by John Hersey
Among the young Zionists of the Neuendorf Transport Stirner found several new friends, a sturdy lot, youths with a strong sense of comradeship and mutual responsibility, who helped each other and their new friends in every way they could. They influenced many inmates to think of Palestine as their future home—and to think in terms of a future home was itself a sustaining act. Some inmates who had been anti-Zionist began to say regretfully that they could have left for Palestine in plenty of time to escape Hitler’s repressions. The inmates all felt rootless. Germany was no longer a home, and it was easy to look to Palestine as a center for their future lives. When news filtered into Auschwitz that the Palestinian Jewish Brigade had been formed, and that young Jews were now engaged as a unit in this war that was palpably against Jews, the Neuendorf boys became excited, and Stirner caught some of their infectious enthusiasm.
Quite often Stirner joined with a circle of friends, several of whom worked in the camp Krankenbau, the infirmary, and talked about politics, strategy, and even literature and philosophy. Dr. Bernhardt was in this group, and it often met in his dentist’s quarters in one of the hospital barracks. Whenever these men discussed survival, they pictured a Europe, with Nazism prostrate, in which Jews would be able to move about freely like everyone else. They would be able, they imagined, to go back to their old homes; or, if they wished, they might go to Palestine or to America, without hindrance. It was good to have friends like this to talk over such things. All day long Stirner looked forward to seeing them, so he could tell them what he had observed and what he thought.
Marching to and from the plant, the Häftlinge were still obliged to sing marching songs, but beginning early that summer Stirner could hear men singing, ever so softly, in the barracks at night, certain Jewish songs. There was a tremendous song from the Warsaw ghetto, Es brennt. There was:
Never, never say,
You’re going the last way….
* * *
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One night early in June, after work, Stirner was called to the Arbeitsdienst. An official there said, “You are registered as a welder. Are you really a welder?”
Stirner gave what evidence he could; he was able to persuade the man he knew the terms and motions of the trade.
The official ordered him to report next morning to a Kommando of skilled metal workers. He was wildly happy that night, for he felt sure he would survive.
A new chapter in his life opened at dawn—there was a difference even in the marches to roll call and to the plant, because Stirner’s new Kapo was a German red triangle, a political prisoner from Dresden, and since he was an anti-Nazi, he had his own ideas of his function. He was not a pleasant man, but neither was he a Judenfranz.
It turned out that Stirners work was not to be welding, after all, for he was assigned to clean tremendous metal plates from Leuna, which were to be used in gasoline distillation columns. He worked with a hand file all day long, but the exertion was far less than on his previous jobs. Sometimes he could sit down on a plate as he worked, and he could almost feel the health trickling back into his body. He was by no means well—both his feet were swollen all the time—but now he sensed that he was gaining, rather than losing, strength.
His transfer to the new job brought in its train one misfortune. He had to move from Barrack Two to Barrack Six, away from Kollin and Wertheim, and he worried about them, still on the digging-and-carrying Kommando under Judenfranz. Neither of them was registered as a craftsman, so neither had much chance of being transferred.
* * *
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Before the war Stirner had had poor teeth, and he had in his mouth several crowns and some bridgework. One morning as he bit into his bread he felt something give way, and taking the bread from his mouth he found a gold crown in it. He put the crown in his pocket. That evening he went to Dr. Bernhardt and asked what he should do.
The dentist told him to forget the cavity and barter the crown to one of the camp’s corruptibles for extra food.
Stirner negotiated with the Stubendienst in Barrack Six, and the man agreed to give him three extra loaves of bread and extra soup for a fortnight. That evening, for the first time since he had arrived in Auschwitz, Stirner ate to satiety.
* * *
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Each advantage, once gained, produced a new one. Each ounce of energy Stirner saved over from his regular work he could spend on extra work for extra food, which in turn gave him a bonus of strength.
Warm weather, which now arrived, helped in this hoarding. The days became so bland that the Häftlinge were issued light summer clothing that caused the French Jews to refer to their fellow inmates as pyjamas. “J’ai vu un pyjama qui…L’autre pyjama m’a dit que…”
After Stirner had been in the skilled metal workers’ Kommando for a few weeks, he put in some time, in the evenings, practicing bedmaking, and at length he persuaded his Blockältester to appoint him as Bettenbauer, official bedmaker for the barrack. This meant he could have his breakfast indoors in the mornings and could stay inside until roll call; on rainy mornings this made a difference. The job also earned him a supplementary ration.
As Stirner grew stronger, his efforts in the plate-cleaning squad improved so much that his name was tacked onto a list of good workers, and one evening late in the summer he was called to the Arbeitsdienst again, along with three others. The Arbeitsdienstführer and a civilian employee of I. G. Farben interviewed the quartet, and again the officials doubted Stirner’s qualifications as a welder, because of his glasses and his intellectual look.
The civilian asked, “Do you know anything about plumbing?”
Stirner said, “Yes.” If the man had asked him if he knew how to fly a Focke-Wulf, he would have said, “Yes.”
“How do you bend a pipe?”
By good fortune Stirner had seen a pipe bent in the Berlin factory where he had worked in the labor gang. “You ram some sand into the pipe to the place where you want to bend it,” he said, “and then you heat the place, bend the hot metal slowly around a form, cool it, and get the sand out.”
When all four men had been interviewed, Stirner and a strong youth were selected to work on a plumbing project, and the next morning, having marched out with the skilled workers’ Kommando, they were met at the plant by a German civilian, who turned them over to a plumber in one of the buildings.
This man was a Saxon, a careful craftsman who did not like the war or Hitler but submitted to both. Work was his religion. He was reckless with himself in his labors and expected his subordinates to be, too. He treated Stirner and the boy as skilled workmen, not as Häftlinge, and he made them feel that he needed their help, and this gave Stirner a sense he had long missed, of having some value.
At first the plumber would not discuss politics at all, saying he wanted no controversy. Later Stirner began to explain the Jews’ predicament and to try to persuade the plumber that acquiescence in Hitler was tantamount to full support of his methods of extermination, but the plumber said he did not understand any of that; he understood only plumbing.
Never had Stirner met such a dedicated and skillful technician, and he quickly mastered the apprentice skills, and as his work improved the plumber seemed to begin to respect him. The boy fell sick, and Stirner was then alone with the Saxon. The work was under a roof, out of the weather, and Stirner no longer had to submit to a Kapo’s whims, and he grew ever stronger. The Saxon began to give him two or three cigarettes a day, which he bartered for bread in camp, and thus he gained more atop the earlier more. The plumber allowed Stirner to do some welding, so his claim of being a skilled welder was gradually consolidated. Best of all, his boss undertook to tell him the daily news. The plumber understood only plumbing; he did not seem to realize that Germany was being beaten, day by day. But Stirner did, and that knowledge was as good for him as bread.
* * *
—
Late in th
e summer, following a controversy between I. G. Farben and the camp authorities over whether the company should pay the camp a full salary for Stirner’s—an inmate’s—labors, he was taken from the Saxon and assigned to a new Kommando of welders, which actually had a Jewish Kapo. Stirner was moved into Barrack Five, where he again wheedled the job of Bettenbauer. He received extra rations for welding, and extras for bedmaking. In the plant he was under the supervision of a young Polish civilian named Smuda, one of a number of Polish employees of I. G. Farben who lived near the plant, a Polish nationalist, a German-hater, a rare Pole in that he was on an easy footing with Jews. Smuda was capable of beautiful work, but his delight was the opposite—sabotage; he accomplished as little as possible and carefully and joyfully wrought hidden faults in metal seams. In these enterprises Stirner became a fanatic pupil.
Smuda soon was bringing Stirner a couple of slices of bread and some sausage every day. Better than that, he began to bring a newspaper, which he handed to Stirner; Stirner put it under his drawers in the small of his back and smuggled it into camp each evening. For the first time he became a person of importance in the barracks—not quite a prominent, but one who was sought and consulted.
* * *
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Wertheim died in August. Stirner’s dear friend Benjamin Wertheim had been in the youth movement and had always been a social worker, in charge of a Jewish children’s home in Berlin, a gentle and rather childish person himself. He had an active temperament, but he had an idea that everyone ought to be a good human being, and the sight of so much brutality and degradation, an awareness of corruption and meanness even among those who were being brutalized, and above all an understanding of what the Hitler system really meant, that the ideality of man was a putrid lie—these things broke his desire to survive, and he welcomed typhus from a louse and died.
* * *
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The inmates could see that Auschwitz was being expanded. The barbed wire was moved back. Many new barracks were built. It seemed that transports must be coming to this haven from every corner of Europe.
One Sunday morning all the welders were called to the Arbeitsdienst, where a Kapo of plumbing received them and said, “Boys, we need two welders to put central heating into the new SS barracks. We’re going to give you an examination in welding. Do your best, because this is a big chance for you.”
What the Kapo had said was true; it was a big chance, for those who worked within the camp were spared an hour of marching to and from the plant; this would be a special boon for Stirner, whose feet remained swollen.
The test was a hard one—in overhead welding. Stirner thought he did his first join badly but knew the second was good.
Stirner was chosen, and now another new phase began for him. He did not have to march. He worked on plumbing in SS buildings, in one of which, later, female inmates lived; the Häftlinge always called that barrack “the brothel.” Stirner’s shop was near the kitchens, and he was able, from time to time, simply to tease extra food from the kitchen staff. When anybody had trouble with plumbing, he brashly demanded food as payment for repairs—and collected it, too. He was on the team that prepared heating and plumbing for an operating room in one of the hospital barracks, and he made new friends among the Jewish doctors, one of whom, having examined Stirner’s feet, gave him a second-hand pair of shoes in place of his own, which were falling apart, and the sores on his feet soon mended. He even acquired spare clothing—one suiting for work and one for free time. He could at last keep clean.
* * *
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One evening early in the autumn of 1943, Stirner heard some electrifying news from friends who had come back from the plant: British prisoners of war had arrived at Auschwitz.
These prisoners were housed in a separate camp, but they were to work in the factory. They were mostly from the African theater, from Tobruk and the desert, and they had been held in Italy until the landings there, then had been taken to Lambsdorff, in Silesia; twelve hundred of them had now been brought to Auschwitz to work—in violation of the Geneva convention.
From the moment of the prisoners’ arrival the whole psychology of the Häftlinge changed. These men had fought Hitler. They despised the Germans and were cheerful to the Jews. The tide of war had changed, and the Britishers were cocky. The German guards shouted at them; the prisoners answered by laughing, thumbing their noses, spewing English oaths. They were ostentatiously lazy, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves like bad schoolboys. All this was wine to the Jews.
Stirner was so excited by what he heard of the P.W.’s that he asked to be shifted back into Barrack Five and the welders’ Kommando, even though that meant marching again. He wanted to see for himself. His transfer was granted, and the first day he marched out and saw Tommies parading across the plant area in uniform, arms swinging stiffly in the British way, roaring, “Roll out the barrel…,” he almost wept. He was assigned to a welding shack adjacent to one where a trio of British noncoms worked under his old friend Smuda. After so many emaciated Jews trying to stand up to the Germans, these men seemed to be energy, power, the force of life itself; they were bears. “We’ll be home by Christmas!” one of them shouted to Stirner that first morning. How devoutly Stirner hoped so!—though in truth he had no idea where his future home might be.
* * *
—
During the autumn Stirner undertook all sorts of new enterprises. He talked his Blockältester into letting him use spare time to make small metal hooks for clothes, which he sold first to the German functionaries around the camp for food, and later even to Jewish prominents; using thin pipes, he fabricated curtain rods, which the Germans bought for their rooms; he made and sold frames for lamp shades. The material for all these things he scrounged from scraps at the plant, and for his work he earned not only food but also extra clothing and even some soap.
Cold weather came, and with it new transports of Jews from France, Italy, Belgium, North Africa, and Greece. Those from sunbaked lands could not stand the damp cold and died in droves. The camp became crowded, nevertheless, and in the late autumn the Germans gave everyone physical examinations, and those who were weak were taken away—presumably to the gas chambers; the use of them by the Nazis for purposes of extermination was now common knowledge in the camp.
When the Jewish holidays came, the camp authorities of course ignored them, and, indeed, on the Day of Atonement, morning roll call took nearly three hours. A Polish red triangle had escaped. Poles quite often got away, because Polish civilians living outside the camp smuggled in clothes and documents. Finally the search ended, and the Kommandos were sent off to work. In the evening the Orthodox Jew from Vienna who had organized services gathered ten men in one of the barracks, and as the other nine murmured, pretending to converse, he said the prayers of the day, in an unusually loud and bitter voice.
In the autumn months Stirner was assigned to a German Meister from Breslau, named Paul Brandt, who seemed to him a wonderful man. The first day Stirner joined Brandt, the Meister said, “I am an old Social Democrat. I am not interested in your stripes. To me you are a worker, no more, no less.” Brandt was the first boss in Auschwitz with whom Stirner got on a Du basis. Brandt hated Hitler. He was perfectly willing to have Stirner associate with the British P.W.’s “Do anything you want,” he said, “but don’t get me in trouble.” Once, when Stirner suffered a stomach disorder, Brandt brought him white bread for several days.
* * *
—
One evening at the showers Stirner conversed with the Jewish supervisor of the clothing supplies, a man with prematurely white hair, whose name, Stirner had heard, was David, and Stirner asked if he was related to some Davids he had known in Berlin. The man said he was not and in turn asked Stirner his name. Upon hearing it, David asked, “Are you related to Maria Stirner who was a Herrmann?”
“Good God,” Stirner said, “she was my mother.”
“Then you are some kind of nephew of mine. She was my cousin.”
David was a prominent, and had a formidable reputation and influence in the camp; he was in charge of the precious linen in the hospital. “Listen,” he said, “if there is anything you need, come to me. You are the only relative I have left in the world, so far as I know.”
On snowy days that winter, when the SS men strode out in fur coats and inmates collapsed by the score, Stirner could wear warm underwear under his uniform, thanks to his Some-Kind-of-Uncle David.
* * *
—
On Christmas Day, 1943, Stirner was given a wonderful present. His Blockältester invited him to move into the day room at the end of the barrack and promoted him from Bettenbauer to Schreiber, or secretary, with duties that took little energy—he checked off men’s numbers as they passed through the line for food; assigned beds; handled complaints. He now had a quiet bed and a small cupboard for his property.
Before New Year’s Day, when a fresh transport arrived, he managed to obtain, by barter of food, a razor and some shaving cream.
Alfred Stirner had become an old-timer. He was near the pinnacle of Auschwitz society, and if even that was a position of utter debasement for a human being to occupy—well, that hardly mattered. There was something worse: not to exist.
* * *
—
Stirner’s friend Kollin contracted jaundice in the first days of 1944, and he was selected for the gas chambers. Besides feeling melancholy—and a survivor’s guilt—over losing his old friend, Stirner thought: The Germans are giving ground on both fronts. When things get really bad, what will they do with us? They’ll surely send us all where they’ve sent Kollin.