Last Stop Auschwitz Page 7

  “Why do we have to wait so long?” Gerard asked.

  “You’d be better off asking why we had to leave the block so fast. You know what it’s like by now: ‘Bewegung, Bewegung, los, Eile!’ They hurry you up on principle, to make you waste as much energy as possible.”

  After half an hour the chilled men were finally let into the kitchen. The kettles were steaming hot. The warm, damp air penetrated their clothes, reviving them a little. The cooks were standing next to the kettles in grimy white uniforms. Big Poles, brash and brawny. You had to make sure not to go too close; they’d been working for hours under constant harassment and provocation.

  Now the Kapo was at it again: “Du Drecksau, you’re spilling half of it! You want me to smash your face in for you?”

  The Pole shrugged. The Kapo was a German with a green triangle, the symbol for imprisoned criminals. He could have five murders on his conscience, but the SS had made him the supervisor and you just had to put up with it.

  Hans and Gerard had picked out a kettle and put the iron braces for carrying it underneath. Hans spotted a barrel of salt and remembered that Friedel had asked him if he could get her some. But as he was sticking a handful in his pocket, a stream of cold water hit him in the face. A cook who was rinsing out a kettle had caught him at it. Now he was sopping wet after all. But that, too, was something he would survive. He looked at the cook and grinned vacantly. How were you supposed to respond to being sprayed like that? Hit back? Madness. The cook was much stronger than him, well fed and, what’s more, in the right. If you catch someone organizing, you’re allowed to punish them on the spot.

  They picked up the kettle and trudged out of the kitchen. After just twenty-five yards Gerard had to put it down again. He wasn’t strong, a slight youth who’d never done any physical work, and the kettle weighed more than two hundred pounds. Finally they staggered into the block. By then it must have been about six o’clock—only the Blockältester had a watch, but you got a sense of time. In another hour, Block 10 would open and he still had a lot to do.

  Janus, the Stubenältester, had already started mopping the floor when Hans came in. It was a small ward with twenty-eight patients, all Poles and Russians—“Aryans.” They slept in triple bunks. The ones in the top bunks got the most warmth; the bottom bunks had the most fleas, because although fleas are good at jumping, gravity makes them fall back down again. This was why the top bunks were occupied by the prominents: leading figures in Poland, many with titles and decorations, political prisoners who were held in high esteem by their fellow inmates. The lower bunks were occupied by simple folk, farmers and workers who had illegally slaughtered a pig, shouted out a swearword at a German soldier, or often not done anything at all they were aware of.

  Living among these people wasn’t easy for Hans. The prominents were demanding, often refusing to submit to camp discipline, not wanting to get up at half past four to go and wash, wanting to keep food in their bed, and deeply insulted if you said anything about it when they threw onion peel and other rubbish down on the floor.

  The ordinary people in the middle and lower bunks made no effort at all to conceal their anti-Semitism. Hans was glad he couldn’t understand what they said about him but you felt something like that. He didn’t let it get to him too much. What difference did it make?

  He looked out of the window just in time to see the prisoners lugging the tea kettles for Block 10 up from Block 19. Fortunately Janus wasn’t a bad chap and let Hans go. He ran outside. As long as the Blockältester didn’t come now. No, the coast was clear. A Greek from Block 19 was happy to let Hans take over from him. Hans was happy too. Panting nervously, he hauled the kettle up the steps and into Block 10.

  There wasn’t a single woman in the corridor. Yes, just one, a girl really. She looked sideways at the men, but ran away when the doorkeeper appeared. They carried their kettle over to the staircase that led up to the first floor. The stairs were crowded with women jostling to collect tea. A fat Slovakian Stubenälteste was blocking the stairs.

  “Nobody comes downstairs! Back, back, you blöde Sauen!” She shoved the women and beat them back and Hans started feeling faint at heart. How would he ever reach Friedel? But there was Betty; she saw him and raced upstairs. It took so long, and the doorkeeper was already shouting, “Men, out! Go on, go!” He wouldn’t get to see Friedel, not this time. Yes, he would! She was coming.

  She worked her way through the throng on the stairs and came up against the Slovakian. Then Hans leapt over to her: “My wife, let her, one minute.” The Slovakian took her hand off the rail and Friedel jumped down the last steps.

  He grabbed her hand. She went to kiss him, but he was too frightened. For a moment they couldn’t speak. She pulled herself together first.

  “Hans, any news?”

  “No, Friedel, nothing.”

  “Do you get enough to eat?”

  “Yes, you can have some of my bread if you need it. A Pole gave me some from a package.”

  “No, sweetheart, you eat it. You work hard. I don’t do a thing all day. Waiting and waiting. Still, my luck’s been holding out. Others…” Her voice caught.

  “What?” he insisted.

  She looked around nervously. “They injected Loulou and Ans yesterday.”

  For a second he bit his lip. He understood why she was so nervous. They didn’t know what exactly the injections were, but they were definitely awful. Friedel told him that Ans especially had had dreadful abdominal pain. She’d bled all night. The blood had come with cramps, ten times as much as a normal period. And now she was lying on her bed, wretched and exhausted, and next week she’d have to go back to see the professor again.

  They were both silent. But in their eyes was the fear that one day she too would have to undergo the same thing.

  Then the doorkeeper came. During her confinement in the camp she had forgotten how to talk and could only shout. That was what made her such a good doorkeeper. “Get out! Are you mad? All the men have left. If the Aufseherin comes, it’ll be my head!” She screamed so loudly the Aufseherin was bound to come and that was why it was better to go.

  Now Friedel could no longer control herself. She pressed herself against him and kissed him and kissed him and he kissed her back. The doorkeeper was beside herself and threatened to get the Blockälteste. That was why Hans pushed Friedel away and forced himself to calm down.

  “Friedel, be brave.”

  “I am brave, but it’s so miserable for those girls.”

  “I understand, but that won’t last forever either.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know, darling. It will all turn out all right.”

  What else could he say? What else could he predict? Friedel was pure gold, but gold is a soft metal, and if she had been made of steel it might not have been so easy for all this suffering to leave its traces on her.

  He walked away, fleeing really, because he felt so powerless to comfort her. What help were words in the face of such deeds? Hans had a good inkling of what was going on in Block 10 and why. Wasn’t mass sterilization one of the Germans’ goals? Wouldn’t they like to be able to sterilize all Jews, Poles, Russians, and possibly others? What could these gynecological experiments be if not attempts at sterilization? Jewish women were cheap guinea pigs. One could only delight in their suffering and if they died a miserable death it hardly mattered at all. In this dark mood, he returned to Block 9.

  He didn’t receive a warm welcome. Paul was waiting for him in the corridor and began swearing furiously the moment he saw Hans coming in.

  He went through his entire repertoire: “Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn, Herr Gott Sakrament, du verfluchter Idiot, just walking off in work time. You’ve been in that whorehouse next door, haven’t you? I don’t understand how they can set up something like that in a respectable KZ. In Buchenwald I literally didn’t see a skirt for five years until they opened the brothel.”5

  Zielina, the head doctor, who was standing next to h
im, gave him a thump: “But then you were there every day, I suppose.”

  “What do you think? I didn’t go there once. I might be a Communist, one of those cursed red pigs, but you won’t find me around whores. Anyway, they never got the better class of customer there in Buchenwald. Don’t imagine for a minute you’d have seen a red triangle—a political prisoner—going into the brothel there. I don’t understand what kind of spineless characters we have here in Auschwitz. They’re queuing up there all evening.”

  “The food’s too good here,” Zielina mocked.

  “But getting back to this emaciated streak of misery,” Paul continued, returning to Hans. “I’ll laugh my head off if the Rapportführer bumps into you there one day. You know what they did to Florek, our barber, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Florek was standing by the window conversing with one of those ladies from Block 10. You know what Florek’s like—the requisite filthy chat, the requisite filthy gestures. And who should come along but Kaduk, the second Rapportführer. He grabs him by the back of the neck, makes a meatball of his face, and then marches him off to the Blockführerstube, where he reported him to Hössler, the Lagerführer: twenty-five on the backside. He got that helping right away—in the bunker with the pizzle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just what I said: a dried bull’s pizzle—a first-class Germanic disciplinary device. Florek had to lie on his stomach for three whole days. He still doesn’t dare to sit down properly and it’s been two weeks already.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘the Land of Twenty-Five’?” Zielina interrupted. “That was German Southeast Africa. The standard punishment for the Negroes there was twenty-five of the best with a whip or a cane. So the whole country got it as a nickname.”

  Paul said, “We Germans just happen to be a savage nation.” He glared at Hans with a terribly fierce expression, swore a little more, and then sent him off to Block 21. Because that was what the fuss was all about: there was a transport Kommando that day.

  There were already fifteen men standing by Block 21. The doorkeeper gestured frantically, pushing the men into rows of five and madly cursing the blocks who still hadn’t sent their contingent of laborers.

  It was all “Schnell! Los! Tempo!” but after the thirty men had been drummed up, it still took another half hour for the SS guard to arrive. And when they’d finally marched out of the gate and arrived at the SS-Krankenrevier, there were no wagons for them to use. The Rottenführer started negotiating and they stood there waiting for another hour. It was cold, bitterly cold, and they were shivering in their linen suits in the middle of the street; the pavements, where prisoners swept away the snow, were reserved for the SS going in and out of the buildings. Three large buildings: SS-Revier, SS-Standortverwaltung Süd-Ost, and the Kommandantur.

  These were real beehives, with men swarming in and out, along with the occasional young woman in smart clothes that had undoubtedly belonged to some—now murdered—young Jewish lady. Sometimes there were also Häftlinge from the Kommando SS-Revier, who worked in the SS hospital as cleaners, with some prominents even working as chemists or dental technicians. They were well off. They ate SS food and had all the toiletries and medicine they needed. The Kommando SS-Revier was the camp’s most important source of medicine. The Häftlinge who worked there smuggled it into the camp, where they sold it in exchange for margarine, sausage, and clothes that others, in turn, had stolen from the Bekleidungskammer. All of the medicaments taken from the thousands who arrived on the trains ended up here in the large attics and the enormous hospital dispensary. Together with the consignments from the Sanitätslager der Waffen-SS in Berlin-Lichtenberg, they formed an enormous stock. From this central point, the medicine was distributed to the entire SS across the southeastern front. In the same way, the Auschwitz Bauhof was the distribution center for building materials for all those troops, and the whole of the Waffen SS Süd-Ost was provided with war materials by Auschwitz factories. DAW, the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerkstatte, provided everything that was made of wood, munitions chests in particular. The munitions themselves were made at the “Auto Union” and in the Buna factories. At Buna they also made synthetic rubber.

  And here in these buildings was the headquarters of the enormous Auschwitz complex, which consisted of more than thirty camps: Auschwitz I—Hans’s camp; Birkenau, the killing center; Monowitz with the Buna factories; and many smaller camps with mining and agricultural Kommandos. Altogether more than 250,000 workers. All administered here in the Kommandantur and Standortverwaltung.

  No, Auschwitz was more than torment writ large. With its factories and mines it was an important part of the Upper Silesian industrial area and its workers were cheaper than anywhere else in the world. They didn’t need any pay and they ate almost nothing. And then, when they were exhausted and fell victim to the gas chamber, there were still enough Jews and political opponents in Europe to make up the numbers yet again.

  Berlin coordinated it all. In Wilhelmstrasse there was a special Concentration Camp Department under Himmler’s command. There they arranged the transports to the camps through all of Europe. They were the ones who sent the order to Westerbork: so-many thousand to this or that camp. They calculated which percentage of the transport had to be exterminated immediately and how many people they needed as laborers.

  Yes, Grün, the dentist, who had been in the camp for one and a half years, could explain exactly how it all worked. He was the model of a Pole who is not afraid of anything or anyone and never takes other people’s interests into account. He was known all over the camp and always had the best jobs. His friends who worked in the political section had told him all kinds of secrets: command decisions, telegrams from Berlin. He had relationships with girls who worked at the SS-Revier, and when he got caught it didn’t cost him his neck because he had another friend in the SS kitchen, who slipped him a liter of gin for the SS man who had found out too much about him. But now Grün’s position was a little tenuous after all. It was like this: “Do you know what Faulgas is?”

  “No.”

  “Faulgas is a Kommando of 600 men—they live in Blocks 1 and 2. They walk three miles every day to a site where they’re building a big plant next to a marsh to extract energy from the rotting sludge. There are civilian workers there too. Faulgas is the biggest Kommando for smuggling. The lads who work there take clothes and linen out with them, concealed under their uniforms, and sell them to the civilians for food. Watches and jewelry too. They get their merchandise from others who work in Canada. Everything from the trains goes there first; the people from Canada get a share of the takings.

  “Two months ago I had a nice little deal going, but it went wrong. A fellow in Canada had found a couple of magnificent diamonds in the lining of a coat. He brought them to me because he knew I was in Faulgas. There was only one price for those diamonds: freedom.

  “First I paid work-allocation a liter of schnapps and that got my mate into Faulgas too. Then we put out feelers with a Polish driver if he could mount a couple of boards under the bed of his truck for the two of us to lie on. Between the crankshaft and the bed. But I had picked the wrong driver, because he was in with one of the guards. I happened to see the two of them talking and reported sick straightaway. It cost me an arm and a leg, but the Kommandoführer ordered a guard to escort me back to camp. I wasn’t even able to warn my friend. They beat him to death that same day. But they didn’t find the diamonds on him because I’d already put them somewhere safe.

  “You understand that since then I’ve been keeping a low profile because now there are definitely a few SS men out for those diamonds.”

  Hans understood something else too. That when the deal went wrong, Grün sacrificed his friend and took off with the diamonds.

  “If you want to shirk,” Grün continued, “the Krankenbau’s the best. Half a liter of spirits and you’re a Pfleger.”

  Grün definitely knew how to shirk.

  The Rot
tenführer arrived. He had arranged a wagon. They had to pick up bags from the train and unload them here. Grün had a quick word with him and the Rottenführer gave him a pad and a pencil. He had to keep tally of the bags.

  They set out with the wagon. It was fairly calm. They were all Pfleger with a black badge embroidered with the letters HKB on their left sleeve: Häftlings-Krankenbau. The Pfleger’s letters were blue, technical staff had red and the doctors, white. But that division was theoretical, because here they were, all pushing the same wagon.

  As a symbol, the HKB worked miracles. With all their aversion to intellectualism, the SS were still scared of it. Was it coincidence that the intellectuals at Westerbork were able to hold their own the longest and were then mostly sent to the privileged camp of Theresiënstadt6? Was it coincidence that doctors, who are intimately involved in questions of life and death, had the best chance of survival not just in Auschwitz, but in other camps too?

  Definitely not. Primitive man lives in constant fear of the spirit world, and that world is made up of the souls of the dead. If you beat someone to death, their soul will be hostile toward you, and the greater their spirit or mind was in life, the more dangerous they will be as a malevolent spirit after death. Especially dangerous are doctors, the stewards of the spiritual legacy passed on from ancient wizards who had power over the spirit realm of the living and the dead. And who could be more primitive than the Übermensch?

  You had to be careful with doctors anyway. Even the greatest SS brute had an inner sense of “you might need him one day.” That was what they owed it to, the doctors and the nursing and technical staff, their not being hurried too much and hardly hit at all.

  But the work still had to be done and it was a nasty job. It was a goods wagon full of paper bags: “Malarial mosquito poison” was printed on them followed by the chemical formula, a sulfur compound. A lot of the bags were torn and leaking fine green powder. When you picked them up, the powder went down your neck and formed a crust in the close-cropped hair on your sweaty head. It got in your nose, which started to run, and in your eyes, which began to water.