. I had no choice if I wanted to walk back to that slab of concrete.
I stroked his stubby prick with a droopy foreskin while he moved his ass rhythmically. He was breathing heavily, and I could hear his heart dancing the conga. I hoped to get it over with before the Kapo decided he wanted to be satisfied in a different manner.
Finally his knees buckled, he grunted, and ejaculated.
With a grin and a kick he buried the evidence in the sandy soil, turned on his heels, and returned to his Kommando. There goes my shirt, I thought as I picked up my chisel. Well, I wasn’t really expecting one anyhow.
That asshole Hans. Being too old for his taste, Hans had pimped me. It was no accident that he put me on that slab of concrete. Maybe he got the shirt. Then again, it could have all just been shithouse luck.
I went back to work and made sure the job was finished before they lined us up for the march back to camp. I wasn’t going to make a second ‘‘date’’ easy for that Kapo. I didn’t see him the next day or the day after that. When I finally did spot him he seemed just as uninterested in me as I was in him, but it still took me weeks to stop looking over my shoulder for him while I worked. It was a pittance compared to the price Han’s fourteen-year-old paid.
♦ ♦ ♦
One of the nice things about my life in Drancy, other than Stella, was the fact that I could get cigarettes regularly. This was a big deal for an eighteen-year-old who had started smoking at age ten by making cigarettes with the tobacco from his father’s cigar butts.
Unfortunately, cigarettes were nearly impossible to get in Monowitz, so I joined up with four other Ha¨ftlinge from my Block who also had a strong need for tobacco smoke in their lungs. Every morning one of us would make a trade with a Russian black triangle: the margarine that we received with our bread and coffee for a pinch of coarse Russian makhorka (tobacco stems). Since the stems pierced PART II | AUSCHWITZ
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newspaper, we rolled it in squares cut from the middle layer of the triple-lined cement bags that we ‘‘organized’’ from the plant’s construction sites.
Once rolled, the five of us hurried behind the Blocks before morning assembly. The one who traded his margarine got the first puff. He would then exhale the smoke into the mouth of the next man, who would exhale into the mouth next to him. Once the fifth man got his, the cigarette would be passed to the second man and he would inhale and the smoke was passed around again. The cigarette lasted long enough for everyone to get one drag from it.
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Exhaling into one another’s mouth was about the unhealthiest thing we could be doing in the middle of winter. When the yellow triangle Czech and red triangle Serb showed up with nasty coughs, we just took our one drag from the cigarette. Still the third, fourth, and fifth men were taking in a lot of germs. Twenty-one days and twenty-one cigarettes later, we wisely dissolved our smoking circle after we all started hacking up phlegm.
In March, I befriended a new arrival, a nineteen-year-old yellow triangle from Holland who was in my Block and Kommando. Peter was tall and unusually skinny for a new arrival. He was lucky that I.G. Farben was demanding more manpower for the Buna plant.
He would have been directed to the left if he had arrived with me.
Peter had been shipped in with his father, whom he missed terribly.
During our lunch break one frosty day I asked him where he had learned to speak fluent German, and without a Dutch accent.
‘‘I’m a German Catholic from Cologne.’’
‘‘Then how come you wear a yellow triangle?’’
‘‘My father is Jewish. Eight years ago we fled to Holland by hiding on a barge.’’
‘‘How about your mother?’’
‘‘She’s Catholic. She stayed in Cologne because everything we own is now in her name.’’
‘‘Do you miss her?’’ I pried.
‘‘Before the war she visited us a few times, but I haven’t heard 74
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from her since the Germans came into Holland. I worry about her because Cologne has been bombed many times.’’
I mumbled matter-of-factly, ‘‘I guess you were starving in Holland, too. You don’t look good.’’
‘‘No, we were doing okay in Groningen, but when we were discovered by the Gestapo I got a bad infection. My father told them that I’m not Jewish, but the agent screamed that a leopard doesn’t change his spots.’’
Peter bragged to me constantly about his father. It seemed that he was the owner of a prosperous factory that produced women’s corsets, and Peter believed that he had landed a good job in Auschwitz.
‘‘I’m sure they’re taking advantage of his excellent bookkeeping skills,’’ he would say time and time again.
I didn’t have the heart to inform Peter that he was living in a dream world. I assumed he used this feeble thread of hope the way I did with my thoughts of Stella, to keep the will to live strong. But amid the stories of camping trips and his father’s keen business mind, I could sense that Peter was becoming more and more dis-traught. Against my advice, he went to the Schreibstube and asked to be reunited with his father in the main camp.
A few days later I openly cried when he waved to me from the back of a truckful of Muselma¨nner. You fool, I wanted to scream.
Was he that delusional that he couldn’t see that no one his father’s age ever escaped the gas chambers? Or was he crazy like a fox, committing suicide without offending his faith? I would never know. The answer disappeared in smoke.
My memory was failing. It was as if someone had wiped my eighteen-year-old mind with a blackboard eraser, leaving me with only the faint outlines of my family, friends, and classmates. Stella was slowly becoming a phantom. I had difficulty seeing her spirited eyes, hearing her voice, smelling her scent, and feeling her touch.
There was only one image that had become more vivid, and it savagely haunted me: food. In my mind, I could conjure up the most complicated recipes. Delicious and appetizing smells would fill my PART II | AUSCHWITZ
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nostrils, and my mouth would water until my salivary glands were close to cramping, but it did nothing for my belly. I couldn’t survive for much longer on the meager pittance of food they gave us.
Every week I was becoming noticeably thinner. I had to find some means of supplementing my rations, but it wasn’t time to trade my one and only possession on the black market. Not when there was a pyramid of cabbages behind the camp’s kitchen guarded by only one green triangle armed with a stick, and not when there were two French yellow triangles in my Block willing to help me
‘‘organize’’ a few heads.
On a moonless night, when the chain of searchlights was providing the only illumination, Antoine, Jules, and I eased out of our bunks. We met next to the red triangle Pole working a shift as night watchman. With the promise of a fistful of cabbage, he didn’t see us walk out. Antoine was our goat; he had drawn the short straw.
Jules and I laid in wait behind one of the Blocks as he crept toward the kitchen. Suddenly, he jumped out from the shadows. The guard went after him, and Jules and I threw ourselves onto the pile of cabbages. Antoine took a few knocks, but we were victorious. Behind our Block, we munched away like rabbits. Though the insides of the cabbages were frozen and we had no salt for seasoning, it was an amazingly delicious salad.
♦ ♦ ♦
‘‘ Links, zwei, drei, vier, links!’’ (Left, two, three, four, left!) Hans commanded. As we did every night, we goose-stepped in rows of five through the camp’s gate. My feet felt like bricks as I kicked them into the air. As always the Lagera¨lteste (camp administrator) and Lagerkapo (head of camp) were standing side by side inside the gate. The Lagera¨lteste was the Prussian with the riding-crop ‘‘interpreter.’’ He ensured that the affairs of the camp were to the boches’
liking and dealt out the punishment when they weren’t. The Lagerkapo, who I figured for some Berlin garbageman, had a red triangle 76
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with the number 1 and was in charge of the Kommandos working inside the camp, which included the kitchen and HKB.
These two senior Hftlinge were like night and day. Where the Lagera¨lteste was a sharply dressed, sadistic matinee idol, the Lagerkapo looked like a wallowing pig with his big, upturned nose and sloppy uniform. Where the Lagera¨lteste’s eyes seemed focused on every detail in front of him, the Lagerkapo’s eyes were listless. I believed he held no pride for his position, doing only the minimum necessary to keep his privileges. That made him sympathetic in my eyes.
‘‘ Kommando one hundred and thirty-six. Forty-four Ha¨ftlinge, one dead!’’ Hans announced as we passed the guard station.
Roster in hand, the SS guard counted our lines. The last row was made up of the dead man who had collapsed while mixing cement and his four pallbearers. The dead had to be returned to the camp or we would have hell to pay. Being so consumed with preventing us from breaking out, I questioned why the Nazis didn’t hang the dead for escaping.
Like birds on a wire, fifty of us sat on the Block’s heating pipe with our bowls of soup and began to thaw out. The bell for assembly rang.
‘‘ Alles raus!’’ (Everybody out!) the Blocka¨lteste shouted.
Armed with a stick, the Stubendienste hustled men toward the door. I hadn’t finished my soup. I took a quick swallow, then hid my bowl on a rafter above my bunk.
Thick clouds blanketed the moon on this damp night and searchlights lit up the Appelplatz where Blocks were already lined up in rows of five. The beam of a single searchlight enveloped three gibbets. Rumors of who was to hang circulated, but no one had any real idea. A group of SS guards with bayoneted rifles formed a semi-circle in front of the gibbets. Three Ha¨ftlinge were marched across the Appelplatz. This was my third hanging, but the first time witnessing a multiple execution.
It was about three weeks after my arrival that I witnessed my first hanging. I looked down at my torn shoes when the condemned PART II | AUSCHWITZ
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Dutchman stepped up to the scaffold. As an SS officer rattled off some Nazi legal crap that frequently mentioned the Fu¨hrer and the greater glory of Germany, I closed my eyes and considered what the Dutchman’s last thoughts were. The trapdoor’s dropping made my body jerk to attention, but I kept my eyes shut. As they marched us past the scaffold, I stared at the blue stripes of the fellow in front of me. It was only a few weeks later that I witnessed my second hanging. By then I was hardened enough by our daily
misery that I didn’t bother to close my eyes.
The execution orders for these three men were ridiculously longwinded. Two of the condemned men were Poles who had been caught trying to escape. The third was a young Greek, not much older than I, who had stolen some bread during an air raid alert.
‘‘ Im Namen des Reichsfu¨hrer Heinrich Himmler! ’’ (In the name of Reich fu¨hrer Heinrich Himmler!) The Lagerfu¨hrer finished and shoved the orders into his SS coat pocket.
A group of green triangle Kapos laughed. For these career criminals the hangings were a Grand Guignol attraction, an entertaining diversion from their monotony. As if betting on racehorses, they put money and cigarettes on which of the three would live the longest.
Resigned to their fate, the two Poles stepped up to their nooses without uttering a word. The Greek fell to the ground with tears rolling down his face.
‘‘ Nichts klepsi, klepsi!’’ (No stealing, no stealing!) I looked over at my cabbage-stealing cohorts. Their blank stares told me that we all had the same thought—it could easily have been our necks. Two green triangles had to carry the Greek up to his gibbet. The Lagerkapo put the noose around his neck. The boy’s legs buckled, tightening the noose. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to drop the trapdoor now, I thought.
The trapdoors were sprung, the bodies fell, and the ropes went taut. The three men swung in slow circles. The Poles’ bound hands convulsively opened and closed as their shoulders jerked and their legs kicked furiously in the air. One of them lost his trousers. His 78
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white, sweaty legs and buttocks glistened in the searchlight’s beam.
The Greek hung lifeless like an empty sack. The Kapos who had bet on him spat curses.
Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora Page 8