Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Szymon noticed at the gas chamber that the Zyklon-B the Nazis were using was made by the German firm of Tesch & Stabenow and that what he supposed were careful instructions came with each shipment. The gas was delivered in neatly labeled cylinders bearing a bold skull and crossbones plus a verbal warning that the gas could be deadly if not used with extreme care.

  He was at the gas chamber one morning, loading his flatbed with dead Jews, when a Dr. Eigenstiller, who served as traveling expert for Tesch & Stabenow, arrived to check on procedures at Majdanek and to compare their operations with those at the other camps that were the principal users of his company’s product. He told the men supervising the chamber: ‘You must keep the nozzles clean. That way you get a more even distribution of the first application, and that’s important if you want an orderly procedure.’

  Eigenstiller did suggest one improvement that had worked well in the other camps: ‘Pack your undesirables in more closely, using about one square foot per person. Giving them three separate blasts assures you a more even distribution and doesn’t waste the Zyklon-B. You’ll see the advantage when you open the doors. The bodies remain upright. They can’t fall down, so you’ll avoid that jungle of arms and legs.’

  There was one regrettable aspect of the system for which no solution had yet been found: ‘When an undesirable dies of strangulation, which is what this is, technically, his bowels often empty automatically, also his bladder, and we have found no way to prevent this. It is absolutely essential therefore that you hose out the chamber after every use. After every use! Otherwise contamination builds up and any communicable germs the undesirables may have brought with them get a chance to multiply.’

  On the whole, Szymon heard him reporting to the camp commander, Majdanek was doing an efficient job, and after sharing drinks and sandwiches with the SS men running the place, Eigenstiller left in a staff car to check what improvements might be needed at Treblinka.

  Shortly thereafter Heinrich Himmler himself visited Majdanek, poking his fat little belly and pig-set eyes into many corners, and what he found delighted him: ‘This place is beautiful! Everything works!’ In his enthusiasm he announced that the Fuehrer had farreaching plans for this camp: ‘It’s to be enlarged tenfold. We want a quarter of a million Poles behind barbed wire, constantly replenished. We’ll build a chain of factories around the perimeter to manufacture many of the goods we’ll need in Germany.’

  To guards like Otto Grundtz, who were encouraged by this prospect of endless employment of a congenial nature, he explained: ‘Your work in such an enlarged camp will advance our program in two ways. You’ll accelerate the death rate of the Polish swine. And by keeping their men away from the women during the years of normal reproduction, you’ll lower the birth rate drastically. Give us twenty-five years—just twenty-five—and we’ll be on our way to settling the Polish problem permanently.’

  So Majdanek went its prosaic way. It would be open about three years, perhaps a thousand days, which meant that not fewer than three hundred and sixty persons had to die each twenty-four hours to maintain the standard. But it didn’t really work that way, because on certain days there were unusual events which speeded the process and compensated for those days when perhaps only a hundred died.

  One such event occurred shortly after Szymon’s arrival. Majdanek housed many Gypsies, collected assiduously from various parts of Europe, and they were housed in segregated barracks in Field Six, where they received extra rations and special privileges. Since they were excused from heavy labor, they seemed actually to prosper in camp, and this caused envy and even animosity among the other prisoners.

  The reason they were so carefully nurtured was bizarre, but understandable if one accepted Nazi philosophy. Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, philosopher of the party, was the son of an illiterate German shoemaker who had not been able to earn a living in Germany proper but who had done so in Estonia, where his son was born. Rosenberg’s amateurish studies led him to the mystery of the European Gypsy, and he became convinced that these strange people out of Asia were a race completely apart. And what made them especially worthy of study, Rosenberg preached, was the unquestioned capacity of their women to produce healthy babies with great regularity and with some kind of immunity which defended the children against normal diseases. ‘We must,’ argued Rosenberg, ‘determine the secret of the Gypsy woman, because then we can apply it to our German women and help them produce a master race of blond, moral, strong Nordics.’ He was convinced also that Germans, Norwegians and Swedes, but no others, sprang from a race of pure Nordics who inhabited a cold Arctic continent which vanished sometime around A.D. 400, having contributed to the world the superior race that was now destined to conquer Europe and rule it justly.

  He ordered any camp which contained a concentration of Gypsies to conduct interesting experiments on the women and especially their child-bearing processes, but regrettably, nothing substantial came of this, so one day in disgust he sent to centers like Majdanek a coded message which read: RESEARCH ON GYPSIES CONCLUDED. HARVEST HOME ACTION.

  The telegram was delivered at Majdanek at seven in the morning, and by nine all the Gypsy quarters were vacated. Nine hundred and sixteen of these curious, talkative, gesturing people were led to a hill at the far western edge of the camp, lined up carefully—names and numbers registered—and machine-gunned.

  The Nazis who ran the individual fields at Majdanek did condone one practiced brutality, and since it contained an element of amusement, it was also approved by the commandant. It would occur at the close of day, when the prisoners were exhausted from their heavy labors and no food. A two-hundred-pound guard called The Dancer sometimes appeared unannounced and arbitrarily, first in this field, then in another, and in a high-pitched feminine voice, shouted at the slaves as they stood at muster before their barracks: ‘Stillgestanden, Mützen ab, Augen links!’ and the captives had to stand very still, take off their caps with their left hand just so, and turn eyes and head to the left.

  As they stood so, The Dancer moved down the line trying to detect any irregularity. Satisfied, he cried in that high voice: ‘Mützen auf!’ and the men replaced their caps and looked straight ahead.

  Then came the terrifying moment, for The Dancer now moved back, folded his arms, and inspected the men standing before him. Finally, on no selective principle that could be ascertained, he chose some prisoner, moved menacingly before him, studied him for about a minute, then with his left thumb wet with spit, marked a spot on the man’s body: behind the right ear perhaps, or on the left side of the belly, low down, or directly over the heart. Twice he would indicate the target spot with his spit.

  Now he showed why he carried his nickname, for he would move well away from the prisoner and begin the dancing shuffle used by prizefighters, weaving this way and that, uttering small grunts as if a true fight were in progress, licking first his left thumb, then his right, and all the time marking his target.

  Finally, with a piercing scream, he would lunge forward with all his considerable force, swing his right fist with terrible power, and strike the prisoner hard on target.

  Invariably the man would be knocked to the ground, for in his weakened condition there was no chance of withstanding such a blow, but this falling seemed to infuriate The Dancer, for he would stand over the prostrate prisoner and revile him in screeching tones: ‘Get up, coward bastard Pole afraid to fight! Get up and fight like a man!’

  With this he would begin to kick the fallen man, hard, heavy blows of the boot to the head and kidneys and heart, screaming for the man to get up and fight like a decent German … like a man. And all the while he danced back and forth like a boxer.

  In Field Four he had killed five men, three by kicking them to death, two by terrible blows which ruptured the heart—and the men of this field, not knowing how many others he had killed in the other areas, often felt that the most hideous sound on earth was that high-pitched cry ‘Stillgestanden, Mützen ab, Augen links!’ for they knew it t
hreatened another indecent death.

  An especially gruesome aspect of The Dancer’s performance was that when it became known to the guards in other fields that he was about to box, these men ran to where he was conducting his evening ‘inspection,’ forming a kind of cheering section and even making small wagers as to whether he would be able to kill his target with one blow. ‘A clean knockout’ that was called, and the watching guards applauded when he achieved it.

  One evening after the usual brutal day of work, Bukowski returned to Field Four, where the guards had gathered to watch The Dancer, and found himself selected as the target, marked just below the heart with that spit-wetted left thumb. Two of the guards cheered their man on and two others arranged a bet as to whether or not Bukowski could survive the forthcoming blow. Szymon, watching the weaving shuffle as The Dancer maneuvered to attain maximum power in his right arm, prayed: Let me withstand this. Body, grow strong. And he looked The Dancer right in the eye as the guards cheered and the terrible blow fell.

  He had never experienced such a paralyzing, thunderous smashing. Resistance was impossible, and he felt himself going down as if a woodsman had chopped off his legs. Don’t faint! he ordered his failing body, but he could feel blackness sweeping over him. Don’t faint or he’ll kick you to death.

  He did faint, but just for a moment. Then he felt the deadly boot crashing into his head, and surprisingly, this revived him. With a fortitude he did not know he had he raised his hands, fended off the next kick, and slowly regained his feet while The Dancer screamed at him: ‘Filthy fucking Pole! Why don’t you stand up and fight like a man?’

  One morning Bukowski arrived with a load of corpses at the crematorium, to find that no one was working inside. Eric Muhsfeldt was there, of course, as chief of the installation, but he had no helpers; Gestapo guards had appeared suddenly that morning and driven the oven workers into a small room, where Zyklon-B was released. Now, before work could begin, it was necessary to remove those bodies from the room and place them in the ovens.

  Bukowski was detailed to this duty, and when he was finished, Muhsfeldt, with his triangular face, staring eyes and smiling lips, said: ‘I want you to work with me now. I’ve been watching you, and you’re very good.’

  Bukowski, knowing this to be a death sentence—all in Majdanek were under that sentence, but to work in the crematorium meant that it would come hideously sooner—thought for a moment that he must protest, but he knew that if he did, Muhsfeldt could order him shot, so he temporized: ‘I’d like working with you, sir, but first I must take my truck back.’

  ‘Of course! You’ll start tomorrow. I’ll tell your commander.’

  Szymon, trembling, drove the truck back to the gas chambers to pick up his next load of Jewish corpses, but as he waited in line he chanced to see the pile of shoes left by the doomed Jews before entering the baths. He knew that these shoes would be taken to the shoe-repair shop, where the sound ones would be mended for use in Germany, and on the spur of the moment he left his truck, a crime in itself, and went up to the officer in charge.

  ‘May I speak, sir?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Some of those shoes. They could be saved.’

  ‘I know that. That’s what I have my men doing.’

  ‘I used to be a shoemaker. I could fix that shoe,’ and he pointed to one almost worth salvaging.

  ‘You could?’

  ‘Yes. I fixed shoes that were in much worse shape than that.’ Then he had a brilliant thought: ‘In Poland, you know, we don’t have good shoes.’

  ‘Not like good German shoes,’ the Nazi said. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘My truck.’

  ‘I’ll find another driver. Drivers are plentiful. Good shoemakers, not.’

  He led Szymon to a small, low concrete building outside the triple barbed wire where six emaciated camp slaves were going through the painfully slow motions of repairing shoes. With thumping heart and almost animal cunning, Szymon surveyed the work area, spotted a pair of pincers like those he had once watched his village shoemaker use, picked them up, and reaching down for one of the shoes lying on the floor, began pulling away the worn sole. When the officer’s attention was diverted, Szymon whispered to the man nearest him: ‘Protect me,’ and that man took from the pile the mate to Szymon’s shoe and began the procedures which a skilled shoemaker would follow. Szymon aped him, whereupon another man said, in the officer’s hearing: ‘This one knows how to fix shoes.’

  He got the job, but at close of day, when he should have gone with the guards back to Field Four, he sought permission from his officer to detour to the crematorium: ‘I should explain to Muhsfeldt. He would be expecting me and I would not want him to think …’

  The shoe-repair officer laughed at the idea of anyone’s apologizing to a chinless wonder like Muhsfeldt, who was kept at the crematorium because he was good for nothing else, but the officer also liked Bukowski’s attitude, so he assigned two guards to return him to his quarters via the burning place, and they watched as Szymon apologized. He did not want Muhsfeldt to harbor any grudge that might cause the angular-faced man to order his death, and the crematorium man, for his part, seemed pleased that the Pole had come to apologize.

  ‘I could have used you,’ he said, the narrow space between his hairline and his eyebrows wrinkling with obvious irritation. ‘But I always come last. They don’t like me because I work here, but this camp couldn’t function without me. We average about three hundred fifty bodies a day, and did you ever stop to think how many men it would take to dig that many graves day after day? It would bankrupt the camp.’ He pointed to his five ovens, their metal work gleaming, and said: ‘These are the most sensible thing in this camp.’

  He was sorry to lose Bukowski: ‘But around here the officers always come first. If they need you to fix shoes …’ He showed Szymon his own, which were not good.

  ‘I’ll fix them,’ Szymon said, and that night he returned to Barracks Eleven certain that he had gained a few more months of life, and he was right, for ten weeks later all the crematorium crew of which he would have been a member disappeared, and Professor Tomczyk explained why: ‘The Nazis want no one alive who could report specific details. When surrender nears—and believe me, it will come—you watch! Then they’ll shoot whoever is left here.’

  Bukowski’s feeling of good fortune in escaping imminent death was dampened by the decline he saw in Professor Tomczyk. As the old man grew ever weaker, he was in danger of being nominated some morning for Barracks Nineteen and accelerated death. But at morning muster, when he stood in the snow for ninety minutes, he drew upon some inner reserve whose power dumfounded Bukowski: How does he do it, that frail old man with the bruised and broken body?

  Otto Grundtz, who monitored everyone in Field Four, always seeking those who could be more quickly killed off, as if to fulfill his quota, had seen Tomczyk as a likely prospect, and assigned him to the great concrete rollers, two massive cylinders with iron pipes set through their middles. They were used for smoothing the camp roads, and work on them was the cruelest that could be devised, for in cold weather prisoners, with no gloves, had to grasp the freezing iron pipes, and then summon all their energy to start the rollers forward and keep them going. It would have been murderous work for a young man consuming thirty-five hundred calories a day of fat and protein. On nine hundred calories of thin soup, it was a sure sentence of death.

  But Professor Tomczyk refused to die. And he refused to be placed in Barracks Nineteen: ‘I will defeat them.’ And he began that series of instructions which no man who survived Barracks Eleven would ever forget. He became a professor again, urgently teaching as if he must within a limited time impart all he knew to younger men who would carry on the obligations he had assumed. In whispered discussions at night, or in casual observations to his fellows as he strained at the concrete rollers, he taught his lessons:

  ‘The most important thing to do when this nightmare ends—and it will end—is to rebui
ld. Every item that they destroy, you must rebuild. Because rebuilding is an act of faith, an act of commitment to the future. If they’ve destroyed a schoolhouse in your village, and they’ve burned down many, rebuild it first of all, because a schoolhouse is a pledge to the future.

  ‘And our beautiful buildings, if they destroy them, rebuild them, because they are testimony to the greatness we once knew. Rebuild a church or a historic palace even before you rebuild your own homes, because you’ve learned here that a man can live anywhere, under any conditions. Homes can wait, but the edifices which warm the civic heart can be lost if not attended to at the proper time.

  ‘Rebuild, rebuild. And most of all, you young fellows, rebuild your own lives. Love your wives when you get home and have many children. This is not the end. Otto Grundtz is not the god who oversees the fields of Poland.

  ‘Rebuild. Rebuild. Think now of what you will rebuild as soon as the evil ones depart. Imagine churches and palaces and schoolhouses. And most of all, imagine the children you will make, and educate, and send on their way.’

  He was incessant in this teaching, a dying man who refused to die until he was sure that the spring fields had been sown with good seed.

  He was really remarkable, the younger men around him thought. Sixty, seventy years old, probably weighed less than a hundred pounds, but there he stood at muster, his feet freezing in snow, and there he worked at the icy handles of the great concrete rollers, and each day it seemed that he must collapse and be moved the final distance to Barracks Nineteen. But at the next day’s roll call he would report: ‘Present.’