“You shouldn’t say that,” Schmidt said to Jakub.
“Tell me what he’s saying.”
“The lieutenant is not a bad man,” Schmidt said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jakub said.
“What the fuck is he saying?”
The sergeant leaned over and whispered the answer. Von Kempt gazed at Jakub. “You fuck.” The lieutenant lunged at him. They fell against the bunk. Jakub pushed von Kempt back. Schmidt grabbed Jakub and pulled him off. Von Kempt lay against the bunk.
“You want to die?” Jakub screamed. “You want to die?”
“What’s he saying?”
“He asked if you wanted to die.”
“What the fuck. He’s threatening me?”
Von Kempt grabbed the sides of the bunk and fought to stand. He slipped in the hay. He struggled. “Put him in the H-block,” the hospital block, he yelled. He was finally able to stand and grasped the sides of the bunk. He perspired around his brow. “Pampered son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Mother fucker.”
Schmidt took hold of the lieutenant.
“I want him in the fucking H-block. You make sure of that.”
“Kommandant won’t like it.”
“Fuck him! Put a kapo in here to watch the fucking horse. If the Kommandant says anything, I’ll tell him Chelzak admitted trying to kill his wife.”
Schmidt led von Kempt out.
COOL FALL AIR SETTLED ON THE VALLEY next morning. Jakub still slept in the bunk in the stable. Von Kempt shook him. “Chelzak. Herr Chelzak. Wake up.”
Jakub stirred.
Von Kempt patted his face. “Herr Chelzak.”
Jakub’s eyes opened. The site of von Kempt startled him. He stood and moved away.
“Don’t worry,” the lieutenant said. He smiled. “I have something I want to read to you.” The lieutenant took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket. “I know you don’t speak German but you’ll understand.”
Von Kempt lit a lantern that hung from the side of the bunk. The flame rose and filled the cramped space with soft light. He moved the paper into the light and read. “My Dearest Klaus: I don’t know how to tell you this in a way that will not wound you.” He took a deep breath. “I cannot...continue…us—” Von Kempt stopped. “I hesitated when you decided to join the Wehrmacht, but you were so excited—what could I do? You began to think only of your service and, I think, you began to forget about me.”
Von Kempt paused and looked at Jakub. “She’s been here three times this year,” he said. “Three times! Most guys only get to see their girl once in a year.”
Jakub looked down at the lieutenant’s side arm and kept his eyes there. Von Kempt continued.
“I might be able to better deal with it if you were in Berlin, but you’re not and that’s the way it is. You are smart and able, and loyal—so why do they put you in a filthy resettlement camp? You know what they say here. They say the camps are not where the best officers go. I’ve asked, Klaus. I’ve asked wives and girlfriends. I’ve asked husbands of women who serve on the Führer’s personal detail. They all say the same thing. The Reich doesn’t send its best men to the camps. We both know why they sent you.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “Fucking bitch,” he said. He looked at Jakub. “You know what she’s talking about. I can’t march as well as the rest, so I get sent here. I’m not good enough. Just like Schmidt. And Fiddler. And that prick Petersdorf. But they’re Schutz and I’m Wehrmacht.” He rose and approached Jakub. “Heal my leg,” he said. He moved closer, obscuring the light. “I don’t belong here. Maybe some people do—but not me. I don’t deserve to be here.”
Jakub looked at him.
“I don’t just kill, you know, like some of the guys. There’s some real freaks here.”
Von Kempt looked at Jakub intently. Then he reached over and touched Jakub’s hand. Jakub hesitated, but von Kempt held him. He took the hand and moved it to his left leg. He placed his palm over the crested top of Jakub’s hand and delicately pressed. Jakub felt familiar quills rise on the back of his neck, penning his discomfort with a thousand little points.
“If you heal me,” von Kempt said, “I’ll get you out.”
VON KEMPT REPEALED HIS DEMAND THAT JAKUB be taken to the hospital block, which was not a hospital at all, but a warehouse-sized barracks with dirt floors and wood bunks. To an airborne observer, hospital blocks looked like Noah’s Arks run aground. The Reich mandated each camp have such a block. The only quality a hospital block shared with a hospital was that it housed the sick. No one in the block received care, and no doctors ever visited. Instead, the sickest inmates—those who couldn’t work, or stand in line long enough to be gassed—came here to die.
Lice, rats, and other vermin ravaged skin-and-bones inmates who lay immobile and covered with bedsores on straw mats, wood bunks, or dirt. Filthy water ran through rusty pipes and dysentery spread. Death rattles in the lungs and hacking from emphysema and tuberculosis kept anyone from sleeping much. In winter, the ground froze, the pipes burst, and hundreds died of exposure or lost limbs to gangrene and frostbite. In summer, the heat killed almost as many, and bugs—mosquitoes, flies, biting chiggers, and stinging ants—crawled and foraged. In the hottest, wettest months, maggots nested in the dead.
Clipboard and smoldering cigars in hand, Schmidt and Corporal Walkenburg stood outside the main door of the block. Schmidt fumbled with some keys. They heard moaning and coughing inside.
“Fucking Stinksaal,” Schmidt said. “I never go in here.”
They opened the door. “Oh,” Walkenburg yelped. He squeezed his nose shut.
The sun jumped in and glared at a few ghastly souls leaning against the wooden plank wall. The rest of the place was dark except where light peered in from a few barred windows high up, near the roof. Schmidt plugged his nose and looked down the corridor. He saw the dead and dying, three and four to a bunk. He stared for a few minutes while his eyes adjusted. He handed the clipboard to Walkenburg
“Remember—everyone counted once. Even dead.”
He didn’t recognize the woman from the gas chamber whose hair had not been shorn. Shosha Mordechai looked at him as he passed. She wanted to spit at him, but she was barely strong enough to breathe.
THREE PEOPLE CROWDED EACH TWO-PERSON BUNK in the hospital block. People sat on the ground. They lay against the walls. They slept next to latrines. They kept each other warm.
Shosha lay on her back on the hard wood of a bunk staring at her face in a jagged mirror the size of her palm. She fogged the mirror when she breathed. She touched her cheeks.
A woman who told everyone to call her Julia sat with her bony legs crossed on the edge of the same bunk drawing on the butt of a dead cigar.
“Why are you puffing that cold stogie?” Shosha asked.
“I can taste the tobacco,” Julia said.
The door at the far end of the block opened and light came in and struck the face of the woman in the next bunk.
“Let me see the mirror—quick,” she said.
“You don’t want to see your face,” Julia said.
Cold air swept in.
“Close the fucking door.”
“Shh!”
“Stupid—what are you saying?”
“It’s fucking cold.”
Everybody waited for the guards to storm the aisle. They watched in the direction of the door. They saw shadows. Then the door pulled back the light.
“Why do I keep thinking they don’t care about us anymore?” Julia said.
“They don’t have time for torture,” said a voice nearby. “This place is overrun.”
“Under run is more like it,” Julia said. She drew on the lifeless butt.
They heard low voices and watched shadowed shapeless forms move. They heard greetings.
“Not here.”
“No, you can't sit here.”
“Keep going.”
“Fuck off!”
“Watch your step.”
“There’s no room at the inn.”
“This village is under quarantine.”
“Go away!”
Someone chuckled hoarsely. The shadows moved down the aisle.
“We have a space,” Shosha said. “We can get one more in at least.”
Julia whistled toward the newcomers. She waved them over. “Down here.”
A girl arrived first. Shosha looked up at her. “There’s room for one,” Shosha said. “We’ll have to draw straws.”
“You are so fucking nice,” Julia said. “How’d you get to be so nice?”
“You’re nice too,” Shosha said. “You let me borrow your mirror.”
“If they catch me with that mirror, I’m a goner,” Julia said.
“See—you take such risks for your friends.”
“I want you all to see how ugly you are,” Julia said. “And how beautiful I am.” She made a mock gesture.
The other two newcomers arrived—a man and another girl. “Is this where?” the man said.
Shosha recognized the voice. She turned her head. “Come here,” she said.
The man stepped forward. She couldn’t at first remember his face. His cheeks sat higher on his bones. His lips were lines and his eyes recessed. His hair was thin. His skin looked worn and old. He had creases and cracks where stress had fractured him.
Shosha remembered him by looking at his hands. “Oh!” she said. Her lips quivered. She turned and when she was on her stomach, she pushed herself forward. Julia stood and moved away. Shosha pushed herself out of the bunk and stood on her thin, shaky legs. She took the hands and turned them and looked at them. She looked into the man’s eyes. “Janusz Jerczek,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes I am.”
LATER, SHOSHA GATHERED HERSELF. “I told the rabbi. I told him what a mistake it was,” she said to Jerczek. “He wouldn't listen. He told me I was mistaken—that I was meddling.”
“He couldn't have known,” Dr. Jerczek said. “None of us knew.”
“How could you be so stupid, I said. How could you trust them?” Shosha said. “He said it was all right. He said everything was arranged. He said you were going to a new orphanage, outside Vienna.”
Jerczek took a deep breath. “We went to Stutthof.”
“From Vienna to Stutthof,” Julia said. “Tell me your travel agent.”
“Shh.”
Shosha forced herself to ask the next question. Her lips didn’t merely quiver—her entire mouth shook. She could barely speak and her face felt hot. A new pit opened in her empty stomach. “The children?” she asked.
Jerczek brought his hand to his mouth. He clenched his fingers around his chin. Then he spread them across his cheeks. His eyes looked moist in the dim light. Shosha saw a fine crack across one of his eyeglass lenses.
Julia put both her arms around him. “It’s cold in here,” she said. “Someone hand me my blanket.
Forty Nine
In July 1944, Soviet troops marching from the East reached the Polish border. On July 19, they liberated Majdanek outside Lublin, where one million three hundred and eighty thousand human beings lost their lives to the Final Solution, second only to the one million five hundred thousand human beings murdered at Auschwitz. At Majdanek, the Red Army found thousands of Muselmänner, skeletal witnesses. The camp itself—and its evidence—was intact.
How to kill the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the Polish camps—and destroy the incriminating remains—before the allies arrived perplexed the Reich. Only so many people could be killed at one time. Even mass murder had limitations. To address this dilemma, Himmler created a counterpart to mass extermination—mass evacuation. Pressed for time, the Nazis were only able to evacuate one thousand of the quarter million or so prisoners at Majdanek before the Red Army liberated it.
But those numbers improved. On July 20th, twelve hundred Jews marched from Lipcani, Moldavia. On September 17, five thousand Jews began a six-week march from the Bor labor camp in Hungary. Only nine survived to the end of the war. Seventy six thousand Jews marched from Budapest in the direction of the Austrian border on November 8. Only a few hundred survived.
ON OCTOBER 26, 1944, HIMMLER ENDED the Final Solution of the Jewish question with a one-sentence command: I forbid any further annihilation of Jews.
The order arrived at Auschwitz on October 27.
The order arrived at Melinka with the first frost, on November 3. On November 5th, evacuation orders arrived at Camp Melinka marked for Franz Strauss—Offizier in Das Kommando. Heinrich Petersdorf opened them. His hands trembled as he read.
A mandatory march of resettled persons and camp personnel to Oswiecim, near the Wisla River, for relocation to the facility there.
Auschwitz.
“Every piece of this plan has been mad and this is the maddest piece,” Strauss told Petersdorf later that day. “Why march? Why not evacuate with trucks and trains?”
“Not enough fuel,” Petersdorf said. “They’re using it all at the Front.”
“Fronts,” Strauss said.
“They want a man in charge,” Petersdorf said. “I say von Kempt.”
Strauss looked at him. “He can barely walk. How can he be expected to march that far?”
“He walks fine.”
“Be serious.”
“I am being serious. He’s the best man for the job.”
“He’s not going,” Strauss said. “Get someone else.”
“YOU SENT FOR ME, STURMBANNFÜHRER?”
Petersdorf stood by the fireplace in his office. He took a leg from a broken wooden chair and fed it to the fire. He went to his desk and picked up the orders. He looked at von Kempt and handed him the orders. “Some are fortunate enough to be reassigned away from here,” Petersdorf said.
Von Kempt read the directive. “Herr Sturmbannführer!”
Petersdorf said nothing.
“This isn’t fair. How can I march?”
Petersdorf went behind his desk.
“I won’t go,” von Kempt said. “I refuse.”
“You have no say in the matter.”
“I refuse. I refuse it.”
“You have no say. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“I’ll take this up with the Kommandant.”
“By all means,” Petersdorf said.
The lieutenant limped out.
VON KEMPT WORRIED ABOUT THE MARCH. He thought about ways he could avoid it. He would put in for a disability waiver. Who would question him? He was a cripple. They could test him and confirm it, but they already knew it. Dr. Hehl had a file full of X-rays and medical information confirming a congenital malformation, a dwarf leg, and attempts to correct it that only made it worse. No one ever made von Kempt march, at least not far. That’s why he was here at Melinka, a stinking hellhole. He was not fit for duty elsewhere. He had sacrificed to be here. There would be no glory for him in this war. There would be no medals, no homecoming parades. He would learn no skills that he could transfer to a new job after the war. His girl was leaving him. His future was a cloud. He was 25 years old and he creaked like a bitter old man, a cynical executioner tired of the smell. He had given up enough for the Reich; he would not participate in some insane travail designed only to set the mass murder in motion, to scatter the mayhem into the wider abyss like so many leaves in a storm.
Lieutenant von Kempt woke abruptly in the cold early morning hours of November 7. His hair and face were wet with perspiration. He felt his heart beating. He brought his hand to his chest and breathed. He looked down at his feet and saw the rise in the blanket. It looked different. He threw off the sheet and looked at his legs. He swung his legs around and looked at his bare feet. He wiggled his toes on the floor and put pressure on his bad leg. It felt different. He pressed down on his good leg.
Then he stood, on both legs, evenly.
JAKUB FELT ROUGH HANDS ON HIS FACE. The hands dragged him out of his bunk and yanked him to his feet in front of von Kempt.
“Is this a joke?” von Kempt said. “You think this is funny?”
Jakub looked at him. Von Kempt pulled up his pants legs.
“I have one question for you,” he said. “Why now?”
Jakub looked bewildered. Von Kempt motioned to the guards. They dragged Jakub toward a line five columns deep. Prisoners from across the camp streamed toward it.
STRAUSS SAW THE PRISONERS FROM A WINDOW in the officer’s infirmary. He set a vase of flowers from his hothouse next to his wife’s bed. He caressed her cheek and watched her chest rise and fall.
“You going to wake?” He leaned down and kissed her forehead. He spoke into her ear. “You going to wake for me?”
A CORPORAL AND A KAPO CROSSED THE YARD TOWARD the hospital block. They saw kapos and guards throwing piles of paper into burning death pits. They came to the hospital block. The kapo opened the door. “Careful,” he said. “Don’t step in any shit.”
The corporal waved a cigar. “Phew. They stink more alive than dead.”
“The Kommandant wants it cleaned.”
The corporal unclipped his revolver. He aimed toward the ceiling and fired. “Time to clean up. You hear!”
They walked among the bunks. People turned their eyes. The two men stopped near Shosha’s bunk. She looked at their legs and feet. They looked in at Janusz Jerczek, who lay sandwiched between Julia and Shosha.
“What are you doing?” Shosha said.
The guard and the kapo dragged Jerczek out of the bunk. The corporal dropped his cigar.
“What are you doing?” another voice said. “What do you want with him?”
“Where are you taking him?” Shosha asked. Jerczek looked at her sternly but knowingly.
“Shut up or I’ll shut you up,” the corporal said.
They dragged Jerczek out of the hospital block.
“Where are they taking him?” Shosha said. “Are they going to kill him?” Julia took Shosha’s wrist and squeezed. “Are they going to kill him?” Shosha asked. “Why did they take him?” Shosha lay in the bunk. She stared at the floor. Her eyes moved to the corporal’s cigar butt. She stared at it. Then she extended her hand toward it.
The Fires of Lilliput Page 37