Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  At the main gate to the camp things happened with startling speed: ‘All women and children here. All Jews here. Men under thirty here.’ The sorting out was swift and amazingly accurate.

  A guard spotted Bukowski standing with the non-Jewish men under thirty and snapped: ‘Can you drive a car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Szymon received a blow to the head, and the instruction: ‘Here you say “Yes, sir,” ’ after which he was told: ‘Over there. That truck.’

  He moved quickly to a long flatbed truck with wooden strakes that formed low sides; if Bukowski or his neighboring farmers had had such a truck, they would have used it to haul manure. It had no driver.

  ‘Take it over there and wait,’ the guard said, and Szymon moved his truck to third position behind two others that were also waiting.

  The guards now had all the Jews separated and were herding them quickly to a low stone building, well built and of good design, marked BATH HOUSE. Here the Jews were ordered to undress, to take a medicinal shower that would kill any lice acquired in the boxcars during the long trip north, and Szymon caught glimpses of their naked pale-skinned bodies, like those of city people who rarely saw the sun. As he waited in his truck he watched an unceasing flow of new arrivals head for the bathhouse.

  Nineteen minutes after the first batch of Jews had entered the bathhouse, the three flatbed trucks with the shallow sides were edged forward, toward the far end of the bathhouse, where four Gestapo guards ordered the drivers to dismount and help with the task at hand.

  Inside the actual shower room, yet another contingent of Gestapo men, this time in gas masks, were busy tossing naked bodies out through small doors, from which the men waiting outside grabbed them, head and feet, tossing them deftly into the waiting trucks. Bukowski worked with a strong German who counted, each time: ‘Eins … zwei … drei’—and through the air the newly dead body would fly. Twenty-one minutes after arriving at Majdanek, the Jews from Hungary and Czechoslovakia were dead.

  When his truck was loaded with fifty-four dead bodies, men, women and children indiscriminately, Bukowski was ordered back to the wheel, and by the pale wintry light he followed the two lead trucks up a kind of alleyway between the barracks, arriving at last at the gateway to another solidly built structure, where a man with an unforgettable face awaited. He was Eric Muhsfeldt, about thirty years old, with a pinched, triangular face, square at the top, pointed at the bottom and with almost no chin. He had big ears, a low hairline, wide eyes which saw everything and a generous mouth which smiled easily. He was in command of this building, and since these were the first deliveries of the day, he was eager to get started. Congenially, and almost jovially, he greeted the first two drivers, then saw Bukowski still in regular dress: ‘You’re new, eh? You’ll catch on.’

  When he directed the first two trucks to unload their cargo, men came out from the building to take charge, and one by one the dead bodies were carried inside. ‘You want to see?’ Muhsfeldt asked Bukowski, almost as if the latter were his brother. And when Szymon stood inside, facing the five effective brick-faced ovens with the gas jets blazing below, he was awed by the mechanical ingenuity displayed in the design of this crematorium.

  Corpses were moved in orderly fashion from the receiving gate to the five gaping mouths awaiting them. When an oven was crammed, the entrance door was locked shut with heavy metal clamps, elegantly designed, and the fierce heat was allowed to do its job. When only ashes and bones remained, equally efficient doors on the other side, each bearing a neat brass sign indicating that they had been built by Cori of Berlin, were opened and the ashes were removed by four Polish prisoners using long-handled shovels.

  Less than an hour after a Jew stepped inside Majdanek, he could be fertilizer heading for a collection dump outside the electrified barbed wire. ‘But you’ll find many Jews still inside the camp,’ Muhsfeldt assured Szymon. ‘We had to handle these so quick because we had no more room.’

  That evening he was formally processed, which meant that all his clothes were taken from him and thrown in a heap for later distribution in Germany. In return he was given only three items, each made from a flimsy material conspicuous for its broad convict stripes in black and white: a cap, a large shirt and baggy pants. One young prisoner who had been a university student and done field work in Italy studied himself in stripes and whispered: ‘Now I look like the Siena cathedral,’ but Szymon, who knew nothing of architecture, did not understand.

  In gathering dusk the new prisoners were marched down the camp road to their quarters, and it was a mournful experience to pass almost a mile of barbed wire, horribly tangled, forming three different fences, one behind the other, inside of which stretched what seemed like an endless row of low, massive barracks. The first impression was one of bleak immensity, for the plan was that when Majdanek was completed, it would hold two hundred fifty thousand prisoners, year after year, for as long as any Poles survived. The Jews, by that time, would have long since been exterminated.

  For the present it consisted of six fields, tremendous in size and surrounded separately by their own barbed fences. Each field contained twenty-two identical barracks carefully aligned, for this was an orderly camp.

  Szymon had been assigned to Field Four, and when he reached the heavily guarded gate which led through the wire he noted that the guardhouse was decorated with the famous SS sign, in which the letters had been drawn to look like two bolts of lightning, and by a huge swastika. The Nazis want us to remember who’s in charge, he said to himself. When the gates were locked behind him he was taken to Barracks Eleven, which would be his home until he died, for it was not intended that he or any of the others in that camp should emerge alive.

  He walked into a room of enormous size, and stood still for a moment, shivering in the wind that seemed to come from every direction through the cracks in the walls. Double-decker wooden frames stretched in two lines, seemingly to infinity, bare planks on which five hundred and fifty slept jammed side by side, each man allocated exactly twenty-six inches.

  While he waited for a sleeping space to be assigned him, a prisoner in charge of handing out blankets to the newcomers whispered: ‘Most of us in here are Poles, like you and me. But one thing I want to warn you about.’ He was toothless and could have been thirty years old or eighty. ‘I seen you driving the death truck to the crematorium. You keep that up, in no time you’ll be dead.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They find men can’t stand it. They go crazy. Do crazy things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The whispering man did not answer that question. ‘So when they see that a team of drivers and oven men are about used up, they wait till you’re together, then herd you into one of the rooms and release the Zyklon-B.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The new supergas the German chemists invented. Zyklon-B. Kills quick and painless, I’m told. So into the room you’ll go with the others who’ve been handling the ovens. Psssst! Here comes the Zyklon-B, and ten minutes later, guess who’s in the oven?’

  Szymon could scarcely absorb such dreadful information, but his informant continued: ‘Another thing. Whatever you do, stay out of Barracks Nineteen.’

  ‘Are they especially tough there?’

  ‘They’re fatal. That’s where the other barracks send their men who look as if they’re going to die.’

  ‘What happens in Nineteen?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s the problem. They stick you in there, feed you nothing—and psssst! Three days later, guess who’s in the oven?’

  But before sleeping spaces were assigned, all prisoners were led out to a feeding area, where the planned horror of Majdanek was revealed: men who had spent twelve hours at grueling labor, many with pick and shovel, were given as their main meal of the day a small bowl of watery soup containing no meat, no fats, just a cube of black bread whose principal ingredient was sometimes sawdust. Those who had been in camp for some months finished by licking their bowls avid
ly, seeking even one additional morsel of nourishment.

  Szymon had suffered great pain from the beatings he had recently taken and the bruises from the broomstick, but he experienced an even greater pain that night. He was unbearably hungry, and from the faces about him he could see that all the others were too. And as a newcomer in one of the most crowded barracks, he was assigned no plank, just a narrow area on the damp ground, with only one blanket so thin that the man next to him said: ‘You could read through that one.’

  With the blanket wrapped tightly around him and rearranged a dozen different ways throughout the night, trying desperately to gain just a little more warmth, Bukowski spent his first night on the cold ground, aware that if this continued for long, he must die of pneumonia.

  It was incredible that men who were expected to labor for the Third Reich, regardless of what work they were to do, should be so abused; Bukowski would not have treated one of his cows this way and then expected her to give milk. Toward morning, as he lay shivering uncontrollably, he realized what the program at Majdanek really was. They want us to die. They want all the Poles who might do any constructive work to die. Leaving only slaves. Despite the aching cold and his tormenting bruises, he laughed bitterly: They’ll find few slaves in this country. They’ll have to kill us all.

  Half an hour before dawn he participated in a routine calculated to speed the dying: he and all the others were rousted out, those from the damp ground confused after the sleepless night, and mustered in long lines before their barracks. There they stood, some without shoes, for an hour and a half while roll calls were taken and orders given. They grew numb. They needed to go to the latrine. They were ravished by hunger. Their feet and legs were aching. But if they moved or fell, they were beaten and returned to the ranks, where they must somehow continue to stand, waiting for the roll call to be finished.

  As Szymon waited, he noticed that the immense open space between the two rows of barracks was kept completely clean, not a shed or a blade of grass intruding upon the bleak expanse. However, between Barracks Six and Seventeen, in the middle of this barren waste, stood a single stout pole with a heavy crossbeam at the top. When the barracks commander was at the other end of the line Szymon whispered: ‘What’s that?’ and the man next to him said: ‘A gibbet.’

  Each field had one, and here from time to time camp officials liked to conduct public hangings: ‘A good execution, well-handled, brings the prisoners to attention. Excellent for discipline, and a hanging is clearly more effective than a shooting.’ The executions were held now in one field, now in another, so that during any one month each field could anticipate two or three. On this day the hanging would occur in Field Four.

  It was customary for all prisoners in a given field to form a square around the gallows, to which the condemned man, his guards and the field commander would march stiffly. At each hanging the commander would announce the reason why this particular man had to be hanged, and someone in the camp, some Pole of extraordinary heroism, would write down in a secret place the name of the condemned and the charges against him. This morning the man was Onufry Unilowski and his crime was that he had spoken against the food being served and had tried to start a riot.

  He was a young man—the secret records of the underground showed that the average age of those hanged at the public gibbets was nineteen—and he met his death bravely, shouting as he stood with no hood over his head: ‘Resist! Resist!’ A Gestapo guard bashed him in the mouth with a gun butt and the white stool on which he was standing was kicked away. He did not die quickly, for camp officials wanted their prisoners to see the prolonged agonies which awaited them if they caused even a trivial disturbance.

  Bukowski remained on the death truck for five weeks, during which he still had to sleep on the ground with only that shadow-thin blanket. He could feel weakness creeping into his bones, assaulting his joints, but he was sustained by Professor Tomczyk, who lay beside him: ‘Szymon, you must try to tell yourself that this is not happening. Do not fight it all the time, or you will weaken all your defenses.’

  ‘The killing all day. The starvation. The sleepless nights.’

  ‘The sovereign law, Szymon, is to survive. Avoid the gibbet. Avoid Barracks Nineteen. Say nothing. Do nothing. Like a bear in winter, you must go into moral hibernation.’

  The old man was able to do this, ignoring the cruelest deprivations, but one morning at roll call, when, hungry and cold, he could scarcely stand, he almost lost his composure. Down the line, checking on everyone, came the commander of Field Four, a big, stoop-shouldered Gestapo man who selected those who were to be hanged on his gibbet, and on this morning he was looking for diversion. Spotting Tomczyk and remembering that he had been a professor, he suddenly grabbed the old man’s glasses, threw them to the ground, and stamped on them with his heel, grinding them into the pebbles. ‘You won’t need glasses any longer.’

  If Tomczyk had made one movement, even a twitch of the face, he would have been hanged within ten minutes, but with the discipline he had acquired during the interrogations, he nodded his head slightly in deference to the commander and somehow indicated that he was ashamed of having been a professor, or one who had read books. The fatal moment passed, and it was a man from Barracks Seventeen who was hanged.

  But when they were together in Barracks Eleven that night, Szymon saw that Professor Tomczyk was weeping, not crocodile tears to gratify his tormentors but the real tears of a distressed old man, and when Szymon asked why, Tomczyk said: ‘Because I will never again be able to read a book.’

  ‘You’ll get other glasses when you get out,’ Szymon reassured him, but Tomczyk said with awful foreknowledge: ‘I will never get out. Thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, will never get out. They will never allow us even to see a book, let alone read one.’ He took Szymon’s hands. ‘Learning is a beautiful thing. Wisdom keeps the world functioning. Get learning. Get wisdom. For on you young people the future of Poland depends. Us old ones, they’ll kill us all to halt the flow of learning.’

  Field Four was under the command of SS Captain Otto Grundtz, one of the best men in the business. With extreme severity he operated his set of twenty-two barracks in a way which quickly stifled any protest. He was a big man, thirty-five years old, and the combination of bulging eyes and bristling black eyebrows made him look menacing even when conducting routine inspections. He had been one of the early Nazi bullyboys, adept at smashing Jewish stores or liberal meetings, but he had been categorized from the first as a mere brute with little likelihood of any serious promotion. He was ideally suited, his superiors felt, for concentration-camp duty, and since Nazi plans called for camps to be permanently maintained in both Germany and the conquered countries, men like Grundtz could look forward to many years of employment.

  Even in Germany, where education was important, he had not attended school beyond the age of twelve and felt no need to repair the loss. He read nothing, discussed nothing, cheered when told to, and was careful to preserve an unblemished record with his superiors. But he was not a dull man. When a new procedure was to be introduced, he studied it more carefully than the other field commanders and instituted it with a minimum of dislocation.

  For example, when the camp commandant found that the barracks were becoming overcrowded because prisoners were dying more slowly than anticipated, it was Grundtz who devised the strategy for Barracks Nineteen. He told his twenty-two subordinates, each of whom supervised a barracks, that they must watch constantly for prisoners who were assigned to especially onerous tasks on diminished rations and not to allow them to waste slowly away, which might take months, but to observe the moment any man fell into unconsciousness: ‘He is not to be revived. Carry him as he is to Barracks Nineteen.’ There the man was to be dumped, and left to die.

  On some mornings as many as fifteen or sixteen bodies would be hauled away from that barracks alone. It was efficient; it was quiet; and it furthered the objective for which Majdanek had been established.


  Morning inspections, with the men standing at attention, became a time for Otto Grundtz to walk slowly down the line, shoulders hunched, big body moving forward, eyes peering out from beneath those heavy brows, trying to pick out which men might be moved on to Nineteen. When he made his decision, there was no review, which was why the prisoners in Field Four tried to use what little strength they still had not to appear sick or weak during these inspections. Among the men, Barracks Nineteen was known as ‘Otto Grundtz’s infirmary. Cure guaranteed.’

  Unlike the other concentration camps which the Nazis built in Poland—unspeakable Treblinka, which was simply an extermination center, in and dead the same morning; or Belzec, which specialized in torture; or Auschwitz, where hideous procedures were encouraged; or its terrible appendage Birkenau, whose gas chambers were able to accommodate 60,000 bodies in any twenty-four hours—Majdanek was a relatively humane center. True, it did kill off 360,000 unwanted Jews and Poles, almost as many of the latter as of the former, but outright torture for its own end was not permitted. A field commander like Grundtz would have been reprimanded had he instituted anything like the infamous little cell at Auschwitz, where at dusk camp officials would cram into a tiny room with one high window some sixty prisoners chosen at random, then lock the door—and expect to find forty suffocated or trampled to death by morning. There was nothing like that at Majdanek. Prisoners were inducted into the camp in an orderly fashion. Jobs were assigned, such as working at the crematorium or in the shoe-repair shop, one being considered about the same as the other, and after a testing period, the strongest and ablest men were selected for work at one of the German commercial factories that had grown up around the camp perimeter in order to profit from free slave labor.

  For all prisoners food rations were kept at a minimum so that disease would the more quickly finish them off; vast epidemics of various fevers and choleras swept the camp at intervals, killing six or seven thousand at a time, especially the many children who found their way into Field Five, where they were sequestered with the women. And of course, the constant regimen of ten and twelve hours of heavy labor, with less than nine hundred calories of food a day, did speed the deaths of any with even the slightest impairment. One abscessed tooth when there was no dentist and no protein to produce white corpuscles could kill a man overnight.