‘‘This one I will keep for myself,’’ he announced.
I looked at the dead eel at my feet and thought, I’ll do the same.
On the way to Birkenau, I hid the eel in the tube that reinforced the side panel of the truck, then sat down next to the girl’s corpse.
‘‘Thanks,’’ I mumbled.
I didn’t even know the name of this decent, fervently religious human being whose God had forsaken her. It was no wonder that I was an atheist. In this place, God validated my choice every day.
Again, the SS ordered me to stand away from the truck as the Sonderkommando shuffled through their dance. When two of them turned the girl over, exposing her eviscerated belly, they froze for a second, shook their heads, then resumed their roles. After all the corpses had been removed, the Sonderkommando loaded the truck with over forty old cement bags filled with human ashes. They stacked the bags in neat, tight rows to prevent them from spilling.
Once the tailgate was closed I climbed into the bed. When I was eight, an elementary school pal showed me the urn that held the ashes of his grandmother. I had a hard time believing that a 122
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canister no bigger than a small coffee can could hold a whole adult.
There had to be at least twenty to twenty-five men, women, and children in each of the cement bags, which meant I was staring at all that was left of one train load of human beings.
As we drove away I peered inside one of them. I had never seen human ashes before. The ashes were grayish brown and coarse like sand, and peppered with blackened pieces of bone. I looked back.
The smoke from the red brick chimneys was beginning to eclipse the sun. Goodbye, you innocent, devout creature. I am sure I’ll see you again in my nightmares.
The truck turned onto a dirt road leading to vast fields of cabbages. We stopped at a patch being tilled by a Kommando. The driver blew his horn and yelled at them to unload the truck. As they approached, I realized that the Ha¨ftlinge were women—black triangles from the Ukraine. I handed the bags down to them, and a few immediately started spreading the ashes along the rows of cabbages. The Nazis made sure nothing went to waste, and from the looks of those bulging, green heads, we made excellent fertilizer.
I wanted to see if one of the women would circulate a message for Stella through the women’s camps, but none of them spoke any of the languages I spoke. At least seeing that the SS had a use for them bolstered my optimism that I would see Stella again. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that there was a father, perhaps even a boyfriend, who was confident he would see that Jehovah Witness again.
After the women loaded our truck with cabbages meant for our camp’s kitchen, the driver once again stopped at the plant’s civilian kitchen to trade his morning catch, along with a large number of the cabbages. When we arrived at our kitchen I helped unload.
While no one was looking I retrieved my catch. I swapped the eel for a ladle of soup with no questions asked, but I could tell by the way that he eyed me that the cook knew how I got it.
C H A P T E R 1 2
The next day, it was a new Block, a new Kommando, and new companions. I now was part of a work detail that was digging trenches for the plant’s sewer, water, and heating pipelines. Most of these trenches had to accommodate several pipelines. The digging would go like this: Four to five Ha¨ftlinge abreast would swing pickaxes to break up the topsoil as another crew shoveled the dirt out. After having dug about one hundred yards in length and a half-yard in depth, we would take our pickaxes and go back where we started and take off another layer. This procedure would be repeated until we reached the Nazis’ specified depth of two to three yards, depending on the diameter of the pipes. At that depth, platforms were erected to facilitate the extraction of the loose earth.
It was a backbreaking Kommando. Every evening there were corpses to carry back to the camp. There was one advantage, however. Since we were digging along the road that led to the civilian factory workers’ kitchen, all the wagons delivering provisions passed right in front of our noses—right above our heads, to be exact. They were loaded with potatoes, a long-forgotten delicacy, or beets or cabbages. Hearing the rattle of the wagons’ ironbound wheels and the clatter of the horses’ hooves, we would first make 123
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sure we weren’t under the watchful eyes of a Kapo or SS guard, then ready ourselves for attack. We would let the wagon pass a short distance, then a chosen Ha¨ftling would jump onto the rear and toss to us whatever he could grab.
We did our work on those trenches as slowly as possible. There wouldn’t be any rolling food markets to ‘‘organize’’ from at our next job site. Before heading back to camp in the evening, a few of us would chop at the sides of the trench, and with the help of the night frost and morning thaw, it would be caved in when we returned. Our Vorarbeiter, Emile, closed his eyes to all this and naturally got the lion’s share of our bounties, but soon the drivers got wise and passed by us at a gallop. We then started attacking en masse, with our mess tins over our heads to protect ourselves from their whips.
Twice a week, a local peasant came to pick up the ‘‘pig pot,’’ an enormous receptacle kept behind the plant’s kitchen in which the spoiled remnants of the day’s soup were poured. The pig pot was always infested with drowned flies, but it took more than that to turn the stomach of a starving man. The peasant drove his wagon slowly in order not to spill any of the foul liquid. That made it easy for us to fill our mess tins as he passed, but left us unprotected from his whip.
The lash marked us all, and one Ha¨ftling even lost an eye from a well-aimed blow. Inevitably one of the drivers complained and Emile was demoted, and we were assigned to a different work detail. Probably for the best, I thought. A few more rancid bowls from the pig pot and we would all have dropped dead from diarrhea or hepatitis.
♦ ♦ ♦
Many times while I dug those ditches, standing ankle-deep in cold mud, I would think about my brief stint in the Resistance. I would chide myself for never seeing action in a raid and for having landed in Auschwitz because of lousy luck and not for my efforts in the Maquis.
My involvement in the underground started in 1941, when I was fifteen years old. At that time, Southern France was under the rule of the Vichy government, a puppet regime of the Germans.
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Nazi troops occupied only the northern half of France. Menard, my neighborhood’s black marketeer, was the one who steered me to the Maquis. He had made a king’s ransom after the Nazi’s blitzkrieg by collecting the abandoned cars of those who fled and selling them for parts. I would always give him an earful of my anti-fascist rants when he came over to have a coffee with my father. After seeing the split lip and black eye a school bully gave me for cheering the sink-ing of the Nazi battleship Bismarck, Menard pulled me aside. He told me to meet an elderly gentleman who was interested in talking to me at a bench on the Promenade des Anglais, which ran along the Mediterranean coast.
Adrenaline pumped through my heart when I spotted an old man in a well-tailored suit and fedora feeding the gulls. It wasn’t the suit, the hat, or the bird feeding that identified my contact, but his gueule casseé, a facial disfigurement that was a souvenir from the WW I Battle of Verdun.
‘‘Bonjour, mon capitaine.’’
‘‘Drop the title, it attracts attention. Call me Mr. Meffre,’’ he said as we shook hands.
I sat down next to him as he resumed feeding the gulls. ‘‘We need a messenger with strong legs and a bicycle.’’
‘‘I have both.’’ I was working after school at a bicycle shop a few blocks from my house.
‘‘When I need you, we will meet here. You’ll meet nobody else.
Understand?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘I’ll tell you where to hide or deliver the messages. Don’t bother trying to decipher these messages. You won’t be able to, and the less you
know the better off you will be. Do not tell a soul, not even your family, what you’re doing. The Germans and Italians are easy to fool, son; it’s our traitors and collaborators you have to worry about.’’ Mr. Meffre got up and shook my hand. ‘‘If we win this war you might get a medal, but if we lose they will hunt you down as a saboteur and a traitor.’’
On my first few trips I tied my fishing tackle to the bike and hid the messages in a double-bottomed can of worms. Then I realized 126
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the merits of my tire pump. When I had a girlfriend with strong legs, I would borrow a tandem bike from the shop. We would pedal off on an outing, a movie, or a picnic that included wine and fooling around, and I would deliver a message. I had a good idea that most of these messages pertained to the organizing of different cells around southern France.
In 1943, when Nazi troops occupied all of France, Meffre called a meeting. ‘‘Are you circumcised?’’ he asked me, as he tossed stale bread to impatient gulls. He was happy to hear I wasn’t. In the Germans’ hunt for Jews, they were forcing males to drop their pants at checkpoints and roadblocks outside Nice.
Now when I pedaled I wondered if the message I was carrying was the arrival time of a military convoy to be sabotaged or the orders to assassinate some Nazi official or collaborator. Every time I met with Mr. Meffre I hoped it would be the moment he would tell me where to pick up a weapon. If I had had the right gun I could have cut down a hell of a lot of boches. My bedroom balcony overlooked a road along a cliff, and every day platoons of German soldiers marched along there fully exposed, a perfect target for a sniper or someone armed with a machine gun. I reported this to Meffre.
‘‘I’m glad to see that you’re this observant, but don’t underesti-mate them. They’re baiting us. At another location outside town they’ve hidden a machine gun nest aimed at a spot where we could easily ambush a patrol. Shooting a couple soldiers would only give them an excuse to burn down the whole city, like they did in Czechoslovakia.’’
‘‘Are we cowards? What good are we doing?’’ I asked.
‘‘Our orders are to lay low until an Allied landing on our coast.’’
I continued to dutifully deliver my messages and patiently waited for the Allies so Mr. Meffre could give me a more vital mission. Shithouse luck saw to it that I never got the chance.
♦ ♦ ♦
I was at the bottom of a nearly completed trench on the plant’s perimeter, shoveling dirt onto a wooden platform, when I noticed PART II | AUSCHWITZ
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a big German Shepherd sniffing the leather toecaps of my canvas boots. Since the boches didn’t waste anything, I wondered if the dog was smelling the skin of his parents. He squatted in front of me and blessed the trench with a long, steaming turd. With strong kicks of his hind legs, the shepherd began to cover it, but quit when he heard the shrill whistle of his master. I picked the shit up with my shovel and deposited it next to a French Ha¨ftling on the platform.
‘‘ Merci pour le cadeau’’ (Thank you for the present), he muttered.
My laughter was cut short when I spotted a group of SS officers passing by, pointing at buildings and jotting down notes. Standing at the rim of the trench, our jittery Kapo and Vorarbeiter pushed us harder. As we chopped away at the earth, we nervously watched the strutting, high-ranking Nazis. Their presence was highly unusual, and from a Ha¨ftling’s perspective, any deviance from the daily routine was a bad omen. These boches though seemed preoccupied with something more pressing than the labor of a filthy bunch of Untermenschen (subhumans).
The following morning I found myself behind Joseph, the oldest member of our Kommando, as we goose-stepped through the camp’s gate. He was a frail, middle-aged Dutch Jew who wasn’t very bright. Many Ha¨ftlinge addressed one another by their first three numbers, which indicated one’s transport. Joseph’s first three numbers were 175, and that made him the butt of many jokes in our Kommando.
‘‘ Bist du ein Hundertfu¨nfundsiebzieger?’’ (Are you a 175?) they would teasingly ask him.
‘‘ Ja, ich bin ein Hundertfu¨nfundsiebzieger,’’ he would answer with a grin that always caused fits of laughter. Joseph never caught on to the joke. One hundred seventy-five was the number of the paragraph in the Nazi penal code that outlawed homosexuality, and as far as I could tell, Joseph was a simpleton but he wasn’t a
‘‘pinkie.’’
This particular morning Joseph had diarrhea, and the brownish yellow liquid was streaming down his pant legs as we marched. I was splashed and sprayed with every step, as were the men goose-stepping in front of him. As a matter of fact, they were getting it 128
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worse. Humiliated, poor Joseph weeped, wiping his tears and nose with his sleeve. When we arrived at our work site, the Kapo ordered Joseph to wash his pants at a faucet at one of the factory buildings across the road. Sniveling and bent over from cramps, ‘‘175’’ did as he was told.
The Vorarbeiter had us digging double-time on a new section of trench as the Kapo paced anxiously, continually looking down the road as if he were expecting an arrival. I noticed that there were German soldiers with binoculars positioned on the roofs of the factory buildings. This had to have something to do with the officers who were surveying the area the day before.
Joseph returned bare ass, his wet pants in his hands. Incensed, the Kapo ordered him to put his pants back on and dig in an area of the trench away from the rest of us. When the Kapo saw a shivering Joseph leaning on his shovel, he pointed at him and barked at the Vorarbeiter. ‘‘Helmut, let’s make a good impression!’’
The Vorarbeiter jumped into the trench and snatched the shovel from Joseph’s hands. Crying, Joseph sank to his knees. He didn’t see the Vorarbeiter raise the shovel, and he didn’t even moan as he slumped to the ground with his head caved in. None of us stopped digging. None of us even hesitated. We all knew it was coming.
The Kapo screamed at us to hide the Drecksack (dirt bag), and a quick thinking Ha¨ftling covered Joseph’s body with an overturned wheelbarrow.
A few minutes later the Kapo and the Vorarbeiter took off their caps and stood at attention as a black Mercedes convertible led by two motorcycles slowly passed by. I recognized Reichsfu¨hrer Himmler*, the boss of the SS, sitting in the backseat. Flanked by two of the plant’s engineers, he had come to inspect the fruits of his slaves’ labor. That was what all the fuss had been about. That was why 175’s body was under a wheelbarrow.
* There is no official record of Reichsfu¨hrer Heinrich Himmler visiting the I.G. Farben plant or Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; it is possible this was one of his doubles.
C H A P T E R 1 3
Every morning, once the Kommandos were counted and through the gate, the goose-stepping stopped and we became our true selves—a haggard, shuffling horde of slaves. A half-mile later, the Kapos would halt us at the Buna gate, where we would wait for the arrival of the British POWs. For some unknown reason, they and their Wehrmacht (German Army) guards had to enter the plant first.
Always whistling some popular tune, these well-dressed and well-fed POWs marched by us like strutting roosters. I would watch them go by with a twinge of envy and resentment, thinking that they wouldn’t be whistling such a happy tune if they were in my ill-fitting wooden shoes.
These strong fellows didn’t seem to mind working, mainly delivering supplies to the multitude of buildings that made up the plant. Pushing flatbed pushcarts, they would buzz back and forth, laughing and joking among themselves. It was probably a welcome relief from the idle monotony of their Stalag. They definitely enjoyed the opportunity for some contact with the civilians—the female civilians, to be precise. The POWs received chocolate in their Red Cross packages, and some of them bartered the sweets for
‘‘romance’’ with the local Polish girls working in the plant. With 129
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thousands of niches and dark corners, and not eno
ugh guards to cover the twenty square miles of plant grounds, it was easy for a hungry couple to duck away for a quickie. Hell, I would be whistling in the morning if I could soak my biscuit once in a while, but I would bust a lung singing if I could get my hands on one of those chocolate bars.
Ha¨ftlinge weren’t allowed to mingle with the POWs, but there were always opportunities to have a quick, furtive conversation. In the winter that usually happened around a barrel with a fire blazing inside, where we warmed ourselves during lunch breaks. From time to time POWs would stop to thaw out, and they would always dis-creetly pass out a few cigarettes to us ‘‘stripees.’’ With the coming of spring, the pace of everyone’s toiling outdoors slowed, and that brought more opportunities to chat with our allies.
In halting English I asked a blond, well-tanned sergeant pushing a cart of steel pipes, ‘‘What new, mate?’’ Having overheard fragments of their conversations, I thought ‘‘mate’’ was a common first name for Aussies and ‘‘bloke’’ was a first name for most of the British POWs.
The sergeant gave me a smile and said, ‘‘We’ve landed in Normandy, and Jerry is running back to the ‘fatherland.’ We’ll all be going home soon.’’ No wonder they marched as if they were in front of Buckingham Palace.
‘‘Take it easy,’’ the Aussie said, winking as he left. With his drawl, ‘‘easy’’ sounded like ‘‘dizzy,’’ so I thought he expected me to be dizzy with delight about the landing.
A few days later we were digging a deep trench between two warehouses. The sergeant sauntered by with a few of his ‘‘mates.’’
‘‘Is this a mass grave?’’ the sergeant joked.
I didn’t find it funny because it could easily have become one.
Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora Page 13