by Eddy de Wind
Again she was silent and looked at the lads. They sat quietly with grim faces and listened to the roar of artillery.
“Six miles,” Jacques said, and they gritted their teeth. Another six miles and they would be free. No, not free, because they had a task, a purpose in life that bound them. They had to shout out what they had experienced. They felt that they were the apostles of a vengeance so thorough that barbarism would be exterminated on Earth forever, a vengeance that would purify the world and open it up to a new humanism.
“I was half frozen and I had a terrible headache, but I managed to get out of the pit. I stumbled to the place where Anja had dropped to the ground. She wasn’t there anymore, but I could see her tracks leading away through the snow and believed she had saved herself. I staggered on to the barracks. Lying inside were the bodies of the women who hadn’t been able to walk and must have been dealt with after us. When I went into Block 8, the typhoid block, savage joy flowed through me. The block was alive. Like everywhere, they hadn’t completed their work here either. The Oscha must have really meant it that morning when he’d said: ‘Those typhoid sufferers will die by themselves!’ I lay down on the straw and went to sleep. Around nightfall we experienced another great shock: the Wehrmacht! But the soldiers didn’t harm us. On the contrary. They emptied out the camp stores and gave us food and some clothes. When it was properly dark, I left. I wanted to go to Birkenau because I thought that Anja would have gone in that direction too, in hope of finding her husband. It was a harsh trek through the snow and by morning I was hopelessly lost. A farmer took me in, bandaged me, and gave me something to eat. I slept all day. Around nightfall I set out again, and now…”
They had the impression that the danger from the SS really was over and that, in the final hours and the fighting that would now come, the camp might be more likely to be spared than an abandoned village. Accordingly several of the lads went back to the camp. In the ward they looked at Hans as if he were a ghost. Japie, the small Dutch room orderly, was overjoyed. He had been terrified the whole time.
Hans sat down next to Gedl, an engineer.
“You were right, son, to get out of here.”
“Why’s that?” Hans asked.
“Haven’t you heard what happened here yesterday? At three in the afternoon a squad of SS men turned up, those dogs from the extermination Kommando, dressed in black and armed to the teeth. They came into the blocks and chased everybody out with the butts of their rifles. Poor old Zlobinsky got a cracked skull out of it. Even the most severely ill were out on the street. They were being held up by the Pfleger and the other patients who could still walk. Then they told us we could go back inside again. They were going to get trucks to take us to the train and when they came back and gave us the order, we had to fall in immediately. After that they went to Birkenau and got up to the same tricks all over again. A lot of the people there couldn’t even get out of bed. With about a thousand sick people from Birkenau, they started marching toward Auschwitz. They were just a few hundred yards outside the camp when a truck came. They called out something. The SS men jumped into the back of the truck, and since then we haven’t seen hide nor hair of them. Most of the people went back to Birkenau. Some of the ones who could walk a bit better carried on to Auschwitz.”
“Do you know what they called out from the truck?”
“According to people who were standing close by, ‘Der Zug ist schon da.’ A train was supposed to come at seven o’clock to take all the SS from this district to safety. The train came a few hours early and saved all our lives.”
“Are you sure they wanted to kill everyone?”
Gedl sent Japie upstairs to get someone. It was a small man. Although he looked terrible, there was still something determined about the way he held himself.
“Dr. Weill from Slovakia.”
Hans shook his hand. “You should be home soon.”
“Home is a relative concept. My whole family has been wiped out here. Anyway, yesterday I escaped by the skin of my teeth. I was a doctor in Trzebinia, a mining Kommando twenty miles from here. They marched off six hundred men. I was left behind with ninety men, almost all sick. Yesterday about midday an SS squad came, twelve men. They had everyone who could walk line up in front of the barracks. Then, in the space of a few minutes, they killed all of the patients who had stayed in bed with revolver shots. There were about forty of us who could walk. We had to build a pyre of straw mattresses and lay the bodies on it—a layer of straw mattresses, then a layer of bodies—and every time we came out of the barracks with another load, they kept about ten of us back and shot them too. Three times an SS man asked me: ‘Aren’t you tired yet, Doctor?’ Why I kept saying no, I don’t know. None of it made any difference. Anyway, I was carrying the last bodies out of the barracks when a man in plain clothes came up to me. I knew him; he was a Gestapo supervisor from the mine. I had organized medicine for him sometimes. ‘Don’t you want to climb over that wire, Doctor?’ I thought he was mocking me, but what did I have to lose? Miracle of miracles, he was serious. They let me escape.”
“Yes, son,” Gedl added, “the SS men who came here an hour later were the same ones. You understand what would have become of us. Fortunately the heroes were more concerned with getting the train out of here than doing their ‘duty’ with regard to us. We’re all alive thanks to a chain of miracles.”
“We need sugar, otherwise I can’t make pancakes,” Japie insisted. Hans had seen sugar somewhere. He thought it was in Block 14 and headed off with a bag.
In Block 14 there was nothing to be found. He went to Block 13 and down to the cellar where three men were sitting calmly smoking as if nothing was going on. Hans said hello and asked them if they’d seen any sugar. The oldest smiled: “We haven’t seen anything here at all. We only came here from Birkenau yesterday.” He spoke very poor German.
Hans asked him where he was from and if he maybe preferred to speak French. That made conversation easier. The man introduced himself as Kabeli or, rather, Professor Kabeli—he was a professor at the faculty of literature in Athens. Hans sat down with them and asked which Kommando the professor had worked in.
“Sonderkommando.”
Hans was startled. It was the first time he had met someone who had worked in the gas chambers and crematoria. Now that everything was over, he would hear exactly what had happened in Birkenau.
The professor smiled: “You don’t dare to ask anything, but I don’t find it at all unpleasant to tell people about it. After all, when you get back to Holland you’ll have to be able to inform them precisely.”
“Were you in the Sonderkommando for a long time?”
“A year. In general you only survived two to three months, but I had protection and because of that I was able to slip through.”
“Would you like to tell me something about the crematoria?”
“Certainly. There were four crematoria. One and Two were near the train, Three and Four in the pine forest behind the Zigeunerlager—that’s the far north corner of the camp. I worked in Crematoria Three and Four with a lot of Greeks. Let me do a sketch of Crematorium Three.
“Seven hundred to one thousand people arrived in one go. All kinds came mixed up together: men, women, and children; infants and old people; sick and healthy. Mostly the strong young men and women were picked out at the train to be interned as slave laborers, but often the entire transport was sent straight to the crematorium.
“The people came into Waiting Room A and then through a narrow hall into Room B, where there were all kinds of slogans about hygiene on the walls. Things like ‘Halte dich sauber’ and ‘Vergesse nicht deine Seife’ to maintain until the last moment the illusion that the people were going to have a shower. Room B was where they had to get undressed. In each of the four corners there was an SS man with a machine gun. But they never needed to use them; the people were all calm. Even those who understood that they were going to their deaths felt how pointless it was to resist, and if fighting
death is futile, then let the suffering be as brief as possible.
“Sometimes—when many transports arrived one after the other—things had to be done in a hurry. Then the Sonderkommando was put to work and had to cut people’s clothes off their bodies, rip watches off arms and tear jewelry off fingers. Long hair was cut off because it had industrial value. Then the whole troop was sent into the ‘showers.’ That was a large room with artificial lighting. In the ceiling there were three rows of showerheads. Once all the people were inside, the big door slammed shut. It was electrically operated and had rubber on the edges that sealed it off, airtight. Then it was time for the final act. The gas was in tins, and in those tins there were grains as big as peas, probably crystals of the condensed gas ethane cyanide—‘Cyclone.’ In the ceiling there were holes between the showers. The SS men emptied their tins through those holes and then quickly closed them again. The gas was released and five minutes later it was all over. Many of the victims would have never been aware of what was happening to them, but those who realized often tried to hold their breath and died in contortions.
“Sometimes it was different: I remember how one day two hundred and fifty Polish-Jewish children were going to be gassed. After they had undressed they formed a long line of their own accord and, singing ‘Sh’ma Yisrael,’ the Jewish prayer of the dying,15 they entered the gas chamber with perfect discipline.
“The SS man would keep an eye on his watch: the hatches had to be kept shut for five minutes. Then he pressed a button and on both sides of the gas chamber the row of hatches opened electrically. When enough of the gas had drifted out, the Sonderkommando went into the gas chamber. They carried long poles with hooks on the end. The hooks were placed around the necks of the victims, who were then dragged to the crematorium, which you can see indicated on the sketch with D.
“There were four furnaces, and four bodies went into each furnace at once. The big iron doors opened, the trollies rolled out. The bodies went on top and they slid the trollies back in. The doors closed and fifteen minutes later it was all over. With four furnaces like that, a crematorium could process a lot. But sometimes it still wasn’t fast enough. The SS knew what to do then too. Two big ditches had been dug behind the crematorium, as you can see here: a hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, and ten feet deep. In the bottom, big tree trunks with gasoline poured over them. That made an immense fire that people could see from miles away.
“One of those ditches could take a thousand bodies at once. The incineration took twenty-four hours, then the ditches were ready for a new load. Everything was taken into account. There was also drainage. A trench ran from the ditches to a small ravine twenty or thirty yards away. The burning mass ran down through those trenches into the ravine. I assure you that I have seen with my own eyes how a man who was working near the pyre got down into the trench to dip his bread into the molten, flowing human fat. You just have to be hungry.
“On June 5, 1944 a special Hungarian children’s transport arrived. As so often in a period with a lot of big transports, the gentlemen from the SS didn’t even have the patience to wait a proper five minutes for the gas to take effect. As a result we had to throw the children into the ditch while they were still half alive. A Greek, Lotsi Mordechai, couldn’t take it anymore and threw himself into the ditch. A lot of the others had had enough too. Alexander Hereirra, also a Greek, with an athletic build, agreed with three Poles and six Russians that they would destroy Crematoria Three and Four. A few days after Lotsi Mordechai’s suicide, Hereirra beat the SS sergeant to death with a shovel. Their plan came to nothing. Hereirra was killed and his body was put on display that evening at roll call in D-Lager, where all of the Kommandos who were involved in the exterminations were housed. Still, Crematorium Three didn’t exist much longer. On October 2, 1944 the uprising took place.
“There was a conspiracy between the 243 Greeks and the other nationalities in the Sonderkommando. They had managed to organize a machine gun with two thousand bullets from the Auto Union factory. Gasoline, they had in abundance. They attacked the SS guards and overcame them. They set fire to the crematorium and killed the sentries at the fence. Unfortunately hundreds got frightened at the last minute and didn’t join in. In ten minutes the Birkenau SS was fully mobilized. SS troops from Auschwitz were brought in too and our men, who were already past the fence, were surrounded. Twenty-five were killed immediately; the rest were burnt the next day along with twenty men from each Kommando working around the crematoria. The Poles betrayed the names of the uprising’s organizers. I’m proud that they were Greeks. Five heroes: Baruch, Burdo, Carasso, Ardite, and Jachon.
“The last ‘commissions’ were on October 24. On December 12, 1944 they began demolishing the crematoria. Twenty-five men—Greeks, Poles, and Hungarians from the Sonderkommando—were assigned to work on the demolition. I was one of them. None of the others who lived in D-Lager were left. We were the last ones in the whole Lager. That was how we came to be forgotten during the evacuation and how I can now tell you all this.”
“How will we ever be able to make them pay for it?” remarked one of the others after a long silence.
“Nothing will make up for it,” Hans said. “All we can do is exterminate all of that SS scum.”
“So you think it’s just the responsibility of the SS or, rather, the party?” Kabeli asked. “Are the rest of that nation angels?”
“Definitely not,” Hans admitted. “The entire German nation is responsible. They’re losing the war now and will renounce their leaders, but if they’d won the war, nobody would ever have asked the Führer which means he had used or what had happened to all of the Communists and Jews.”
“So should the whole German nation be gassed as a punishment?”
“No, Sir, definitely not, but everyone who was part of the SS, the Gestapo, and so on, will need to be wiped out to make sure they never come back. The rest of the German nation needs to be kept under foreign control until a new generation has grown up with a humanist education and upbringing, and removed from the militaristic influence of big business and the nobility. Then, maybe after many years, a socialist German nation might be able to live independently.”
The next morning bullets ticked against the walls of the blocks. It was mysterious; there were no soldiers in sight. Hans was helping in the Block 21 outpatients on the camp’s southern corner, near the Sola.
Then an enormous bang. Plaster fell from the ceiling and several windows shattered. He looked out. The river was flowing fast, swollen from the thaw. And there, floating among the chunks of ice, were beams and planks—what was left of the bridge.
“They’ve blown the bridge.”
They realized now that it was all over. The Germans were trying to delay the Russian pursuit, but their main force must have already been many miles away.
The camp was out of danger. Without noticing it, they had already spent a whole day in no-man’s-land. A couple of hours later, the first Russians came strolling up in their white camouflage suits as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. Walking in the middle of the road as if no Germans existed. When they saw the prisoners in their uniforms, they smiled silently, no doubt thinking of their parents, who had been murdered by the Germans; their wives, who had been raped; their country, that had been turned into a wasteland. And the prisoners thought of their wives and children, of all the people they would never see again.
There was a long, grateful handshake, but no cheers escaped their throats, which were choked with emotion.
Now everything was different. Now the dream had become reality. In many places the wire had been cut and posts had been knocked over, and in those places there was a brisk traffic of trucks and horse-drawn wagons going in and out of the camp. It was beautiful, radiant weather, the sun was shining with new vigor, everywhere clumps of snow were falling from the rooftops. It was as if Nature wanted to add her bit to make the promise of new life complete. Hans couldn’t bear it in the camp any longer. An inner tensio
n was forcing him to take flight, like a bird whose cage has just been opened.
He walked in the direction of Raisko. The roar of guns faded; the tumult of war had receded into the distance, where the Germans were trying to form a new front. After a short while he reached No Pasarán. He was shocked by the state of the village. The house had been partly destroyed by a shell. Close to it were two German tanks that had probably caused this havoc. One was completely burnt out.
Hans went into the small house. There was nobody there. The living room was intact, but the kitchen was a ruin. There he found the remnants of the saxophone. He had to smile. What could material loss mean now?
Still, he was nervous. It was as if something was driving him to start walking again, farther and farther, to an unknown goal. Or to keep walking until, overcome by exhaustion, he lay down on the side of the road until it was all over.
He walked across fields that were still covered with snow. It had been reduced to a thin layer, and now and then he stepped in a puddle. His feet were wet, and despite the warmth of the sun he felt cold and uncomfortable.
Suddenly he was standing in front of the tower. He didn’t know how he had ended up there. He hadn’t been looking for the tower at all. He’d just wandered through the fields aimlessly, without a goal. The wood was wet and still covered in snow here and there. He climbed up cautiously.
The tower had three platforms. After reaching the first, he looked down. He felt extremely uneasy: fear of heights. Again he felt that “something” was compelling him to move. Not away now, not far away until fatigue had drained his last bit of strength, but down. One false step and he would be lying there, broken but free of the sorrow that gripped him, together with her who filled his thoughts.