‘‘This man’s Greek, not French.’’
Janec shrugged. I guessed that to an untrained Slavic ear all the Mediterranean languages sounded alike.
‘‘What’s wrong with him? Is it something catching?’’ Hubert asked.
‘‘Pleurisis is pressing on his lungs. He won’t last,’’ Janec said matter-of-factly and walked away.
The Greek kept tugging at my sleeve, muttering indecipherable sentences between moans and coughing fits. He was desperate to discuss something of importance. I turned to Hubert, who was sitting at the other end of the bunk. He wanted no part of this.
‘‘Talk to him in Hebrew. Find out what he wants. The poor fellow is desperate to tell us something. Maybe he’s going to divulge where a treasure is buried,’’ I winked.
‘‘Buried, my ass. I can’t speak Hebrew.’’
‘‘But didn’t you learn the language for your Bar Mitzvah?’’
Hubert informed me that he had learned the prayers phonetically.
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‘‘That way I wouldn’t embarrass my parents in front of all my relatives.’’
Janec came back with a large needle that he unceremoniously shoved between the Greek’s ribs. A greenish fluid gushed out onto the floor. I was fascinated. Hubert got up and headed toward the piss pails. The procedure seemed to give the Greek some relief, but he gave up trying to speak to any of us. By the time evening rations arrived I realized that the man had fallen into a coma.
With his back turned to the Greek, Hubert giggled.
‘‘What’s funny?’’ I asked.
‘‘You thought that all of us can speak Hebrew, didn’t you?’’
‘‘I guess,’’ I shrugged.
‘‘The only thing we Jews have in common are a few traditions, snipped foreskin, and these yellow triangles.’’
After rations the next morning the Greek’s body was carried away along with his treasures.
Since Hubert had been in the HKB for more than a week, his odds of being ‘‘selected’’ for the ovens were in the Nazis’ favor. To the boches, if you were too weak and sickly to be a productive slave, then you were a useless mouth to feed and had to go. At irregular intervals and always without warning, the SS would conduct a
‘‘selection’’—a weeding out of the Muselma¨nner, in all the Blocks.
They made more frequent visits to the HKB because they hated to waste aspirin. Recovered or not, Hubert knew he would have to leave. He prayed that, when discharged, he would end up in a different Kommando. The Kommando he had been in mixed concrete for the ever-expanding plant complex, and the dust from the mixers was ruining his lungs. Many from his Kommando had already been stricken with emphysema. Two days later, and still edematous and yellow, Hubert got a release from a reluctant doctor.
‘‘Listen, mon ami.’’ I grabbed his arm. ‘‘We have to stay in contact. Together we’ve got a better chance of getting back home.’’
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or Kommando. And the Nazis made contact more difficult by regularly shifting us around, depending on their labor needs and to prevent gangs of resistance from being formed. Hubert promised that through Janec he would get word to me of his Block number and Kommando.
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I had fully recovered. I was amazed what a few days’ rest could accomplish. Janec kept telling me that my saving grace was the re-silience of my eighteen-year-old body. By rubbing the thermometer, I was able to make it register high enough to allow me to remain in the HKB. Because of my numerous childhood illnesses, I was barely out of bed until the age of five, and thus I lulled myself into believing I was immune to the epidemics raging around me and could pass any ‘‘selection.’’ I managed to switch to a bottom bunk near a window, figuring I would breathe in fewer germs from those coughing and spitting up blood. I would also have a reminder that there was a world, no matter how unsavory, outside this sideshow of unraveling mortal coils.
For some lucky reason I shared my bunk with only one other man, and though sometimes I woke up chewing his toes, there was enough room for me to roll over. Mario was an anti-fascist Italian who barely uttered a word to me. He was extremely sick and slipping fast. Every night, he would implore some saint or ancestor while his feet kicked my face. Every day the doctor would come by and ask Mario where it hurt. He would point at his whole body, 103
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and the doctor would walk away shaking his head. One time I overheard him mention to an orderly that Mario must be a hypochon-driac, but I knew better. No one could fake the cramps and convulsions that wracked his body. I was sure that worms were chewing through his guts. A medicine man in the Amazon could have cured Mario with a few herbs, but unfortunately our circumstances were more primitive.
One night I awoke to find Mario trembling and pressing his abdomen with both hands. He was crying silently, his moist, black eyes staring out the window. I felt uneasy, as if I had blundered into a private moment. I wanted to comfort him, but how? Words were impotent—lies, actually—and although I was lying next to the man, I couldn’t bring myself to wrap my arm around him in solace. I didn’t have the courage.
His face taut with pain, Mario slowly sat up at the edge of the bunk. I figured he had to take a leak. He dropped to all fours and crawled to the window. Curious, I sat up. Grabbing hold of the window ledge, Mario pulled himself to his feet. He tried to open the window, but he was too weak.
‘‘What are you doing?’’ I asked in Italian. ‘‘Mario, stop.’’
He shook his head defiantly and kept struggling. Not wanting any trouble for either of us from the night watchman, I jumped to my feet.
‘‘ Alto!’’ (Stop!) I hissed.
Breathing heavily, Mario pressed his face against the glass.
Coming up behind him, I realized he was staring at the barbed-wire fence only a few feet away. A searchlight’s beam swept across it. In the nearby watchtower I could see the reddish glow of a guard’s pipe. Mario tried to open the window again, but it wouldn’t budge.
He turned to me with imploring eyes.
‘‘ Ajuto, amico’’ (Help, friend), he whispered.
How could I ask him to go back to that bunk and continue his senseless suffering? I studied his eyes to reassure myself that this was the best and only way. I pried open the window. My muscles tightened against the rush of cold air.
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Mario grasped my hand. ‘‘ Gracie, tante.’’ (Thanks a lot.) At least it’s on his terms, I consoled myself.
Mario slid over the sill, dropped three feet to the ground, and began crawling toward the wire. The searchlight found him.
‘‘ Halt, halt, oder ich schiesse!’’ (Stop, stop, or I’ll shoot!) Mario didn’t stop. He reached out. A flash of blue light enveloped him, then a thunderclap rattled the window.
As I shrunk back into bed, a burst of machine gun fire echoed.
I guess the guard wanted to leave evidence that he wasn’t sleeping on duty. I had seen many bodies lying next to the fences on my way to work detail, but I had never before seen a person electrocuted. It was hard to fall back asleep. Finally, I got up and closed the window.
The smell of Mario’s burnt flesh was just too much.
In the morning, an Austrian named Pressburger became my bedmate. He was a man of forty, relatively old for the camp. I knew at first glance that he wasn’t going to leave the HKB alive. His breathing was labored, and there was a wet gurgling coming from the depths of his lungs. I had to feed him like a baby because he couldn’t hold a spoon in his trembling hands. I wondered if Janec was bunking me with the most critical cases because he knew I would nu
rse them. Or was it just his way of scaring my ass out of the HKB?
The second night after Mario’s death I was awakened by the sound of gunfire and guards shouting. The barbed wire glowed red with the reflection of huge flames. One of the Blocks was on fire. I anxiously called to the Ha¨ftlinge outside my window, asking if they knew what Block was burning. They shook their heads, no. I flopped down beside Pressburger. With my shithouse luck it’s probably my Block that’s burning, I thought, and my only possession is melting into oblivion. The fire burned through the night because the camp’s poorly equipped fire squad could protect only the adjoining Blocks.
The next day I got the confirmation. Sixty Blocks in the camp, and it was mine that was charred. Fate is so perverted. How many times had I laid in my bunk with a growling stomach, dreaming about the loaf of bread and cauldron of soup I would buy with my 106
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ring? How many mornings, standing in the freezing rain, had I schemed how I would buy myself the position of Vorarbeiter in a Kommando working inside the factory? How many ruses had I con-cocted? How many risks had I taken during searches? And there was that beating I took after I recovered my ring. It had all been for nothing. My only insurance against becoming a Muselmann was gone.
♦ ♦ ♦
Every time I had to take a piss I would pass by a section of bunks being tended by an orderly who seemed to be highly competent and compassionate when treating patients. He could have passed for the twin of that Nazi officer on the train from Nice who had the cans of milk, except that the orderly wore a yellow triangle. The day after the fire he came and sat on the edge of my bunk.
‘‘ Mein Name ist Paul. Kannst du Deutsch sprechen?’’ (My name is Paul. Do you speak German?)
‘‘ Je parle le franc¸ais.’’ (I speak French.) He frowned. ‘‘ Mon Franc¸ais nest pas très bon’’ (My French isn’t very good), he told me.
‘‘That’s okay, I was only kidding,’’ I told him in German.
His face brightened. ‘‘Did you know any German Jews in France? Two cousins of mine emigrated there in ’33. I haven’t heard from them since the war started.’’
‘‘Only German Jews I met were a few elderly couples while I was in a camp in Paris.’’
‘‘I’m sure those couples didn’t make it past the first day here.
My parents didn’t.’’
‘‘I’m sorry. Why didn’t you leave Germany with your cousins?’’
‘‘My father was a decorated veteran. He thought that the Nazis wouldn’t touch him, and I was in my fourth year of medical school.’’
I asked a question that I had been eager to ask a German Jew for some time.
‘‘Why do you think Hitler hates you people?’’
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‘‘I don’t know, but he sure needed us—blaming us for losing the war and causing the depression. He would’ve been a nobody without us. He got rich off us, too.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘The gangsters confiscated everything we owned. Affluent Jews were jailed, and when they managed to secure a visa to another country, the Nazis turned them loose and legally took everything they had.’’
‘‘Legally?’’
‘‘Oh, yes. Hitler imposed a penalty for fleeing Germany, a Re-ichsfluchtsteuer, which was only a lawful way for him to steal everything a man owned.’’
‘‘There were many wealthy Jews?’’
He shrugged. ‘‘Wealthy, I don’t know. Understand that many were forced to start their own businesses or be self-employed because the German guilds and unions didn’t accept us.’’
I told him that I never knew that. ‘‘I always heard that Jews didn’t want to get their hands dirty.’’
He laughed at my ignorance and bid me good luck. My heart grew heavy, realizing how horrible it must have been for Stella and Hubert to grow up stigmatized and then witness that intolerance turn into ovens.
On a rainy Tuesday night the assembly bell rang as the Kommandos returned from the plant. I pitied my fellow Ha¨ftlinge for having to stand out there, soaked and shivering, after toiling for twelve hours. A gaggle of bitching SS passed by. I went to the window. The wind carried the echoes of the Lagerfu¨hrer’s pronounce-ment. They were hanging another man for trying to escape. The execution was over quickly; the boches were in a hurry to get back to their warm quarters.
I slipped back into the bunk. For the first time, Pressburger was sleeping soundly. I mulled over why the SS hadn’t postponed the hanging. Was the man’s demise that urgent? Were the boches that rigid with their protocol? Of course, they were. They probably kept records of every man, woman, and child they slaughtered. Maybe 108
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they didn’t want to wait one day because then the condemned man would have enjoyed the double ration of bread and spoonful of jam we received every Wednesday morning. For a doomed Ha¨ftling that jam would be a royal delicacy, but as the White Queen told Alice,
‘‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.’’
The Nazi jam, like their margarine, was made from coal. I didn’t believe it when I was first told, figuring it was a dirty trick to sucker me into giving my portion to an ‘‘old timer.’’ Then I overheard some Ha¨ftlinge mention that they worked in the factory labs that used coal to make synthetic food products and other materials used in the camp. There wasn’t any nutritional value whatsoever in the ersatz jam, but it did help quiet the hunger pangs for a while.
I awoke as a searchlight beam skimmed across the icy windowpane, making it sparkle like crystal. The footsteps outside told me the sentries were being relieved. I had to relieve myself, so I ran for the pail. My bare feet stuck to the cold, oiled floor. I passed the Ha¨ftling who was on night watch. He was asleep in a chair, snuggly wrapped in a blanket. Nice to see that one of us was momentarily having it better than the Nazis outside.
When I got back under the covers, Pressburger’s feet were on my side of the bunk. Irritated, I pushed them away. His legs were rigid and cold. He was dead. Pressburger was gone.
Having slept next to a man while he gasped his final breaths gave me the creeps. My instinct was to run, but since there was nowhere to go I just laid there and got goose bumps. It’s a depress-ing revelation how easy and unceremoniously life can vanish. I couldn’t help thinking that if life had any value at all, then Pressburger’s death wouldn’t seem so completely meaningless. I thought about waking the night watchman, but he would have to wake the Stubendienst, who would have to wake a couple of the orderlies. I felt foolish that Pressburger had that much sway over me. Why rouse the whole Block for one corpse? It could wait till morning.
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popped into my head. In a few hours Janec would arrive with the morning rations, and if he saw that Pressburger was dead he would keep his share. Why should he get it instead of me? The big Pole didn’t need the bread and jam; he got packages from home. I was the one who had taken care of Pressburger, made things easier for him in his last hours. I deserved his ration.
I dragged Pressburger to the other side of the bunk, away from the light of the corridor. The body had stiffened, and it took all my strength to move the limbs into the semblance of a normal sleeping position. I turned his face toward me. The features were contorted into a horrible scowl. I pushed on his jaw, but his mouth wouldn’t close. His eyes were rolled back and his eyelids kept sliding up every time I tried to close them. I pulled the blanket so that only the top of his head showed. I went to the spot where Janec would stand while distributing the food and inspected my stage setting. It seemed perfect.
As I tried to go back to sleep, I considered what Pressburger would have done if he had known that he was going to die so forsaken. Would he have confided in me about his life, his dreams
, his failures, his loves? Would he have prayed to God or cursed him for such a foul-smelling fate? Here was another man whose family, if he had one and if they were still alive, would never know where and how he died. This man suffered, laughed, thought of the future. . . .
No, I had to stop. I wasn’t strong enough. There were too many dying for me to grieve for any of them. And was Pressburger the one to be pitied? His suffering was over, but what was still in store for me? What would I have to go through till my forsaken death?
The camp’s reveille brought me to consciousness with a jolt. I kept my back turned to my bunkmate and dozed back off. A little while later the Kommandos marched out as the camp’s band played
‘‘Beer Barrel Polka.’’ Every morning the band, which was made up of some of Europe’s finest musicians and composers, played mo-ronic German marching songs as we left for the plant. In my first couple of months, goose-stepping past those SS guards I wondered whether the music was for their entertainment or whether they 110
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were seriously trying to rouse us to give our all to the Reich. What I figured now is that they decorated this human slaughterhouse with the trappings of normal society so they wouldn’t see the butcher in the mirror. The only music playing in the HKB was the symphonic coughing and spitting of awakening Muselma¨nner.
I heard baskets scraping along the floor. The orderlies were beginning to distribute the rations. My heart began to beat faster. I slipped my foot under Pressburger’s body and made it move up and down to the rhythm of my own breathing. He sure seemed alive. I looked over to Janec, who was chatting away with one of the Polish patients. What are you doing? Why the morning chat? Don’t keep me waiting, Janec, my leg is cramping! Finally he came over and gave me my food.
‘‘Sleep well?’’
‘‘Oh, yes.’’
‘‘Why did you change places?’’
‘‘He was falling out of bed,’’ I said, making a gesture toward the corpse.
‘‘Hey, Pressburger,’’ Janec patted him on the shoulder.
Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora Page 11