by Eddy de Wind
“A year.”
“Is it possible to stick it out?”
“Sometimes. If you’re lucky and get into a good Kommando.”
“What’s a good Kommando?”
“The laundry or the hospital or something like that. Almost all of the Kommandos that stay in the camp in the daytime are good. The food Kommandos too. But as a Jew you don’t stand a chance of them.”
“I’m a doctor. Could I get into the hospital?”
“Didn’t you tell them you were a doctor?”
“Yes, but they brushed me off. Where do they take the women?”
“The women from this transport were brought into the camp. There’s a women’s block here where they do all kinds of experiments.” Hans’s heart stood still. Friedel, here in this camp. Experiments! What could that mean?
He told the Belgian about Friedel and asked him if he would take a message to her, as he himself would be leaving for Buna. The Belgian said it was extremely difficult because it was very dangerous to go near the women’s block. Just then an SS man came in. They all jumped up, as they had been taught. He asked the big question: “Are there any doctors here?”
Three of them leapt forward: Hans, Eli Polak, and a young fellow they didn’t know.
The SS man asked how long they had been practicing medicine. The young chap turned out to be a junior doctor. Eli had been a GP for eight years. The SS man sent Eli back to the others: “You’re going to Buna with them.” He took Hans and the younger man away with him.
They walked through the camp, past all the buildings, and arrived at Block 28, where they had to wait in the corridor. It was a long, concrete corridor with whitewashed walls and doors on both sides. On the doors were signs: Ambulanz, Schreibstube, Operationssaal, Hals-Nasen-Ohrenarzt, Röntgenraum, and many others. Halfway along the corridor were concrete stairs up to the first floor.
After a couple of minutes, a man in a white suit arrived. He took them to the end of the corridor. Aufnahme was written on the frosted-glass door. It was a large room, more like a ward, and only half-filled with bunks. In the other half there were a few benches, scales, and a large table covered with books and documents. This was where everyone who was admitted to the hospital registered, either as a patient or a member of staff.
They were met by a small fat Pole. He snarled at them, wanting to know why they looked so filthy, told them to get completely undressed and pointed out a bed. The beds were triple bunks. Hans lay naked under two thin blankets on the top bunk. He tried to roll himself up a little in the blankets because the straw in the mattress itched.
Just after he had lain down, a man clambered up to his bed. He was about thirty, with a round face and a pair of glasses perched jauntily on his nose.
“What’s your name?” he asked. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes, I’m Van Dam. And you?”
“De Hond. I’ve been here for three weeks now. I saw the Lagerarzt last week. He took me on and now I’m on the Pfleger reserve list.”
“Where did you study?” Hans asked.
“In Utrecht. I was at the children’s hospital.”
“What kind of work do you do here?”
“Oh, all kinds. They come and get you for all sorts of odd jobs all day long. You’ll see. It’s filthy work, with cadavers and so on. Don’t you have any clothes?”
No, Hans didn’t have any. They would need to be organized the next day. De Hond would help him.
“Do you know anything about the women’s block here?”
“Oh,” De Hond replied, clearly nervous. “Yes, that’s Block 10; my wife’s there. She’s a doctor as well. She arrived there three weeks ago.”
Hans was glad to hear there was a Dutch doctor there. He told De Hond about Friedel and that she too had been taken to Block 10.
“Hmm,” said De Hond. “We’ll have to see what can be done for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Samuel, the professor who works there, promised me he won’t take my wife because she’s a doctor. Maybe he’ll be willing to bend the rules for a doctor’s wife too.”
“What do they do with those women?”
“You’ll have to ask Samuel that yourself. He comes here every day.”
“Can I see my wife?”
“That’s very difficult. If they catch you, they’ll put you in the bunker, in the prison, and then you can count yourself lucky if you get off with twenty-five.”
“What do you mean, twenty-five?”
“That’s the standard punishment. Twenty-five strokes on the backside.”
Hans smiled. Things like that didn’t scare him. You just had to make sure they didn’t catch you. And anyway, it would be worth it to see Friedel. De Hond promised to take him with him the next evening. Then it was nine o’clock and lights off.
But it wasn’t dark in the ward. Block 28 was the last block in the row and admissions was on the side, near the fence. The lights along the wire were on and there were brighter lights on every second concrete post. Anything that came near the wire would be well lit.
It was an impressive sight, those long lines of bright lights with red warning lights between them. They shone into the room, illuminating the patients, who had been allocated beds in admissions before being presented to the Lagerarzt the next day. Hans didn’t want to see the light anymore; it frightened him. He closed his eyes, but kept opening them again for another look, as if forcing himself to take in the painful reality. He grew nervous and turned from side to side, but the light pursued him. He pulled the blankets up over his head, but couldn’t block it out—it shone through everywhere. There was no escaping it: he was in a Konzentrationslager. Whether you turned your head away or shrank back under the blankets, that awareness remained. No matter what you tried to think, that thought dominated everything, just as the lights on the wire followed you wherever you looked.
Hans wept. He wasn’t crying out of anger, like he had as a boy when he hadn’t got his way about something. This was a quiet weeping that seemed to rise up by itself. There was no storm inside him. He was simply overflowing with sorrow, and the tears flowed automatically. But fortunately he was tired, dead tired. He didn’t even wipe away his tears. He no longer felt that he was crying and slowly the flame of his consciousness went out.
In concentration camps people experience many happy hours every day. The lights are turned off for them, the electric current is shut down, and the wire is cut. The soul can free itself from the exhausted and tormented body. In the realm the Häftling enters at night, there are no SS men, no Blockälteste, and no Kapos. There is only one master: the great longing. There is only one law: freedom.
Life is a cycle made up of two periods: from the morning gong to the night gong, and from the night gong to the morning gong. When the morning gong sounds, the senses come to life and the soul is enchained: paradise is over.
Half an hour after the gong, the patients began arriving. Hans was able to watch the whole process from his bed.
The men undressed outside, tied their clothes up in a bundle with the number on the jacket visible on top, then entered the block naked. In the washroom they were all washed and their numbers were written on their chests to make sure the Lagerarzt didn’t waste any of his valuable time checking who was who.
From the washroom they went back to admissions, where they were registered and could start waiting. There were approximately sixty of them. They were all washed and registered by seven, but the Lagerarzt didn’t arrive until about ten. Still, nobody was bored. Most of the men were glad to be able to stay away from work for a day. Many were too ill to be bored. They were able to sit on the few benches and otherwise nobody paid any attention to them. A number of them were in pain or running a fever, but nobody was allowed to give them anything or help them until they had seen the Lagerarzt.
At nine thirty Hans and Van Lier, the junior doctor, had to get up. They too were going to be presented to the Lagerarzt. It was a strange way to appear
before your future boss but, on the other hand, it was perhaps better to be introduced naked than in one of those filthy uniforms. Then the call sounded in the corridor: “Arztvormelder, antreten!”
The Reich Germans went first. They were prisoners too but, in this camp, with mostly Polish and Jewish inmates, they occupied a special position. After the Germans, the Poles and other “Aryans.” The Jews came last.
They went through the corridor, all trotting in line to outpatients, which turned out to be in quite a good state. Running through the middle of the room was a metal bar at about knee height, which the patients had to stand behind. Generally, nurses stood on the other side in front of large tables with wound-dressing materials while the clerks sat behind a glass wall in the office, where all those who had ever visited the outpatients clinic were listed in a card-index system.
This time there were no patients and no nurses, only the Lagerarzt with another member of the SS, an Unterscharführer, and two Polish prisoners—the Polish Lagerältester, who was responsible for all prisoner doctors, and the admissions doctor. The Poles had examined all those who had to see the SS doctor the previous evening, and were there to present them to him now.
Not that the presentations amounted to much: there were no explanations, no discussions, no further examinations. Quick, quick, the Obersturmführer didn’t have any time, he never had any time. A diagnosis read off a card, a fleeting glance at the patient, and he was ready with his answer: admission or Blockschonung. In the latter case, the sick prisoner received an exemption from work for a certain number of days and could stay in the barracks. This was for those who didn’t need to be admitted to hospital but still couldn’t work, due to things like injuries to their fingers or boils on their legs.
The sick Jews, however, usually needed to be admitted, because their general condition was extremely poor. These were the people who worked in the harshest Kommandos, never received packages, and were always cheated the most when the Blockälteste were distributing food in the barracks.
Admission, admission, Blockschonung, admission. They got through the whole line in a few minutes and only the two Dutchmen were left.
“Doctors arrived on transport yesterday,” the Polish doctor reported.
The Lagerarzt nodded: “Assign!”
Then it was done. They raced back to the admissions ward and had to get back into bed. Hans was happy. After all, this was his chance. Life in the hospital would be very different from outside on those building sites. Nurses took the patients who had been admitted to the various blocks: surgery, internal diseases, infectious diseases. The others went outside to get dressed. Those who had Blockschonung were given a note for their block clerk.
De Hond came to fetch the two Dutchmen and took them outside. The clothes of the people who had been admitted to hospital were still lying there. A few nurses were already untying the bundles and removing anything of value from the pockets. Any clothes that were good and intact were laid to one side. The rest went on a barrow, from which the two young men were allowed to pick something out.
Afterward they were somewhat bearably dressed. They even had leather shoes—very down-at-heel, true, but easier on the feet than wooden sandals. But now that they were dressed, they could also work, and were immediately claimed for a job. They had to take the barrow of clothes to disinfection.
The Kapo from disinfection was standing at the door. He was the absolute ruler over the twelve men who worked in his wooden outbuilding. When the two novices approached, he gave a sarcastic bow.
“Two grand gentlemen. And where are the gentlemen from?”
Van Lier tried to be polite: “We come from Holland, Sir.”
The Kapo laughed: “Then you’ll soon be dead. The Dutch all drop dead here in a couple of weeks. You’re too delicate. You can’t work.”
Hans shrugged as if to say, We’ll see. Just then the big steam boiler opened and the trolley with disinfected clothes came rolling out.
“Go on. Unload it.”
They unloaded it. It was hot, terribly hot: the clothes were still at boiling point. Steam was billowing up everywhere. They burnt their hands and choked in the scalding air. Within seconds they were dripping with sweat. But the Kapo kept harassing them and when they stopped to gasp for air, he shoved them and snarled, “Faster, you idiots!”
After they’d pulled all of the clothes out of the boiler, Hans was reeling as he tried to catch his breath in front of the small building. Suddenly someone gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. It was a Polish Jew, one of the lads working in disinfection.
“Our Kapo’s a sterling fellow, isn’t he?”
Hans gave him an uncomprehending look.
“Well, he was joking with you, but you don’t know what the Lager really means.”
“Have you been here long then?”
The Pole pointed at the number on his chest: 62,000-something. “I’ve been here one and a half years now. I went through the hard times. Now it’s like a sanatorium. They hardly ever hit you and if you don’t turn into a Mussulman, you’re in no danger at all.”
“What do you mean? What’s a Mussulman?”
“You really are new, aren’t you? Have you heard of those people who go to Mecca on pilgrimage? Emaciated, completely starved, skin and bones, characters like Gandhi? They’re Mussulmen.”
Hans didn’t understand. “What do they do with them?”
“They can’t work anymore. They go to the crematorium. It used to be different. I was working in Birkenau. Back then, when the Kommandos turned out and the Kapo reported, ‘Roadworks Kommando, 270 men,’ the SS at the gate said, ‘That’s forty too many.’ Then the SS guard who was leading the Kommando and the Kapos would make sure to beat forty men to death that day. Marching back that night, we’d smell our mates who had been superfluous in the morning roasting. They didn’t care if they were Mussulmen or not. Thousands died like that and anyone who was lucky enough to come through it croaked some other way. Picture it: five miles out in the morning and five back at night. Standing in water all day scooping up gravel, sometimes up to your ankles, sometimes up to your waist. In winter we’d often come back with clothes frozen solid and as hard as a plank. And the beatings! Don’t think you could lean on your shovel, not for a second. There’d be an SS man there right away who knew what to do with you. Look.” He showed Hans his leg: a big scar. And his left hand: two fingers missing.
“Smashed to a pulp. My mate was smoking a cigarette on the job. I asked him for a drag. Just when he was about to pass me the cigarette, the guard came. He swung at me with the butt of his rifle. I deflected it and my hand got caught between the rifle butt and a wall. There was a second blow for my friend. That evening we carried him back to the camp unconscious. We might have been able to save him, but it was a long roll call that night. A good three hours, and he had to lie there all that time.”
“Couldn’t you get him any help?”
“It was roll call and the number had to be right. No matter what state you were in, you had to be counted.”
Jacques, the Polish Jew, was quiet for a moment, staring at the stumps on his left hand. Hans looked around and was suddenly shocked. Diagonally across from disinfection there was a block with wire mesh on the windows, and behind that wire he could see women. Yes, there was a sign too: Block 10. So this was the women’s block.
Jacques saw the surprise on his face. “What do you see?”
Hans hesitated. “I think that’s where my wife is.”
Jacques could hardly believe it. “Your wife arrived yesterday too? Man, you really are a lucky dog.”
“Could I see her?”
“In the evening. It’s risky. You have to be prepared for that.”
The Pfleger who had accompanied them with the clothes came over: “Back to the block.”
The rest of the day passed with bustling inactivity. There was always a loose straw to be found on one of the beds. There was always a window with a smudge on it. Grab a piece of sc
rap paper and clean it. It was boring, but Hans didn’t complain. Instead he thought of the work machines outside. Every day you put behind you unscathed in here was one day closer to the end.
That was what Kalker said too. Kalker was a doctor from the Hague. Hans had seen him now and then at the home of relatives who had him as their GP. Now he was working in Block 21, the surgical block. He had dropped by to see which new Dutchmen had arrived. “It’s a rude awakening, all right,” he told Hans and Van Lier. “Not what we expected.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three weeks now. I was here in admissions for the first fortnight; then they assigned me to Block 21.”
“Do you assist the surgeons?”
Kalker burst out laughing: “Yes, after studying the anatomical topography of the lavatory construction, I’ve moved on to cleaning work. You have no idea how complicated and fascinating it is. You mop the floors four times a day and scrub the toilet bowls with sand every other day. My lavatories are a feast for the eyes. I have two: one for patients, with twelve bowls in two rows, and one with a row of six for staff. In the small lavatory there is a closed-off cubicle for the camp’s leading lights—the Blockältester and the Lagerältester—and rumor has it that it’s sometimes even used by the Lagerarzt. But that honor hasn’t been granted me just yet. In any case he’s only in the camp for half an hour each day, and I’m sure he’s quite capable of holding it in for that long. It would really be too much for him to have to sit down on a toilet that Häftlinge have sat on beforehand.”
Hans was enjoying the cheerful tone Kalker had adopted for his story. “Do you get enough to eat?” he asked.
“Well, it’s all right. There’s usually seconds of the soup, so I get one and a half liters. And once you’ve been officially assigned somewhere, you get extra bread twice a week.”
“How much exactly?” Van Lier asked.
“You get one liter of soup a day and a ration of bread, then, twice a week, 1.5 ounces of margarine, a spoonful of jam, and a 1.5-ounce slice of sausage. But don’t expect too much. The margarine is only fifteen percent fat—the rest is synthetic thickener—and the sausage is only fifty percent meat—soggy horsemeat.”